JUDGING AMERICA Part II

“The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are…Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.”



You see, if not for slavery, the nation and its strength would not exist.



In leaked audio from an emergency townhall meeting with staff members, NYT executive editor Dean Baquet admitted the failure of his paper in pushing one narrative, the false Russian collusion story. Rather than just reporting the news, he announced the creation of another narrative.

“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well. Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story…this one is a story about what it means to be an American in 2019. It is a story that…requires imaginative use of all our muscles to write about race and class in a deeper way than we have in years.”

1619’ers argue that slavery provided the capital for the industrial revolution, propelling the nation to its current exalted status. It is uncontroversial to say slavery was big business. Northern textile factories certainly benefitted. Between 1800 and 1860, “King Cotton” was the primary driver of the Antebellum South’s wealth. American exports accounted for 66% of the world’s cotton. However, in “Did Slavery Make America Richer?”, Vincent Geloso uses copious data to assert that slavery’s windfall has been greatly exaggerated. Almost no cotton was grown in the United States in 1787. Geloso claims that per capita growth was actually greater in the North between 1800 and 1860. Regardless, the whole argument is unnecessary. The error is the conflation of Southern wealth with the entire nation. What is true is that America could not have defeated the British without Southern colonies’ support. However, the Northern economy grew independently. Northern victory was not due solely to overwhelming manpower but industrial might. The agrarian South had few factories, 1/3 of the rail and an economy based on a singular cash crop. They simply couldn’t keep up with the endless supply of arms, ammunition and supplies the North turned out by the trainload.



360,000 dead and massive debt retarded Northern growth for a decade. While slavery created great wealth between the invention of the cotton gin (invented to make the lives of slaves easier, ironically) and 1859, the Civil War destroyed the South’s economy miring the entire region in deep poverty for nearly a century. Nearly all Southern banks were ruined. The hog population in South Carolina shrunk from 965,000 to 150,000. Cotton production would not recover until 1879. Most Southern capital was invested in slaves. It vanished instantly with the 13^th Amendment.



America was a fledgling power in 1865. Our rise to superpower status was built on many things but not slavery. Did slaves make Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fortune in shipping and rail or build the Transcontinental railroad? Did slavery create Rockefeller’s enormous wealth or build the oil industry? Were slaves Carnegie’s steelworkers, J.P. Morgan’s bank tellers or Thomas Edison’s go-fers? Were slaves responsible for electrification, refrigeration or cars? No.



I am going to make another, somewhat disconnected argument in this piece as I build the series on the premise that the DNA of America was never uniquely corrupted. Our current greatness is not due to oppression, but the beauty and uniqueness of the American idea.



Some argue that American slavery was a special kind of violence against Africans. They argue that slavery was a more gentle affair across the Atlantic. Simply put, it was not. The section below is largely lifted verbatim from an excellent source. It is succinct and well-written and, well, why reinvent the wheel?

361,000 slaves were imported into English speaking North America by 1808…From the time of the Arab conquest of the Middle East in the seventh century, approximately 14 million black slaves were imported into the area that extends from Morocco through Iran.

Why had the Middle East not become overwhelmingly black and mulatto? One reason was extremely high slave mortality. As the Encyclopedia of Islam notes, “The high mortality rate which overtook these coloured men in Persia prevented them forming an important element of the population.” I will provide two examples of this—one from North Africa, the other from Iraq: “Of the Saharan salt mines it is said that no slave lived for more than five years;” and “the black slave gangs that toiled in the salt flats of Basra [Iraq] . . . numbering some tens of thousands . . . were fed, we are told, on a few handfuls of flour, semolina, and dates.”

In addition, casual mating was not permitted and marriage was discouraged. Consequently, of the 3,000 female slaves emancipated in Zanzibar in 1860, only five percent had ever had a child. Many of the children born to slave women were murdered. In 1856, the Anti-Slave Reporter observed that in Constantinople, the murder of the babies of black slave women was practiced “as a matter of course and without the least remorse.” As a result, in Constantinople, “it was commonplace for Turkish gentlemen to have numerous [black] concubines, [but] it was rare to see a mulatto.”

