Kekes, On the Human Condition II

There is an enormous world of brute physical events and objects, having no significance or value in themselves and independently of what any conscious being thinks or desires. In this midst of this there is a tiny place we carve out in which events and things matter to us because we are beings who have preferences that things to go one way for us rather than another. There is no larger story. Death is the end for each of us. Some of us have undeservedly bad lives, and there is no balancing of the scales afterward. There is a set of values by which we can guide ourselves to fulfilling lives if we are in sufficient control.

Such is the secular view of the sort Kekes describes. If this seems unsatisfactory, then you are committed to the position that if there is no supernatural backdrop to the cruelty and contingency of life which redeems it for its shortcomings, then life is not worthwhile, there are no genuinely good lives worth aspiring to, and there is no right and wrong but only, as Euripides said, dreams of these things. This is an untenable position. It is conceals an inevitable commitment to despair.

However, religion, in its decent and good varieties, of which there are many, is a beautiful complement to life. And God, if he exists, would be disappointed in the covert commitment to despair. Look at it in this way. He loves you. He is in your heart. Upon death, you cease to exist.

A second point, about what I've called "Humean realism." It may also be called "subjective realism." Do not confuse it with Kekes view of moral facts, which we will endeavor to discern as we go. But to make it clear, consider the taste of sugar: sweet. It really is sweet, is it not? You might convince yourself otherwise as a freshman in Intro to Philosophy class, but only for a moment, and only with the giddy knowledge that you are playing with the facsimile of belief. Sugar is sweet. It has this property, as a matter of fact. Now, this property is not one it has independently of the subjective states of human beings and other animals, any more than "70 miles from Charlottesville" is a property Richmond has independently of Charlottesville. Similarly, the various moral values we hold dear are genuine and real, but they do not exist independently of the set of desires which beings like us have by nature and by cultural and individual persuasion. Think about these things a little more and you will begin to get an idea of subjective realism, at least of the variety I espouse.

We'll turn to Kekes's chapter two next, in which he fills in his picture of control.

Kekes, On the Human Condition I

We continue our series of looks at John Kekes’s books. His A Case for Conservatism is required reading. You can tuck into the archives for other posts in this series. These posts aren’t reviews or summaries, although they briefly describe the books chapter by chapter. Rather, they are my own musings. This year On the Human Condition appeared. Let’s take a look.

Kekes thinks he needs to defend a secular view of the human condition, that is, to explain and defend the way in which we ought to conceive of human well-being and to do so without appealing to a supernatural realm. I disagree. I think there is no need to dwell on the secularity of a view of human welfare. One need only state and defend it. Critics may object that it suffers for leaving out the supernatural, and one may defend the view against them. In any event, Kekes does not dwell long in the beginning of the book. After distinguishing his view’s secularity from that of others, which assume the perfectibility of Man, the supremacy of science in human reasoning, or the universalism of moral judgment, he notes that any secular view must respond to the concern voiced by Euripides long ago that Man may be so completely tied by natural contingency to the chance or luck of physical forces and natural events, that to aspire for him to aspire to a good life may be delusional. In other words, either we have control over our lives and may fulfill our hopes or we are completely at the mercy of brute forces which have no intention at all of fulfilling them and may fulfill them only by chance.

The first step Kekes takes in the book is the break down this dilemma. We have a little control, and we may get more. There is no dilemma but only an opportunity for the individual to move from the one extreme of being at the mercy of luck toward the other extreme of complete control. The means of this progress are the large array of values which we inherit which enable us to choose lives suitable to producing our well-being, cooperation with others, success in competition with them, and the power to use practical reason to reflect upon the other means to determine how to refine them.

