Satire is dead

Compassionate conservatism anyone?

Had it been a Chinese ferry full of teenage girls, the Derb would have been in sackcloth and ashes.

A confession from another conservative (me): I didn’t even read the story!

Steve, please feel free to chastise me.

News from the Dark Side:

checking through the rest of the site I came across the acronym VLWC, which a quick websearch indicates stands for Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

Ironic obviously.

Except..er…it’s not. As other quotes indicate the irony zooms over their heads (or under their asses). Indeed, one of them links to this book here:

http://tinyurl.com/c27vj

Which is described as (this is the fool, sorry, full title, btw)

‘The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President–and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.’

The book is described: ‘Democrats raised an unprecedented level of funds in their attempt to elect John Kerry to the White House, and not just through contributing to directly to Kerry’s campaign. Led by George Soros and his multimillion-dollar donations, money flowed to liberal groups like MoveOn that tried to push hard on President Bush’s record…..’

etc etc etc etc etc.

These people are all mad. No, but really.

The Derb: “At some abstract level, as a human being and a Christian, I do care about them.”

He’s practically Christ-like, isn’t it? If only Muslims could be more like the Derb!

Actually, Derbyshire is the most interesting corner writer – probably the only interesting corner writer. He regularly violates the taboo about supporting the ID movement — he thinks it is ludicrous. He also has expressed more doubts about Iraq than any of the other conservatives on that post, plus pointing out the hypocrisy of big government conservatism — he believes the conservative project of small government will always be in minority because people are generally parasites who love government handouts, whether these are handouts for the middle class, CEOs, or whatever. In a sense, he’s a throwback to the early National Review writers, with their manichean melancholy that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. Most conservatives writing for N.R. now have given up all those early conservative principles in order to simply, unequivocally support the G.O.P., no matter what it does.

Derbyshire is the last person who would call himself a compassionate conservative. That is the point.

Roger, your post #10 was apparently posted while I was writing, but you said it a lot better than I did. Nice. Derbyshire is a real traditionalist conservative, we need more of them.

I have no sympathy with his politics, and I don’t know what kind of a novelist he is, but Derbyshire’s book on Riemann (etc) is wonderful, and he apparently has another coming out on the history of algebra.

I suspect that the main difference between Derbyshire’s statement (which was one of two “data points” to illustrate a thesis) and the readers here is that Derbyshire did not lie.

O.K. I am willing to be corrected. Please stand up anyone who did anything — donated money, prayed for the lost, wrote a letter, looked up maritime standards — anything, in regard to the catastrophe.

I think his point is valid. People mostly are somewhat tribal and can’t completely get away from that. I’m not sure where to go from there. “We should attempt to get every institution controlled by our trime.” Not practical. “We should never compromise with other tribes about anything.” Likewise not practical. “We should forge strong bonds with some other tribes so we can exterminate the tribes that are our immediate issues. We can play the world like a game of Risk.” No, not practical.

And yet, people are tribal, some. Going after him for saying it is — well — tribal.

For however little it’s worth, I’ll chime in with others and say that, in his tactless way, Derbyshire is onto something. I think the sum total of MY response to the disaster was “My, that’s awful.”

It’s astonishing that NRO features both the obviously sharp Derbyshire and Jonah Goldberg, who has the IQ of a bag of wet oatmeal.

Tribalism is the root of most evil and the source of most good. The only principled alternative for those not eligible for beatification is a committed misanthropy. I have started a club, and have already blackballed Emerson and abb1.

Incidentally, a principled misanthropy does not forbid generosity and magnanimity, for certainly one does not deserve one’s blessings, but does demand their random and arbitrary application, for any discrimination would be tainted by one’s own prejudices, bad faith, and egocentricity. Flawed misanthropes like themselves. A principled misanthropy would in fact look much like a universal benevolence, without the bullshit.

If you would like to join my club, you can’t, for reasons that should be obvious.

Sure there’s some interpretation of what the Derb said that is largely accurate….we care less about those further from, and maybe different from, ourselves. That’s obvious, and so trivial, IMO, as to be beside the point he’s making. Haven’t you guys seen “conservative code” before?

The point was he gets to write, after hundreds of Egyptians died, “I don’t care about Egyptians”…yuk yuk. Oh snap! He did NOT just say that, did he!?

From posts on the NR front page:

“Now, no one condones the use of racial epithets. But […]”

Yes, no one condones THAT! (heheheh)…It’s always a “free speech” issue, or a principled argument about “affirmative action”, or a treatise on “immigration”.