(Also)…many were castrated. Castration was lethal for the large majority of slaves on whom it was inflicted, especially blacks. White eunuchs were produced by merely cutting off their testicles, but blacks were subjected “to the most radical form of castration . . . level with the abdomen . . . based on the assumption that blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite;” “every [black] eunuch represented at the very least 200 Sudanese done to death;” and at the beginning of the tenth century the caliph of Baghdad alone had 7,000 black eunuchs.

In “No Property in Man”, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz sketches a picture of abolitionist founders defeating the enshrinement of slavery in the Constitution. The first draft, explicitly pro-slavery, was voted down 10-1. The final document’s compromises with slavery “were substantial” but Madison’s notes, published posthumously in 1840, detailed the abolitionists’ dogged resistance, sowing the seeds of abolition by future congresses. The mission failed. The fault, however, rests not with the Convention.



In a famous 4^th of July speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass savaged America for the brutality of slavery. He also expressed great hope. The “eternal principles,” the “saving principles” in the Constitution, that “glorious document”, were real “and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it”. He later stated, “I base my sense of the certain overthrow of slavery, in part, upon the nature of the American Government, the Constitution, the tendencies of the age, and the character of the American people…. I know of no soil better adapted to the growth of reform than American soil. I know of no country where the conditions for affecting great changes in the settled order of things, for the development of right ideas of liberty and humanity, are more favorable than here in these United States.”



The old narrative of American greatness is under great challenge today. Perhaps it is time for honest reexamination but to do so requires honesty and facts. We should always strive towards a “more perfect union.” Yet, if a scarred runaway slave can see through such hypocrisy and brutality to believe in the founders’ promissory note of liberty, why can’t we do the same in 2019?

JUDGING AMERICA Part I

Four young congresswomen known ominously as “The Squad” are getting a lot of attention right now. Talented, attractive crackpots, they represent a mindset that, until recently, was only held by cranks and college professors. But I repeat myself. To them, the birth of America and Rosemary’s Baby are essentially the same story. To anyone with sense, this seems, well, stupid. But history shows that whole nations can go mad. The liberty we now enjoy is unnatural and against all human history. We take it for granted at our own peril. And now, arguments that were once self-evident must be pulled from dusty shelves and fed like mother’s milk to babies who believe that 2 + 2 = 4 is “white people math”.



When America is condemned as uniquely oppressive, the obvious question is “compared to whom?” Let us tackle the question by first looking at the two most resonant issues: slavery and Native American genocide.



When the Constitution was ratified, slavery was legal in eight states. Some argue this tolerance of slavery is like an Original Sin which can never be expiated. Far from eager acceptance, the debate over slavery during the convention was acrimonious. Compromises were made without which the embryonic nation would have been stillborn. Of these were the greatly misunderstood 3/5 compromise, which Madison introduced to limit slave states’ power, and the banning of the Atlantic slave trade in 20 years.



A few nations and locales abolished slavery around the 14^th and 15^th centuries but bans were never permanent until the modern era. The first modern sovereign state to abolish slavery permanently was Vermont in 1777. In Great Britain, abolitionist sentiment mirrored northern states’ discomfort with slavery. Yet, despite Britain’s economic dependence on slavery largely consisting of house maids and landscapers, they did not abolish slavery until 1833. Peter the Great in Russia and the Chinese Qing Dynasty abolished slavery in 1723 but the bans did not last or were not enforced. Several European nations banished the slave trade by 1820 but only Spain had full abolition by then. Mexico and Central America abolished slavery in 1824, France in 1848. After the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, France threatened to invade. Haitians agreed to extortionist “reparations” amounting to ten times their GDP. Payments finally ended in 1947. Slavery was abolished in most Western countries in the 19^th century but continued to be ubiquitous worldwide well into the 20^th. Most African and Middle Eastern nations ended slavery between 1900 and 1950. It was abolished in Saudi Arabia in 1962, Oman in 1970, and equality-loving Mauritania in 1981, which finally criminalized it in 2007.



Few of these nations had purely agrarian economies almost wholly dependent on slavery. The Antebellum South is held up as an archetype of human evil but abolition was an unfathomably difficult proposition. It meant certain impoverishment and the obliteration of their culture. Yet, slavery was morally corrupting in a way that extended far beyond their treatment of blacks. White southerners’ blindness to this cost them dearly for generations.

