The other day, Kevin Williamson wrote this piece at National Review. It is interesting for a number of reasons. One is that Williamson is a tiny bit brighter than his colleagues at the magazine. Many of them are young and from the managerial class, thus having little to no experience with reality. By comparison, a middle aged man like Williamson sounds like Confucius. He has partnered up with Charlie Cooke, the British libertarian, to form a sort of senpai – kōhai routine that makes Williamson sound like a sage.

The older crowd at National Review has a refrigerator bulb quality to them. They are reliable and important to the functioning of the magazine, but you have no reason to notice them. If Rich Lowry were hit by a truck tomorrow, his absence, as well as his splatter, would be noticed, until the splatter was mopped up. By comparison, a guy like Williamson is a towering intellect. His odd style and choice of topics stands apart from the older guys kicking around the site.

Leaving the comparison stuff aside, I’ve often suspected he is at least vaguely aware of the problems afflicting the American Right and elite dogmas in general. He has written some things on race and culture, for example, that suggests he is not blind. His story on Appalachia and the Oxycontin Express is very well done and free of the modern habit of trying to jam everything into the mythology of our time.

He has to make a living so he engages in the esoteric subterfuges to stay out of trouble, but you still  see enough to suggest he is a guy who could one day end up sleeping in Steve Sailer’s basement. Then again, it could just be part of the act to seem edgy, when he is thoroughly conventional. The edgytarian is a real thing. Anyway, the conclusion of the article I linked above has this:

During the Civil Rights Movement — the real one, not the ersatz one led today by Jesse Jackson et al. — politics did genuinely intersect with brunch. On one side of the issue were people who argued that the social situation of African Americans at the time was so dire and so oppressive that invasive federal action was necessary. On the other side were well-intentioned conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and any number of writers for this magazine, who argued that if the reach of Washington were extended into every mom-and-pop diner in the country, it would constitute a step toward the abolition of private life, that the natural and inevitable extension of the principle at work would ensure that rather than being treated as private property, businesses reclassified as “public accommodations” would be treated more like public property, that the greasy snout of politics eventually would stick itself into every last precinct of what had been considered the sphere of privacy beyond the public sector.

As it turns out, both sides were right.

That last sentence is the grabber. Both can only be true if you exclude the possibility of a moral society based on individual liberty. The godfather of the modern Right, Harry Jaffa, certainly thought that was the case. Equality trumps everything and no man’s liberty can come at the expense of another. When equality is in conflict with liberty, then liberty must yield, which may sound great until one tries to nail down what equality means and how to define it.

As I said at the start, Williamson seems like a bright guy and he surely sees the problem, but the alternatives are currently off the table. There’s no way to claw back the idea of individual liberty without opening up the old wound of race relations. Any attempt to restore liberty as the dominant partner in the equality-liberty relationship, lands you in the same trouble as Rand Paul found himself in when asked about the Civil Rights Act. The heretic has no future in public life.

The bigger problem is that the very ideas of equality are at odds with observable reality backed by an growing body of scientific evidence. Boys and girls are not the same. Intelligence is distributed unequally. Variations in environment, culture and history have led to differences between human groups that go beyond track and field. Even if accept the triumph of equality over liberty, you’re chasing an imaginary thing that can never be realized.

That can only end in madness. When one person goes mad, we can lick him up. When the ruling classes of whole countries go mad, the results are catastrophic. I don’t know how we break out of this spiral. The Cult holds all the high ground in American life. They run the the cultural institutions, the academy and most of government. Even if the people in charge snapped out of it and suddenly realized the insanity of their ideological obsessions, there’s no going back. After the Year of the Four Emperors, the ruling elite of Rome knew that the system was broken and could never be fixed, but there was no way to go back to the Republic. They just had to make it work, until it didn’t.

I was listening to a Boston sports radio station over the internet today and I heard an ad for the New England Cannabis Convention. It’s possible that this is an internet-only ad, but lots of people listen on-line these days so I’m not sure that matters. That means these ads are hitting a broad audience, even if it is not over the public airwaves. Apparently, the station thought it was OK to run ads for this thing, since it is legal in the state. Why not?

Imagine a parent on the way home with their pre-teen kids, listening to the radio. This ad comes on and there’s not much the parent can do about it. Turn off the radio and the kids will take note. Leave it on and the kids have to hear about the exciting new world of weed dealing. Parents have been talking about drugs and alcohol with their kids for a couple of generations now, I would assume. By the early 70’s parents knew their kids would be exposed to street drugs, in addition to booze. Their natural ally was the fact drugs were illegal. Now, they are cautioning against something that is celebrated.