It is good that Kekes brings control, or, as he has called it in previous books, self-direction, to the foreground in the beginning of the book. Your best high-level strategy for improving your life is to try to increase your control. You ought to decide to do this if you have not. I decided to do this when I was about 13 years old, and the depth and happiness in which it has resulted in my life have been enormous. It is central. It is the lynchpin. You will have otherwise only luck to count on. Control entails determining a set of mutually consistent goals for your life which fit your aptitudes and inclinations well and then relentlessly putting these goals above less important concerns in your actions over time. This involves practical reasoning about which goals these are to be. It involves reflection on the large set of values you have inherited which enable you to do more than just to fulfill your basic animal needs. It involves disposing yourself to cooperate and compete well with others.

Naturally, this might seem for a moment like it goes without saying. But think for a moment about the many people you have witnessed in lack of control, in drift. This may include yourself.

Enough of that. One other point of interest: that for Kekes our values are fallible. You might find ones that are not good. These are values which do not get it right about us. He says,

Our values and attitudes are fallible and we continually revise them in the hope of making them less fallible. They are also unavoidably reflexive, because we are both the valuing and the attitude–forming subjects and the objects of our evaluations and attitudes. Our fallible and reflexive attitudes and our forever changing values are genuine characteristics of the law-governed world. Although we have made them and we are perpetuating them, they really do exist.

Quite right. But there are questions to answer about this (tuck into the archives on this.) The status of moral facts is a tough nut to crack. The subjectivist position holds that these facts are not real. It is incorrect. The objective realist position holds that these facts are independent of human desires. It is incorrect. There is nothing that would count as evidence that the Manson murders, Stalin’s murder of millions of Ukrainians, or the whichever paradigmatic case of brutal evil you would like to summon from your local newspaper were not, as a matter of fact, very wrong. And there is nothing that would count as evidence that there is a set of determinations of right and wrong which hold true even though they are deeply abhorrent to and inconsistent with the various desires human beings have, the fulfillment of which makes their lives worth living to them. Subjectivism and objective realism, then, are both untenable. My own view, which you can find in the archives, is a revised and extended version of Humean realism. What is Kekes’s view? We shall see.

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident

Human nature being understood, and moral language being understood, one can make some observations.

Human beings are more likely to thrive under conditions of liberty. The chances of fulfilling a person's preferences by coercing him are much lower than his own chances of fulfilling his preferences by his own discovery of those preferences, decision as to how to fulfill them, and freely undertaking to act on his decisions. If his betters have wisdom on the matter he can seek it out by inquiring of them. If someone decides to control and coerce him, it will unlikely be his better and even if it is, it will unlikely be a man who could fulfill the preferences of his subjects as well as they could fulfill their preferences.

This is pretty close to self-evident. Anyone who understands human nature and history sees that this is so. This is part of the reason why it makes sense to say that it is self-evident that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.

The rest of the story is this. The terms of morality, "right," "just," "good," and so forth are defined in such a way that certain truths are self-evident, tautologies. "People have a right to the property they earn by labor." "People have a right to liberty." "People have a right to life." Also, "men are equal" in the sense that they are equal under the moral law is true because this is simply the statement that different moral evaluations require that there be relevant differences between the subjects of these different evaluations. If we judge person A's action to be permissible while person B's we judge to be impermissible, then we must be able to point to a morally relevant difference between their actions. In other words the concept of the moral law entails that all subject to it are equal under it. These truths are self-evident because there is nothing that would count as evidence that they were not truths. They are momentous tautologies subsisting at the core of the conceptual system of morality. Morality isn't about cheese or planets. It is about these things; they are the warp and woof of it.

This is why it is so that "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Some Points about Human Nature

But to get back. I just have a few points about human nature.

Human nature includes a set of desires. These are wired in, with various degrees of intractability and malleability. The set is a cluster: a set with a set of sensible connections amongst its members. By “sensible” I mean reasonable, told in a cogent story, fulfilled in a way that can be explained, told as a fulfilling life. By “fulfilling” I mean a maximization of the fulfillment of the desires in this set.

