In the immediate aftermath of World War II many Americans focused their lives upon safety and settled circumstances: “a secure job, a home… material prosperity… putting a bit aside”. This was not hard because wartime industries “managed to convert to peace-time conditions with unexpected speed and success” and fueled an economic surge.

But, raised in safety, some looked “for adventure, challenge, and self-fulfillment.” And so, by the mid 1950s, there emerged “juvenile delinquents” and the James Dean movie Rebel without a Cause. Call it the birth of the “generation gap.”

There was an honorable opportunity for adventure in the post-war Civil Rights Movement and then opposition to the US war in Vietnam. These movements gave meaning to a whole generation and trained them in the culture of what we now call “peaceful protest.” And when the civil rights protests achieved the civil rights legislation of the mid 1960s the cause of opposing the war in Vietnam reenergized the protesters.

The Vietnam war was two-fold, the physical war in Vietnam and “the world-wide propaganda war waged by the two camps of foreign powers that backed their Vietnamese proxies”. And the US debacle at the end of the Vietnam war sold the idea that “the superpower USA was no match for the people of a tiny nation heroically struggling to liberate itself from colonial oppression and imperial aggression.”

Thus, for many “the feats of their youthful activism” defined their lives, and shattered their trust in the society in which they lived. In other words, they were primed for a rerun of the 19th century radicalism of Marx & Co, “to undermine ‘the world as it is’ in preparation for its overthrow”.

So the ex-activists

would become advocates for and promoters of an ever-expanding array of political commitments, be they tied to workers, racial or cultural minorities, feminism, the environment… homosexuality, climate concerns, disabilities, illegal migrants… and more.

In other words,

The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution.

It was the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory that provided the intellectual ballast for the omnicause, and none less than Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man. In Eros he used Freud to brand the modern economy as repressive and helped launch the Sexual Revolution.

In One Dimensional Man Marcuse provides

a program for fomenting revolution in a society whose members by and large live lives of relative ease within it.

So overall, Marcuse says:

1. Judge the culture by the standards of perfection, as in Marx’s “species being” .

2. Poison appreciation of prosperity, because systemic oppressive exploitation.

3. Sanctify victimhood and lead the victims to end their “exploitation and oppression”.

What more could the seasoned activists of civil rights and Vietnam want? Sexual and economic liberation for the generation of “New Left student ex-activists… in academia/education”!

The opportunity for the activists came after the Soviet H-bomb in 1955 and the first orbital satellite in 1957. It “triggered a massive expansion of higher education” and the activists walked right in. They wanted to change the world and they had the skills to play the political game in the “faculty meetings and search committees” of academia. And so the education system went Left creating “an industry of of left-leaning and radical discourse in the humanities and social sciences”, featuring

Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, Communication and Media Studies, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory , Gender Studies, Literary Theory, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, even just Theory, and more.

All of this was inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, taking “the stance of overthrow, the need for a ‘fundamental transformation’ of society to be the default position”, substituting “politics for science”. It all appealed to the “partisans of overthrow and enemies of promise”. And they used the “prestige of academia” to advance their cause.

But then came Edward O. Wilson in 1975 with his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. He argued that the science that enabled us to understand animal behavior helped us understand “our own nature and sociality as well”. In other words, forget the Blank Slate. He provoked a storm of protest, and no wonder.

The very suggestion that biology constrains and shapes our nature as a special was offensive to his critics.

Fortunately, the postmodernists like Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault were on hand to brand such science as “metanarratives” and “cultural mythologies” to serve “oppressive elites.” The partisans of overthrow needed that!

But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, and so Marxists had to stop advertising their Marxism. It was all “Critical Studies”, understood by the ordinary citizen as “political correctness”. And the activists seeped not just into universities but the administrative state and consumer advocacy, not to mention “non-governmental organizations, think tanks, and foundations”.

But there is a cost to this. By disrupting cultural norms, the activists prevent ordinary people from getting on with “the conduct of ordinary life”, for it is culture that provides the framework for “coherence and continuity in normal times”. And that’s a problem.

Of the two legacies of the Enlightenment, Merker’s Ethos 1 — the British Victorian culture — is moderately adapted to modern life. But Ethos 2 — devoted to overthrow — “has never approximated implementation anywhere”. Yet Ethos 2 has advanced for over a century, mainly because both ethoses believe in “other-regard morality”.

One sign of the advance of Ethos 2 is that educated people used to vote conservative; now they vote left. Business elites used to vote conservative but now not so much. One of the reasons may the “explosive growth in the… spoils of the benevolent state”. The educated and the wealthy both benefit. Universities have mission statements advertising their commitment to change the world, and Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 advertised that “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company”. An ethos encodes aspirations: “social prestige and influence”. And Ethos 2 is the way to get it today.

If just chilling with the cool kids is not enough to change the world, there is now the existential peril of climate change, that “the ‘Western way of life’ in and of itself is unsustainable”. This is not new. Marx prophesied that capitalism was unsustainable, because the workers, and the Frankfurt School prophesied the same, because “systemic exploitation”. The point about such an existential peril is that emergency empowers the elites to short-circuit the approval of electorates.

If the war on climate change is not enough of a warning, there is always COVID. It “provides a sample… of the governance vision implicit in Ethos 2”. It featured “unprecedented peace-time infringements of civil liberties, physicians’ right to treat their patients, and the rule of law”. It “gives a foretaste of a world in which Ethos 2 would have completed its ratchet-like advance toward hegemony in the West”. But there is hope. “The future is, as always, opaque”, and the “contest between Ethos 1 and Ethos 2… have been in active contention since the days of the French Revolution”.

And there is this:

What if the commitments of Ethos 1… played a causal role in the ascendance and accomplishments of Western civilization”?

If true, it means that in the present advance of Ethos 2 “the West is in the process of losing the very ideals, principles and commitments that informed its ascendance”.

There is hope. Perhaps the advance in science, including our knowledge of the very nature of mankind, can expose the errors and ignorance of the partisans of overthrow, to be addressed in Book 3.

More to come.

One is more emancipatory and revolutionary, labeled the Continental branch in the foregoing, while the other is more everyday and reformist, represented in the main by philosophers of the British Isles.

What is the difference?

[T]he British Island philosophers leaned to caution and meliorism, while les philosophes on the continent tended to more drastic modes of renewal, up to wholesale revolutionary overthrow.

And this has prevented the Enlightenment from “coalescing into a coherent ethos… preventing the West from fulfilling its civilizational promise”. In the last century the British branch has been in constant retreat from the Continental branch that tends to oppose “existing societal arrangements”.

In brief, the British Victorian ethos

channels the exertion of ordinary people… into socially constructive deployment by upholding ideals of personal responsibility, prudence, earning one’s keep by earnest work, and cultivating reliability and rectitude in one’s dealings with others as a means to earn their respect.

But that ethos has been crumbling, particularly since the 1960s, and as the left’s culture has irradiated the initial success of the welfare state with cheating and fraud.

Merker sets forth a table in which he contrasts “Ethos 1”, the British culture, and “Ethos 2” the culture devoted to taking Ethos 1 down. Examples include:

Negative rights vs. positive rights
Technological optimism vs. technological pessimism
Distinctions between class and race should not be enforced vs. Enforced distinctions
Two sexes vs. many sexual orientations

The differences have tended to emerge in the context of some issue “pressing for remediation and reform in an ambience of other-regard”. And it is also misunderstood because of the characterizations of the two ethoses as “left” and “right.” In fact, most people, from “progressive activists” to “devoted conservatives” agree on moral issues such as “Care/Harm” and “Fairness/Cheating”. But the “left” differs from the rest of the West when it comes to “Authority/Subversion” and “Loyalty/Betrayal” and “Purity/Disgust”. The left is against authority, loyalty, and purity.

In Merker’s analysis

what goes by the names of conservatism in the West aligns well with what we might call “the common sense of mankind”[.]

Left and right are not polar opposites. Instead the values of the left “represent a unique Western departure, a deviation, from a widely shared human sense of the values underpinning political morality across cultures”.

But the deviation of the left makes sense. If you believe in overthrow then you wouldn’t respect authority, loyalty to country, and moral purity.

The actual opposite of the left’s “focus on care and fairness” is, of course, fascism, which downplays “care and fairness while embracing respect for authority, loyalty, and norms of purity”.

But ordinary people respect all the five types of moral concern: care and fairness and authority and loyalty and purity. The difference is that the left downplays authority, loyalty, and purity.

The problem, for Merker, is that the left defines morality solely in terms of “other-regard” while the rest of mankind balances its morality between “other-regard”. “self-regard”, and “prudence”.

And the left exploits the natural human instinct of other-regard to power its program of overthrow. Back in the day, Lenin talked about “useful innocents” and Marx wrote about using the workers to demand concessions from the bourgeoisie.

Whether this is other-regarding morality or just power politics is up to the future to determine.

