Melville on Envy and Evil

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People talk about how envy drives the poor. They forget that the rich, the intelligent and the successful are driven by envy too.

They envy anyone who can’t be bought and sold, because it makes their own values look shabby.

They envy people who are free and not enslaved by the need to impress anyone else with the size of their house, their bank balance, their resume, or anything else.

They envy a clean conscience and clean hands.

They envy guilelessness and an open nature.

They envy it and in a strange way, they are also attracted to it.

That’s been my perception over the years as I’ve watched similar characters on the national political scene.

The envious can sense the superiority of what they envy.

But being limited and passionless, they can only act to strike down or humiliate this thing over which they have no control.

In some cases, they will destroy it utterly.

Read Billy Budd.

What made Claggert hate the young sailor? What had the boy done to him? Nothing. Except be as his Creator made him. Honorable and generous. Billy sang because he had a song in his heart. But Claggert couldn’t abide either the song or the heart from which it sprang. He had to strike them down.

Melville:

“With no power to annul the elemental evil in him, though readily enough he could hide it; apprehending the good, but powerless to be it; a nature like Claggart’s, surcharged with energy as such natures almost invariably are, what recourse is left to it but to recoil upon itself and, like the scorpion for which the Creator alone is responsible, act out to the end the part alloted it.” (Chapter 12)

Lila:

Apprehending the good, but powerless to be it.

There you have the essence. It was Melville’s genius to understand how weakness of character allied to a strong intelligence could produce a pure malevolence that used intellect solely to manipulate and destroy what it ought to have admired and emulated.

What else is this but envy?

This evil can mask itself in the finest manners, the most discrete bearing, the most rational facade, but the heart it hides is a charnel house.

Melville:

“Though the man’s [Claggert’s] even temper and discreet bearing would seem to intimate a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason, not the less in heart he would seem to riot in complete exemption from that law……

Now something such an one was Claggart, in whom was the mania of nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short “a depravity according to nature.”

Dark sayings are these, some will say. But why? Is it because they somewhat savor of Holy Writ in its phrase “mystery of iniquity”? If they do, such savor was far enough from being intended, for little will it commend these pages to many a reader of today.”  (Chapter 11)

Lila (update):

Melville’s choice of words is notable.

He talks of “mania” hidden by rationality. This is something I touched on in Language of Empire – the irrationality at the heart of rationality.

Mobs – at least what I wrote and conceptualized in it  – was written with this mind.

Further Update:

To clarify in response to a comment –  Mobs deals with the herd instinct not simply as in “crowd behavior” ( ala Mackay) but also at the level of the individual and in terms of the nature of language.

I think I spent quite a bit of time in Chapter 10 on the misleading use of mathematics to convey certainty about things that are much more ambiguous and uncertain than we make them out to be. This is what I mean by the phrase, the “irrationality at the heart of rationality” —  the fact that every logical system has to have a foundational point that is assumed…and is irrational.

Now how does that relate to the individual, to Claggert?

In this way.  Claggert acts and behaves like those logical systems that aren’t aware of and don’t guard against their own foundational “irrationality”.  He  becomes a monster following his own arbitrary laws, just as they do.

The “mass” we talk about in Mobs is not solely the crowd of people in the market (or in the streets or rioting or doing whatever else crowds are famous for doing).  The mass, the herd, exists in every individual.

Google Searches

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Never google yourself. You’ll be in for unpleasant surprises.

Here are a few:

Some blog post refers to me as a CIA2/Mossad operative.

On the strength of what, I wonder? Shouldn’t a Mossad operative at least know some Hebrew?

Maybe it was that post on Tikkun Olam I did around Easter?

You’d think the chump editor who runs this blog would realize that someone who taught comparative religion and mythology for several years could be expected to know something about the symbols and doctrines of various religious traditions, especially the one they came from.

Or, perhaps it’s a spoof of some kind that I missed. I didn’t read the post through and don’t intend to. It didn’t look like much.

What’s funny is I get articles turned down all the time for being too critical of  Zionist figures in the government (for eg. Chertoff) or for criticizing the banking cartel (this is supposed to be code language for anti-Semitism).

What’s also funny is that recently, I’ve been linked by Christian blogs, some of my leftist friends have suspected me of Christian theocratic tendencies (on the strength of having some pieces published at Lew Rockwell) , whereas, last year, a Christian blog classified me as “demonic,” presumably for my interest in so-called occult studies.

So I am Mossad and anti-Semite, Christian theocrat and demonic

Jihadi and Hasbara

Far-right wing-nut and Knee-jerk leftist

You’d think the geniuses would ask why a Mossad double-agent would go to such career-busting trouble to point out the Zionist component of the two biggest stories of the last five years (torture and the financial heist. But, for some people, any one who doesn’t fall into an easy left-right, religious-secular, statist-libertarian box is someone who must have ulterior motives…..