The intractability and malleability: There are many conflicting possible lifestyles which human beings have selected and found fulfilling. The ascetic lifestyle and the life of the American middle-class family man are a pair of examples. Both can be fulfilling lives. This shows that a narrow and partial fulfillment of the set of desires may be found satisfactory, as well as a broader net fulfillment. The ascetic fulfills only a few desires, the family man many. On the other hand, there are varying degrees of likelihood of achieving a good life amongst these alternate paths. The lifestyle which fulfills only a few of the desires most intensely is less likely to be good. The drug addict, the astronaut who leaves earth alone forever to journey to another solar system, and the ascetic are less likely to have good lives than the family man who has his social life, his hobbies, his religion, his career, his health, etc. So, there is a human nature which constrains the range of possible good lives, even though that range is not narrow.

So, there are ways of life which fulfill human nature in various styles - subsets of the fulfillment of the larger set of desires. Each subset is a structured cluster which may be explained as a life which delighted its owner by fulfilling a large set of his desires in a delightful way. A subset of human desires which hangs together by mutually abetting each other’s fulfillment relies on a set of practices for just that particular fulfillment. This is a culture. Culture is an enormous source of good lives for human beings because it is a way of enabling human beings to fulfill their desires as a large set, including the benevolent ones and the sense of justice. This set of practices emanates from human experience through trial and error, through interaction with the set of desires which is human nature. (Notice that the drug addict, the astronaut who leaves society forever, and the ascetic need little of culture.)

If you make a plan for society, and you are not deeply wise about human nature, you will come up with ghastly austerities which contort our preferences. Top-down social planning requires a grasp of human nature. The rub is that human nature doesn’t mix well with top-down social planning. Such planning is therefore self-undermining. No one is wise enough to create a social plan for the fulfillment of human nature. No one is smart enough to create a culture worth preserving. The set of desires in human nature is too complicated.

Aiming to preserve a culture is a different matter. Naturally, one loves one's culture. It is good because it is a source of human fulfillment. It enables a person to fulfill a large set of his deeply held desires. It gives him pathways which will enable him to fulfill many of them. Naturally, a set of values needs to have mistakes ferreted out of it. But this is perfectly consistent with a devotion to its preservation. People are well-suited to recognizing good cultures, to improving them in small, piecemeal ways, and to preserving them by practicing them, advocating them, and passing them down to the next generation.

There is one more thing which we can see here and which is unfortunate. Those who like to partake in top-down social planning are not likely to be concerned with planning in a way consistent with human nature. Those who are so concerned are not likely to be interested in taking a role in government. In other words, the one who would control and plan society is more likely to be one who doesn't understand that he must let culture take the lead and not try to replace it with his plan. People who want power are usually like that. Human nature is suited to limited government. Societies are fortunate which promote to leadership people who do not wish to replace their society's culture.

As the Declaration of Independence says, we have inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What this means is that human nature is such that a person's life cannot be good unless he is alive and is free enough to pursue the fulfillment of a large subset of the desires which make up human nature. Since it is self-evident to anyone who understands human nature and the concepts of right and wrong that human beings have a right to pursue good lives, it follows that human beings by nature have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. (Notice that it is not strictly self-evident that we have those rights but follows self-evidently from a self-evident premise.)

Palin and Death Panels

You thought Sarah Palin was a ditzy broad when she said there would be death panels in the Democrats' health insurance bureaucracy. Why did you think that? Because she's pretty?

Anyway, there are death panels in the senate bill and Reid wrote them in there so that they can't be repealed without 67 votes.

He did? Let's see what Palin has to say about it.

But the bill raises taxes on everybody just as we are teetering on the brink of a depression. At least there's that.

You're being taken to the cleaners and you will be denied medical care. The joke's on you.

But go ahead and donate to the DNC and vote Democrat again. Follow your leaders, sheep.

Obama really did turn out to be an asshole, as I told you a year and a half ago. Oh, well, at least he's black. You'll vote for him against Palin in 2012. Otherwise, you'd be shamed by the other "progressives" in your little circle of friends. As stupid as you are, that's more important to you than avoiding getting ripped off, having your country's economy trashed, or being denied medical care.