While there are plenty of examples in history, defining genocide can be thorny. There are few issues more hotly debated than whether America’s shameful treatment of natives qualifies. The U.S. violated treaty after treaty, committed massacres and exiled tribes to unfamiliar lands. 90% of indigenous peoples may have died from contact with Europeans. While tragic, the historical record shows no intent to eradicate or destroy whole peoples. In other words, no genocide. The vast majority of these deaths were from diseases to which they had little natural defense.

We must also draw a distinction between the brutality of early Spanish colonists and later American settlers. Despite later government policies, many American settlers tried earnestly to coexist with natives. Early American literature is saturated in racial and cultural superiority but also with awe and reverence for natives. Feelings were mixed and sentiments were not monolithic. Despite attempts to link Manifest Destiny with Nazi ideology, they are not the same.  

There is also the matter of the moral nature of Indians themselves. The trope of Rousseau’s “noble savage” suffers under the weight of historical evidence. Intertribal warfare was pervasive and the dogma of natives’ harmony with the earth is more complicated. Often overusing and abusing lands, the effect was sometimes devastating and permanent. Tribes cleared whole forests with slash and burn techniques. Anasazis nearly caused the extinction of native Junipers. Their collapse was also due to some familiar issues: “…recent ideas include extremist politics and religion, and an unsustainable stratification between the rich and poor—the ancient equivalent of income inequality that so infuriated the masses, they couldn’t take it anymore and left.”

Murders and kidnappings of white settlers were common. “The Last of the Mohicans” was inspired by the real-life events of Daniel Boone rescuing his daughter from Cherokee-Shawnee raiders. Many tribes participated in the slave trade, selling native captives to white slave traders before Africans became the preferred commodity. Many tribes themselves owned African slaves. Cherokees owned slaves at a higher rate than Southern whites and brought them on the Trail of Tears. The 1842 Cherokee slave revolt inspired rebellions in other tribes. In a sad, greedy irony, Cherokee Nation elders, mumbling something about getting their own dang casinos, expelled descendants of Cherokee slaves from membership in 2007.

Controversy surrounds Aztec human sacrifice but recent scholarship suggests it was as bloody as Spanish conquistadors portrayed. One historian stated Aztecs were “a culture obsessed with death: they believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing. When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated in 1487 the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.”

Steven Pinker calls the advancement of freedoms in the world “The Rights Revolution”. For all of human history, slavery was uncontroversial and there were no such things as voting, free speech, or fair trials. Women had the right to shut up. Criticism of kings, who ruled by Divine Right, meant imprisonment or execution. Ancient man was ruled by an ethic of conquest. Nearly every people group on earth has a history of attacking, killing and raping their neighbors. What changed was the Enlightenment. The Protestant Reformation gave people the idea that individuals could decide for themselves what was good and right. By the 18^th century, Western thinkers determined that the rights of individuals were inherent and that man should be governed by reason. America was born from these ideals. If America’s founding and by proxy, the ideals that formed it are attacked, what foundation is there for the rights of women, gays, or minority groups of any stripe?  

The point of all this what-about-ism is not to excuse America’s crimes but to wrap them in a blanket of context without which there is no truth or understanding. America has many sins but why not speak of the virtues as well? The question should always be, “Compared to whom?” The sins of America are the sins of humanity itself. For some, this is hard to accept. Truth often is.

AMERICA, WE HAD A GOOD RUN Part III

It may feel right to blame Trump and white privilege for America’s implosion but there is a different story. The decline of religion and quality education (Parts I and II) are poisons working through the body politik but those are simple corruptions that are visible and comprehensible. The third poison is more insidious and revolutionary. It might just be the final nail in our coffin.

Remember squealing in delight at hearing “You’ve got mail!”? It was hard to see the downside to such an explosion of information and connectivity. As Custer said to Sitting Bull when he sold him a case of whiskey, “What do you mean, what’s the downside? A beverage that tastes good and makes you feel great, too? What could possibly be the downside?”

