James Brody
March 26th, 2009, 12:33 PM
“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.†CS Lewis (Levin, p. 23)
Levin’s Intentions
Levin wants to link the history of conservatism to the threats that it faces today. He succeeds fairly well, although I found Tom Sowell’s narrative (Conflict of Visions) easier to follow and Fred Hayek’s (Road to Serfdom) more beautifully expressed.
Levin, a former Reagan staffer and popular radio talk host, is fast and brilliant with his choices and descriptions of contemporary losses in religious influence, erosion of Constitutional restraints on government, constraints on the free market, the cancer known as welfare (including Medicare), the invasion of illegal immigration, and how we fail to use our environment. Even George McGovern’s plea against Card Check from two weeks ago is in Levin’s book! Now is the time to resist “Statist†(rather than “liberalâ€) attacks on our freedoms. Levin, thus, beats a drum that I hear, waves a flag that I see upside down, and inspires me to do likewise.
Individuals and Swarms, Conservatives and Statists
As Rahm Emanuel sagely noted, “Never waste a crisis.†The corollary is “Make a crisis whenever you need one.†Jack Kennedy knew this, so does BHO. Their tactics can be found throughout biology and in several new sciences, including the physics of emergent networks: restrict assets with a disaster - a meteor or an earthquake or a convenient disease - and mass action appears almost by magic. In contrast, rich times favor individualism as was true of the American republic which was built in a natural manner, from bottom-up rather than top-down. European misfits eventually produced today’s conformists and small things, nourished over two centuries of time, grew into greedy large things – monopolies, unions, and governments - that suppress or abandon those of individual participants.*
Conservatives, however, can “swarm†as well as misnamed “liberals,†but we have a short attention span for group benefits and have to be angry to keep us on target: for example, conservative electronic assaults burned out the Congressional phone banks on the matter of immigration reform. Levin’s material is equally flammable – we must defeat those who want to cheat our kids of what we want to give them. Levin is, thus, timely, and a fuse.
Individualism, you see, is not only a gift from God but also an expression of the biological differences between any two persons. As Ed Wilson once remarked, making your own environment is perhaps the ultimate adaptation and rebellion is in our every soul. Every one of us finds, organizes, and constructs his or her environment not only of walls, floors, and roofs but also of ideas, activities, and quests. And this individualism remains despite the best efforts of academics to erase it: no matter what the program, student preferences for individualism and conformity are only transiently affected by teachers and, for reasons in our nature, one-third of us will remain individualist, a statist, or a copier of whatever happens next door. The issue becomes the relative rather than the absolute absence of freedom and the battle is for leadership of the middle third.
A Sense of Our Present
Societies fragment. Toynbee and Spengler described such things but did not fully understand why. And our nation is already fragmented by invasions from the south and from Islam, a failure of our wives to produce children, our sons to achieve in school or careers, our cocaine-like addiction to fast free money, failure to develop energy supplies, and our fool’s urge to share our technical and military secrets with our enemies. However, pushers and candy men prosper.
Our immigration rules, for example, choose illegals who act on impulse and immediacy, do poorly on their I.Q. tests, bring tropical diseases, and fill both our prisons and our special education programs.) And the argument of American elites is 1), we need our modern equivalent of slaves to harvest our food and hang our roofs, 2) we need their tax contributions to pay our Social Security, and 3) we need them to buy our house and clean our ass when we get old. And if we give the correct lectures, they will all be just like us.
And of Our Future
BHO’s story - this week - is that individuals must sacrifice personal interests in order to satisfy obligations that we have to each other. I view BHO and his pack not as leaders but as symptoms of our failing society, opportunists who, like an addict, are most interested in doing more and doing bigger as they tear down the options we each had to make our world. The new Bolsheviks will kill us not with machine guns but with ID chips, roadside cameras, and transponders in our homes, computers, and cell phones. The very technologies used to track “terrorists†will spy on patriots just as Bobby once spied on Martin.
Meanwhile, I waiver between ranting and flying my own flag or spending my Social Security on beer and women at the Pumptown…
*Roger Sperry observed that society reflects the war of our left cerebral cortex on the right. Elkhonon (Nick ) Goldberg describes our right brain as an organizer of novelty and our left brain as the keeper of routines once they are organized. Further, as we age, our right side becomes less active and the left more so. (And males tend to have more active right cortices but that’s another story!) Metaphor: the aging of our minds is reflected in the aging of our society, the accumulation of rules (there are no erasers on a lawyer’s pencil), and every one of us becomes a Gulliver tied by Lilliputians. BHO really did win the election for “change†but one we have seen before and that I do not want to repeat.
References
Levin’s radio program is on many stations, 6-9 p.m., M-F. Local access is on 990 AM (WNTP), 770 AM (WABC), or 810 AM (WGNY) but at in a later time slot.
Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books.
von Hayek Friedrich A (1944/1944) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago. See also Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.
