Take the Best, Leave the Rest

2 Comments

• 

  Augie Fossicker

  January 22, 2018 at 12:11 am

  Sorry to do a “drive by” on your site, which I stumbled onto “Googling” Raymond Aaron, but you’ll likely get nowhere trying to contact me, and that is intentional. Being naturally curious (and a habitual ditherer and time-waster), I looked around a bit. You are obviously leading a good life, and I congratulate you on it. “Good work”, meant literally (and not Joe Biden literally, but literally, literally!).

  I’ll comment on this and couple of other posts, and critically I’m afraid. Taking the Best and Leaving the Rest, betrays a Goldilocks attitude toward some things. Yoga first.

  I think yoga is a combination of potentially dangerous physical culture attached to a much larger mystical/religious practice that can become an equally dangerous intellectual rabbit-hole, from which unwary explorers will be lucky to emerge. But, my adult daughter is a devotee, and semi-professional teacher of it. While it has triggered serious physical injury from which she is currently rehabilitating, she seems so far to have escaped the greater danger – though not entirely. Perhaps it is California (where she lives) as much as the yoga, but I’ve noticed a softening of her formerly sharp lawyer’s mind. Not that she has become stupid, or blind, but I notice less willingness in her to confront things directly, and a soft-focus view of the world. No matter how cynical you get, you aren’t going to keep up (attributed to Lily Tomlin of all people). She’s falling behind more quickly than necessary.

  Like Chiropractic, a relatively harmless, but potentially dangerous, practice of joint manipulation built on a discredited pre-scientific theory of medicine, yoga is a relatively harmless, but potentially dangerous, practice of physical culture, built on a seductive but fundamentally batty religious and philosophical basis.

  As a shorthand I’ll call it skepticism, but cynicism might work too. Screw it up to the maximum anywhere around Eastern mysticism, of which yoga is a manifestation. There is very little “best” here, and that best is difficult to isolate from the rest.

  Which brings us back to Goldilocks. She was a dilettante, in a bears’ house. Don’t be a dilettante in dangerous places.

  And now for someplace not dangerous at all, where you seem much too cautious.

  First of all, gun stores can be a bit forbidding, though due to bad proprietors, not customers. Some proprietors have no patience with casual shoppers, or with any inquiry that does not meet their own idea of correct and intimate firearm knowledge. It is a form of arrogance, where they are kings in their little area of expertise. You should ignore that as you would any similar manifestation of such narrow-mindedness.

  It is just people being people, and fortunately, though common enough, is not the rule. A lot of people in the hobby, and the industry, are welcoming to newcomers and neophytes.

  I find your ambivalence to firearms telling (and your confidence in police protection positively adorable). I can easily understand the attitude of firearms haters, unfamiliar with them, afraid of them, and trapped in those attitudes by an unwillingness to face the contingency of life that violence, including firearms violence, represents. The idea that your continued existence, moment-to-moment, depends on the forbearance of strangers, and your general safety to the willingness of rough men to do violence to those who would otherwise do violence to you, is an existential insight too disturbing for many to face.

  You do understand these things, and have faced them (as have I, as gunfire punctuates the night outside a cheap apartment). At some moments, and in some times, a man who is not dangerous is not free, and we’ve all heard the old aphorism that “God made men, Sam Colt made them equal.”.

  The “moments” are those rare occasions when a deadly threat arises that cannot be avoided. Though I carry a gun, I’ve never encountered such an occasion, and expect never to. But, they do occur. The “times” are those periods of chaos, anarchy, tyranny, warfare, etc., when civilization breaks down and its normal protections are lost. Although such occasions of disorder seem inconceivable as we go about our daily ordered lives, they are as regular as clockwork throughout history, and occur, sooner or later, in all times and places.

  The unfortunate popularity of the “Zombie Apocalypse” in entertainment is an obvious sublimation of a fear of the civilized, the fear than civilization will break down and people will be exposed to the ravages of the rule of raw strength and unchecked violence, without any of the supports of the market economy that feeds and shelters them. In this way, the LA riots were a miniature Zombie Apocalypse, and similar zombie attacks happen here and there all the time, generally safely contained to the TV screen, as they play out in some distant “shithole” (as Donald Trump so felicitously expressed it).

  I would hope that a consideration of individual freedom and responsibility would take a person of open mind such as yourself toward the conclusion that firearms are a necessary element of maintaining freedom, both as an individual and a society, and that while interest in them and proficiency with their use is an individual choice, there is no reason to disparage their enthusiasts, quite the contrary.