That’s always been the issue with drug legalization that gets ignored. Prohibition does not reduce use only by raising prices and reducing supply. When you ban something, a stigma is associated with it. After all, why ban something that is morally good?  When you legalize something, the stigma is lifted. Anti-smoking campaigns took decades to stigmatize smoking. Even so, they needed the law to step in and ban the practice from most public places. In some jurisdictions, smoking is allowed only in your own home.

The legalization of cannabis will come with all sorts of surprises like that advertisement I heard on the radio. Half a century of prohibition means all sorts of customs and institutions have grown up expecting drugs to be illegal. Pull the pin of legalization and all sorts of unexpected things get damaged in the explosion. The pro-legalization people only see the potential upside of legalization. The big important stuff, however, is always the stuff you don’t see.

What that ad for the convention makes quite clear is that the goal of the weed community to to attract more weed users. If you tried to have a tobacco convention, using Joe Camel to pitch your show, the cops would throw you in jail. The weed crowd is, so far, immune from these laws, so they are doing what any business does. They are advertising and trying to increase their customer base. That means we will have a lot more pot smoking and that means more of the problems that come from pot smoking.

Sensible people, who have argued for legalization, have also acknowledged that it would bring an increase in drug use. Forty years ago when Milton Friedman was making that case, we had three TV channels, analog phones tethered to the wall and AM/FM radios. Advertising, marketing and “socializing” a product was greatly limited relative to today. Imagine your kids getting text message from the local pot dispensary with the daily specials aimed at a more youthful audience.

I think the data from Colorado is pretty clear that legalizing cannabis will result in an explosion of cannabis use. The power of science and modern business techniques means many more people are going to be high in the workplace, school, at the mall, etc. Doing bong hits requires privacy while munching on a THC-laced candy can be done at your kid’s soccer game – by the coaches. I’m not imagining reefer madness, but I’m thinking we better get used to dealing with stoners in our every day life.

The Ik people are a tribe living in the mountains of northeastern Uganda near the border with Kenya. The only thing interesting about the Ik people is their near total lack of social structures. They have no government, not hierarchy, no religious customs or anything one would associate with human society. The members of Ik tribe spend all of their time foraging for food as their environment is extremely harsh.

Each member is able to get enough food and water to survive so there is no sharing of resources. Men will let their wife starve while they eat. Brothers will steal food from one another, even if it means death for the one. Children are usually expelled from the home at 3-5 years of age and left to forage on their own. Husbands and wives spend little time together as they are always hunting for food, which they never share with one another. In fact, marriage does not exist. They are just mating pairs and their time together is accidental.

The only reason to care about the Ik is from an anthropological perspective. It is largely assumed that early humans had social structures similar to chimps and bonobos. These social structures evolved as man evolved and therefore “society” has been a part of humanity since before there were modern humans. The Ik show that maybe it was not necessarily so. But, they could simply be a rare exception due to their unusual environment. Still, there are conditions in which humans will lose all traces of society.

I was thinking about the Ik on my run this evening. The temperature was in the low 40’s so the black males were out loitering. It is still too cold for the Hispanics to hang outside and the whites will remain indoors until it is wife beater weather. The ghetto is an unnatural environment that humans are distinctly unfit occupy, but we insist on jamming our poor into ghettos anyway. Like the Ik, people in a hostile environment will develop some strange habits.

The inside/outside life is what I was thinking about tonight. Black men look to get out of the house as soon as possible. They live off the women who dominate the house so the men have to go outside to be free to be themselves. There’s simply no place for them inside. Like male lions, they live on the edge of female life, quarreling with one another on the streets.

Hispanics seem to have evolved a different set of habits. I see underclass Hispanics outside using the cell phone and my hunch is that’s for privacy. The custom around here is for twenty people to pack into an apartment so there’s no privacy, but there is family life. As a result, they tend to remain indoors. Hispanic males will walk miles to get beer or food so you see guys walking home carrying beer on payday, but they do their drinking indoors.

Poor whites are an inside animal. Here’s where things are most obviously different. The males run the house and women are secondary. The males will do their drinking and drug taking in their own place with their friends and family. They will get high right in front of their kids. In the summer, I’ll ride through a white trash section of town and smell reefer coming from adults on their front steps, watching their kids play.