UPDATE: It's teh kleptocracy, stupid.

UPDATE: Let's see, what's the name of the political system in which government strong-arms business, pays them off, and teams up with them to control the masses in anti-democratic fashion? Oh, yes, it's fascism. And of course, the socialists hate the fascists:

Moneyed interests "control" the Congress, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) lamented Tuesday.

Sanders, the liberal independent senator, said that health insurance companies and drug manufacturers are getting too much out of the Senate healthcare bill, but said he'd still vote for it in order to extend coverage.

"The insurance companies are going to make out like bandits. The drug companies are going to make out like bandits,"

Wouldn't you hate your totalitarian competitors if you were a totalitarian? Oh, but he's still going to vote for the bill! LOL. These are your rulers. You elected them. August and noble statesmen to be taken seriously. Congratulations.

Sentimentalism, Conservatism, and Human Nature

The question is: What gives the basis for conservative values? Why not pursue a fetish as the progressive does? Well, the progressive is really a tool of a kleptocrat, but leaving that aside, can't he quixotically pursue his ideology's fulfillment as reasonably as the conservative pursues the preservation of the large set of values which he cherishes?

The progressive usually bases his views in "reason," portraying conservatism as irrational bias, prejudice, or unreflectively dogmatic tradition. In fact, there is not the slightest reason underlying progressive ideology, as the finest attempt at justifying it, that of Rawls, failed miserably. But what is the basis for conservatism?

The basis is human nature. Yet, this citation is subject to the charge of dogmatism unless it is explained in a manner which shows it to be rational. "Because that is your nature" is not good enough.

The British sentimentalist tradition of Butler and Hume provides the basis for conservatism and human nature. Human nature is a set of desires which creatures like us are liable to have, and it delimits this set as distinct from desires which we are not likely to have. It implies certain institutions, traditions, and values because it renders these practically consistent with the fulfillment of our desires, whereas others are practically inconsistent with it.

Run through a list of time-honored values in your mind. Those are values which make it likely that we will fulfill our desires, whereas the rejection of those makes it unlikely that we will fulfill them. Run through a list of desires people naturally have. Now think of ones which people are not likely to have, such as cutting chunks of their flesh out of themselves, lying in utter torpor all day every day, avoiding the learning of language, preferring not to have liberty, etc. Of course, people do sometimes desire these things in unusual circumstances as means to fulfill another desire, as in the case of surgery in which flesh must be removed in order to fulfill the desire to live. So, what I'm asking you to do is to consider non-instrumental desires. It is obvious that some are natural and others are not, where by "natural" I mean nothing more than the likelihood of human beings' harboring these desires.

Of course, there is some flexibility and variation in human nature. There is a variety of possible cultures which allow for the fulfillment of desires natural to us. Streams of culture in ancient China, India and Greece are paradigmatic examples. People have flourished in these streams. Perhaps there is a ranking of the effectiveness of each in the order of flourishing, but that is beside the point. While there may be better and worse amongst good cultures, some cultures and values are obviously bad. Bad cultures do not allow for flourishing because they do not allow for people who are liable to have the desires we are liable to have to fulfill those desires. We should also note that the boundaries of a traditional stream of values are not rigid. The variation in human nature allows for individuals within one traditional stream to imagine new possibilities within it. Yet these boundaries are not absolutely permissive, constrained as they are by human nature.

The basis, then, is as the sentimentalists showed. There is nothing that we should count as a reason for a certain action other than that one desires to do it; and if an action is most fulfilling to one's desires then it is reasonable to do this action. What would you take as evidence that an action was reasonable to do even though it was not practically consistent with your set of desires? What would you take as evidence that it was not reasonable to do even though it was so fulfilling? Nothing. Conservatism sees high moral theory as anathema, and rightly so. Most such theory is nonsense used in progressive causes. But the sort of moral theory I'm laying out here maintains precisely that we should conserve our time-honored values because it is what we prefer to do and because they are ours. This is abundantly sufficient reason and No other reason can be necessary.

