The Better Letter: Both Sides Now
There is always more than enough nonsense, stupidity, and evil to go around.
The word “conservative” in our current culture is essentially meaningless. The data now shows “a politician’s support for former President Trump has come to define who party activists think of as conservative.”
I resist that change.
Throughout my lifetime, “conservative” has mostly been a fair label for my view of the world, broadly construed. The idea meant something.
I am temperamentally conservative in that I recognize things can always get worse, perhaps much worse, and that unintended consequences are constant, often dangerous, and rarely insignificant. That means I resist changing things without good evidence that those changes will make things better.
I am politically conservative because I think freedom is the highest political good. Thus, I default to liberty in the inevitable tension between liberty and equality.
I am a conservative in foreign affairs, since I believe that humans are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, rights so important that free people should generally try to help those who are not free.
I am fiscally conservative. I believe that smaller government and freer markets typically result in better outcomes.*
I am a social conservative in that I believe freedom and equality are good, but recognize they can conflict with the common good, requiring careful balancing. Isaiah Berlin put it really well.
“Both liberty and equality are among the primary goals pursued by human beings through many centuries; but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs, total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted…. Equality may demand the restraint of the liberty of those who wish to dominate; liberty — without some modicum of which there is no choice and therefore no possibility of remaining human as we understand the word — may have to be curtailed in order to make room for social welfare, to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, to leave room for the liberty of others, to allow justice or fairness to be exercised.”
I come to this outlook, first and foremost, because I try to see the world as it is, which informs my view of human nature, upon which science and scripture agree.
“There is none righteous, no, not one,” the apostle tells us, which is not to say that all humanity is as depraved as possible. Calvin never taught that. The “total” in total depravity refers to the scope, not the depth, of the problem of sin. The doctrine affirms that every part of us is subject to sin’s corrupting influence.
In other words, there is always more than enough evil to go around.
Human nature skews authoritarian. Authoritarians all insist they’re different – because they are “right.” The American Founders had a better view of human nature, however. They insisted on protecting minority rights from authoritarians who insist on doing things their way because they also recognized that human nature skews fickle. Those in charge and ideas that rule the roost today may be out tomorrow and vice versa.
Truth be told, we have made progress, and often enormous progress, on virtually every human problem except for the most fundamental one. Human nature – a complex amalgam of the base and the heroic, the compassionate and the brutal, the brilliant and the imbecilic – remains largely static across human history. “The worst in our nature coexists with the best, and so it will ever be,” according to sociobiologist E.O. Wilson.
We created vaccines almost overnight that protected countless lives while a guy shot his pharmacist brother and his wife for administering those vaccines because he decided they were dangerous.
This means that, always and everywhere, we must balance the need to protect against evil with the goal of fostering the good. Ronald Reagan got it exactly right with a rhyming Russian proverb: Trust, but verify (Доверя́й, но проверя́й).
This week’s TBL looks at human nature in our current context.
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Thank you for reading.
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* Kevin Williamson: “One of the many blessings of a market-oriented economy — besides the fact that somebody has to earn those billions before they can be given away — is that markets are one of the few social institutions that really force us to think about other people’s lives and aspirations and that reward us for satisfying other people’s needs and desires. Government agencies can be run — indefinitely — for the benefit of their employees, and philanthropic endeavors can persist for years in vanity, crankery, and incompetence. Which is not to say that we do not need good government and effective philanthropy — we certainly do. But we should appreciate how powerful is the urge to build monuments to oneself and to create high-class sinecures for one’s family and allies.”
Both Sides Now
A brilliant friend and subscriber I could not admire more thinks I am wrong for thinking the obvious flaws in our current political climate are evidence of a human (nature) problem more than a partisan problem.
“Liberals have this annoying habit of focusing on policy and finding ways of improving lives….”
“The evidence for ‘both sides’ doesn't exist. The left is flawed, but not in the same galaxy here. Again and again I’ll say, the right has no principles, no goals other than power and subjugation. The left’s agenda is clearly stated, which isn’t to say desirable or achievable.”
I disagree. The left’s principles are also compromised and its actions also performative and authoritarian. The GOP is hardly a one-stop-shop for bad motives, bad people and bad outcomes.*
In February 2020, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology held a symposium called “Is Left-Wing Authoritarianism Real? Evidence on Both Sides of the Debate.” There are plenty of doubters.
Psychologist Bob Altemeyer claimed that many ordinary people are psychologically disposed to embrace anti-democratic, fascist policies, but those people are all right-wingers. Left-wing authoritarianism is “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology — an occasional shadow, but no monster,” he claimed. Other psychologists agreed.
Like my friend, academic psychologists (and the press) doubt that good liberals act in bad faith. Not coincidentally, academic psychologists (and the press) lean heavily left.