  As for the NRA, who will defend our right as free citizens to be armed? You and your “moderate” friends? Opportunistic politicians? Biased judges with political agendas? You don’t have to like their style, but you should thank them every time you touch one of your guns. The actual NRA – not the one you imagine when looking at a display in a gun store, were you are a pilgrim among what you see as an alien culture – is a pretty moderate group in most ways, including what they promote in the way of gun rights.

  Of your discomfort in a gun store, I can only ascribe it to a sheltered California life. Those doughy plebeians in their camouflage hats are the workers who do the dirty jobs, provide the manpower for our military, and are a mainstay of our common civic culture. Nothing to either fear or disparage there. (Unless you have a problem with people who, often out of desperation when given no other choice, may have voted for Donald Trump!)

  I’ve earned a Ph.D. from a top twenty university in my field (which will not be revealed), with a fairly wide, if not particularly deep, knowledge of Western history and philosophy, and you’ll find me at a gun show, in a gun store, or at a shooting range on occasions. I’m perfectly at ease with my “inferiors” at such venues, probably because I don’t consider them inferior. I come from the same humble origins, but was just luckier in certain ways than many of them.

  Of course, your discomfort with such deplorable elements as “ex-Marine Corps lance corporal[s]” and the “white working class” is entirely understandable in a person of your intellectual depth, but I would hope that you could transcend those prejudices, as so many of your less worthy intellectual compatriots have not.

  This is of a piece with your Goldilocks attitude toward California politics, disdaining the extremes, and pulling for the middle to prevail. The middle never holds. More energized, convinced and determined elements have all the energy, and the moderate middle believes nothing strongly enough to defend it. This does not mean that the Bolsheviks always overwhelm the Mensheviks, or that the Stalinists in their turn always end up annihilating the Old Bolsheviks. There are reasonable factions and reasonable people who hold strong opinions, though you’ll never find them enthralled with moderation and its siren-song of sweat reasonableness, which always translates, in the end, into indecision and weakness.

  Look at California now, as it descends into a failed state outside its elite enclaves. The Left, and their instinctive (and sometimes conscious and diabolical) cultural Marxism has divided, taxed, regulated, and generally constricted California into an unsustainable state of extreme wealth, power and arrogance, and a mass of poverty, squalor and ignorance, with a withering middle class sandwiched in between.

  Illegal immigration, which has become a secular religion among California elites, is the battering ram used to eliminate any hope of recovery or sanity. To create a third-world Plutocracy, where arrogant elites live lives of excess while working out their personal inadequacies through political impositions on the peasants, you need a third-world population and culture, or enough of one to seal a permanent political stranglehold on power.

  If you think this is going to end well, you have no grasp of history (and you pretty evidently do).

  And yet, your complacency, and civilizational hubris of thinking that we are the stronger cultural force, compared to Islam (I do not say “radical” Islam, as Islam as it exists is uniformly radical to the core, with insignificant exceptions, right back to Mohammed). Who will preserve and defend our values and traditions? Not the elite universities, nor our public intellectuals, who are smitten with various incarnations of the “Opium” that I was researching when I found your site. Not politicians who, when they are not actively assaulting our civic culture, ignorantly calculate how to ride the wave created by those who are. Not our debased media, who have drunk deeply from the shallow end of the Marxist pool at university, and are now little more than aspiring celebrities willing to say anything to be noticed favorably. Not our business elites, who are either intent on providing the market its most base and untutored desires, or are devotes of shallow cultural Marxism themselves. Certainly not our entertainers and celebrities, whose self-absorption makes them perfect devotees of the Leftist agenda of self-righteous utopianism, which promises to wash away all other sins and shortcomings, so long as the approved bromides are mouthed

  No one of any influence, outside a few determined conservative scholars, commentators and politicians, has any true interest in sustaining anything about our civilization beyond its most puerile and transient manifestations. Governments last decades or a couple of centuries at the most (we don’t have the government now that we had a century and more ago). Cultures last centuries. Religions last millennia. Notice that we are actively extirpating the religious component of our culture at a breath-taking pace, removing its most durable support. (I’m personally a convinced agnostic, so don’t look for me to convert you! I’m just a believer in Washington’s admonition about the need for virtue in the citizens of a republic, and the necessity of religion as a support to virtue.)

  Islam is a religion, which in turn dominates a culture and its politics. It has immense self-confidence, coupled with deep insecurities, which only make it more aggressive and dangerous. Our culture has largely lost its religion, and will soon, as have our European friends already, completely eliminate it, if nearly unstoppable elite opinion gets its way. The culture itself is under relentless attack by cultural Marxism, whose restless divisiveness, and corrosive embrace of impossible measures of justice, soon dissolve everything, including the very concept of fact or truth. They will soon be able, like O’Brien in “1984”, to “float off this floor like a soap bubble”. Using the tools of envy, guilt, greed and jealousy, they will build their utopia.

