| Tuesday, December 23, 2003 |
21:03 - Drawn and quoted
http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/005498.php
|
(top)  |
Tim Blair has done quite a service: rounded up all those oh-so-memorable moments of 2003 in a long series of nice crunchy quotes. With links back to where they all came from, no less.
This may come in handy.
The time is drawing near when I will have to unmask myself to my long-time e-mail correspondent, who still evidently hasn't guessed my hideous secret (I'd actually prefer it if it stayed out of the conversation entirely, but it's really hard to avoid it when the discourse unfailingly turns toward the stupidity of Texan drivers with Bush stickers on their cars, or the sheer apolitical genius of that Kucinich Flash ad that Eric Blumrich did, whoring the names of the American soldiers killed in Iraq to suit the Left's corporate-cabal conspiracy theories). He knows there's something I'm not telling him, but he hasn't struck near the mark yet. The closest he's come so far is to theorize that I'm actually a woman. Hmm. Good try...
And of course I'm rehearsing just how I'll break the news once I'm finally requested to, because I know that moment is coming soon. Tim's quotes might indeed help, but they won't do the whole job. I need a way to lead into it gently, bearing in mind that as far as he knows, I'm just another benign San Francisco leftist, a bit politically unmotivated perhaps (why else would I answer him so noncommittally whenever he fumes about Bush's latest energy bill involving a provision to develop nucularnuclear bunker-busters and fusion reactors?), but thought-provoking nonetheless. I seem at least to have chastened him on the subject of just how helplessly stupid the American sheeple are, and how dismissive it's okay to be of them; he doesn't fume about them quite so much anymore now that I've used words like contempt and arrogance in describing that kind of attitude toward things like the South and Middle America in general.
(I'm wondering, incidentally, how he'll respond to the next sortie that I'm preparing. For some six months now he's been tossing off dozens of rather alarming bits of racially supremacist value judgment, in passing, bam-bam-bam, when describing how the human mind works. See, he's of mixed Native American ancestry, and he gets to regale me with theory after theory about why the Indian mind is so vastly superior to the white man's, how he's tried so hard to wean himself off the hateful white man's habits, how he's worked to rid himself of white man's prejudices, and so on. I've sat and silently taken it, because what else can one do in this day and age? Yesterday, though, I inserted a brief line between a couple of his paragraphs that held forth on all the moral and physical and spiritual inferiorities of the white race: "You know, they say that on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. I'm starting to feel as though I'd be better off as one than as a white person." We'll see how he reacts to that.)
But one day soon I'll have to broach the larger subject, and I'm not sure how I'll go about doing it. All this rehearsal is only getting me halfway there.
I think I'll have to start out simply saying that there are what amounts to two different schools of thought in the world, and most philosophical/political conflicts seem to boil down to them. The first is this:
Success is a desirable thing.
And the other, barring some unfortunate language quirks, is this:
It's best for everybody to be the same.
(I didn't say equal, because while I do intend this in the sense of "equality" of status, prosperity, freedom, etc, we use the term "equal" to mean something specific: what Den Beste calls equality of opportunity, versus equality of result. Remember how Meg Murry confronted IT on Camazotz? No! like and equal aren't the same thing at all! That's stuck with me since third grade. So my meaning in this second philosophy is that everybody should be on a level playing field, whatever the best way of expressing that is.)
Not quite polar opposite concepts, are they? That's sort of the problem. In fact, they're somewhat orthogonal to each other in meaning, though in practice they often turn out to be opposed to each other.
Success is very closely tied to freedom. The freedom to succeed cannot exist without the freedom to fail; but the presence of the freedom to fail is exactly what inspires success, which gives back in value more than it receives as input. Likewise, success is about the freedom of one man to take care of himself and his family, out of the belief that he is better capable of doing so than someone else he doesn't even know. And this applies not just to people, but to economies and to nations on the global stage, too; nations need to have the freedom to make the right decisions for their people, just as they need to have the freedom to make the wrong decisions. But there also must be consequences for the wrong decisions, not a coddling of the mistaken and a punishment of the successful.
Trying to make every person (and every nation) the same, however, is patently alien to the idea of freedom, particularly the freedom to succeed or to fail; because people are different. Sameness must be enforced by an outside hand. Some people are better capable of success than others; some are better capable of taking care of themselves than others. The question lies in whether this is a bug in the design of the human animal, or a feature.
Now, the argument goes something like this:
ME: Success is a good thing. When people succeed, wealth is created, and everybody benefits.
HIM: But it also means the people who don't succeed are poor. What about them? It's much better to give excess wealth to those who don't have any. Then everybody will be happy, and there'll be no need for greed or hunger, just like in Star Trek.