The age old argument is whether it is the environment that makes the people or is it the people who make the environment. It’s both, of course, which is why the black ghetto is different than the white ghetto, which is different from the Hispanic ghettos. At the same time, the organization of these ghettos shapes the people. Places like West Baltimore or Detroit eventually become distilled versions of the worst the people and environment can muster.

The Ik people did not end up in the mountains of Uganda by accident. Odds are they were driven their by hostile tribes. Relegated to the worst possible environment, the worst aspects of these people concentrated as the other qualities boiled off. Just as Amish have become more Amish over time, the Ik got more Ik-y the longer they were stuck in that terrible place. It seems to me that our ghetto system has the same results, concentrating qualities that should be diluted and boiling off qualities that should be cultivated.

Increasingly I find myself reading about how systems decay and collapse. It is a subject that appeals to me because I like finding patterns in things. As a kid, I enjoyed taking IQ and personality tests because it was fun to deconstruct the exam and figure out how the test maker was filtering the answers. Figuring out how a puzzle works or how a system is designed tells you something about the person who created the test or system. At least I think so. I could be completely nuts on that score.

There’s not a lot of literature on the subject of collapse. This is probably the best known book on the subject. This may be a better known book or at least as well known. I don’t know of a way to compare them in that regard. I run across more references to Tainter on this subject than Diamond, but maybe that’s just due to hanging with a bad crowd. You never know about these things. Sometimes it is not the world; it is you.

Anyway, the common element in social collapse is that the leaders cannot break free of their traditional mode of thinking in order to address a new challenge. The Late Bronze Age featured a series of cities collapsing, but being rebuilt as they were before the revolt, earthquake, invasion or famine. It is as if they learned nothing from the calamity. Eventually, the destruction was so thorough the city was abandoned or the society was swept away.

That’s what comes to mind reading this in the Spectator.

 The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.

In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. And, of course, it is what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris last week.

All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.

This may be comforting to some, but where is the evidence to suggest the ruling elites think anything of the sort? If they really think Islam is a violent antagonist to western society, the easiest step to address it, without admitting error, is to cut off immigration to Muslim countries. If after 9/11, American elites concluded Islam is the problem, why did they increase the number of immigrants form Muslim counties?

This bit from Tony Blair posted on NRO today seems to confirm that it is not just a pretty lie. Blair is the Prime Minister who ramped up immigration into Britain in order to increase diversity. He and his coevals remain convinced that diversity is the answer to every problem, even the problems that arise from diversity, like Muslim terrorism. The madness is so through that many have declared themselves experts on Islam, claiming the terrorists are simply bad Muslims.

The evidence is all pointing in one direction. The people in charge have no answer for the current threats. To take on the Islam problem means a) admitting prior error and b) abandoning the keystone of their ideology. To do either undermines their legitimacy as a ruling class. Even if they could plausibly claim we have reached peak diversity and therefore are shutting off immigration, the implications are obvious.

In the palace system of the Bronze Age, the rulers existed to control the palace economy. All goods flowed through the palace, which was pretty much a distribution center with ceremonial buildings. Even though a centralized system could not work beyond a certain scale, what else was there? A distributed system would not need a king so it was unthinkable. Instead they kept trying to make the palace system work until they failed utterly.

That’s what we seem to be seeing in the West. Cultural Marxism may be a dead end street, but what else is there? If the alternatives cannot prop up the pseudo-meritocracy and the attendant exam system, what’s in it for the people in charge? The answer is nothing so alternatives are unthinkable. Instead they keep racing around, trying to keep an increasing number of plates spinning.

At some point, it simply stops working.

Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, the usual suspects in America have been hooting and bellowing about “free speech.” Sadly, the usual suspects include many on the Right who should know better, but are overcome by the appeal of standing next to the hippies, shouting down the dissidents, in the name of free speech.

An example of that last point is this posted on National Review. It is the inspiration for this blog post. Some at National Review have an obsession with the current Pope. I suspect it due in part to the fact this Pope is a Marxist. But, many are Catholic so it is understandable that they would have a particular interest in the Pontiff. Naturally, when he came out with his position on speech offensive to religion, they jumped all over him. The claim being that the Pope wants to bring back blasphemy laws.

First off, I would hope the Pope and every other religious leader, for that matter, would want to bring back blasphemy laws. It is a weak and dying religion that invites the scorn and mockery of non-believers. Strong religions are tough and they don’t take any guff from heretics and infidels. If given the opportunity, they will stifle dissent and punish the critics. That’s what religions do. It is what they have to do or at least try to do. Otherwise, they stop being religions and instead become a list of suggestions supported by magic.

