national amnesia............

 

It’s difficult to think of a more divisive way of addressing sensitive personnel issues, but many power bases in America had been infected with the idea that discrimination on behalf of some racial and ethnic groups was not only permissible, but commendable. A common message on campuses was that discrimination against whites, and particularly white males, was necessary to eliminate imbalances.

These beliefs, which would never have been accepted by the nation which embraced the “no one should be subjected to racial discrimination” message of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amazingly caught hold. It was as if there was national amnesia. They were soon joined by programs that were less focused on behavior – a clear and measurable standard – than on the far more intangible and elusive issue of feelings.

-Michael Wade, from here

consumable otherness...................

     Chesterton knew that progressivism and capitalism were bedfellows that would produce unnatural offspring.  He was also conscious that the politicization of sex would lead to confusion instead of fulfilling the desire for equality or the happiness of both sexes.  Sexlessness, the refusal to acknowledge the God-ordained design of sexual difference, would be the result of the battle of the sexes.  Once cut off from its spiritual roots, equality would lead not to fairness but to a culture of lies and the popularizing of consumable otherness.  Chesterton was sure that, in the name of equality, standards would be attacked and what Pope Benedict XVI would later name a "dictatorship of relativism" would become the norm. 

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

equal.........................

 

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. 

-so begins Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story Harrison Bergeron

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All people are created equal..........

 

..............They just don’t stay that way very long.

Souls.........................

      Now, you may be an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or something else, but this posture of respect and reverence, this awareness of the infinite dignity of each person you meet, is a precondition for seeing people well. You may find the whole idea of God ridiculous, but I ask you to believe in the concept of a soul.  You may just be chatting with someone about the weather, but I ask you to assume that the person in front of you contains some piece of themselves that has no weight, size, color, or shape yet gives them infinite value and dignity.  If you consider that each person has a soul, you will be aware that each person has some transcendent spark inside them.  You will be aware that at the deepest level we are all equals.  We're not equal in might, intelligence, or wealth, but we are all equal on the level of our souls.  If you see the people you meet as precious souls, you'll probable wind up treating them well.

-David Brooks, How To Know A Person

About equality.....................

 Now, I know of only two methods of establishing equality in the political world; rights must be given to every citizen, or none at all to anyone. . . .

     There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored.  This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter 3

Distinctions...................

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing. In the act before me there seems to be a wide and unnecessary departure from these just principles.

-Andrew Jackson, from his Bank Veto message

Titles.................................

     Through the Dillys he also connected with the radical politician John Wilkes, who was in prison at King's Bench, where he had been remanded after being expelled from the House of Commons for his views.  Rush visited him in prison, for a dinner party attended by more than a dozen of Wilkes's friends in his two-room cell (which included its own library).  Rush was impressed that Wilkes was "an enthusiast for AMERICAN Liberty" and was intrigued by his advice about the need to build a new nation that challenged class distinctions.  "If you can but preserve an equality among one another,"  Wilkes told him, "you will always be free in spite of everything.  Titles are the bane of an infant country."

-Stephen Fried,  Rush:  Revolution, Madness & The Visionary Doctor Who Became A Founding Father

THE YEAR WAS 2081......................

.......................................and everybody was finally equal.

Re-reading Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s short story, Harrison Bergeron, is an annual event around these parts.  Try it out.

Others feel the same

On seeking fairness......................

....................................in a world generally described as "unfair:"

"....despite appearances to the contrary, there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness."

-from this paper, Why People Prefer Unequal Societies, as pointed to by Greg Mankiw

On pursuing horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary............

     Aside from noting the formal similarities between Christianity and democracy, Mencken also used Christianity to explain the appeal of popular sovereignty.  Democracy relied upon the premise that human beings were created in the image of God.  This contention placed democracy on the same footing as the Genesis accounts of human origins and with the same leverage that the "sacred faculty" used to argue that without a divine aspect to human nature men and women would be no better than brutes.  Democracy, then, was a form of theology, and the antidemocratic was 'not merely mistaken; he [was] also wicked."  Modern defenders of democracy were "full of Christian juices," fundamentalists "by instinct."  The specific human instincts that fueled democracy were fear and envy.  Human beings entered life with a collective sense of fear - "Make a loud noise behind an infant just born, and it will shake like a Sunday-school superintendent taken in adultery."  Properly executed, an education would rid many humans of such native or "phylogenic" fears.  The trouble was that all men were not equal.  Intelligence, for Mencken, was largely responsible for sorting the superior out from the inferior.  This inequality made democracy inherently susceptible to demagoguery.  Such Christian politicians as Wilson and Bryan obtained office by alarming the mob against their superiors.  Instead of Christian statesmen, they became merely "witch-hunters,"  politicians who promoted "melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary."  This concoction of fear and envy led Mencken inevitably back to his main point that democracy thrived on the inferior man's jealousy of his superiors, which was remarkably similar to his view of Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.  "In precisely the same way democratic man hates the fellow who is having a better time of it in this world," he wrote, "Such, indeed, is the origin of democracy," and "such is the origin of its twin, Puritanism."

-D. G. Ward,  Damning Words:  the life and religious times of H. L. Mencken

Some context:  this paragraph was taken from a chapter largely dealing with Mencken and Prohibition, a slice of Americana to which he was greatly opposed.

Equality at last...................

  via

Part of what makes it so difficult to keep.....

"It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory."

-Thomas Mann

Without doing any deep thinking............

.....................................................................I am calling this true:

"Worse, it is government intervention, not laissez faire, that has done most to increase inequality and to entrench wealth and privilege."

-Matt Ridley, as excerpted from here.   As they say, read the whole thing.

The problem with models...........................

.....................................(beside the fact they involve mathematics):

What economists call "models" are interpretive frameworks.  They are presented mathematically, with proofs that connect initial assumptions to ultimate predictions.  However, the predictions are not falsifiable.  The models' predictions hold only when other things are equal, and other things are never equal.

-Arnold Kling,  Specialization and Trade:  A Re-Introduction to Economics

Commonality....................

.................................A list of "things the world's most and least privileged people say".  

Yeow........................................

...........One would expect that this trend is not sustainable:

via (also a more readable version)

About equality.........

“Jealousy is the foundation of equality, but not of liberty; putting man constantly on his guard against the encroachments of his neighbors. It prevents affability between different classes. There is no society without affection, without tradition, without respect, without mutual amenity.” 
-Ernest Renan

But some are more equal than others.......

...Collectively, us humans can be scary from time to time.  Like here.

Rigidity................................

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

-Andrew Sullivan, as culled from here