The Gold Cartel’s End Game

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James Turk of Gold Money is afraid that the gold cartel (Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and to a lesser extent, Citi) may not go down so easily:

“The gold borrowed from central banks would not be repaid because obtaining the physical gold to repay these loans would cause the gold price to soar. So beginning this decade, the gold cartel would conduct the government’s managed retreat, allowing the gold price to move generally higher in the hope that, basically, people wouldn’t notice. Given its ‘canary in a coalmine’ function, a rising gold price creates demand for gold, and a rapidly rising gold price would worsen the marked-to-market losses of the gold cartel.

So the objective is to allow the gold price to rise around 15% p.a., while at the same time enable the cartel members to intervene in the gold market with implicit government backing in order to earn profits to offset the growing losses on its gold liabilities. Its trading strategy to accomplish this task is clear. The gold cartel reverse engineers the black-box trend-following trading models.

Just look at the losses taken by some of the major commodity trading managers on their gold trading over the last decade. It is hundreds of millions of dollars of client money lost, and gained for the gold cartel to help offset their losses from the gold carry-trade. All to make the dollar look good by keeping the gold price lower than it should be and would be if it were allowed to trade in a market unfettered by government intervention.

There are only two outcomes as I see it. Either the gold cartel will fail in the end, or the US government will have destroyed what remains of the free market in America. I hope it is the former, but the continuing flow of events from Washington, D.C. and the actions of policymakers suggest it could be the latter.”


My Comment:

This is my fear. I see a growth in public awareness. I see people writing and talking.  But at the top, the policies don’t reflect public opinion at all. That tells me the disconnect is complete. They don’t listen, because they don’t have to. They’re hearing their master’s masters’ voices.

Judged by the Elitest of Elites

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I knew the Supreme Court of the US was weighted heavily in favor of the elite products of high-powered law schools, high-powered federal work experience, and high-powered theories.

But this chart of the make-up of the Supreme Court in recent years at the New York Times (May 2, 2009) was still something of a stunner to me.

One hundred percent of SC justices are former federal judges.

How many now are state judges? Nil.

How many now are private lawyers? Nil.

How many now are elected officials? Nil.

How many now are government lawyers? Nil.

How many now are law professors? Nil.

As Adam Liptak, the SC correspondent at The Times, justifiably complains,

“None of the justices have held elective office. All but one attended law school at Harvard or Yale. And the only three justices in American history who never worked in private practice are on the current court..”

But then Liptak holds up as a model, David Souter, a former attorney-general of the State of New Hampshire.

This, as trial lawyer Norm Pattis points out, is like depending on a sprinter to win a marathon.

“When is the last time a lawyer who made his living from fees earned
representing ordinary working people sat on the Supreme Court?”

But the question could be asked of many more government insitutions.

When was the last time the SEC was staffed with officials from small banks and  thrifts?

When was the last time a mayor from a small-town made it to the White House?

We talk about localism a lot. But in practice we’re heavily prejudiced against it.

A small-town resume, we presume, is fit only for small-towns.

There are a lot of reasons for this but I’ll focus on a couple that strike me at once (and I’ve blogged on them recently):

(1) It used to be that education fitted you to exercise judgment. These days we avoid judgment altogether, confusing it with judgmentalism.

In the absence of the ability to judge (and any common standard to judge by), we become victims of public relations and marketing. When no one can agree on substance, image becomes everything.

Brands rule. Harvard and Yale are the best known national brands, so we outfit our justices in them.

(2) Increasing specialization means that fewer people feel capable of pronouncing judgment about something, even if they felt it was permissble to. They look instead to experts to make their choices for them. The media, which has a disproportionate effect on nearly every choice made,  tends to focus on experts who come from the same educational and socio-economic background. The circle of the elite thus tends to get smaller and clubbier with every year.

Jack Kemp Dies Of Cancer

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Jack Kemp, former Congressman and star quarter-back, George Bush Senior’s housing secretary and Bob Dole’s running mate, noted “compassionate conservative,” good-natured supply-sider and defender of Reagonomics, died of cancer today.

Kemp seemed to me to be one of the truly genial and sincere figures in politics. Here’s a characteristic quote:

“Pro football gave me a good perspective. When I entered the political arena, I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy.”

And a quick bio from Yahoo News.

“Kemp was born in California to Christian Scientist parents. He worked on the loading docks of his father’s trucking company as a boy before majoring in physical education at Occidental College, where he led the nation’s small colleges in passing.

He became a Presbyterian after marrying his college sweetheart, Joanne Main. The couple had four children, including two sons who played professional football. He joined with a son and son-in-law to form a Washington strategic consulting firm, Kemp Partners, after leaving office.