This is the rational basis of conservatism. It is human nature, which is a set of desires human beings are likely to have. "Human nature" here is not a meaningless term wielded by dogmatists but an empirically discoverable set of facts about what human beings are liable to desire. The rational basis, then, of conservatism is the close coupling of what one prefers - what is practically most consistent with one's desires - and what it is rational for one to do.

Leftism, fascism, progressivism, and so forth, are enamored of little bits of human nature, such as the desire for poverty relief, in utter neglect of all the other components of our nature. The are so obviously lacking in basis that one inspects for something else underlying them, which, as I've suggested a couple of posts below is kleptocracy. They are frauds. When a man stands to gain enormous power and wealth from you by titillating you with fulfillment of one or two of your desires - for example your desire to gratify your envy - you are about to be defrauded. If you haven't the character formed in traditions conservative of a large set of values which are able to fulfill a much larger set of your desires, you will not recognize the fraud. The drug addict, the Jim Jones cult follower, the alcoholic, the sex addict, and the kleptocrat's sheep are all characters stunted in formation, liable to fetishize only a few human desires and so unable to manage the fulfillment of the many desires whose fulfillment is necessary for good lives.

Climate Fraud

It's little-guy scientists against big oil $$$, right? Sure:

The Climate Industry: $79 billion so far – Trillions to come.

You're getting taken to the cleaners. Oh, well. But you won't change your mind. Because you hate rich oil executives. And Americans who drive but SUVs. You prefer the style and emotion of your political views. The science and reasoning aren't really all that important to you. How's that going to work out for you?

UPDATE: Charlie Martin shows how to follow the money.

Leftism/Progressivism: There's No Such Thing

There is only kleptocracy. The followers in a kleptocracy believe it is leftist/progressive. The leaders do not. The leaders use their followers. They are useful idiots. The leaders want power and money. The followers want gratification of their envies.

There is kleptocracy. Useful idiots fantasize that it is something called "leftism" or "progressivism." End of story.

Fascism? Same thing. No such thing. It's teh kleptocracy, stupid.

Climate Change

Are you an easy mark for a con-man who wants a few grand from you every year (and from your kids and from their kids)? Don't be.

But you'll still vote for decimating the American economy and crushing the hopes of development in the Third World. Because none of your friends aren't liberals and if you don't believe in AGW they'll think you are a weirdo and make you feel guilty. That's how you decide right and wrong: by how accepted or guilty other leftists make you feel. Yes, don't reject the beliefs of your chosen liberal elite. They will shame you, make you feel guilty. Do as you're told, you little worm.

UPDATE: Of course Al won't debate him. He actually knows stuff.

Oh, and the AP says that there's no there there in Climategate? LOL. The AP is implicated in Climategate. How do you like being lied to by "news" agencies?

UPDATE: Statistician William Briggs has a series on homogenization.

Some Climategate Links

While the wealthy are lavishing $200M or so on themselves in Copenhagen this week, there is also this:

Hiding the decline.

How to make a fake hockey stick.

WSJ.

Scientists behaving badly.

It's fraud. It's kleptocracy. The AGW industry is big money. Fortunes are being made, as well as pseudo-scientific careers.

The ass kicker? Suppose it is a fact that there is AGW and it's a problem which we need to address. These con-men have so well and truly fucked the data and the science, we won't be able to discover this fact for decades. They are to blame for any delay. And you for your credulity.

Climategate

It turns out you were lied to by the IPCC gang. Follow the money. And the power.

To catch up start with these articles by Charles Martin, all of them.

Then, read this post and all subsequent posts on that site. Guess who's money supported this CRU "research"? Yours.

For afters, don't miss this. And this.

