As H1N1 Hits Kenyon, A Debate on the Ethics of Vaccination

Late this summer, as we were all eagerly preparing our returns to campus, the Health Center sent an e-mail titled "Student with Influenza" to the student body. The meaning was clear from the title alone: the H1N1 influenza virus, colloquially known as swine flu, had arrived. A student was infected. Now, what were we to do? We got the usual advice: "wash your hands" and "cover your face when you sneeze," etc. But real help is on the way. According to information in an e-mail and on the College Web site, the H1N1 vaccine should be available to the campus this fall.

This sounds all well and good, right? Maybe not. It would be wise to stand back and look at the whole picture before succumbing to hysterics.

Read the rest here...

Rethinking the "Good War"

On September 1, seventy years ago, Germany invaded Poland. And thus began the most destructive and deadly war in human history. Too few people, however, dare ask Why? or How? The orthodox view of World War II as the "Good War," as a war of Good versus Evil, has reached canonical status.

Patrick Buchanan provides us with the insight that, if not for British guarantees to Poland, the entire war could have been avoided. Justin Raimondo adds to Buchanan's observations: "...the Cold War would most definitely have been avoided. For Hitler was determined to destroy the hated Bolsheviks, and it was only US entry into the conflict – engineered by FDR, in alliance with the Brits, the Communists, and the left in general – that saved the "workers’ paradise" from Germany’s sword." And finally, Robert Higgs reminds us that "One is scarcely engaging in moral equivalence if one concludes that neither side represented 'the good guys.' There was plenty of evil to go around."

No historical event should be sacrosanct, including World War II.

Enough About Iran

The whole election hullabaloo in Iran has made me even more cynical about the U.S. news media -- if that is even possible. Sure, there are probably some inconsistencies in the voting. But who cares? However, if you still care, here is a great little piece by Ilana Mercer that makes the case for why you should not, or at least watch to the mainstream news with a critical eye.

More on gay marriage

I deposited the following rant on the current hot topic over at Taki's Magazine, under the flourishing title, "'Do You Take This Pony?' Or, The Counterrevolution Will Be Facebooked."

You used to be able to take some sort of traditionally-minded patriarchal order for granted. Now it is in pieces and streaks of mayhem, mediocrity, anxiety and insanity are running strong. What do we have to leverage some sort of restoration? Blogs, web magazines, comment threads and social networking sites, apparently. Just another reason to turn gloomy and Spenglerian.

But, why not and what the heck? I use my Facebook profile to air all sorts of reactionary web literature, as if I’ll coax egalitarianism back to the underworld proper with another turn of phrase by Mr. Zmirak, Mr. Spencer, or the Other McCain.

Recently one of those links was to Mr. Derbyshire’s rubric for the secular-right heteronormative argument, which Razib Khan brought to our attention. Since gay rights are so hot right now I got plenty of response, some of it from relatively new friends, acquaintances, and coworkers who only lately have wandered within my right-wing orbit. The Left gets heaps of abuse for social experimentation, but I have my own styles of social labwork, and I love nothing better than witnessing the squeals and writhing of those who can’t keep this particularly unsettling reactionary vampire at bay with the usual crummy crosses, garlic, and accusations of prejudice and discrimination.

I have met the common egalitarian mind, and it is really hot and bothered that Mr. Derbyshire would write the following:

Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose further redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team?

Oh, those crazy conservatives! What can you say about people who are worried that man-pony marriages will soon become epidemic?

The point to Derbyshire’s remark, of course, is logical and cultural, which would become clear to the PC antagonist could he but pluck his head out from whatever orifice it was crammed in and engage in a moment’s reflection. Once the publicly-accepted understanding of something changes so does the wider social setting, which shapes what people can make of their lives. Our understanding of marriage reflects the kind of world in which we live, and the confidence and reinforcement we can expect to enjoy in that world. Will it be, on the one hand, a setting where people see in their attachments to others nothing deeper or more fundamental than a practical and perhaps momentary solution to the question of their own individual needs and wants? Or will it be one in which those attachments relate to greater obligations, a wider social order, and ultimately a transcendent good?

I might be free, in the egalitarian society, to cohabit with a woman and call it marriage. Yet I’m palpably not free to enjoy the support of a wider society that gives my attachment to that woman its traditional meaning and obligation. To the extent that gay “marriage” is accepted as a non-controversial public understanding, the older traditional patterns erode. Those traditional attitudes aren’t just an arbitrary function of nasty heteronormative preference. They are based on a time-tested recognition of what makes sense and tends to work with regard to human activity and attachment.

By the way, if you would like to upgrade from my budget traditionalist conceptualizing to the authentic product, you will need to obtain a copy of Jim Kalb’s recent accomplishment, The Tyranny of Liberalism. Now if you will excuse me, I have a Facebook feed to tyrannize.