Levin’s Intentions
Levin wants to link the history of conservatism to the threats that it faces today. He succeeds fairly well, although I found Tom Sowell’s narrative (Conflict of Visions) easier to follow and Fred Hayek’s (Road to Serfdom) more beautifully expressed.
Levin, a former Reagan staffer and popular radio talk host, is fast and brilliant with his choices and descriptions of contemporary losses in religious influence, erosion of Constitutional restraints on government, constraints on the free market, the cancer known as welfare (including Medicare), the invasion of illegal immigration, and how we fail to use our environment. Even George McGovern’s plea against Card Check from two weeks ago is in Levin’s book! Now is the time to resist “Statist†(rather than “liberalâ€) attacks on our freedoms. Levin, thus, beats a drum that I hear, waves a flag that I see upside down, and inspires me to do likewise.
Individuals and Swarms, Conservatives and Statists
As Rahm Emanuel sagely noted, “Never waste a crisis.†The corollary is “Make a crisis whenever you need one.†Jack Kennedy knew this, so does BHO. Their tactics can be found throughout biology and in several new sciences, including the physics of emergent networks: restrict assets with a disaster - a meteor or an earthquake or a convenient disease - and mass action appears almost by magic. In contrast, rich times favor individualism as was true of the American republic which was built in a natural manner, from bottom-up rather than top-down. European misfits eventually produced today’s conformists and small things, nourished over two centuries of time, grew into greedy large things – monopolies, unions, and governments - that suppress or abandon those of individual participants.*
Conservatives, however, can “swarm†as well as misnamed “liberals,†but we have a short attention span for group benefits and have to be angry to keep us on target: for example, conservative electronic assaults burned out the Congressional phone banks on the matter of immigration reform. Levin’s material is equally flammable – we must defeat those who want to cheat our kids of what we want to give them. Levin is, thus, timely, and a fuse.
Individualism, you see, is not only a gift from God but also an expression of the biological differences between any two persons. As Ed Wilson once remarked, making your own environment is perhaps the ultimate adaptation and rebellion is in our every soul. Every one of us finds, organizes, and constructs his or her environment not only of walls, floors, and roofs but also of ideas, activities, and quests. And this individualism remains despite the best efforts of academics to erase it: no matter what the program, student preferences for individualism and conformity are only transiently affected by teachers and, for reasons in our nature, one-third of us will remain individualist, a statist, or a copier of whatever happens next door. The issue becomes the relative rather than the absolute absence of freedom and the battle is for leadership of the middle third.
A Sense of Our Present
Societies fragment. Toynbee and Spengler described such things but did not fully understand why. And our nation is already fragmented by invasions from the south and from Islam, a failure of our wives to produce children, our sons to achieve in school or careers, our cocaine-like addiction to fast free money, failure to develop energy supplies, and our fool’s urge to share our technical and military secrets with our enemies. However, pushers and candy men prosper.
Our immigration rules, for example, choose illegals who act on impulse and immediacy, do poorly on their I.Q. tests, bring tropical diseases, and fill both our prisons and our special education programs.) And the argument of American elites is 1), we need our modern equivalent of slaves to harvest our food and hang our roofs, 2) we need their tax contributions to pay our Social Security, and 3) we need them to buy our house and clean our ass when we get old. And if we give the correct lectures, they will all be just like us.
And of Our Future
BHO’s story - this week - is that individuals must sacrifice personal interests in order to satisfy obligations that we have to each other. I view BHO and his pack not as leaders but as symptoms of our failing society, opportunists who, like an addict, are most interested in doing more and doing bigger as they tear down the options we each had to make our world. The new Bolsheviks will kill us not with machine guns but with ID chips, roadside cameras, and transponders in our homes, computers, and cell phones. The very technologies used to track “terrorists†will spy on patriots just as Bobby once spied on Martin.
Meanwhile, I waiver between ranting and flying my own flag or spending my Social Security on beer and women at the Pumptown…
*Roger Sperry observed that society reflects the war of our left cerebral cortex on the right. Elkhonon (Nick ) Goldberg describes our right brain as an organizer of novelty and our left brain as the keeper of routines once they are organized. Further, as we age, our right side becomes less active and the left more so. (And males tend to have more active right cortices but that’s another story!) Metaphor: the aging of our minds is reflected in the aging of our society, the accumulation of rules (there are no erasers on a lawyer’s pencil), and every one of us becomes a Gulliver tied by Lilliputians. BHO really did win the election for “change†but one we have seen before and that I do not want to repeat.
References
Levin’s radio program is on many stations, 6-9 p.m., M-F. Local access is on 990 AM (WNTP), 770 AM (WABC), or 810 AM (WGNY) but at in a later time slot.
Sowell, T. (2002) A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. NY: Basic Books.
von Hayek Friedrich A (1944/1944) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: Univ of Chicago. See also Goldberg J (2007) Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. NY: Doubleday.