More to come.

Of course, Marxism is built upon a fundamental conceptual error, Marx’s “theory of surplus value,” that is founded upon a muddle in the classical economics of 1776 that was not cleared up until 1870 and the marginal revolution.

Marxism is an exploitation theory.

Exploitation theories of wage labor claim that the exchange of labor for wages in a market transaction hands the worker a wage whose value is less than the the labor that is performed in exchange for the wage in fact is worth[.]

That means that the employer profits from the work of the laborer. And that is exploitation and injustice. This interpretation issued from the two value systems in classical economics: use value and exchange value.

In the marginal revolution use value and exchange value were merged into the fact of prices in the market. The difference between the laborer’s wages and the employer’s product price is simply explained by the operation of the market in labor. The worker accepts or refuses the wage he is paid from prices in the market for labor, and the employer accepts the price he gets for selling the product to a buyer in the market for products.

In the Marxian understanding, “profits are obtained by what amounts to theft”. But what if the employer doesn’t make a profit, and has to sell at a loss? What then?

For Marx and his followers the difference between wages and prices meant that the laborer would become more and more impoverished, and the capitalists would get richer and richer. Obviously, this would end in “a bitter class struggle… [and] a violent overthrow of [the] exploiters [in accordance] with historical necessity”.

Marx’s analysis of labor exploitation benefited the alliance between social democratic parties and labor unions. If worker poverty was “intrinsic to the industrial mode of production” then systemic remedies were called for, and this was executed in the special privileges of labor “instutionalized in welfare state polities.” In addition,

The Marxian and socialist account of profit as concealed theft… has tainted the very concept of successful enterprise with connotations of ill-gotten gain, extortion, and parasitism in the popular imagination.

And if so, then nothing less than the overthrow of the capitalist system is required. If the current system is “sustained by a systemic mode of exploitation” then “overthrow” is the only solution.

The politics of overthrow experienced a headwind by the end of the 19th century as

industrial workers experienced improving conditions… and the middle classes, instead of disappearing, kept growing.

Thus, in 1899, Eduard Bernstein wrote

a virtual prospectus of the reformist path to socialism through parliamentary participation and legislative reform[.]

And so

the labor movements of “most countries on the Continent” secured their interests on a path of reform rather than by the violent revolution to which Marx was wedded[.]

In response, the Marxists had to reinvent their philosophy of revolution and overthrow. Lenin, in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, proposed that the capitalists had evaded disaster “by ‘bribing’ the proletariat at home with a portion of the proceeds from colonial exploitation abroad.” This postpones “the inevitable demise of capitalism” through the “ruthless exploitation of colonial peoples.” We can see why the Left has railed against colonial imperialism ever since. But “history proved Lenin’s theory wrong”, so another justification for revolution and overthrow was needed.

Enter the critical theorists and the Frankfurt School, from Lukacs to Gramsci to Horkheimer to Adorno to Marcuse, who generalized the exploitation theory from the workers to the exploited in general.

The goal is an “organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community”… in which “mankind will for the first time be a conscious subject and actively determine its own way of life”.

They used a theory developed by Feuerbach in The Essence of Christianity where he developed the ideas of “species-being” and “species-life”.

Species-being has to do with humans being “aware of themselves as a species.”

Species-life is only for humans and means “thinking, speaking to oneself, loving, willing, doing science” in addition to the simple animal life of “mating, rearing, hunting” with other individuals.

But for Marx, the only way that humans can acquire species-life is “to demolish in its entirety the order that thwarts it at every turn”. Revolution, baby! And this:

For Marx the species-being was a “godsend”: on its wings soared his hope that rising form the rubble of the toppled house there would emerge, Phoenix like, a new and pristine order of human creativity free of conflict and the pressure to earn a living.

On to Frankfurt School headmaster Horkheimer, imagining

a state of affairs in which there will be no exploitation or oppression, in which an all-embracing subject, namely self-aware mankind, exists, and in which it is possible to speak of a unified theoretical creation and a thinking that transcends individuals.

“Self-aware mankind” equals Marx’s “species-being”, and Marx had developed this ideology of revolution in the 1840s in The German Ideology: “Proletarians and Communism”.

For Marx the proletariat had by this time emerged as the ideal proxy for the species-being.

If you want “the complete redemption of humanity” then the “universal sufferings” of the proletariat was your excuse for revolution in the uncertainties of the 1840s.

All this had been unpublished until the 1930s and was developed and used by the Frankfurt School intellectuals to develop a universal justification for revolution and overthrow when the proletarians no longer available as helpless victims.

Horkheimer and colleagues developed their “praxis” to crafting diverse and ramifying discursive “critiques” to undermine and stigmatize various facets of the world they inhabited, found wanting by species-being standards (Horkheimer’s “all-embracing subject” of “self-aware mankind”.

Or, if you like:

the prevailing mode of production systematically dictates and poisons every aspect of the life it supports[.]

Or this, from Adorno:

We, however, know what is at stake!… Namely, earning a living, which commandeers all activities as mere means[.]

If you want to know what Marxian “alienated labor” means, it is “the need to earn a living”! The ideal, a quote from The German Ideology, is the famous quote: to be able “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”.

Critical Theory rests its faith that the radical abolition of “all that exists” will be followed by a spontaneous order of harmonious benevolence.

Replacing the inevitable revolution arising from the immiseration of the proletariat is the notion that capitalism, after an initial advance, will corrupt into “a new oppression, mandating the emancipatory revolution Critical Theory meant to promote”.

The impact of Critical Theory is “to supply inspiration and ideological weapons for a heterogeneous amalgam of partisans of overthrow” in any context in which oppression can be imagined to inspire revolutionary impetus.

And so the context between the Continental and the British Enlightenment continues.

More to come.

Why? Because boots on the ground didn’t work so well in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

And, I suggest to our friend Vladdy von Putin, not so well in Ukraine. Old chap.

What is the strategic interest with Iran? I’d say that, first, Iran must not get The Bomb. Why? Because everyone, since Hiroshima/Nagasaki, has had good reason not to start a nuclear war. Whereas with Iran, we experts have to wonder. Second, we need to dial back Iranian power so that the Mullah/IRGC regime can’t afford to finance proxies like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Houthis. Obviously, the Iranian regime has had tremendous success over the last half century by using proxies to fight Israel and the US but steering clear of direct boots-on-the-ground war with Israel and the US.

Clearly, someone in Israel and/or the US has decided that the way to stop the Iran nuclear project is with a bit of bombing from a great height every now and again. And someone has been thinking about how to get out of the proxy trap.

Obviously the proxy game runs on money. So if Iran runs out of money it can’t finance the proxies.

But the other thing that I notice is that, up to now, it looks like all the Sunni states around the Persian Gulf didn’t want to poke the Iranian bear. But since February, it is clear that they have pretty well all decided: enough already. Did that happen because of the strategic brilliance of Trump and Netanyahu, not to forget Jared Kushner and the Abraham Accords, or did it all just fall into place by accident?

I suppose that in the months and years to come we will be presented with various Narratives about how it all came about and who is the real strategic mind behind the whole thing.

The other thing that seems to be emerging is that the US has used the crisis as an excuse to extract the Strait of Hormuz from Iranian domination and place it under US hegemonic domination. Will it work? We shall see.

Again. Was this all foreseen by some strategic genius, or are we feeling lucky?

Like I say, ask me when it’s all over. All I am doing is trying to understand some meaning within the chaos of day-to-day events and the usual rubbish from the media and our Democratic friends.

The one thing I feel confident to preach is that, in Trump Two, someone has decided that the foreign-policy conventional wisdom going back to the end of the Soviet Union needed to be put in the garbage disposal. Why and how this occurred we cannot know. Not yet. And obviously the resolution of the question cannot be separated from the whole Deep State question about who is really the power behind the throne in the whole National Security Industrial Complex, including the intelligence community, the secret police, the foreign-policy establishment, the armed forces, and I know not what else.

Meanwhile, I think it is fair to say that on the Iran question we are not in Kansas any more. Am I right, Dorothy?

The premodern Arabic chronicles simply record events: in a given year the Nile rose to such a height, a governor was appointed, a plague came, a noted scholar died. There is no sense that these years fell into [a] particular epoch, and no overarching patterns of progress or development.

There is, in other words, no story.

A reader of Ivanhoe [by Walter Scott], by contrast, presumes that he is reading about a different time—the Middle Ages—with its own ways of doing things.

Historical fiction was brought to the Middle East by a chap called Jurji Zaydan.

Altogether, [Zaydan] wrote 22 historical novels from the material of Islamic history with the devices Walter Scott had invented some 80 years earlier for portraying the Scottish past: private lives caught up in public events, a hero of modest rank rather than a prince, a period depicted with its distinct manners and forms of speech.

So, we westerners taught the Arabs how to view history as a story! I had no idea. But Zaydan was part of a bigger story.