ME: Where does this supposed "excess wealth" come from, though?
HIM: Well, rich people, of course.
ME: People who succeeded, in other words. You're saying we should identify the people who have the gall to win in the game of life, and punish them by taking their winnings and giving them to the people who haven't won. Won't that just remove the incentive to win? Won't that just make sure there are no more winners?
HIM: Yes. Because, see, in my system, if there aren't any winners, at least there aren't any losers either.
ME: Really?
HIM: Yeah.
ME: Except for Soviet Russia and Cuba and North Korea. And France.
HIM: Exactly. We should give our wealth to those countries. We have lots, and they have none. And our military power and economic influence too. Why should America be so powerful?
ME: Um, because our way is better?
HIM: That's not the point. It's much more important for everybody to be on a level playing field, than for "better" or "worse" ideas to be the basis of judgment of countries that affects the well-being of their people.
ME: So you'd rather punish a wildly successful country, that's created more wealth and freedom and social and technological achievement than any other in history, where even the poor are richer than the richest people in some other parts of the world, to help make sure the countries that chose other paths-- wrong paths, I would venture to say-- don't have to bear the consequences?
HIM: Yeah. That way everything's equal.
ME: Except that without the incentive for individuals to succeed in entrepreneurship, or for countries to develop economies that reward the creation of wealth, or for proven just democratic nations to adopt international policies that champion their own systems of justice over those used by brutal third-world dictators with seats on international lawmaking bodies, there won't be any more wealth or freedom or justice created.
HIM: Oh, there will. You'll see.
ME: Will I now.
HIM: Yeah. You think "success" is such a noble concept, but it only creates a gulf between rich and poor, between powerful and powerless, between just and oppressed.
ME: Making sure that nobody has to work for wealth, power, or justice only means that nobody will.
HIM: Sure they wil. Just ask Gene Roddenberry.
I told one friend the other day about what the dole is in France, the benefit the government gives you just for being in France: $1300 a month. And that's the basic dole, to which are added hikes if you have kids, and even a Christmas bonus, which I'm sure amuses the North African Muslim immigrant population no end.
This friend looked wide-eyed at me. "Damn!" he said. "I should move to France! I could make more money being unemployed there than I can by working here!"
Which is why, I patiently explained to him, Paris has those cités full of unemployed people who outgun the gendarmerie.
There's a reason, after all, why we call it making money.
It's so easy to stand in a circle, holding hands with all your compatriots, and sing songs about peace and love and brotherhood, and sharing all your wealth so nobody goes hungry. It all sounds so simple. It's so obvious. And people who resist-- why, they're just hateful simian throwbacks to some ancient feudal society. They're greedy and thieving leeches who genuinely hate poor people and will do anything to keep them from being happy. And of course they're racists, too, because they're too stupid to realize that the color of one's skin has nothing to do with their mental, physical, or spiritual capacities.
So we see the Instant Rhetorical Superiority that comes from the "make everybody the same" school of thought. It makes the practitioner into the occupant of the moral and intellectual high ground-- and he doesn't even have to have put any thought into what he's saying, let alone what the other side's story is. (By definition, the other side's story is simplistic rhetoric designed to glorify oppression and imbalance of power.)
It's conventional wisdom that people start out as unthinking right-wingers, and then become compassionate liberals as they grow older and meet people and travel the world.
Phenomenal, then, that the vast majority of movement from one side of the political aisle to the other over the past few years (as long as I've been paying attention) is in the other direction.
What was that about how if you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart-- but if you're not conservative when you're old, you have no brain?
It's not such an antiquated notion after all, perhaps.
I'm still working on distilling all this into an appropriate plan of attack, one that will keep me from ending up on the person's hammered-into-stone shit-list. But I'm left with the memory of an episode of the New Twilight Zone, from the 80s, which I saw as a kid and never really left me:
In a technocratic futuristic city, a guy stands trial for "coldness" to his fellow man. He is convicted, and sentenced to wear a "mark of Cain" on his forehead. This mark signifies to all he meets that they are to shun him, at whatever cost, thereby punishing him with a measure suited to his crime.
He wanders the streets, increasingly desperate for human contact and conversation. Nobody will meet his gaze; nobody will acknowledge his existence. Finally, he meets a blind man in a restaurant-- a blind man who, of course, can't see the mark on his forehead. Companionship at last! The two strike up a warm conversation, sit down to eat, and get along famously.
Then, the waitress comes up to the blind man and whispers something in his ear. His expression changes immediately to a mask of betrayal and hatred. "Damn you," he snarls, as he stands up from the table and leaves.
The Internet is a wonderful thing, isn't it? It's a tool for creating selective blindness in your conversational partner. But the secret will always come out.
|
|
Brian Tiemann