Addendum: Let me finish off my gloss on Derbyshire, to spell out every last hint and syllable for people who need to believe that conservatives are, for example, terrified of the legitimization of barnyard love. The point of such phraseology by Derbyshire (are we really having to make this clear?) is not that pony marriage trends are likely to develop, but that such questions start to occur to people given what we now have decided marriage to be. They start to occur, in the sense that it becomes harder to say what is truly special about an arrangement that is just a suitable utilitarian pairing between two individuals and that lacks the old meaning and significance. People start to say, “What’s to stop us from marrying ponies?” not because such things are actually on the horizon, but to express something about how difficult they find it to make sense of the concept of gay “marriage” as an overall social standard. To be worthy of the appellation marriage needs to have a real overall social purpose, like transmitting the habits and customs of one generation of a civilization to the next, which then ends up relating to a more transcendent meaning. Gay marriage lacks this. So would marrying a pony.

I have also heard from five people in the last twenty four hours, almost verbatim, that “THERE IS NEVER ANY REASON TO DENY PEOPLE THEIR RIGHTS.” Never? Never ever? I seem to recall some sort of historical trend involving the mass murder of those who had some reluctance in accepting the social reconstruction of the rights regime. The Vendée? The unfortunate flotsam and jetsam of opposition to the Communists? I know that my impoverished interlocutors can’t be bothered with the marrow of their own civilization’s history. I also recognize that direct brutalization is no longer the egalitarian fashion, in our present phase of “soft” anarcho-tyranny (except when it is, and we decide it is time once again to spread some more of that democracy by the bayonet and the bunker buster). But maybe the PC moralists could afford to be a little less categorical and a little more agnostic in their socio-political judgments.

The abnormal is the new normal

This especially is true when it comes to sex. Why?

In Sartre: Ideologue of Our Time the Hungarian Catholic philosopher Thomas Molnar follows the path of Sartre’s ethical neutrality and exaltation of freedom and individual choice to one of its major destinations: the valorization of sexual exotica per se.

Freedom [in Sartre’s analysis] is a dreadful possibility before which we [as bourgeois people] recoil; in self-protection we set up taboos, collective guidelines, so as to avoid making free choices. We prefer to act comfortably, within what society permits with our own tacit approval. Yet there are those not afraid of their freedom and its consequences. Society chooses to call them criminals, as if they had injured an absolute good when in reality they acted outside and against the prevailing taboos. If society did not define a certain evil, their acts would have no ethical connotation, they would even be sources of value. The myth of evil was forged by the so-called respectable people (gens de bien) who deprive human freedom of its positive power and give it a negative interpretation. They call a free man an evil man; and once he is so labeled, whatever he does as a free agent will be called harmful.

Sartre thus pushes with metaphysical determination for a de-neuroticization of society. Such a society would be purified of such dishonest, self-serving bourgeois oppression and denial of freedom. Molnar writes:

The de-neuroticised society is the one which knows no good and evil, whose only criterion is freedom. But the problem arising here, ignored by Sartre, is that this kind of freedom invariably begins and ends with the approval of certain acts (called evil in the language of conventional morality) and the condemnation of other acts (called good in that language). It other words, the “de-neuroticised” society does not look neutrally at man’s conduct; it does not abolish, but merely reverses, the meaning of good and evil: It gives the first term a negative, the second term a positive, sign. Hence it is not difficult to see in Sartre’s analysis of the Genet case history the desire to indulge in absolute license in a world to which his own imagination alone sets limits. Theoretically, this would not have to lead to the abolition of all restraint and ultimately to sexual frenzy. But there is a logic of human nature at work here as was shown by the Marquis de Sade in La Philosophie dans le boudoir. Welcoming the Revolution, the divine marquis exhorted his compatriots not to stop halfway but to push toward the ultimate freedom, the abolition of all institutions as man-made, and the institutionalization of the satisfaction of instincts, made by nature. The basic instinct is, of course, the sexual one, so true freedom for Sade consists in license for all, men and women, young and old, to satisfy their sexual urge in any way and with whomever desired. A frenetical sexuality was, thus, the goal of mankind, the last and best thing freedom could offer. A singular restriction of the infinite number of choices permitted by the theoreticians of freedom!

Why object?

A teacher I had in high school whom I respected was dismayed to find me taking shots at opinion columnists whom he apparently agrees with and sees as supporting the moral and sensible viewpoint. We had an email exchange, a lot of it toxic, in which I tried to establish that the right-minded writers I chase after are doing good work. That didn’t take with my former teacher, though. “Why play the right-wing hack?” he ended up saying in effect. “Why not do something closer to the pursuit of truth?”

He’s right, in part. Fuming buys nothing and comes across as amateurish and uncultivated. You can complain and criticize, but eventually you have face bigger questions and say where it’s all headed. If you just fume, eventually you lose the ability to say what it’s all about.