No force in history has democratized man like the internet. Vast distances are meaningless. Commerce and the spread of ideas are instantaneous. Instead of relying on McDonald’s to transport culture through the delights of saturated fats, flashy websites and massive commercial platforms now allow us to read thousands of user reviews from all over the world. The world is united in Stooge-ian bliss by a woman choking on a spoonful of cinnamon.  

The ability of anyone to publish without social connection or money has led to an explosion of ideas, many of them bad. It used to be that publishing meant impressing gatekeepers who were both judges of what would sell but also of what was worthy. This had its downside, of course. Herman Melville and George Orwell dealt with punishing rejection before experiencing success. But now, anybody can vomit ideas into cyberspace. Think Alex Jones and Infowars, QAnon, the proliferation of conspiracy theories and fake news. Think of how many terabytes of data have been wasted posting pictures of food.

The Great Sorting

This mass democratization started long before the internet, of course and curmudgeons issued dark warnings long before Omnipotentblog. Printing ended the monopoly of the Pope. Radio and TV ended the monopolies of newspapers. And now with Fox News, CNN and MSNBC, we don’t ever have to be bothered with anybody’s obviously false opinions again. Infinite choice has led to a sort of ghettoization of like-minded communities, a siloing of information and parallel realities. Maybe journalistic standards have always been low but there is no longer any internal pressure to be fair and balanced since there is confidence the other side will be told. We no longer have a common language, a common morality, or even a common understanding of basic facts. In 1953, historian Herb Butterfield wrote, “…the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.” Is this not our world today?

Some believe enlightenment is the inevitable byproduct of knowledge; The human spirit, they say, is designed to grow. Aided by greater knowledge, man will inevitably strive towards self-actualization. Conservatives, obsessing over the difference between knowledge and wisdom, say this is bunk. Knowledge is meaningless without guidance, they say. Whether from ancient text or tradition or the old lady down the street who always seems to know the right thing to say, wisdom must be either forged through experience or handed down by others who have already done the heavy lifting. Wisdom is not something that just washes over us. We need a doctrine or heuristic to point us in the right direction. Can wisdom be found on the internet? Certainly. (See Omnipotentblog.blogspot.com) But one has to sift through piles and piles of garbage. And honestly, when one has not even begun to scratch the surface of all the hilarious cat videos out there, who has the time?

Now that information is essentially instant and free, another belief system emerges: With Google, who needs to know anything at all? Mankind has available an instant, voice-operated encyclopedia. We are drowning in a sea of information and yet, we seem to swallow none of it.

My kingdom for a “like”.

A whole new genre of media deemed “social” has led to a great irony: we are becoming more and more lonely. This new generation is the most fragile in history. Seen as a national crisis, British Prime Minister Theresa May appointed a government minister with 200 million pounds to combat loneliness. One American study showed the level of anxiety of incoming college freshman is equal to the average mental patient in the 60’s. Parenting expert John Rosemond states the number of children diagnosed with a mental illness is 50 times greater than in the 1950’s. Suicide has nearly doubled in the last five years and psychiatric intakes at Children’s Hospital of San Diego have tripled. They are adding a new wing. A psychologist affiliated with the program acknowledged that cyber bullying has a nastiness that old-fashioned school yard bullying did not. Dr. Jean Twenge of SDSU has published research showing that social media and smartphone use is not only correlated with depression but is the clear and convincing cause of it

We are in a time where the values of the Enlightenment are being eclipsed by Romanticism. Feelings dominate reason. The criticism of the Enlightenment, especially that of the French philosophes, was always that materialism and cold rationality do not solve the problems of man. Are we not beings of beauty and light as well as intellect? Clearly. But we are also not designed for lives ruled by carnality and instinct. It seems the internet is basically designed for instant gratification and emotional itch-scratching. Are we not better than rutting tribal beasts fooled into believing this sort of thing will lead to happiness?

Man has never been healthier, wealthier or safer. We have also never been more sad. And we are becoming more ignorant about real life by the day. Of course, the internet doesn’t turn people into drooling masses; People turn people into drooling masses. It’s just a tool. But misused, it is a doomsday device of stupidity, insularity and loneliness.