Through his political life, Kemp’s positions spanned the social spectrum: He opposed abortion and supported school prayer, yet appealed to liberals with his outreach toward minorities and compassion for the poor. He pushed for immigration reform to include a guest-worker program and status for the illegal immigrants already here….”

In January this year, around the time Kemp’s cancer was diagnosed, The American Conservative ran a long piece on his contributions.

The Am Con piece notes that Kemp would send his children out into the world everyday with three words:

“Be a leader.”

The rest of us might find them worth remembering too.

R.I.P. Jack Kemp.
(More later)

Debt And Sin In The Bible

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A British Christian libertarian blog on why canceling the debt is questionable from a Christian perspective:

“Should Christians be concerned about this [the levels of debt contracted by the government]? One angle on this is the fact that in the teaching of Jesus, sin is often compared with debt. Two obvious examples are the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matthew 18:23-35), and the fact that in the Lord’s Prayer as found in Matthew’s gospel, disciples are taught to pray “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” (Matthew 6:12) In other words, there is a correspondence between sin and debt.

Many may consider sin not to be serious, but the Christian does. I am reminded of the words of Anselm of Canterbury, addressing Boso in Cur Deus Homo (Book 1, chapter 21) “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight sin is.”

If sin is serious and Jesus compares sin to debt, surely it follows that for Christians, debt is serious as well. And if that is so, government borrowing which will saddle our country with huge levels of debt, possibly for decades, is serious.

Yes, it is true that in the Old Testament, there was provision for the cancellation of debt every 50 years in the Jubilee, but to argue that such a provision means that one of the world’s wealthiest nations (that has incurred its debts by living beyond its means) should have its slate wiped clean is simply ridiculous.

Perhaps the message for Christians who are not horrified by the levels of debt that we are incurring is: “You have not yet considered what a heavy weight debt is.”

Top Ten Christian Libertarian Blogs

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Greg at The Holy Cause lists the top 10 Christian libertarian blogs , with Lew Rockwell and the popular Pro Libertate making the cut among the blogs I follow.

Now Greg want to make another list of Christian libertarian blogs and invites nominees and suggestions. This sounds like an interesting way to get to know more bloggers out there. Here are Greg’s criteria:

(1) The blogger(s) openly professes Christianity, and includes biblical content at least occasionally in blog postings . This is a “big tent” as far as the definition of “Christian” is concerned.
(2) The blog has libertarian content as one of its main thrusts. This libertarian content may include activism, advocacy, commentary, debate, economics, education, persuasion, politics, research, etc. This too is a “big tent” but will of necessity be judged somewhat subjectively. An example – Father Hollywood easily qualifies, despite the fact that he has significant other content. It helps that his other content has a Christian thrust.
(3) The blog must have some longevity, being a minimum of 2 months old.
(4) The blog must show consistent and recent postings. “Consistent” means averaging at least one posting per week. “Recent” means at least two postings in the last month

Speaking Blogistani….

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Thanks to all readers who write in to correct my frequent typos.
You will have to forgive me for speaking blogistani.

For years, I taught spelling, grammar, punctuation, and the rest. I corrected fine distinctions of meaning. I forced captive student to rewrite words.

But it turned out that I was more captive than they were.

Blogistani is now my native language and I speak it like any transplant, picking up the rules as I go along.

One rule of blogs is that corrections should appear as corrections.

But for minor matters of grammar and spelling, that would create a fine mess and be more confusing than useful most of the time. So I simply rewrite mistakes as I spot them. And the same goes for changes in style, or additions of non-essential detail (although I’ll make note of an update and time, if the information is more critical).

Of course, for any important details, or for citations or quotes where other people are affected, or for breaking news, I cross out and insert an apology as well.

There are also some physical reasons.

The charm of blogistani is that you can speak it as you go along and so I rarely reread my posts before posting. I like the feeling of writing on the run. That has its upside – I catch all those fleeting thoughts. But it also has its down side – typos.

Another thing. I rarely wear my glasses and sometimes don’t see errors until I (or you) reread a post.
This isn’t vanity (since I lead a reclusive life). It’s my fixation with the thesis that crutches make muscles weaker. And glasses are crutches. I got that notion into my head as a child when I read a copy of the “Bates’ Method,” which is a system of natural corrective exercises for myopia. Whether they work or not, I don’t know. But after a lifetime of squinting at piano scores, exam papers, manuscripts, and pixels, in all sorts of light, without my glasses, my eyesight hasn’t got any worse than the original prescription. I see this as something of a vindication of a pet crank of mine, and naturally I hang on to it by going without my glasses.

The third reason for my blindness is my way of reading. I either read at lightning speed, absorbing big chunks of reading matter at a glance….or I take forever to get through a paragraph.