Another Derb nugget, same page:

“Consider immigration, for example. If–I am hypothesizing, let’s suppose–if group differences could be shown to be sufficiently intractable that some human groups would be a net burden to a liberal, European-style nation, would it be good policy to permit large-scale immigration of those groups?

I don’t know that group differences have that character; but I don’t know that they don’t […] recent results suggest that our current consensus & national policy may be on the wrong side of this.

“Like you, I can’t imagine a scenario that would change my mind about equality of citizens under the law. In issues beyond our borders though (foreign policy, immigration, development aid) […]

IOW, when we’re talking about foreigners (and therefore, necessarily, immigrants here) who can say? They might just be inferior. Dunno….See the Derb isn’t saying he AGREES with that, mind you, he’s just a dispassionate servant of the truth.

Is Derbyshire, perhaps, alluding to the paragraph from Adam Smith’s “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”?

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, were suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would react upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity…
The most frivolous which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance … provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren.

I find this quote in Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”. Chris, are you the Chris Bertram whom Pinker acknowledges in the introduction?

How often do nicer people than Mr. Derbyshire make British and American casualties in Iraq the prime horror. In some cases I think they are just thinking what will have traction but that kind of proves the point. Would “Bush lied, people died” have the same resonance if some of the people who died were not American?

What’s shameful in Derbyshire’s comment is the step he refuses to take. Yes, it’s true, we’re a tribal species, and yes, it’s true, we are not going to care equally about all tragedies. But if we recognize intellectually and morality that people’s distance from us doesn’t make them less worthy, then we can see that we ought to set up institutions so that their needs don’t go dangling on our whims of the moment – institutions like the social services of the nation-state, and the international relief efforts of NGOs and the UN and so on.

As it is, he’s like someone saying “gosh, it’s a shame buildings burn down, what a depraved lot we are” without following it up with “but a good fire department might help a lot, let’s get one going.”

So what did you do when you after you heard about the Egyptian ferry sinking? Have a good cry?

“So what did you do when you after you heard about the Egyptian ferry sinking? Have a good cry?”

Reductive, contemptuous, and soul-deep ugly…all in one comment. Well done, if that’s what you were going for.

How many people die in a given day? At a rough guess, about a quarter million? Not only am I not going to care about most of them, not only can’t I care about most of them, if I could and did care about most of them, I’d go stark raving mad with grief over the terrifying loss of so much humanity, so many unique individuals going down into the darkness. Just to read of all of them would consume all my time, and I’m a speed reader.

Don’t sell ideals that it’s humanly impossible to follow, and which would destroy anybody who tried. Human morals have to be fit for human beings to live by.

Actually, john quiggan, I don’t think it means you are unlike John Derbyshire at all. His point is, I think, that religion forged a mode of caring for people outside the tribe, and that it is through that mode that such concern is expressed. Your idea is that our parochialism is diminishing over time. Now, you might think religion has nothing to do with that, but you are saying something is making our parochialism diminish over time, aren’t you? Or is that happening of itself?

I disagree with Derbyshire, politically and philosophically, but I don’t think it is fair to disparage him for opinions he doesn’t hold and edited versions of opinions he does.

“So what did you do when you after you heard about the Egyptian ferry sinking? Have a good cry?”

Reductive, contemptuous, and soul-deep ugly…all in one comment. Well done, if that’s what you were going for

In a word: Asshole

Great thread. Really good.

Don’t sell ideals that it’s humanly impossible to follow, and which would destroy anybody who tried. Human morals have to be fit for human beings to live by.

A valid position, but one that, I think, is actually open to argument. I’ve seen a lot of writing, for instance, by both left-wing Christians and hardcore utilitarians like Peter Singer that promote ideals of generosity that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for most human beings to follow: that we should literally think of suffering strangers on the other side of the world as being as personally important to us as our families, and give of ourselves not until we’ve hit some magic percentage, but until it almost destroys us. They acknowledge the impossibility or near-impossibility of actually living this way, but argue that it’s important to keep impossibly uncompromising ideals in mind so that we always try to do better and never, ever become satisfied that we’ve done enough.

Personally, I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Followed more widely, it may well increase the amount of generosity in an ungenerous world, but it verges on a kind of masochism. If everyone seriously tried to live this way, the world would grind to a halt, but on the other hand everyone doesn’t seriously try to live this way, so the impossible ideal might be useful as a way of nagging our insensitive minds into doing better.