The solution is to go out and meet someone for conversation. Read a serious book that is not political propaganda. Lie down on your lawn at night and contemplate the beauty and majesty of the stars. Reconnect with God through prayer or song. And for crying out loud, stop looking at your phone so much. Except when the new installment of Omnipotentblog comes out. Obviously.

AMERICA, WE HAD A GOOD RUN Part II

Increasingly, America is ruled by two tribes of lunatics, snapping their fingers, ready to break into a dance fight at any moment. While Trump has indeed cranked it to 11, he is but the cherry on top of the banana split. How did we go so wrong?

West Side Story

American education was once the best in the world but as early as 1948, Richard Weaver wrote “…we have lost our grasp of the nature of knowledge...” Schools have become “social centers…where teachers, living in fear of constituents, dare not enforce scholarship, and endeavor to turn classes into democratic forums…” And, while knowledge alone will not make citizens more moral or kind or refined, a nation cannot be great without great schools. The 2015 ranking from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which includes countries like Tunisia and Kazakhstan, puts the U.S. at #39 in math, 24 in reading, and 25 in science.

One problem is the deep resistance to reform embedded in teachers’ unions. Unions tell us that teachers are the bedrock of society. But if that’s true, wouldn’t it be important to have good teachers? And to have good teachers, shouldn’t we be able to fire bad ones? In California, where fruit and common sense are stopped at the border, one teacher fed semen-laced cookies to his students. Several victims now have eating disorders but the district had to pay him $40,000 to quit due to the arcane steps required to fire someone. In 2014, a California judge ruled the state’s lax teacher tenure violated students’ civil rights. He was overturned.

Yet, dangerous as general mediocrity is, perhaps the bigger danger to the republic is the pervasive indoctrination that saturates everything from English to Home Economics. “Ohhh, Omnipotentblog. Isn’t that just another whiny conservative trope disproved by this Huffpo piece I read the other day?” asked a friend, a professor at an elite university while sipping cherry Kool-Aid. (True story.) Well, the liberal Atlantic disagrees. In “Admit It, American Colleges Do Indoctrinate Students”, Conor Friedersdorf argues that it does happen but it’s generally a good thing.

Gresham’s law in education states that content that leads to credentials more easily will replace that which is more difficult but has higher intrinsic value. With the advent of Gender, Ethnic and other grievance-oriented programs as well as the infiltration of those values in most other subjects, the bad replaces the good. This material naturally displaces traditional education not only because it is favored by instructors but because time and resources are limited. And when you have a society to indoctrinate, American History and Shakespeare must go.

If you approach two random professors sipping lattes while complaining about the Nixonian conservatism of that imperialist dog Leon Trotsky, they would likely have difficulty naming a Republican colleague. According to one recent study, the ratio of liberal to conservative professors is almost 12 to 1. Economics, the most conservative profession is a mere 4.5 to 1 but in history, the ratio is over 33 to 1. What’s shocking is how these numbers have shifted in the last 50 years. A 1968 study put the ratio in history departments at just 2.7 to 1. As recent as 2004, liberal history professors outnumbered conservatives by as little as 9 to 1. One recent study from Stanford found that conservative-leaning law professors face overt discrimination in promotions and hiring. Another study of social psychology professors noted 37% would not hire a conservative and 44% thought their peers would not. 37% also believed their peers would discriminate on a grant review. My defensive friend points out that STEM professors are generally not communists. While true, STEM students are less than 40% of all graduates, which means the overall ratio for non-STEM fields is far higher than 12 to 1. Primary and secondary education are no better as 85% of elementary and 87% of High School teachers identify as liberal.

Is there evidence students are brainwashed? In a slightly dated study, two researchers found only “slight shifts” in ideology.

But when analyzing the numbers, the “slight shifts” are rather striking. “Far left” students more than doubled while the “far right” cohort dropped nearly a third. Conservatives dropped by 10% while liberals enjoyed a 25% bump. This is hardly insignificant.

How did education drift so far from the broader culture? The social ferment of the 60’s did lasting damage to the nation and education was not spared. In 1969, armed, militant black students, angry over Cornell University’s pervasive “racist attitudes” and “irrelevant curriculum”, seized control of a dormitory. Death threats were phoned to professors who had previously opposed them. Thomas Sowell, a black economist and Cornell professor until 1968, did not experience the alleged mass racism on campus but he did have harsh words for the president at the time, James Perkins, whom he described as “a veritable weathervane, following the shifting cross-current of campus politics…the quintessential appeaser and dispenser of pious rhetoric”. With their demands happily met, the militants walked free.