[There is] Rifa’a al-Tahtawi, a Sunni cleric sent to Paris in 1826 as chaplain to the first Egyptian student mission. Five years later he published An Overview of Paris, a work that fits no earlier Arabic category—part travel record, part constitutional description, part appalled inventory of French manners.

Then they revived poetry. But it wasn’t easy.

The language itself had to be rebuilt before it could carry any of this. Like many other languages, classical Arabic came with no punctuation to speak of, no equivalent of the paragraph, and no words for parliament, revolution, political party, public, class, society, consciousness, or nation in the European sense.

Are you stunned yet? Go and read the article in full.

Of course things got out of control on the language front. Enter The Experts. In 1932 “an academy in Cairo [was created] to bring order to a rapidly expanding lexicon.”

And this. The periodical political magazine.

Within a single generation, an Arab reading public came into being that expected, at monthly intervals, an essay—another new form—taking the condition of the Muslims as its subject and reporting on how that condition stood.

Then came Constantine Zureiq — who created the nakba — and Sayyid Qtub — who invented Islamism.

The movements Zureiq and Qutb unleashed, secular Arab nationalism and jihadism, spent the following decades at war with one another[.]

And everything was a “crisis.” Nothing new there. That’s what the French Revolution and Marx and our beloved wokies are all about: permanent crisis.

Hey!

Crisis is the secular form of apocalypticism… In Scripture it is Judgment…

In his book Critique and Crisis, the German historian Reinhart Koselleck reconstructs the post-Christian transformation of the concept of crisis.

Because there is something very human in the culture of crisis. Particularly if you want to Change the World with Fundamental Transformation. Right, Barack?

The myth of crisis has imprisoned Arab political thought, and the prison is built of…

OK. Enough already. Go and read The Whole Thing. At least it helps understand why our lefty friends and the mullahs and the British rape gangs and Hasan Piker are all on the same page.

Because if there isn’t a crisis — if the world isn’t about to end because climate or Trump or ICE or Israel or Palestinian genocide or data centers — why then, what’s a poor activist or Islamist or DEI administrator to do?

Bless their hearts.

I wonder if AI is the answer to the crisis culture. Because AI is so… sensible. I think it is time for me to ask AI about “apocalypticism”, as in “how to dial down apocalypticism”.

Be they believing Christians, secular citizens, or committed atheist, Western minds lend to equate moral action with the doing of positive good to others.

And by declaring our other-regarding beliefs, “we can be held to those principles by those who would subsequently challenge us to defend our stances, opinions, or acts.” For we are social animals: we can be shamed.

So we reach out to help those in need, and the needier they are the more the need for remedial action. Unfortunately, the mere belief in other-regarding benevolence does not necessarily lead to action that can “promote the good is it meant to accomplish”.

As this morality attaches to politics it becomes natural that “suffering-groups will be in competition for the benefits that are their due under this ethic”. If something must be done, the question is who is on first.

Thus the “enemies of promise” — Marxists, reformers, corporate interests, and those interested in “government contracts, subsidies, concessions, tax exemptions, tariffs, capture of regulatory agencies.. and… rent-seeking” get to work. The modern notions of “equality, freedom, and justice… can be invoked to legitimate special interest demands”. But the agendas of the competing interests will be resolved under the rubric of other-regarding morality, and will thus drive the politics of liberal democracies.

For instance, differentials in wages are bound to create perceived “distress, resentment or envy” among those getting the short end of the stick. “[R]ealism and prudence” may seek to limit the reach of other-regarding morality, but

in a culture pervaded by other-regard, the scales of justice are never quite impartial. The thumb of benevolence keeps weighing down on one of its arms, however slightly.

And once severe causes of discontent are brought under the protection of politics, others will soon seek “remedial measures in the form of legislation and government programs”.

To Merker, it all began with the issue of slavery. It began with abolition of the slave trade and moved onto the abolition of slavery itself. The movement provided a “striking image” of the potential of activism. Many abolitionists were women, and moved on to women’s suffrage, liberation and feminism.

But the issue that really transformed the role of the state was workers rights, or, “the social question”: what to do about the misery and suffering of industrialization, and who was to do it.

In Britain, the challenge was met largely by “private philanthropy and voluntary efforts, including worker self-help initiatives”, plus poor law reform, “labor legislation” and gradual increase in the franchise.

Was that enough? It didn’t matter, because Denmark and Germany decided to solve the “social question” with the power of the state.

A key influence was Lorenz Stein and his 1842 book Der Sozialismus and Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs that influenced Marx.

Stein made the case that the new class of the proletariat posed an unprecedented challenge to.. modernity itself… [Otherwise] the modern societal order… [would be] shattered by the industrial proletariat rising in revolution against it.

Stein argued that the industrial laborer would not be able to “achieve the material independence required for full membership in modern society” and so would resort to violence and overthrow.

It took a while for events to show that the workers were achieving independence through increased wages and overall prosperity. Even Marx admitted it in 1872. But meanwhile Stein proposed that the Prussian state should step in to solve the problem, and so, after the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Chancellor Bismarck introduced government “workers’ insurance and social welfare programs… as a tactical measure to preempt socialist agitation.” It all went hand in hand with Germany’s rise to national greatness. Pretty soon Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries followed suit.

It is worth noticing how little any of this originated with or directly involved the industrial workers themselves.

For Bismarck it was all about defusing the danger of a rerun of the French Revolution. He had first tried repression of “political worker movements.” But when he launched worker insurance programs he encouraged the socialists to participate with him and “promote social reforms.” Thus, “the European welfare state is the offspring of imperial Prussian paternalism”.

And thus government transitioned from being “a necessary evil” to “a benevolent agency” — with the socialists inside the tent. We all take this for granted, but it is “a brand new experiment in statecraft”.

Lost in the enthusiasm to do something in the crisis of industrialization was the question of whether government coercion is appropriate for “socially desirable ends”. Instead everyone went along with “the century of the ‘expansive state’ in the West”. Only now, in the early decades of the 21st century is the project receiving some scrutiny.

More to come.

But it ended with the dissolution of four empires: Russia, Austria-Hungary, German, and Ottoman, and that

devastation opened windows of opportunity for every interest opposed to the previously established orders, cultural no less than political. Institutional dislocation gave them increased room to maneuver[.]

The Bolsheviks conquered Russia in a coup d’état in the midst of war; the Fascists conquered Italy and Germany after the war.

To Lenin, the seizure of power was the hard part; the rest was easy. Capitalism had “simplified large-scale production” to such an extent that “armed workers” could take over and “fill out the required receipts.” Oh Vlad, honey.

A key to understanding is that

With the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 the prospects of the partisans of overthrow everywhere underwent an abrupt and qualitative transition.

If Lenin and the Bolsheviks could take over the ruins of the Czarist regime, then anything was possible for a devoted activist. Lenin organized the Comintern to coordinate the efforts of “124 communist parties” and others from all over the world.

As Lenin put it, you never knew “which spark… will kindle the conflagration” that leads to regime change. So communists should “set to work to stir up all and sundry… to gain victory over the bourgeoisie”.

And “the partisans of overthrow” have stirred up all and sundry ever since in their quest for “the seizure of power”. Because “bending the arc of history”. And who succeeds at this? The “hardest of the hard”: the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Khomeinis.

There were plenty of efforts to establish “worker rule” after World War I, in Germany and Eastern Europe, but they all failed, because as World War I had demonstrated, the workers “overwhelmingly sided with their own nation’s cause in war”. Nationalism was the royal road to power, as Mussolini and Hitler demonstrated.

Communists and National Socialists were revolutionary rivals… They shared implacable contempt for liberal democracy… [and] competed for similar constituencies, particularly among the many unemployed[.]

Hitler and Mussolini fought for the nation; later on Stalin, I recall, fought for “socialism in one country.” And the key to power is to declare war on a small minority. Josef Hell found this out in 1922 in interviews with Hitler. First Hitler spewed his emotional hatred of the Jews. Then he sobered up and delivered his strategic vision:

[In all revolutions,] a struggle for ideals… for any kind of improvement, necessarily… must be supplemented by a struggle against some kind of social class or caste.

And The Jews, all over the world, tend to be a small minority. The skilled politician can unite the nation against that small minority for a quick win. See my Four Wars, and Grok’s analysis.

There is, of course, an economic difference between Communism and Nazism.

Politburo communism, then, can be defined in rough and ready terms as dictatorship dedicated to the abolition of private enterprise, while Fascism in the same terms amounts to dictatorship that tolerates or exploits private enterprise for its own ends[.]

Merker observes that of the three regime types that dominated the interwar period, World War II was a resounding defeat of Fascism by an alliance of Communism and liberal democracy. The Cold War was a conflict between the anti-fascist allies of World War II. Fascism, needless to say, continues to thrive in “post-Mao China, and post-Soviet Russia”.