Both styles of reading suit me and have their uses.

I use the slow method for philosophy and fiction.

I use the fast method for getting through the news on the net.

Fast reading is also partly a bad habit left over from exams in India, where we had to extract the salient facts from reams of overwritten material. My eye sometimes doesn’t actually see the individual phrases but gets the information out of the writing holistically. People who sight-read music a lot use the same technique. They can get through and synthesize a lot of information this way very fast. But it also means they need to proof their writing more than most people.

I’ll post more on this subject, because I’ve thought about it a lot over the years – how we absorb information, how we remember it and reuse it, how we process our sensory input.

And I come at this not from the point of view of a specialist in cognitive research (although I’m familiar with some of it), but from the point of view of pedagogical theory….

R. D. Laing On The Absurdity Of Normal Men

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Psychoanalyst R. D. Laing on Normality:

“From the moment of birth, when the Stone Age baby confronts the twentieth century mother, the baby is subjected to those forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father, and their parents, and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities, and on the whole this enterprise is successful. By the time the new human being is fifteen or so, we are left with a being like ourselves, a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world. This is normality in our present age……

The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”‘

“The Politics of Experience” (New York: Ballantine, 1967), pp. 58, 28.

My Comment

Laing is making an extreme statement, I realize. But there are insights in what he writes, as well, for instance,  when he says that habits are imposed on us early in life  to make us conform to certain ways of thinking and acting – habits which alienate us from our conscience and from our authentic self.

That’s close to the teaching of “mechanical man” in Gurdjieff’s writing.

The Hindu teaching about “vasanas” or sense impressions (that we cultivate) seems close too. The vasanas.drive us (through cause and effect) into mechanical action. The emphasis here is less on external conditioning as on our own unconscious role in creating mechanical patterns.

In Christianity, the closest teaching is the one in the Gospel about casting off  the “old man” and putting on the new. The “old ma”n conforms to the outward appearance of things; he’s driven by the “old Adam”. I take this to mean biological urge (one form of habit and enslavement), but surely it must also include conventions formed by society and by state, although we have to distinguish between these types as well.

Couldn’t that be why one of the teachings of the Gospel – a controversial teaching – is that the love of God comes before love of parents and family? And that it can bring a sword between family members?

If we set aside the theology for a moment, isn’t that close to Laing’s comments about our need to escape our family conditioning, a conditioning imposed on us often in the name of love?

All these traditions are very dissimilar and we can’t gloss over the differences, but the underlying phenomena are not that far apart, either. Laing’s conclusions can be  indiscriminate, but the questioning of childhood conditioning seems very useful.

Those are my thoughts, anyway, coming from my interest in how and why people become deluded or propagandized.

Why Pork-Chop Health-Care Doesn’t Work

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Donald J. Boudreaux on why collectivized health care solutions don’t work (hat-tip to Cafe Hayek):

“Collective efforts — which, in practice, mean “imposed by government command” — typically allow each of us to free-ride off of each other’s resources. And when I get to spend your money and you get to spend mine, it’s a sure bet that that money will be spent wastefully.

Consider Medicaid and Medicare — huge socialized health-care programs. Funded with tax dollars, these programs allow the millions of Americans covered by them to consume medical services without paying the full cost of those services. The predictable result is that these services are over-consumed.

To see why, ask the following question posed by my George Mason University colleague Russell Roberts. If you go to dinner with a large group of strangers and you know that the bill will be split evenly, aren’t you more likely to order pricier dishes and drinks than you would order if you, and you alone, were responsible for picking up your full tab?

The answer is surely “yes.” Let’s say that you’d be content to order the pork chop priced at $15, but would get even greater enjoyment from ordering the rack of lamb priced at $25. If you alone were responsible for your tab, you’d order the lamb only if it is worth to you at least the extra $10 that it costs. So suppose that you value the lamb by only $8 more than you value the pork chop. In that case, you’d order the pork chop. You wouldn’t spend an extra $10 to get extra satisfaction worth only $8.

But if the bill is evenly shared among, say, 10 diners (yourself and nine others), then if you order the lamb, your share of the higher bill will be only $1. That’s $10 split evenly 10 ways. You’ll order the lamb.

You might think that this sharing arrangement is good. After all, in this example, the cost to you of getting something you valued more (the lamb rather than the pork chop) was reduced. It became sensible for you to order the lamb.

Look more deeply, though. What happened is that society (here, the 10 diners) was led to supply something that wasn’t worth its cost. The lamb was worth to you only an additional $8, but to make it available to you, society spent $10. Ten dollars were used to raise the welfare of society by only $8. (You’re a member of society, so any improvement in your welfare counts as an improvement in the welfare of society.) That’s a waste of $2…”

My Comment

(Check back later tonight)