You've been had. And now your economy is about to be crushed by Crap and Tax. Follow the money. It's called "fraud." You pay. Do you have any idea how much money there is in trading carbon credits and sucking money out of the federal government for green energy ventures? You pay. You lose. You're being defrauded. Do you have any idea how much power is embodied in the government control of how much carbon dioxide an economy generates?

No, but there's anthropogenic global warming, right? It's just that it's been taking a break for the last ten years with temperatures holding flat.

Go ahead and pay. You lose.

UPDATE: Don't miss this. What do you think of scientists who use your money to present distorted versions of their data and do not comply with FOIA requests to reveal their data and methods? Yet you want to change our economy on the basis of their pronouncements.

Follow the money and power:

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have.

What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.[SNIP]

The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.

Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.

What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power.

If it was about saving the planet, "cap-and-trade" (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) -- how Big Government, Big Business and Big Green ludicrously pretend we will "fight" global warming and "save the planet" -- would have been consigned to the dust bin of history because it doesn't work. We know it doesn't work because Europe's five-year-old cap-and-trade market -- the Emissions Trading Scheme -- has done nothing to make the world cooler.

All it's done is make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported.

Fascism is that form of leftism in which a cabal of government, business and media kleptocrats screw you out of your future. You support it? You're a fascist or one of their useful idiots.

UPDATE: Delete the data. Hide the decline.

Things You Believe

• Anthropogenic Global Warming is pretty well confirmed by the scientific evidence. Our release of CO2 has caused the climate to warm. There is no evidence to the contrary.
• Cap and Trade is a great idea. It will create jobs, lowering the unemployment rate, and help cool the planet.
• The belief that economic stimulus - spending by the federal government in order to stimulate the economy and create jobs - works is based on sound economic evidence.
• Sarah Palin is stupid, ignorant, and a silly, while Barack Obama is smart, knowledgeable and accomplished.
• The only reasons there is any resistance to the federal government's plan to take over the health insurance industry are selfishness, ignorance and stupidity. The values at stake in the debate are fairness, decency and justice on the one side and greed on the other.
• We should make private health insurance companies illegal and let the government be the only health insurance provider.
• We have double-digit unemployment and will do so for the foreseeable future because of what Republicans did in the past.
• Our guys in the military are stupid and have no other viable options in life and therefore are being taken advantage of by our government.
• Good solid conservatives worth listening to for the sake of your open-minded fairness are chiefly David Brooks and David Gergen.
• MSNBC is fair while FOX News is extremely biased.
• The opposition to Barack Obama is attributable to racism and ignorance.
  

Kettle

No, really.

Bigwig?

It's making a sound. Can't poke it because it's made of cyberpixels. Just have to wait. The world's most bestest blogger stirs. Prolly it'll just roll over and go back to sleep, which is just fine. Thy will be done!

Peter Bocking RIP

Fare thee well, PeterUK.

RIP, Mr. Bocking.

Conservatism is in the Middle of a Web

There is a web of values which we have inherited from our ancestors, a large set which form the moral substance of the ways of life which we love and which make for good and decent lives. They hang together in mutual support in the way that a the strands of a spider web do.

Unfortunately, some of the strands may be pursued monomaniacally. Fetishizing one value over the rest, away one goes off on a tangent away from the central network. One leaves the other strands behind, gives them short shrift, allowing one's preferred thread to trump all the others. Libertarianism is an example of this monomania. Go to a local libertarian meeting. Half the room will turn out to be anarchists. Liberty is a trump, so government is not allowable.

Some of the strands do not fit in with the rest of the web. Moral and political debate is supposed to ferret out these elements and discard them, just as one discovers and erases whichever of the entries in a crossword puzzle is incoherent with the rest.

Some people make fetishes out of an improper strand instead of properly discarding it. An example is the effort to redistribute wealth. There is no justice in the redistribution of wealth. It also does no good. It is a bad value. Yet many base their political points of view on it, fetishizing it, making it trump all the other values in the web. They, too, end up far away from the central cluster of values, out on a tangent. But, unlike the libertarian, they sacrifice all else to a bad value, not a good one.