Another Cornell professor at the time, Allan Bloom, wrote in “The Closing of the American Mind”, that “universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements and did so in large measure because they thought those measures possessed a moral truth...” Perkins “had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time…(he) thought he was engaged in a great moral work.”

In 2018, on American campuses, leftists now feel empowered to threaten violence, physically assault conservatives and journalists, rip posters out of teenaged hands, shout down speeches, riot, and commit an extraordinary number of other fascist and violent acts. This happens because the ideological progeny of James Perkins support it.

Jonah Goldberg describes the 1930’s as a “fascist moment”. A world-wide depression had shaken confidence that democracy could solve problems and there was great affection, fawning in fact, over movers and shakers like Mussolini and Hitler. WWII changed this, of course, but that doesn’t erase the fact that there was a time when many viewed the Bill of Rights as crusty and stale. Is Western Civilization having another “fascist moment”? The left has made serious attacks on the 1^st, 2^nd, 4^th, and 10^th amendments and many on the right embrace a president that, while unfairly slandered as fascist, appears thoroughly annoyed he has any restraints at all.

When an entire generation expresses fondness for socialism but can’t even define it, it’s time to admit our schools have failed. Fixing education would be a daunting task. Perhaps when Millenials start running everything and really making a mess of it, panic will ensue and a correction will begin. When that time comes, God willing, maybe we should start with the teachers and school books first. 

AMERICA, WE HAD A GOOD RUN

or

WHAT THE BLEEP IS GOING ON? 

Part I

My last unfinished blog asked whether America was in decline. I had data on crime, drugs, mental illness, declining morals and other issues which clearly pointed to an unravelling. And then my laptop was stolen, yanked from my feet at Starbucks. I chased the man but…(sigh)…I’m fat. I lost the computer and the piece. And some sweet headphones. Bastard. Surely the incident was just a coincidence but a year and a half later, it now seems silly to even ask such a question. Of course everything’s going to hell.

Why?

A few years ago I became obsessed with the Enlightenment, Western Civilization and the Reformation. Millennials were rejecting universal dogma about free speech and embracing socialism. SOCIALISM! As grandma would say, “Oh, for cryin’ out loud in a bucket.” I thought if we better understand the cultural blessings we take for granted, maybe we can save them. I was not alone. Pieces on the Enlightenment have become a cottage industry. Famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “Ideas rule the world. In fact, little else matters”. Well, for the first time since the industrial revolution, the West is questioning the very ideas to which we owe our existence.

To counter the horrors of the Wars of Religion (1517-ish to 1648) and the centuries-long tension ignited by the Reformation, some felt the answer was to reject objective truth itself. To paraphrase John Lennon, if there’s no belief, there’s nothing to fight over. Hence, we live in a time where cosmopolitan debunkers scoff at notions of Natural Law and timeless truth as crusty and primitive (except for that one truth that says there is no truth, of course). With straight faces, they swear they have no ideologies; They’re just, you know, pragmatic. Two giants of modern Christian thought held this view in utter contempt. C.S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man”, wrote that a hard heart (believing in nothing) is no defense against a soft mind. He was likely intentionally echoing G.K. Chesterton who said, "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing—they believe in anything." The future seems to have vindicated them.

We hear from the most obnoxious of atheist evangelists that purging religion will usher in a golden age of reason. David French’s Post Christian America: Gullible, Intolerant and Superstitious disputes this. French recalled how his Harvard classmates sneered at the absurdity of the New Testament but thought reincarnation was “cool”. French lamented seeing Harvard students walk in and out of the witchcraft store and he described one friend talking about her son’s “Indigo Aura”. 

Mother Jones noted a rising belief in astrology.