Of course, the Pope speaks for the Catholic Church. That’s his job as God’s intermediary. It is perfectly reasonable for the Pope to oppose mocking religion and to command his flock to avoid doing it as well. It makes even more sense for the Pope to convince non-Catholics to avoid criticizing his religion and his church. Getting non-Catholics to sign off on that would be very good for his church. That horse left the barn a long time ago, but you can’t blame the guy for trying. Islam is proving the value of that strategy.

As a general principle, it is probably bad form to mock religion. That’s not to say it should be illegal or even strongly discouraged. It just means it is one of the many things we can judge one another on, like our tastes in clothes and foods. A guy with a mullet and wife beater swilling cheap beer is judged differently than a guy in a suit having a salad. Similarly, someone who gratuitously mocks religion is judged differently than someone who is respectful of other faiths. Even in our degraded age, people appreciate politeness.

What’s dangerous about this latest burst of “free speech” fanaticism is it distracts from what is important and cedes ground to the Left by adopting their choice of language. Specifically, the formulation “free speech.” There’s no such thing as free speech. It is an abstract idea that conflates official censorship with social custom at the expense of the latter. The Left sees no limit to the state and no place for the organic culture that flows naturally from ethnicity, created over thousands of years of trial and error.

The fact that the libertarian weirdos are trying to out bellow the liberals on this issue once again proves that the former suffer from the same defects as the latter. I’ll grant that the increasingly deranged Karl Denninger is probably a bad example. He obviously knows nothing about religion or self restraint. Charlie Cooke is the house libertarian hipster at National Review and he is ululating about free speech as well. Again, the defect here is the the very idea of “free speech.”

Rights do not exist in the abstract any more than left handedness exists in the abstract. People have natural rights based solely on the fact they are a living human. One of those rights Americans believe humans posses is the right to speak freely and publicly on public issues, such as politics and policy. It is not an absolute right. Speech that involves incitement, false statements of fact, obscenity, child pornography, threats, and speech owned by others are all completely exempt from First Amendment protections.

In other words, Americans give the government very limited powers to regulate speech. The state must pass a high threshold in order to limit what I can say, where I can say it and to whom I can say it. But, and this is a big one, the state does have that authority. Every society gives the civil authorities this power, some more than others. That’s the place for debate. What can the state regulate and what proof must they muster in order to exercise that authority. The reason the Left hates this line of reasoning, the view of the Founders, is it means a natural limit on state power, something the Left rejects.

The worst part, is that these free speech mavens conflate state censorship with social custom. Every society has taboos. These are things we prohibit by custom. The reasons for prohibition may be sensible or magical, but every human society has them. It’s called culture. If you doubt this, start talking about your sexual interest in children at the next dinner party. It will be your last dinner party because decent people in our culture think sex with children is monstrous. It is one of our more serious taboos.

Sex with minors is illegal, but talking about your desire to have sex with a minor is not. That type of speech is permitted to a point, based on local obscenity laws. Custom, however, is not so permissive. It rarely is as permissive as the law. That’s why every human society has counted heavily on custom, the unwritten rules of society, to regulate most behavior. Being cast out from your own has always been one of the worst things that can happen to a human. The threat of it is a powerful corrective.

Conflating social custom and taboos with state power is the dream of ever liberal. It is why they keep demanding more laws. It is why our legal code has ballooned beyond the comprehension of the citizens. The Left imagine a state that more than dominates life. They imagine the state as the medium in which the citizen is defined. A system where your very humanity is defined by your relationship with the state and there’s no space between the public and private. Accepting this premise by treating the utterances of a religious leader as equal to those of a state actor gives the game away. All that is left is the time and place of surrender.

Making the made up concept of free speech a fetish obscures the real issue that is worthy of debate. The state should have power to regulate speech only at the fringes. The people, through their customs and traditional institutions should be free to sort these issues out as they see fit, without seeking permission from the state. Freedom of speech and freedom of association go hand and hand and always mean freedom from state coercion. When a group of citizens are free to not associate with another group of citizens because of the things being said, the unwritten rules are able to work and the state is not needed to referee.

That last part is important. You’ll note that the phrase being bandied about is “protect free speech.” This is only necessary when the citizens are not free to leave the room when they hear things they find objectionable. Instead of protecting freedom from the state, the state is protecting our rights from one another – at a price. Before long the state is no longer a referee but a game warden.