Conservatism is the intent to preserve the cluster, to prevent any drift of one's morals or of the body politic in any direction away from the center. The cluster is worth preserving. None of the strands in the cluster, whether proper or improper, is more valuable than the entire set.

So-called moderates? They are people who drift from the center in whichever direction, only not very far.

This is a decent picture of conservatism and its alternatives. As I've argued in previous posts, the left-right spectrum is a very poor model.

Conservatism is Indexical

Reader Stephen Krueger writes in:

I've read some of John Ray's writings on the meaning of "right" and "left". What I took away from it is he was defining them as conservative and progressive, respectively. Conservatism meaning a general temper for experience or what came before, and progressivism meaning a temper for changing the standing order. The terms are not to be taken as determining what level of government is acceptable. So your statement: "It means that libertarians are to the right of conservatives, and anarchists still further to the right," doesn't fit.

Well, yes, but there is more to be said.

By "indexical" I mean referring to a certain thing. Political and moral conservatism is a conservative stance about a certain thing; it is not just a conservative stance about anything. And it that certain thing is a certain set of ways of life; it is not just any ways of life. There is a reason that there are no leftist conservatives, and it's not a superficial reason.

Of course conservatives are known for loving and preserving traditional ways of life inherited from history. This being so, one might set of a right-left spectrum in which those who want a new society are on the left and those who do not - conservatives - are on the right. This dichotomy might render the terms "left" and "right" more sensibly than the dichotomy between totalitarianism and liberty. In this way one could not be too conservative and anarchists would not be nonsensically placed to the right of conservatives.

However, this allows for the possibility of communist conservatives, anarchist conservatives, and so forth. In any society in which totalitarianism or anarchy held sway, the conservative, we would have to say, would favor maintaining the totalitarianism or anarchy. You might be satisfied with that sense of "conservative," in which the term applies to anyone who wants to keep his society the way it has been for some time. But this is not the best sense of the term.

The term "conservative" is indexical. It refers to the desire to preserve the ways of life suitable to our nature; "our" is an indexical term, a pointer. Take an analogy: "great lover." We don't mean someone who demonstrates deft and fervently amorous behaviors behaviors about just anything - bicycles, twigs, people, water, string, chunks of ice in Saturn's rings, etc. We mean he does demonstrates these behaviors toward human beings, and even certain human beings, at that, ones worthy of his affections. Similarly a man who reflexively aims to preserve his countries old totalitarian, welfare-statist, or anarchist system is not a conservative any more than a member of the Charles Manson clan would have been had one of them devoutly tried to preserve its traditions.

Therefore, what drives conservatism is human nature. Conservatism aims at obtaining and maintaining moral and political values which are appropriate to the kind of beings we are, which promote our flourishing and enable us to live decent and good lives. Fondness for tradition isn't conservatism without this tether to human nature. Conservatism is a disposition to keep to traditions but within the constraint that the traditions track the facts about human nature. You needn't be fully aware of this tethering and tracking to be a conservative; you need only have a sense that something like this is what you are trying to do in preserving your values.

To be conservative, then, you have to get it right. Conservatism is indexical. If you haven't pointed your conservative dispositions at the right set of ways of life, you are not a conservative. You may be a crank or a reactionary, but you aren't a conservative. You might think you are a conservative, but you would be mistaken, just as a child who doesn't know anything about soccer at all may play with a ball and think he's playing soccer but be utterly mistaken.

There are two points downstream of this. First, the right-left spectrum is still not very helpful here. There is a sweet spot called conservatism in which we get a variety of values right and intend to preserve them. Then, again, there is a variety of directions in which one may diverge from these values: libertinism, anarchism, libertarianism, welfare-statism, and totalitarianism. I suppose if you would like to call the sweet spot in the middle "the right" and all the deviations away from it collectively "the left," then you may. But I don't know why anarchists and totalitarians are leftists. No, the left-right spectrum is not useful.