It could be said that the three regime types existed as local experiments until the convulsions of the World Wars crystallized them. What we call “liberal democracy” was “wrung from the wages of two world wars.” The question remains:

[how] to convert Enlightenment ideas regarding freedom, equality, tolerance, and popular sovereignty into institutional arrangements in the West.

One key item is the gradual enlargement of the franchise. Today we take the universal right to vote for granted, but it is very new.

Historically, vast numbers of humans have lived under conditions in which a governing elite commandeers, by naked force of the threat of it, whatever surplus the population under its control produces beyond the mere means of subsistence.

Yet since the Enlightenment the idea has got about that “the exercise of governmental power is legitimized by “the consent of the governed”. The popular franchise would “wrest the reins of government from the hands of despots”. In reality,

The promise of rights or other general benefits can be used as what amounts to a bribe by those interested in using the consent of the governed to boost their own power[.]

And so

it is perhaps not surprising that a widening franchise has gone hand in hand with the massive expansion of the modern state.

The question is whether the universal franchise has really been a good thing. But there is this:

It is the only instance of practically realized absolute equality among individuals on record in human affairs.

But not, obviously, “equality of political influence”. Voters may be voting for a specific benefit, but in practice

they are placing a bid for exactly how the official use of the power of compulsion is to be deployed in the society they inhabit.

As Bastiat wrote:

Remember that law is force, and that, consequently, the proper functions of the law cannot lawfully extend beyond the proper functions of force[.]

And we easily forget that everything delivered by government, whether despotic or democratic, involves “the official use of force in our lives”. You would think that

Fashioning… a civil order of peaceable social intercourse would seem a worthy challenge for the exercise of popular sovereignty through the franchise.

Instead we have seen “an unprecedented expansion of the peacetime state” into almost all domains of social life. And it was all pioneered by Bismarck’s Germany after 1870. A centralized state could be “an instrument of national greatness.”

It is no surprise that Communist and Fascist despotisms expand the power of the state. The question is why it also happened in liberal democracies. Is it low-income voters? Or women? In fact, it’s complicated, and Merker proposes to use “the trope of composite voter preferences” to analyze the “complexities of voting behavior outcomes”. And that is to say nothing about “the tug of war between British and Continental Enlightenment currents in shaping the world in which we live”.

More to come.

Needless to say, to undergo the greatest change in methods of production since the introduction of agriculture, and to do so in the span of less than a century (roughly from 1790 to 1840), is bound to entail considerable social disruption.

And Britain did so without a political disruption. It passed Factory Acts, and reform of working conditions, and expanded the franchise. But the political regime endured.

This political continuity goes against the “Stein-Marx ‘materialist conception of history’”. For Marx, the Bourgeois revolution was to be followed by a Proletarian revolution. Yet, by 1872 Marx was forced to concede that, “in England, ‘the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means’”.

How could this “world historical economic revolution” occur without political disruption?

It was due in part to a universe of voluntary associations, including

self-help and mutual-aid societies… charity schools, ragged schools (for destitute children and orphans), Sunday schools, societies to promote piety and virtue, others for the relief of aged widows, penitent prostitutes, the dear, dumb, blind, and otherwise incapacitated, mothers meetings, soup kitchens, maternity charities, crèches… working men’s associations, slate clubs, medical clubs, lending libraries, natural history societies… holiday funds, penny banks, saving banks, visiting societies, temperance societies, pension societies, and more.

Meanwhile government and religion weathered the disruption, and often thrived.

But over and above all this were cultural norms.

[C]entral cultural norms pertaining to family, sex roles, personal responsibility, work ethic, public demeanor, decorum, and standards of respect (“respectability”), not only retained their traditional orientation, but were in some respects deepened and consolidated in this era.

Call it “Victorian morality” or “Victorian ethos”. And it extended down to the “laboring poor”.

The Victorian ethos was… eminently compatible with — and perhaps even a causal contributor to — a culture of diversifying enterprise that supported a rising population, rising standards of living, and international great power status based on a vast maritime empire.

And all this was going on while the Brits led the world in ending slavery.

Victorian virtues were domestic virtues.

They centered on the family, and… defined what was required of you to earn the respect of your fellows… as a function of your manners, attitudes, and behavior.

To succeed in a life of Victorian virtue was to have “character”. Its culture promoted life-long marriage, division of domestic responsibilities. Divorce was very rare, and even without modern contraception, illegitimate births declined from a peak of seven percent in 1845 to four percent at the end of the century.

Was this all very stuffy and cramped? Not according to Robert Wright in The Moral Animal.

[I]n the case of either sex, Victorian sexual mores have the effect of promoting male parental investment in spouse and offspring[.]

Victorian Britain gives us a glimpse

of a culture in which the exertions of ordinary people — anyone, in fact — are channeled in socially productive directions by making social respect contingent on living up to a code of rectitude and responsibility that lies within everyone’s capacity to fulfill, given will and earnest effort.

So what went wrong? Why do we regard the Victorians as stuffy and cramped?

First, there were the “partisans of overthrow” and the myth of the “unfinished revolution” in France. If you believe in revolution, then the success of ordinary morality and its ethic of “hard work, rectitude and personal responsibility/accountability”, then Marxism and revolution “would be a dead letter”.

Second, there were those that looked down on efforts to provide

education, poverty, insurance… by private initiative and voluntary organization as an unsystematic and ineffective way to deal with the problems that should, they insisted, be the responsibility of government.

Social reformers were therefore on the same side as the partisans of overthrow. They both wanted the power to realize their ambitions. But by validating the power of the state they created an opportunity for corporate and financial interests to get in on the state power game:

government contracts, subsidies, concessions, tax exemptions, tariffs, capture of regulatory agencies… and additional forms of rent seeking[.]

Third, there were those opposed to “Victorian attitudes to sexuality and sexual mores”. They wanted to live “unconventional sexual” — even libertine lives.

What about women’s liberation? Elizabeth Roberts, in A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940, found that working-class women were down with “Victorian values”.

“Victorian values” were embraced by the Victorian working class no less than by its middle class, but women by and large expressed contentment with their lives shaped by those values, to the point of experiencing a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment in their roles and wives and mothers.

For the ordinary middle class and working class, the “Victorian ethos” was a good thing. But for those who itched for something else, “with other visions of the good life and the kind of society that might realize it” the ethos had to be dismantled. And so it has, piece by piece.

How the enemies of the Victorian ethos advanced their cause is the subject of Book 2: Down a slippery slope greased by two world wars.

More to come.

soft despotism that wields the slogans of popular sovereignty, self-governance, and democracy as means to buttress its power over the populations under its jurisdiction.

One of the key moments in Merker’s Western story is the socialist frenzy of the university rich kids in Berlin in 1840. Of which our pal Karl Marx was a contributor. Merker represents Marx as a kid who resented having to get a job when his father died and his mom withdrew his allowance.

As they say: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

In our day we have the DSA frenzy of the university rich kids — featuring the girls this time — who really resent… well, something. It looks as if they are taking over the Democratic Party, and, they think, the world.

But as a famous philosopher said, nearly 200 years ago, there is a tendency for historical events to appear: “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.

In 1840, as Marx & Co. were all ablaze, the economy was in the middle of the second technological revolution in 50 years. First was machine textiles in the 1770s, and then steam and railways in the 1830s. The fact is that humans tend to feel totally adrift when the economic foundations are shaking.

I suspect that was particularly true for the educated middle class of 1840. Marx came from Trier, in Germany just east of Luxembourg. You can imagine that the fixed world of guilds and lawyers and bourgeois security was under attack from a rising generation of textile and rail entrepreneurs. Socialism, the best people knew, would put an end to all the turmoil.

Same thing in our era. The Age of the Educated Class, with the credentialed holding forth for the best interests of society overall from their tenured positions in academia, administration, and media, seems to be under attack.

What’s left for a professor if her students can answer the questions on a test with AI? What’s left for traditional media when podcasters can reach millions with YouTube and the internet? What’s left when a college degree isn’t the key to a career in corporate administration any more?

Back in 1840 all the best minds were focused like a laser on the plight of the industrial workers. There was a bit of a cock-up in the US Panic of 1837.

Triggered by wild land speculation, reckless state bank note printing, President Andrew Jackson’s anti-central bank policies, and a collapse in cotton prices, it resulted in widespread bank failures and massive unemployment.

Oh yeah. The end of the Second Bank of the United States. What could go wrong? And in Europe the Hungry ‘40s, as told by Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton. Mary’s father was a textile machine worker and big into unions.

What do we have, in 2026? The late COVID unpleasantness with a 40% increase in the money supply. Plus AI. Plus Woke Politics. No wonder the kiddies are all upset.

In the late Cambridge University Unpleasantness, a brilliant black professor was outed by a Dirty Jew. Professor Nathan Cofnas was fired from Cambridge by its girl Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice and is now, apparently, under fire at his new job from the transgender girl rector of Ghent University. I kid you not.