Saying you should just pursue truth has its own problems, though. Such pursuits don’t occur in a vacuum—they happen in a particular setting that favors certain understandings, attitudes, and views over others. If you like the favored views and think they sum things up well then you can just go ahead. If you have objections, though, you’ll need a way to gracefully refrain from going with the flow.

Getting mad at Connie Schultz might not be the solution, ultimately. Rejecting things like multiculturalism, universalism, egalitarianism, and propositional nationhood is the solution to some degree and at some level, though. There are people who make that case intelligently and who deserve to have their arguments given some due. Instead they are kept out of the public view.

What's happening?

There’s a piece in the Harrisburg Patriot-News today by Anthony Infanti, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. He writes in support of a pending state anti-discrimination bill that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

He focuses on what he says are the economic benefits the legislation will bring by making the state more welcoming to LGBT people. Professor Infanti doesn’t much develop the logic of anti-discrimination, which makes sense, since that logic is increasingly taken as given across our culture, and in our social, religious, and political institutions. Why spend time defending something that a lot of people will take at face value, at least in the public square?

Anti-discrimination, though, isn’t a habit of mind that occurs to everyone naturally. Until recently in human history it didn’t occur to anyone at all, practically. Affairs were conducted on a basis that was less than fully egalitarian, and it seemed natural for people to live in a setting in which different individuals with different identities would be placed on different footings. While not all of our past attitudes are to be invoked as things worth restoring—impossible, anyways, since attitudes that differed from time to time often contradict each other—at some level we should be surprised to find that justice and basic decency now require us to replace our inherited public understandings with a single self-contained principle of equality that is to override all other considerations. That seems to be what is happening, though, even though some continue to object and complain.

Jim Kalb

I’m young and novice, so naturally I’m heavily indebted to people who have been experiencing, thinking, and articulating longer and more seriously than I have. One of those people is Jim Kalb, an independent writer who keeps a website here, and whose recent book has been fairly described as “a blockbuster that belongs on the shelves of any thinking conservative who wants to understand where we are today, and where we are going.”

In his writing he focuses on overall tendencies, general trends, and basic issues, instead of emphasizing particulars. That seems to leave a lot of room for people to adapt their answers to particular questions in ways that suit their circumstances. To that degree you might say there’s a level of agnosticism to his approach. Still, he favors the Catholic Church as the institution best fitted overall for housing civilization’s renewal.

Among those with whom he’s made some sort of common cause, in writing, analyzing, and pointing toward ways out of the current crisis, not all share his Catholic bent. That’s not really alarming—things in general are highly fragmented, and people with a variety of loyalties and inclinations are going to reach a variety of conclusions on central questions, even when they’re pulling in the same right-wing sort of direction. I wonder, though, if that point of diversion is something Jim has had occasion to deal with directly. I wonder what he would say are the strongest criticisms he’s seen on this point, and how he would respond to them, and how much he thinks the question matters in the scheme of things.

Update: Jim follows up with remarks about his approach.

Prejudice versus exotica

An article in the New York Times suggests that sexual exotica is growing more open in Iraq, as a result of conditions created by Western invasion. The authors of the article can’t call homosexuality “exotic,” but the view comes across anyways, in the quotations from Iraqis and their officials, and in the apparent effort by Iraqis themselves to brutally stamp out homosexual habits, even and especially among family members. The authors say that a spate of violence against openly gay men shows that “Iraq remains religious, conservative — and still violent.”

On that view it’s the regular, “heteronormative” habits and attitudes of Iraqis that are the problem and the source of violence and tension. A traditionalist might ask, why not the other way around? Why doesn’t the effort to normalize anti-traditional modes of behavior attract blame as being the root of the problem? It might be seen that way by evangelical Christians, but their handling of basic issues always seems amateurish and superficial to me—at least, that’s my unstudied view.

If traditional attitudes and prejudices are merely aberrant and arbitrary, then there shouldn’t be any fundamental difficulty with reconfiguring things to get rid of them and obtain satisfaction and social peace. That sort of project is now typical in the West. But that’s not what traditional attitudes are, and that’s not how dealing with them works.