  How will such an edifice, already half-built, stand up to the fanaticism of a great religious/cultural combine?

  The Left has already, under the banner of multiculturalism, and the old credo that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” (their ultimate enemy being bourgeois Western culture), uncritically embraced Islam. (E.g., the deputy chair of the DNC is currently an anti-American Islamist of the racist variety.)

  Your confidence in Western Culture is misplaced. Its elites have no interest in preserving it, only their comfortable sinecures, which they imagine will remain hanging in the air, unsupported, when the rest of our culture has been torn down.

  As an educated, and evidently good man, it is your responsibility to moderate your moderation, to face the inconsistencies in your comforting illusions and your palliative politics, to abandon virtue signaling, the tragic occupation of the current age which will do more than anything else to doom us, and embrace thoughtful opinions outside the degraded Left-approved mainstream, while seeing the world, perhaps for the first time, as the unfortunate place it really is.

  Also, it wouldn’t hurt if you got to know a few “white working class” people. You will likely be appalled, amused, challenged, occasionally informed, and against all expectation, make some wonderful friends.

  Unless of course you’ve bought into the new acceptable racism. There is always an acceptable elite racism, it just changes with the times. Once it was anti-black, then also anti-yellow or brown, then anti-Catholic, and of course antisemitic. We’ve come full circle on antisemitism, which is newly popular in academia, and is even being embraced by some liberal Jews. Marxism of course, seeks to pit all groups against all others, but Marxism needs a racial Goldstein (“1984” again), one race that all of the others can unite against. These days the acceptable racism is anti-white, and like the new antisemitism embraced by many Jews, elite whites are among its most enthusiastic proponents.

  But you aren’t uncomfortable with the “white working class” because of that trendy bigotry. I think too highly of you to believe that.

  • 

    Richard Geib

    January 31, 2018 at 6:22 am

    Dear Augie Fossicker,

    As a public school teacher I come into contact with a bit of everything, including the “white working class.” I am and have been comfortable with all sorts of people from different ethnicities and social classes — I try to take people more as individuals, and less as representatives of their gender, ethnicity, or social class. This has worked well for me, overall.

    But our politics disagree, obviously. I was never going to be sympathetic to the latest Moses of the white working class, Donald Trump, as he describes an America I don’t recognize — this dark “American carnage” of a nation betrayed by coastal elites and criminal immigrants. You talk at length of an America at war with itself and in decline. I see things differently. I don’t buy an America sold out to globalists against coal miners and steel workers. And since I would never wear a “Make America Great Again” hat or attend one of Trump’s rallies, I would never have bought into the demagoguery of earlier populists — I would have opposed Huey Long and his “Share the Wealth” plan, or George Wallace and his politics of white working class grievance. Does this make me “uncomfortable with the white working class”? Politically, it might.

    I could of course be friends with anyone. I get along just fine with the enlisted Marine Corps recruiters and drill instructors I deal with and they have limited formal educations, and I have dealt a lot with them in the past year. But there is something that separates us. Our upbringings and life experiences are different. Our educations have been different.

    As Tom Wolf once wrote, “Any fool sociologist could tell you there are only two objectively detectable social classes in America: people above the bachelor’s degree line – i.e., people who have graduated from four-year colleges – and people below it, who haven’t.” There certainly is nothing magical about a college degree that makes a person better or worse than someone who doesn’t have one. But it often makes one person different from another.

    The college degree is the great dividing line in America nowadays politically, economically, and socially. I doubt my wife would have married me if I didn’t have one: she is UC Berkeley, I am UC Los Angeles. College was almost the formative experience of our early adulthoods. Everyone in my family has a college degree, and almost all of my co-workers and friends do. Just about all my tennis buddies have college educations, and the ones that don’t — well, nobody much cares, as long as they can hit a decent topspin forehand. But my wife and I very much hope our daughters marry young men with college degrees — for obvious reasons. As an experiment I asked my cousin (Claremont McKenna College, class of 2002) a couple of years ago up in the Bay Area if he had ever dated a girl without a college degree. The question surprised him, but he had to admit that he had not. He hadn’t previously thought about it.

    Does this make me a “uncomfortable with the ‘white working class’”? I don’t think so. Maybe? But it does explain why I feel out of place in just about every gun store I’ve been in and with so many NRA members. And why we have officers in charge of the enlisted military, and civilians in charge of those officers. And why I want nothing to do with Donald Trump.

    Augie, the American middle class is stronger than you might think. Watch the college educated professionals from the suburbs (“soccer moms” and dads) assert their voices in the mid-term elections. We are not a Third World banana republic yet.

    Be well.

    #nevertrump