And over last weekend devoted activists held a peaceful protest in memory of the late fabulist Jason Arday in London’s Trafalgar Square.

I know. You couldn’t make this up.

Really, lefties? You make a huge issue about blacks, because slavery abolished roughly 200 years ago. Then you promote unqualified blacks into prestigious academic positions. Then you push back and fire an academic that exposes your follies (or should we say, injustices)?

Then you hold a vigil in Trafalgar Square when the fabulist understandably commits (presumed) suicide?

We all push back mightily when our belief system betrays us, and reality hits us right in the solar-plexus. It’s not that we don’t believe it. It’s worse than that: it’s “inconceivable.”

Ever heard of that River in Egypt?

I don’t know what comes next. Nobody does. But I am certainly getting a feeling that we are approaching a “turn.”

Here’s a Narrative to explain the whole thing.

Back in 1840 when the Marxes and the Engels were holding forth it made sense that the jumped-up bourgeois capitalists were a menace. They were new; they didn’t have credentials. Or breeding. So we all decided to put the curbs on the industrialists to make sure they didn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But as usual, the problem wasn’t the capitalists. They went on to create steel steamships and internal combustion engines and cars for the common man, and the internet and reusable rockets and AI. The problem was the activist politicians, the Lenins and Trotskys and Maos that demolished the nascent exchange economies in Russia and China and sent 100 million souls to an early grave.

And now the fans of Stalin and Mao want us to elect them for a redo on socialism?

I don’t think so.

Just for a refresher here’s Google’s take on the notorious Robber Barons:

John D. Rockefeller: Controlled the oil industry through Standard Oil, buying out or crushing competitors with aggressive pricing.

Andrew Carnegie: Dominated the American steel industry using vertical integration and severe labor suppression.

Cornelius Vanderbilt: Built a massive empire in shipping and railroads, earning the nickname “The Commodore”.

J.P. Morgan: Consolidated giant corporations like U.S. Steel and dominated American finance and banking.

Jay Gould: A notorious railroad tycoon and Wall Street speculator known for stock manipulation and bribery.

Well? Here’s my take:

John D. Rockefeller: Invented the oil industry, saved the whales including Moby Dick.

Andrew Carnegie: Invented the steel industry, allowing architects to create skyscrapers.

Cornelius Vanderbilt: Built a massive empire in shipping and railroads, helping ordinary people to travel about.

J.P. Morgan: Cleaned up all the railroad debt defaults and bankruptcies.

Jay Gould: Fought Vanderbilt over Erie Railroad. Tried to corner the gold market. But fixed Union Pacific and pushed against monopolistic rate-fixing.

Today we have the tech lords and the venture capitalists. Should we Fight Oligarchy with Bernie or just let the tech bros do their thing and vaporize the education industrial complex with AI?

I think it is time to admit that the Robber Barons weren’t much of a problem, and the tech “oligarchs” even less so.

See, Exxon — you know, the creation of Robber Baron John D. Rockefeller — has just come up with a new way to kill the climate.

It’s an improvement in fracking technology. Fracking’s the deal where you drill horizontal oil wells and the pressurize the well so that it opens cracks in the well walls and oils seeps into the cracks and gets pumped out and oil flows out to power fossil fueled cars that will kill the climate. All over the world.

A big part of fracking technology is pumping sand into the cracks so the cracks stay propped open when you stop pressurizing the well. They call the sand proppant.

But eevil Exxon came up with a new twist on the proppant front.

Now ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others have opened a new chapter: lightweight, synthetic proppant made from petroleum coke, a refinery by-product that used to be treated as waste.

Because it is lightweight it gets further into the cracks that sand can’t get into, and because it’s lighter than sand it flows along easier, and because it’s stronger than sand it keeps the cracks open.

Here’s a map of frack-ology research in North America being conducted by the nation’s credentialed frack-ologists. There’s a lot more than I thought.

Guess what happens next. Exactly, Uncle Sam gets to rule the world and nobody cares a wink about the Strait of Hormuz.

And mental health professionals will also benefit from treating the mental health crises of our environmentalist friends.

It’s interesting. President Trump has been boasting about a new Golden Age of America. Naturally, as a credentialed expert, I wasn’t at all sure that I believed him.

But here we are. Fracking as far as the eye can see.

And the latest information I learned is that Texas has 335 data centers in operation and 248 under construction. I think that’s important because I don’t think we can really get the Golden Age of America going until we have bombed the entire government education system to rubble and replaced it with mom-friendly homeschooling AI.

But that is another story.

But guess what. Marx stole the ideas for proletarian revolution without attribution from a guy called Lorenz Stein, who wrote a book in German published in 1842, titled Socialism and Communism in today’s France. A contribution to contemporary history. Today we would regard Stein’s analysis as economically flawed. But Marx just took it and made it the foundation of Marxism.

In the first chapter, Das Proletariat, Stein describes the new working class as a threat to society

through its numbers and its frequently demonstrated courage… through its consciousness of its unity… finally through its feeling that it can arrive at the realization of its plans only through revolution… Because all that the proletarian wants can in the end by achieved only through the toppling of two of the absolute pillars of all societal life, through the destruction of the sacredness of law and that of property.

Why is the proletariat going to topple the world? It’s complicated, but Stein argues that the proletarian has only one resource, his labor.

[U]nder modern conditions of industrial production… the interaction of labor and property in the production of wealth is said to permanently debar proletarians from raising themselves into the ranks of the propertied.

“The absolute victory of capital over labor power” presented the proletarians with no hope of rising into the ranks of the propertied, except by revolution. The classes were bound “to confront one another in enmity” and this provided the ground for a solution in socialism and communism.

In theory and history, it turned out that Stein was wrong. But in 1840, who knew? Meanwhile the coffee-house intellectuals in Berlin had developed a way for activists to help the poor to make “things by right how they ought to be.”

Marx had left Berlin in 1841 because he had to get a job — ending up as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1842 — and had not kept up with the intellectual fashion of coffee-house intellectuals and the moral argument for socialism, and rejected their articles.

He stole Stein’s analysis and used it as the basis of his prophecy of revolution. He rejected the intellectuals’ “class-less ‘True socialism’ in favor of Stein’s ‘proletarian’ socialism-communism” that prophesied revolution on the basis of “‘objective’ economic mechanisms” taken from Stein’s book.

But the one central theme was “the necessity of societal overthrow.” As Engels said at Marx’s grave,

Marx was before else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society[.]

But when it came to Russia, a pre-industrial society, Marx imagined that revolution could skip the capitalist phase.

By 1872 the economic progress in America and England suggested that the proletariat could thrive through “peaceful progress”, and Marx admitted it in a speech in Amsterdam. But for the rest of the Continent “the lever of our revolution must be force.” Never mind peaceful progress: revolution forever!

Could it be that Marx, after carousing at the university on an allowance from his father, couldn’t deal with the removal of support after his father died and he had to get a job? Yet, as a journalist he felt that journalism degraded itself by being a trade.

The fact is that Marx resented having to earn a living. Thus the slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”, the “decoupling of productive endeavor from consumption”. We can see that this resentment continues to our own day with resentful college graduates, condemned to lower status than they surely deserve, the backbone of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Marx’s revolution fitted “with the myth of the ‘unfinished revolution’” in France. The revolution could not be complete until a proletarian revolution completed the “final revolutionary transition to communism… and a world of prosperity in which all would be equal, happy, and free”.

There has been no shortage of withering economic critique of Marxism, starting with Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk in 1896, an economist of the Austrian school who critiqued Marx on the ground of his own theory after the publication of Volume 3 of Das Kapital. But Bohm-Bawerk understood that Marxism owed its strength not in its argument, but in the hearts of its disciples, “in their hearts, their wishes and their desires.”

Merker summarizes the commanding heights of Marxism. It

(a) enthrones the destruction of the prevailing order as the necessary prerequisite for human felicity, (b) buttresses activist hope and patience by a teleological construal of history, (c) absolves its believers of personal responsibility for both the condition they find themselves in and their acts, (d) receives unearned moral credit from a culture wedded to other-regarding ethics, and (e) appears to stake out a path to what is but an unspoken promise implicit in the ambience of modernity, namely a condition in which everyone is equal, happy, and free.

A vital point is that the secularization of the world has created a demand to fill the religious space with something, and Marxism is “religion in the guise of politics.”

And it matters not that events have denied the assertion of the immiseration of the workers. People, especially educated people, need a saving faith, and Marxism has delivered, especially for the secularized that still resonate to an “other-regarding” morality.

More to come.

Everything was changing, and Merker proposes “Romanticism in art and intellectual fashions” as, at least in part, a reaction against the merciless change issuing from the French and Industrial Revolutions. And this Romanticism included Nationalism, an effort to create meaning in national myths for the various peoples of Europe.