Not strictly an American phenomenon, Europeans are embracing their own silliness. In the Wall Street Journal, Naomi Schaefer Riley writes that “In Austria, 28% of respondents say they believe in fortune tellers; 32% believe in astrology; and 33% believe in lucky charms…(“They’re after me Lucky Charms!”) More than half of Icelanders believe in huldufolk, hidden people like elves and trolls.” She quotes Baylor scholar Rodney Stark who stated, “More than 20 percent of Swedes believe in reincarnation…half believe in mental telepathy.”

In National Review, author and professor Clay Routledge remarked that decline in religiosity is connected to more belief in ghosts, UFO’s, and clairvoyance and that those who reject traditional belief often embrace what he describes as “supernatural-lite” beliefs, “often wrapped superficially in the language of science and technology, making them more palatable” to the irreligious. He noted, however, that those rejecting theism are often still influenced by it. Finnish researchers found that both theists and atheists exhibited similar levels of physiological stress when reading aloud statements daring God to cause harm.

Routledge wrote that while many are finding nontraditional substitutes for church, “there are reasons to doubt that those are effective substitutes for religion”. He writes that the substitutes are more individualistic and focused on personal interests rather than social duties and interdependence. They are belief systems that lead to loneliness. Routledge called religion a “uniquely powerful” resource for meaning because it “binds individuals to a meaning-sustaining social fabric.”

“Let us not neglect meeting together, as some have made a habit, but let us encourage one another…”

                                                                                                                       Hebrews 10:25

Suicides have risen an alarming 30% since 2000. One author noted that the average anxiety of the incoming freshman was equal to that of the average mental patient in the 1960’s. Parenting expert John Rosemond claims that mental disorders in youth have increased 50-fold since the 1950’s. In a piece on Intellectual Takeout, Marcus Roberts noted how the same Clay Routledge documented this increase in suicide as due in part to a crisis in meaning.  Routledge says there is much empirical evidence for existential anxiety being tied to substance abuse and other mental health issues. Roberts writes, “…the changing landscape in the USA is undermining people’s sense of meaning. The decline of neighborliness, the shrinking of the family and the diminishing of religion are all posing serious threats to a meaning of life. Americans today are less likely to know and interact with their neighbors, they are less likely to believe that people are generally trustworthy and to feel that they have individuals they can confide in.”

Millenials are the least religious generation in history. Is it a surprise they are so lost? British Prime Minister Theresa May called loneliness a national crisis. She appointed a minister to tackle a problem believed to affect over 9 million in her country. I would argue, however, that loneliness is but a symptom. In “Man’s Search for Meaning”, existential psychologist Viktor Frankl described how his fellow concentration camp victims displayed great disparities in reacting to the crisis. Those who rejected nihilism and embraced their God or connectedness and service to others were able to stave off despair. What shocked him was that, in the midst of the depths of some of the most profound human misery—starvation, typhus and imminent execution—some appeared…happy. They knew that whether in life or in death, in abundance or suffering, life had meaning.  Witnessing this changed his life.

I am a deeply religious person. I see religious thought and behavior everywhere because I know what that is. I see non-believers often as no less religious than churchgoers. People need meaning. They need to be part of something bigger than themselves. I think this is what drives many social justice warriors. The big battles against racism were already won but they want to fight the same evil. So they tackle the horrors of offensive Halloween costumes and ethnic food in the cafeteria. Maybe they need some of that old-time religion.

HOW RACIST ARE WE REALLY? Part II

Some argue there has been little racial progress since the fifties but even the president says this progress simply cannot be denied. Can anybody see a man named Barack Hussein Obama being elected president in 1960? The idea is laughable. What racial arsonists like Black Lives Matter fail to see is that decades ago, battles were fought over segregation, lynchings, and voter suppression (the real kind). The very existence of words like “micro-aggression” and “cultural appropriation” is proof that times have changed.

 

Is racism really everywhere? In 1997, CNN and Time conducted a poll that asked white and black teens “Is racism a major problem in America?” Both groups said, "yes." But when black teens were asked if racism in their own lives was a "big problem," a "small problem" or "no a problem at all", 89% percent said racism was a "small problem" or "not a problem at all" for themselves. In fact, not only did black teens see racism as insignificant in their own lives, but nearly twice as many black teens than whites called "failure to take advantage of available opportunities" a big problem in their lives. Could black perception of mass racism really be an illusion?