A large and important new study (consistent with earlier research) should settle the question. Left-wing authoritarianism is indeed a thing and authoritarians of all stripes show a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
No doubt most of these authoritarians are absolutely, positively, pass-a-polygraph certain that they’re saving America rather than destroying it.
To be clear, this research doesn’t show or purport to show that left and right-wing authoritarianism are equally prevalent or dangerous. But they are prevalent and dangerous.
A current example might help.
This past summer, Ezra Klein wrote an op-ed in The New York Times (sort of, but not quite) advocating environmental terrorism to combat climate change.**
“Humanity has spent thousands of years building the social organizations and technological mastery to insulate itself from the whims of nature. We are spending down that inheritance, turning back the clock. I don’t believe this reveals our true preference for the world our descendants will inhabit. I believe it reveals our deeply human inability to take the future as seriously as we take the present.”
I doubt that Klein and the left, more broadly, believe in the existential threat of climate change nearly as strongly as he suggests. If he did, climate innovation would get more than an afterthought mention. If others did, they’d spent less time hectoring us about eating less meat and eliminating the combustion engine and much more time working on technological inventions that might incentivize China, India, and the rest of the third world (which are much more of a current climate problem than the U.S.) to use less coal.
I’m entirely on-board with the idea that climate change is a real, large, and man-made crisis. I’ve written about it for years. But if the left truly thinks it is the huge threat it claims it to be, it would be entirely on-board with nuclear power – our cleanest and safest energy source – as at least a stopgap measure toward solving the problem.
Nuclear power is responsible for exactly zero greenhouse gas emissions. None. It is unquestionably and by far the safest form of energy in existence, even safer than wind or solar, and is supported by a huge majority of the scientific community.
That innovation and nuclear power are, at best, throwaway long-shots in Klein’s estimation and to the left generally and, mostly, not treated seriously suggests to me that they are much more interested in power and control than in solving or even mitigating the climate problem.
As Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s first Chief of Staff, famously said: “Never allow a good crisis go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do the things you once thought were impossible.”
There are plenty of other examples.
C.S. Lewis had it right.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
Liberals aren’t just “focusing on policy and finding ways of improving lives.” Not remotely.
One more thing.
That those on the left are similarly authoritarian and motivated by power and control like those on the right should be obvious.
That it isn’t is partly due to political savvy (Mitch McConnell steals Chuck Schumer’s lunch money almost daily, meaning that Democrats can wallow in their alleged good intentions while licking their wounds), but mostly because the mainstream media is happy to promote the purity of the liberal cause at every opportunity.
Media figures like to see themselves as referees, carefully and objectively calling the game as they see it. Instead, they’re mere commentators, and not of the Al Michaels variety. They are much more like that homer of homers, Johnny Most.
The list of real, honest-to-God fake news promoted by the mainstream media is broad-based and a long one – you might have thought it was only a Fox News sin – and includes reports of Russians hacking a Vermont energy grid, tales of Michael Cohen in Prague, the pee tape, the Covington high school fiasco, Russian oligarchs co-signing a Deutsche Bank loan application for Donald Trump, Bountygate, the “mass hysterectomies” story, and more.
Adam Schiff seemed to do MSNBC hits every night to inform us he’d seen the evidence that would finally do Donald Trump in. It was all lies.
The MSM is all about keeping the myth of liberal purity alive.
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* Which is not to say the two main sides are necessarily equivalent. The general unrest, the conspiracy theories, the personality cult, the lack of any policy platform, the anti-democratic forces that launched an insurrection on January 6 and that promote apocalyptic ideas around the imagined reinstatement of President Donald Trump provide an existential risk to the American way of life. Most of the huge number of tell-all books by former Trump staffers and confidants conclude or demonstrate the obvious: “I was part of something unusually evil.”
** Imagine, just for a moment, if a Times columnist had suggested, say, that an abortion clinic bombing was understandable.
Totally Worth It
This is the best thing I saw or read this week (more here). The most impressive. The best factcheck. The least surprising. The craziest. The funniest. The most heinous. The most despicable (and expected). The least surprising. The most obvious (CNN and MSNBC are reliable in the other direction). The most insane. The stupidest. The smartest. The best ad. Stanfurd. We live in an age of grift.
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Benediction
The Spotify play list of TBL benedictions and other music now includes more than 175 songs and has more than 12 hours of great music. I urge you to listen … and turn the volume up. Way up.
The greatest voice in popular music is singing this week’s benediction.
To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that offers hope. And may love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 83 (October 8, 2021)
Another good column. Would disagree or change perspective on one point. re:"Which is not to say that we do not need good government and effective philanthropy — we certainly do. But we should appreciate how powerful is the urge to build monuments to oneself and to create high-class sinecures for one’s family and allies.” - Business will do the same, and easier- robber barons etc.- takes the power of a government to hold in check the excesses of business and the power of business to hold in check the power of government.
Everything you write is wrong. But it is well written.