The point is that we live in a time of momentous change.

[We have] the French and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, Romanticism, Nationalism, science, and beyond[.]

And everyone is trying to understand the present, to divine the future, and also make their divination happen.

What’s it all about, Alfie? One thing is clear. In the two and a half centuries since the convulsions centering around the year 1800, we still have not agreed upon what to do. We have been unable to stabilize our Enlightenment heritage as divided between the competing French and English interpretations.

So Merker proposes to investigate the “superordinate ideals and values” that are directing traffic. And he suggests that Romanticism, especially as it helped birth Marxism, is the key to understanding what ails us. A key to the birth of Marxism in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, except that they were not really philosophers but literary figures creating modern myths.

These three failed to be bound by Kant’s dictum that we cannot know things in themselves, and pretended that they could know everything by conducting speculative exercises in “German Philosophical Romanticism.”

But there was a problem. Hegel’s philosophy proposed an “end of history” culminating in the “glorification of the Prussian state” and did not provide a secular version of Christianity that looked towards the future and provided an engine of “hope, purpose, and activism directed at a ‘promised’ future state of felicity.”

No problem. David Friedrich Strauss wrote The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach wrote The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach proposed that the notion of God is a projection of positive human attributes “such as understanding, strength and love” into a divine being that is really just a projection of ideal human nature.

According to Feuerbach, in our conception of God we have divested ourselves of our own nature in an act of self-alienation that leaves us estranged from ourselves and divided from our fellow humans.

Suppose there were other, non-religious alienations “whose abolition would complete the liberative restoration of an imagined human state of perfection”. Moses Hess came out with On the Essence of Money that experienced humans as subjects “under the ‘worship of money’” as a secular equivalent to Feuerbach’s religious alienation.

Obviously, this secular alienation could be “ended by a restoration, under a future system of socialism or communism, of the cooperation which Hess held to be characteristic of human productivity in the unalienated state”.

Marx and Engels converted this restoration into their “materialist conception of history” where human history is driven by “changes in the material means of production.” Thus the Industrial Revolution changed the means of production and the bourgeois revolutions would be followed by proletarian revolution, and “the cataclysm would issue in a world of conflictless cooperation”, for, following Feuerbach, it would release the

cooperative, unselfish, communal species-being [that] constitutes the real nature of the individual awaiting liberation from its occlusion by “alienated labor”[.]

The genius of Marxism is to copy the Christian arc of history into secular form.

By its assumption of an inevitable passage from capitalism to revolution Marxism recaptured, in purely secular terms, … the psychology of hope and purpose that is inherent in Christian sacred history[.]

And it equips the followers with patience, for if the revolution doesn’t succeed today it just means that “material conditions are not sufficiently ‘ripe’ for the passage to the final apocalyptic transformation.” Meanwhile the faithful can keep busy with “the proselytizing, organizing, and agitation that will inevitably… be rewarded with success in the end by ‘the iron laws of history’”, never mind the “defeats along the way to the shimmering goal.”

More to come.

And that is important because all good people with a conscience adopt the reigning moral framework, and however aware people are of the standard moral framework within which they live, whether the awareness is innocent or informed or insincere, “moral principles exert causal power in the culture that promotes them.” Christianity, since the beginning, “extols self-abnegation as the epitome of virtue.”

Jesus’ teaching was responding to an existential crisis for the Jewish people, what with the death of Herod and imposition of Roman rule. The air was full of messianic expectations, and that is what Jesus provided in a classic cult. He prophesied that in the new world

the last will be the first, the first will be the last, and righteousness will reign after the unworthy have been cast down and the good exalted.

What should a follower of Christ do?

To qualify for admission his new order of things, one placed one’s trust, belief, faith, in him as the scripturally prophesied Savior, by bearing witness to him, and becoming his follower…

[Y]ou should deny yourself and take up your cross to follow him, distribute your wealth to the poor, become like a child caring not for tomorrow, humble yourself in service to others, love those who hate you do good to those that wish you ill, and turn the other cheek when smitten.

All this was predicated upon the Savior’s “bodily resurrection from death”.

Of course, when Christ failed to reappear, century after century, the extreme cultish beliefs softened. Somewhat.

The way to understand the Enlightenment is to understand that it represented “an unwitting assimilation of a specifically Christian moral stance into the foundation of secular ethics”. Secularists, to this day, believe in a secularized Christian moral universe.

Then came Thomas Aquinas and Summa Theologica and the insertion of Aristotelian “prudential ethics” into European culture. Prudential ethics is “self-regarding” rather than “other-regarding.” But it warns against “violating the self-interest of others”. Self-interest is a good thing as long as it does not violate the self-interest of others.

But Aristotelian prudential ethics remained in the second tier below the other-regarding principles of Christian ethics. It took Thomas Hobbes “to make self-interest the foundation of his moral and political system.” But Hobbes’ ideas ran into a headwind.

So successfully had Christian teaching shaped Western moral sensibilities that any stance that questioned an other-regarding conception of morality appeared to be an assault on morality itself.

For example: the Bishop of Peterborough, the Earl of Shaftesbury.

Then came Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Public Benefits.

There Mandeville argued that… envy, vanity, love of luxury, novelty and fashion… creates… livelihoods for many who might otherwise go unemployed.

And this:

[Mandeville] never tired of uncovering self-interested motives behind ostensibly disinterested pursuits and stances, and delighted in exposing its operation in moral posturing[.]

Frances Hutcheson countered Mandeville with “moral sense theory” in which

the moral worth of actions… is defined by the consequences of those actions… in terms of the extent to which they promote enhanced happiness in others[.]

And on to Bentham and “the greatest good for the greatest number”.

To Merker,

other-regarding ethics are no more fit to guide conduct and decision making for this world than was the original moral message of Jesus at the time when he thought apocalypse was imminent. The difference is that Jesus’ teaching was not intended to promote felicity and flourishing in life on this side of the cataclysm, while the secular heirs to Christian other-regard think it supplies the very key to right action in this life and this world itself.

Then came Adam Smith. His analysis of economic exchange in The Wealth of Nations led to an “ethic of reciprocity” that applied to the acts of buying and selling.

Smith recognized… the wide-ranging ramifications of the fact that… an exchange will take place only when it benefits each of the exchanging parties in accordance with their own conception of their self-interest, and that unless prevented such exchanges will take place and be extended as far as possible by the force of self-interest alone.

Merker suggests that the ethic of exchange is morally superior to the ethic of benevolence.

In the act of exchange the exchanging parties engage each other in a relation of symmetry… They both receive and they both give, they both exchange one value for another, they each bind themselves to a mutual obligation to respect the change of ownership, and by fulfilling it they each realize a bit of their self-interest…

The act of benevolence, on the other hand… is asymmetric throughout. Only one gives, the other only receives, one is the possessor of a resource, the other in need of it, one has the status of benefactor, the other that of supplicant.

And note that the recipient of benevolence takes away the feeling of indebtedness, so that in the best of all possible worlds they would like “to convert it into an exchange.”

All this might have transformed the world, except for the labor theory of value implied in Smith’s work. Smith didn’t directly deal with it; others did, and they knew that the workers were being exploited.

“Laborers, the argument goes, though entering voluntarily upon” an exchange of wages for labor get less in wages “than that labor, embodied in its product, actually is worth when that product is brought to market.”

A century later the marginal theory of value would make the labor theory of value irrelevant, because there is no use value, no labor value: only the actual price of exchange. But not before a century’s worth of intellectuals, from William Thompson and Thomas Hodgkins to Marx, had damned the act of voluntary exchange as inherently exploitative.

Merker notes that for the critics of exchange “the stance that portrays laborers as wronged in principle by wage labor” counts as “a moral act of disinterested benevolence” for “other-regarding” morality, both from the Christian tradition and the new secular tradition. Never mind that it now contradicts the science.

Smith’s pioneering insight… [of] a self-regarding alternative to the other-regarding version of morality… was simply… swamped by… social movements and intellectual fashions that… came to cement rather than to replace, other-regarding ethics in the ethos of modernity.

Except for rebels like Bjorn Merker, you and me. And we note that there are three moralities in this fallen world. In Merker’s definition the three are:

Other-regarding morality
Prudential ethics
Ethics of reciprocity

But I have a better idea:

Altruistic morality
Prudential morality
Trust morality

Your mileage may vary.

More to come.

Of course, some people felt that using the tactics of the Spanish Inquisition and tarring and feathering the yahoos as “science deniers” was a bridge too far. (Not that the Spanish Inquisition ever dealt with heretics using yahoo tar-and-feathers, or even the boiling oil of The Mikado). But what’s a liberal to do when scientists agree that the Earth in is peril?

But then, scientists agree that, with CO2 below 150 ppm, plants start to die.

During the coldest peaks of the last ice age (the Last Glacial Maximum roughly 20,000 years ago), atmospheric carbon dioxide dropped to a low of about 180 parts per million (ppm).