 

In gauging the true extent of racism, simply looking at intergroup disparities is not helpful. Thomas Sowell, a conservative black economist, notes that one of the stupidest ideas in all of politics is that all groups in a society should end up with equal results. If one child comes from a family where sports are discussed every night over dinner and another comes from a family where science and literature are discussed, are they really likely to be equally successful? Sowell notes in Wealth, Poverty and Politics that across the world, many ethnic minorities actually excel such as the Chinese in southern Asia, the Lebanese in Ethiopia and the Armenians in Turkey before the genocidal purge. He also notes staggering differences between African Immigrants and African Americans. 75% of black students at Harvard are African, Caribbean or mixed race. 

 

To separate fact from rhetoric, let’s begin with income. There clearly is a disparity.  According to a 2014 Census Bureau study, blacks are almost twice as likely to live in poverty as all races combined, 27% vs. 15.5%. What can explain this? Marriage. Conservatives have always argued the preeminence of family and the data (you know, “science”) proves it. 71% of all black children are raised by single mothers. The poverty rate for black married couples with children is only 10.8% but skyrockets to 46.1% for single mothers. The rate for all races is very similar: 8.2% poverty for married couples and 37% for single mothers with children. The drastic difference in poverty rates is almost wholly explained by family status.

 

Fig. 1 shows how black marriage rates were decimated soon after the war on poverty started.

 

Fig. 1

 

Family structure is not the only factor, of course. Figure 2 shows the impact of well-meaning but counterproductive government policy.

Figure 2

 

Figure 3 shows the inverse relationship between welfare spending and poverty reduction.

 

Fig. 3

 

Despite ineffective anti-poverty policies, Figure 4 shows the poverty gap between black and white families continued to close until about 2000.

 

Fig. 4

 

The education gap has also closed significantly. In 1940, the ratio of whites to blacks attaining college degrees was 5 to 1. In 2011, it was 1.5 to 1.

 

Fig. 5

Could simple geography partially explain the racial income gap? Possibly. While blacks are relatively well dispersed throughout the nation, there is still a major concentration in the South and other low income regions. If blacks had the geographical dispersion of Asians, the highest income group in America, the overall income gap might be smaller still.

 

America has come a long way but suspicion of white bias is not all fake, of course. A report on the Baltimore PD was just released showing lots of excessive force and harassment. While Part I showed that police abuse is not the problem it’s thought to be, should it surprise anyone if riots occur in cities where it is, in fact, worse? Also, there are a number of clever studies that show unconscious bias despite people’s good intentions. If you think you’re enlightened, take the Implicit Associations Test, then feel bad about yourself. However, blacks, too, have internalized this sense of inferiority. In 1995, one study had black participants answer 20 questions from the GRE. After being asked to simply state their race on the test, correct responses dropped in half.

 

Henry Kissinger argues that the notion of oppressed peoples rising up is a myth. The oppressed tend to rise up when the situation is improving. And that’s what seems to be happening here: It is finally safe to express anger at a level not seen even during the Civil Rights era. In Milwaukee right now, rioters are grabbing random whites off the street and beating them up. How interesting that now that we have a black president and the most equality-obsessed generation in history, the streets have exploded.

 

Some of this, of course, is due to a terribly cynical group of hucksters who exploit race hatred for political gain. They know that if blacks one day realize conservatives don’t hate them, the Democrat party is done. However, there has to be more to it. To confused, decent white people, the renewed anger doesn’t make sense. Racism is the biggest taboo in our culture and real progress has been made. Viewed through a psychological lens, however, it makes perfect sense. In the midst of danger, one simply survives. In the South, you will still find 80 year old black gentlemen who open doors for white people and call them “sir” and “ma’am”. We are only one generation removed from fire hoses and attack dogs and the collective PTSD is still working itself out. Will it? 

 

Unfortunately, many seem to be waiting for every vestige of unconscious racism to be vanquished before looking at the broken families and anti-intellectualism in their own communities. But unconscious bias doesn’t work that way. White women will continue to clutch their purses until the links between blacks and crime are severed by reality. That change has to come from within. If they are waiting for white people or a benevolent government to save them, it’s going to be a long wait.