Update: Razib Khan's observations in response to mine are, I think, correct. I probably abused the terms "homosexual" and "gay" a little by mixing them, but I hope my overall point doesn't contradict Khan's remarks, which are sound. He writes:

An addendum to Evan McLaren’s comment on The New York Times piece, Iraq’s Newly Open Gays Face Scorn and Murder. I generally think that the semantic quibbles of anthropological types who caution against comparing societies as if terms are equivalent is a rather useless exercise, but in this case I believe some clarification is warranted. It seemed implicit in The New York Times piece that there is a distinction between homosexual behavior, and an open gay subculture. Whether it is taboo or not, homosexual behavior exists in many human societies. In fact because of sex segregation in much of the Islamic world homosexual behavior flourishes.* See this piece from The Atlantic about homosexuality in Saudi Arabia. But it is likely that most men who have engaged in homosexual behavior in Saudi Arabia are as gay as most prisoners who have engaged in homosexual behavior; not very. The point is that the violent reaction to gay subculture in Iraq from traditionalists is less about homosexual behavior per se, as opposed to the emergence of a gay subculture which seems to be modeled on its Western variants. In fact some scholars, such as Camille Paglia, have argued that the gay culture as we understand it in the West is a relatively new phenomenon which is qualitatively distinct from variants of homosexuality which are extant in the historical record, from ancient Greece down to Tokugawa Japan. The rise of the gayness internationally, and the subsequent backlash, can therefore be viewed as simply another clash between Western values and non-Western values.

* The Sultan of Oman seems likely to be exclusively homosexual in his preferences.

The Devalued Prime Minister of a Devalued Government

Apparently there are still some decent politicians in Britain:

Fact or Fiction?

I think this is about as arbitrary as what they have been doing:



Thanks Tim Swanson at mises.org

Walter Block Takes on Campus Thought Police

I posted last semester about Prof. Walter Block's incident at Loyola College Maryland. He was accused of racism and sexism after claiming wage gaps between races and sexes might be due to something other than discrimination. Of course he used evidence to support his claims, but egalitarians on a witch hunt don't usually bother with the facts. Anyways, Dr. Block gives a nice update on the situation during a podcast with Lew Rockwell.

I'm Glad He's Here

Oops. Turns out the U.S. government will have to borrow $9.3 trillion over the next decade to pay for Obama's inane projects. Right now the national debt stands at just over $11 trillion. Our total Gross Domestic Product equals $14.5 trillion. So if we add all of that new debt to our current debt, we will have a national debt 140% of our total national GDP. That means it would take over an entire year to repay all the government owes; that is over a year of paying for nothing but debt and nothing else. And to bring it a little closer to home: $20.3 trillion in debt equals almost $67,000 per man, woman, and child in this country. I am sure it is all worth it, Barack.

Hope

This is change vast sums of money I can believe in:

Six Years Later

It has been six years since the war on Iraq began. What do we have to show for it? Well, there are the 4259 American soldiers dead. Then we have $600 billion in official costs; other estimates go as high as $3 trillion. And of course, we can't overlook the 1.3 million Iraqi civilians that have been killed.

The costs are clearly staggering. But there seems to be no end in sight. Obama has said he will end our "combat" role in the country within a couple of years. Apparently the 50,000 remaining soldiers--trained in the art of warfare with guns at the ready--will have nothing to do with "combat" missions.

Nevermind all that! I am sure in these tough times our gracious leaders would never lead us astray. Besides, I am also quite sure that the squandering of trillions of dollars must stimulate our economy. Or something.

Can Government Fix the Roads?

A scare story over at CNN about our failing infrastructure got me thinking. Would any of this have happened without government ownership of roads, bridges, dams, etc.? I think we would be in a much better place with a competitive market for infrastructure.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave our roads a grade of "D-". Apparently we spend "more than $4.2 billion a year stuck in traffic." This points to one of two things: either we have a shortage of roads or the cost to drive on the roads is too low. Either way, it seems there hasn't been an efficient distribution of roads. Government, of course, owns these roads. Why not let private individuals and companies own the roads? With competition and free pricing system we could figure out where roads are most needed and ration the space available on the roads to avoid too much traffic.

Next, I think the Engineers inadvertently admit who is at fault. They also handed a "D-" to the inland waterways. "The average age of all federally owned or operated locks is nearly 60 years, well past their planned design life of 50 years." Of course the federally owned or operated locks are outdated. As Milton Friedman once said: "If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand." Mismanagement, waste, and inefficiency is a symptom of any government-owned entity.

This may all seem a little abstract and not applicable to these so-called "public goods." But put it in the context of your everyday life. What if the government mandated that all milk would be "free," that is, it would be paid for like roads, with taxes and fees that are often divorced from the milk market all together. Clearly everyone would hurry to get some free milk and shortage would ensue, either by all the normal milk drinkers taking the milk or inviting new milk drinkers that did not buy milk before. So it goes with roads; free access or encouraging driving at high-traffic hours creates traffic jams, which could be a shortage of roads or an overabundance of drivers.

Or what if you went into Best Buy and instead of selling computers they were selling typewriters? The market would surely put them out of business, or severely damage their revenues. Government ownership, however, allows outdated equipment and infrastructure precisely because there is a lack of competition.

Engineers, when you say "that the government and the private sector need to invest $2.2 trillion over five years," I say: You stick to engineering and let others take care of the economics.