And scientists say that plants are experiencing a Global Greening with today’s CO2 at 420 ppm, resulting in an improvement in crop yields.

So you tell me, dear liberals, what the science says.

But back to Earth. If there is one thing that economists agree on it is that rent controls don’t work. As a test of science denial, we are fortunate to be experiencing the rent-control experiment of a social scientist from Uganda, Zohran Mamdani, who is presently testing his theories on the landlords and renters of New York City.

Guess what! Rents in New York City are up 10% on last year.

The median rent, meanwhile, sits at $5,295, up 6% from last July, though it held flat month over month after climbing 3% in both June and July from May’s previous record of $5,125.

And more:

At the same time, apartments are becoming harder to find. The number of rentals available across the city fell 1.4% from a year ago, while Manhattan saw a 4.4% drop.

Guess what. Developers remove apartments from the market in a city with rent control. But don’t worry. Mamdani has Plans: to “build 200,000 new apartments over the next decade.”

In a parallel social science experiment, economist Javier Milei abolished rent controls in Buenos Aires and rents went down. I was shocked. Do you know why? Because landlords started renting apartments that they had been keeping off the market for years.

Now I ask you, dear liberal friends: who is the biggest science denier? The eevil right-winger who wants to boil the climate with fossil fuels? The BA landlord that keeps his apartment off the market during rent control? Or noble Mamdani, the rent-controller?

Yeah, I know. Back in the day, they called it “scientific socialism.” It was going to save the world from the evils of capitalism, including landlords.

It’s odd isn’t it, that word “landlord.” The people that own apartment buildings aren’t “lords” and the don’t own “land,” if you think of land as rich green acres.

Fact is, dear liberal friends, pretty well every time you propose a new program, you ignore the science. Because practically everything government does is an attempt to dodge the science of the price system.

In fact, practically everything that liberal politics has tried to do since Rousseau has been an attempt to dodge the reality of the price system.

What puzzles me is that the journalists willing to call out politicians for proposing programs that deny the science are as scarce as hen’s teeth.

We know why, of course. It’s like the good old days of the Hollywood moguls: “you’ll never work in this town again.” With journalists, it’s “you’ll never get a leak from a confidential source again.”

In our modern era, of course, the same rule applies to everyone in public life except JK Rowling, including the little kiddies that acted in the Harry Potter movies.

Yeah! What’s the science about transgenders? Legal expert Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson once asked us to check with a biologist on that. Thank goodness she believes in The Science.

Of course, I get where this is coming from. Prices are up about 40% since the Day Before COVID, so everyone is blaming it on the Other Guy.

The Democrats are blaming it all on billionaires and oligarchs.

Ron Dreyer quotes Evan Barker and her new book: Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative.

As life becomes more unaffordable for Americans, and our politicians do not take meaningful action to address the problem, it is clear to me that the future, right or left, regardless of who is in power, will be populist. Whichever “establishment” party is in charge will continually be voted out, every four years, until a transformative FDR-like figure emerges, from either side of the aisle, delivering either a Republican or Democratic version of transformation that permanently improves the lives of most Americans.

OK. So what “transformation that permanently improves the lives of most Americans” is on offer?

None, really. Because the affordability crisis, the “problem” to be addressed, is the fault of two parties. There’s the Democrats, courtesy of FDR & Co. And there are the Republicans, that don’t have a clue.

You see we have an affordability crisis in the US in part because government takes about 40 percent of the income Americans earn in useful work and spends it on stuff that is less useful. Then it regulates the economy in favor of various interests. Wanna know who that is? Any group that can credibly be described as Big Something, from Big Government to Big Pharma to Big Education. And also any group that can be described as an Industrial Complex, from Ike’s Military Industrial Complex to the Activist Industrial Complex to the Climate Industrial Complex.

Then there is the Federal Reserve System that printed 40 percent more dollars in 2020-21 and has reduced the value of the dollar by 99 percent over the past century.

Then there is Social Security that channels savings for retirement through government.

Then there is government healthcare programs and regulation of healthcare. Healthcare costs are increasing faster than anything else, from real estate to automobiles.

Then there is government welfare that encourages women to get government to pay for their children rather than the child’s father.

Then there is government education that is mostly administrators doing who knows what.

Then there is government subsidies for home loans that increase the price and the size of homes.

There’s your affordability crisis.

The Democrats won’t do anything about it because each of the programs mentioned helped buy them votes back in the day.

The Republicans won’t do anything about it because nothing infuriates a human more than having their government benefits cut.

Back to Evan Barker. She understands that the “establishment” parties are chained to the status quo.

But what can “populists” of left or right do about it?

Right populists like Trump are trying to fix the economy with magic tricks like Trump Accounts and Trump Tariffs and No Tax on Tips.

Left populists like the DSA are trying to fix affordability with government food stores and taxing billionaires with a wealth tax.

Nobody dares to deal with our real problem: the trash mountain of free stuff handed out over the last century.

I have boiled this down in my Maxims to Liberty vs. Liberté, and Equality vs. Egalité:

Anglo culture: Liberty is the right to be left alone by government, to live life as we have always lived it.
Continental culture: Liberté stands opposed to tradition in the emancipatory overthrow of the present way of life.

Anglo culture: Equality means the ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen, and nobody is above the law.
Continental culture: Egalité means substantive equality. No social distinctions except to support the common good.

Rousseau was the guy that really set up the Continental revolutionary tradition, and “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” It’s the secular analog to the Fall of Man. Only now it’s all the fault of society, not the fallen man. So Rousseau produced a “universal alibi.”

[A]nyone experiencing a lack of satisfaction with their lives… [could] treat their condition as one for which they bore no responsibility but which instead could be laid at the feet of “society”.

Thus society robs the frustrated individual of “a happiness they would have enjoyed by virtue of their nature.” Obviously there is only one thing to do: overthrow the society that has frustrated you.

The curious thing is that Rousseau wants to solve the frustration of the individual by the force of a societal “general will” that instinctively works to advance the “common good”. And how does this happen? Through the “great soul of the legislator”. And who is that “great soul”?

We know now. It is the Rousseau, or Marx, or Lenin, or Mao, or devoted activist that knows he holds the secret of the general will and common good in his soul and has the talent to express it. So what’s the difference between this “great soul” and the monster soul encoding in capitalists, robber barons, economic royalists and billionaires? Never mind. Anyway:

[T]he fasle alibi of Rousseau’s stance of blaming “society” (“civilization”) for his own subjective discomforts, combined with his totalitarian collectivist prescription for a cure, supplied the modern world with a permanent gate of recruitment to the banner of the partisans of overthrow[.]

No doubt our present generation of woke DSA kiddies exactly fits the mould. Encouraged by their woke university teachers and emboldened by the lack of completion in their young lives, the answer to their woes is obvious. Burn it all down.

For us, the point about Rousseau is that he helps us understand the revolutionary radical. He interprets his feeling of failure, of inadequacy, as the fault of society. If our radical feels he is in chains, because of lack of tenure, or lack of material success, it cannot be his fault, born free. It must be the chains that did it.

Interestingly, to me, Rousseau wants to understand the “general will” as magically imposed by a great soul. But anyone with half a brain understands that the “general will” is worked out every day in the market economy by the communication between buyer and seller in the price system. And the millions of transactions between millions of actors is what works out the “common good.” That is why we say that humans are social animals.

But that is the last thing that the educated sons of businessmen (Engels) or tippy-top lawyers (Marx) are willing to admit.

It’s obvious that the feeling of inadequacy is a fundamental experience of human life, whether it’s the feeling of Sin, that it’s all your own fault, or the feeling of injustice, that it’s all society’s fault.

And it seems there are two solutions. One is to build yourself up, despite discouragement and, willy-nilly, make yourself into a worthy person and contribute to society. The other is to build yourself up by destroying society.

With the example of Rousseau, Bjorn Merker helps us understand how the two solutions to the problem of inadequacy present themselves to people in the modern world.

More to come.

As the second Millennium progressed, the Renaissance humanists, while Christian, obtained an access and familiarity with texts of other religions and philosophies.

Christianity started to appear as one of many ancient religions… [with its] truth and “wisdom”… diluted by a willingness to recognize genuine value in other traditions.

Scholars started to discover errors and discrepancies in the various sacred texts, and the Donation of Constantine, the basis of papal power, was exposed as a forgery. It began to seem that the Christian faith was a product of history. And then began the wars of religion, from the German Peasants’ War beginning in 1524 to the Thirty Years War ending in 1648. Not to mention Gutenberg and his press in 1440.

Renaissance thinking developed the idea of the “dignity of man” and the notion of mankind occupying a middle ground between the divine and the animals. Instead of mankind in a state of sin needing the salvation of Christ, it seemed that humans were capable of an ascent of the soul towards divinity, drawing on individual and cultural “works of creativity.” Maybe mankind could understand the world by deciphering the Creator’s “book of nature,” the “rational order and harmony which has been imposed on [the world] by God”.