Secondly, conservatism is indexical but has a less-than perfectly strict threshold for accuracy. If you took yourself to be a conservative but in aiming to preserve all the right values you didn't get everything right, but got almost everything right, then you would still be a conservative. The more you get wrong, however, the more we are inclined to remove you from the category "conservative" and place you in the category of "ideologue" or "reactionary crank." (Do not confuse "conservative" with "reactionary." Leftists can be reactionaries and there are many such leftists about today. A reactionary who will not take any criticism of his tendentious and unproven views seriously but will instead excoriate his critics.) Still, like many other concepts, "conservatism" is one the fulfillment of which doesn't require absolute perfection. This is why conservatism is a big tent. Conservatives have much to deliberate about, to disagree on, and to debate. It isn't easy to get all the right values right.

The Cause of the Financial Crisis Was Government Interference

I notice that some people continue to blame "greedy" businessmen and underregulation of the market for the crisis. The idea is that it was they and not the CRA that caused the crisis. One fact adduced in favor of this theory is that most of the bad loans did not go to poor people. That's as deep as the theory goes. It's very shallow, but it gets you to where you want to go: to support for your leftist welfare state and your hatred of free markets.

So, let's rehearse this again. (Prior posts here and here.)

CRA. Must make bad loans. Artificially low interest rates? Why not.

Need to pool risk. FNMA FMAC MBS. Plus CDS/CDO.

Hey. I can dump all sorts of crappy loans into these MBS's! FNMA and FMAC are happy to cover for me. I'll make bad loans to middle class and even richer folk.

I'm making a killing. Flipping houses. Making crappy loans.

All of a sudden: POP! Oh, well.

Now let's go back in time and do this without government interference: without CRA/low interest rates/MBS/FNAC/FNMA.

Ready? Here we go:

Did you miss it? No, you didn't miss anything. Nothing happened. No bubble. No pop.

Let's even stipulate that the government allowed financial institutions to diversify in banking and investment and to get overleveraged. So, what? Nothing happened. It would have been a great world.

But alas, we live in this world, in which government interference is considered normal and in which the bad effects of stupid and immoral businessmen are amplified beyond belief, rather than squelched by market forces. Oh, well, at least it gives the leftists a chance to claim the crisis as a reason for even more government interference.

There will always be stupid and immoral businessmen. It's almost as unavoidable as stupid and immoral politicians. The free market and prudent laws are normally able to crush these people. But government over-interference in the market is not unavoidable. It is purely optional.

Government over-interference in the market kills and ruins lives by the million, yet you continue to support it because you hate the rich, you find in your pseudo-support for the poor (you give nothing to charity) a satisfactory facsimile of moral depth, and because you believe that this time, after all the failures of the last 100 years, a welfare state will finally work. You still believe that Keynesian stimulus will work someday because you hate the alternative: the free market. You still hate the fact that tax cuts for investors stops recessions. In fact, you are so far gone that all you need to dismiss these concerns is to wave your hand at the notion that moneyed forces have raised them. You are so far gone that you are all but satisfied by "that's just health insurance company propaganda" as a retort to every argument against socialized health care. Etc. You really are in quite a state of befuddlement. And you're proud of it.

You should re-examine your beliefs. Start by considering whether they are based upon hatred, rather than fact. Part of the problem is that much of your university education taught you that critical analysis means inventing moneyed interest behind every argument against your leftist ideology. This has crippled your intellect by allowing the muscle that dissects actual arguments to atrophy. You also have lost hold of the notions of the rights to life, liberty, property, free association and contract, and so forth. You have a lot to reflect upon.

Palin in Hong Kong

Here are some excerpts. Point after point, spot on.

Fuller excerpt here.

More Palin, please.

Karl Denninger

Here he sums up his last year or so of blogging. It ain't pretty.

If you haven't been following Denninger, dip into his archives. It ain't pretty.