Then there was the dramatic expansion of the scope and possibilities of the world by the age of discovery, and the skeptic movement in the mid 16th century and “the uncertainty of all claims to knowledge, from science to religion.

The uncertainty of skepticism could be resolved by a resort to faith. Or a corpus of knowledge.

[Thus] Western philosophy acquired a long-term goal and agenda; that of arriving at a basis of certainty from which to overcome the crisis of skeptical doubt.

Thus we come into the age of Euclid, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Gassendi.

But then came Newton, whose “mechanics created a ‘god-free zone’” from our domestic experience on Earth “to the ends of the solar system and beyond”. And he inspired thinkers to vault out of physical mechanism to the question of “human affairs, relations, and institutions”, in other words, a “science of man.” It gave rise to the concepts that we are squabbling over to this very day: “social contract”, “human nature”, “common sense of mankind”, “natural laws.”

On the Continent, this thinking led to the idea of revolution. Thus Robespierre, “convinced of the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration… creating a new people.” And all who have followed him were able “to weather its failure with their revolutionary faith intact.”

But there was another strain in the Enlightenment, the “British” one. And the contrast can be understood by a comparison of Liberty and Equality.

In the British concept, Liberty is the right “to be left alone by government, to live life as they had always lived it.” In the Continental version liberté “stood opposed to tradition… It became identified with the dynamic of emancipatory overthrow… [of] an entire way of life.

In the British concept, Equality refers to the “ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen,” and nobody, “the king in particular, is ‘above the law’”. In the French concept egalité means that “social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.” Equal treatment under the law versus “substantive equality.”

Thus the West arrived at a post-Christian culture “divided down the middle by an ideational watershed.”

On the one hand there is a more concrete, every-day, and reformist Enlightenment of the British Isles and America… and on the other, a more abstract emancipatory and revolutionary Enlightenment[.]

Building a life between these clashing ideologies is “a risky enterprise” as we can see in the aftermath of the Two Enlightenments.

More to come.

[It was an] attempt to promote Christianity as the exclusive and all-encompassing framework for the conduct of human affairs and the fount of final answers to all human questions.

In the First Millennium Christianity picked up Greek philosophy and its primacy of “reason.”

• Epistemological primacy of reason, such as Plato and his Theory of Forms.

• Moral efficacy of reason, that to know what is right leads directly to acting right.

• Ontological primacy of reason, where “nature is held to be pervaded by a universal reason.”

That fitted well into the world of Christian theology, and “a long line of Christian thinkers saw reason as the handmaid of the faith” helping make its doctrines intelligible to the intelligent.

But then came the rediscovery of Aristotle, in the century from 1125-1250, “driven by translations from Arabic and Greek manuscripts in Spain and Sicily.” And that put the cat among the pigeons. Aristotelian empiricism tended to challenge the notion of Christianity as the “repository of ultimate and all-encompassing truth” and its comfortable relationship with Platonism.

It led to a war at the University of Paris between the Faculty of Theology and the Faculty of Arts. The theologists “attempted to control the Aristotelian studies in the Faculty of Arts.” It ended with the Bishop of Paris in 1277 forbidding the philosophers from disagreeing with the theologians. It drove philosophy underground for a century or so.

In Islam, in the 11th Century, “Al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers helped Islamic orthodoxy put and end to the philosophical activity that threatened its doctrinal commitments.” No such luck in Christendom.

Christian orthodoxy… never succeeded in stamping out the philosophical ferment stimulated by the reception of Aristotle.

Instead the “reception of Aristotle” began the long process that separated reason from faith, philosophy from theology, natural philosophy from metaphysics, and science from philosophy.

Naturally, the Church tried to put a stop to this, with philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno burned at the stake for heresy in 1600 and the 1633 arrest and trial of Galileo. But it failed, and theology diminished in importance, and inquisitive minds started to go their own way to answer unanswered questions.

For Merker, the Protestant Reformation represents the definitive end of the medieval hope for a “Comprehensive Christian Culture.” Now Christians would practice their faith in denominations, and scholarship detached itself from the Christian framework.

But it wasn’t until Newton and the Enlightenment and the French Revolution that Christianity itself came under attack.

More to come.

Capital need labor infinitely more than labor needs capital.

Not the case, says Ben Shapiro. Because “millions of people” are willing to work for wages.

Actually, I’d say that everything needs everything else. A pencil factory owner needs “wood, paint, graphite, rubber and aluminum,” as the student asserts. But he also needs a factory and a market and wholesalers to buy his pencils, and on and on. And he needs the prices for labor and materials and energy and money to add up to a profit. Because if the sums don’t add up there are no pencils, no jobs, no profits, no nothing.

And do you know how that all comes together? In the market and its prices, including prices for workers, equipment, money, real estate, and on and on.

If you do not understand that, dear socialist friend, you know nothing, and you certainly should not be pontificating in public, or running for office, or conducting peaceful protests, or administering the pencil industry from a government bureaucracy.

But the bigger issue is that it does not matter if you know nothing and do not understand capitalism and markets and prices. You can know nothing and still survive and thrive in a market economy.

All you need to do is show up at the supermarket with money and pay the price for the groceries you buy. You don’t have to know about butchering cows, or bottling milk, or making butter. That all happens off stage, and is the result of it all is the price the supermarket wants you to pay. If you don’t like the prices or the products you can go somewhere else.

All you need to do is apply for a job and decide whether the wage offered is good enough for you to take the job. If you work at a job for six months and you don’t get a raise, you can always quit and go find a job somewhere else.

All you need to do to get a roof over your head is find a house to rent. You do not have to have the skills to build your own house, only to demonstrate that you can make the rent.

Maybe the true miracle of the market economy is that you don’t need to know nuttin’ about it. The people that created the market economy knew nuttin’ about it. The rulers that allowed cities to create local market economies knew nuttin’ as to how the market works. Workers migrated from rural serfdom to wage labor in the cities without knowing a thing about how to live and work in an industrial city. We live in houses filled with gadgets that we know nothing about, except how to use them — sorta.

And yet it works. And yet it has visited unimaginable wealth on all of us.

And in every generation some dumb kid thinks he knows better than the millions of minds and lives that created the life he lives and takes for granted and complains about.

Remember the song:

I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales

You never know what might be going on a couple of connections away from your own little life.

What a world!

But Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise tells us that the Catholic Church had the whole thing down pat starting at the turn of the First Millennium.

He tells the story through the growth of the Latin Church. See, after the Fall of Rome the Church knew if was “in danger of sharing its fate.” The whole point of Augustine’s City of God therefore was to dissociate the City of God from the Earthly City of the deceased and fallen Roman Empire. So the Church pushed into northern Europe and went to work on Christianizing the Germanic tribes.

But, of course, the Christianizing of the Germanic pagans didn’t just involve religious conversion.

In the process Christian doctrines, values and institutions were impressed upon societies undergoing the far-reaching changes attendant on the transition from an essentially preliterate tribal culture to a literate civilization.

The point is that the conversion was both religious and political.

This fusion of tribal and ecclesiastical power… [was] characterized by an absence of a principled distinction between worldly and spiritual authority and power[.]

And it didn’t hurt that the Church “engaged in large-scale land clearance effort, introduced efficient management techniques, and improved agricultural methods.”

But what happened after the conversion was complete — even extending to Iceland? Perfectly simple. It was time for “activism.”

Professing Christians could easily be shown to violate their own ideal in practice,, handing activists the lever of shame in pursuing their goals.

Sound familiar doesn’t it.

[T]hat lever and logic is a constant fixture of activist movements, whether religious or secular, [as we shall see.]

And they even had a Peace Movement, the “Peace of God.”

In due course came Pope Gregory VII, born Hildebrand of Soana, and he declared in Dictatus Papae in 1075 that the pope had the power to depose emperors. Yes, so Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV had to take the Road to Canossa.

Then the Church invented the Crusade.

The nature and scope of papal aspirations were reflected… in the Holy War or Crusade, directed against external enemies, and the Inquisition directed against internal dissent (heresy).

The point to understand is that the Crusades were not just fought against the Muslims, but also against Byzantium, Jews, and “non-Latin Christians such as the Copts.”

Internally, within the boundaries of papal authority, there was what we now call totalitarianism. If you were not a baptized Christian you were excluded from society.

Thus, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) prohibited Jews from owning land and from all civil and military functions.

And woe to those outside the gates.

[T]he heretics, even if innocent of any other crime, were considered fit to be killed, and were in fact killed.

You can see what Bjorn Merker is setting up here. He is telling the history of the last millennium as though it were the first draft of our own totalitarian age, where religious and political leaders are ever tending towards enforcing a one true faith under one great leader.

As we say now: it’s in the jeans.

More to come.