Here’s the thing: At times I have a go at thinking this way, but become so distressed and self-critical that I become irritating for other people to be around. That makes me think that there’s something wrong with this point of view if taken really seriously, but it could just be my own failing.

Nat (should you return),
I made a donation to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent. Not being much of a pray-er, that was about the extent of the action I took, and while it’s admittedly a small thing, I believe that it’s somewhat more constructive than hurling trollish comments at people who actually want to discuss the disaster & Derbyshire’s reaction to it like adults.

Why are conservatives so reluctant to admit the possibility that people who embrace a different ideology are less likely to succumb to the irrationality of tribalism? For what it’s worth, *I* do not ascribe more value to the lives of citizens of one state over the lives of citizens of other states.

Derbyshire meant something like “I don’t care enough about Egyptians to have kept reading the article once I found out that’s what it was about.
Holsclaw is essentially correct about that, and the larger point, that Derbyshire is in effect exposing something that’s hardly unique to him and his ilk.
What concerns me greatly is this bit that shows up later in the thread:

“I agree with all that, Jonah. The thing that troubles me is, that while liberalism is a terrific aspiration, it may, like most of Christ’s injunctions, be asking too much of human nature. Which DOES exist. And in our understanding of which, we are just beginning to pass from the realm of tradition, opinion, and prejudice, into the realm of cold scientific fact.”

This specious trope, that “human nature” is some immutable quality shared by all, is more dangerous than any rank superstition.
Because it masks the changes that are occurring – by denying their possibility. And the “realm of cold hard scientific fact” is one great engine driving that change.
It is impossible to have something like “human nature” that never changes, without renouncing Darwinian evolution.
This is where the seeming polarities in the heated debate over creationism and evolution find common ground.
The insistent denial that our social constructs shape the race.

Rollo,

I suspect that the essence of your point is correct, but feel that you would be on firmer ground if you identified the Darwinian evolution that is inconsistent with immutable human nature as being memetic rather than genetic. The difference in timescale must be crucial. To invoke genetic evolution in this context is to ape the style of those who say that global warming is nothing to worry about because we are due for another ice age.

J Thomas,

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I was suggesting that what is loosely called “human nature” may be subject to a confusion of levels. At one level (the genetic) it may be regarded as fixed for practical purposes due to the long timescale. At another level (the cultural) it is more fluid. Confusion between the two levels can lead to people talking past each other. If by Darwinian evolution Rollo meant genetic evolution, then that is a point of disagreement between us, but, even if that was the case, then I believe that Rollo’s point can be resurrected at the memetic level. Regardless of whether you accept the fine detail of the more extravagant claims for memes, the unarguable progress of material science through a memetic process is highly persuasive that human nature as expressed through socialisation within an evolving tradition of polictical philosophy can be evolutionary.

When we talk about “one level (the genetic)” we mean something that I think is closer to “our understanding at this time of what’s contained in the information packaging we call genes”.
I have no doubt that’s a profound thing, but it would be more than a little arrogant to leap from that to an assumption of complete knowledge.
An arrogance that’s refreshingly absent from both Alan Peakall’s and J Thomas’ erudite comments.
Still, we do know that what’s in that packaging is susceptible to micro-adjustment.
And those micro-adjustments radiate down the time line.
Macro-adjustments like extinction happen, virtually overnight sometimes, and their consequences reverberate as well, but silently.
The genetic alteration of extinction is pretty much a complete thing, though a case could be made for an eventual ability to retrieve and resurrect of some kind. Something like a forced evolution from Przewalski’s horse forward to the mustang, should mustangs disappear.

.

On the one hand geneticists point to specific areas that produce very specific behaviors and conditions, on the other there seems to be an assertion that we’re all carrying much the same gene-load.
This kind of discussion often founders around concepts of race and intelligence, with the politically correct model being there is no genetic blueprint for either.
It seems logically obvious just the same that one of the things that makes real genocide so heinous is its removal forever from the commonality of human things at least some traits that were unique to the victims. I’ll stress the immediate genetic affect of extinction to make my point.
Removing things is quicker than building them, always.
Social constructs that memetically alter the human presence will alter the human code as well and – it’s unscientific of me to say this, but I can because I’m not a scientist – in ways we don’t yet understand, in addition to the ways we do.
The millions of years required for the Galapagian finch to become what it is now is like that proverbial journey of a thousand miles – it needs the beginning of the first step – and every one after that is a kind of first step too.
The world may be more or less the same place without the dodo in it, but without the dodo and the polar bear and the elephant and the mountain gorilla and myriad smaller less charismatic species it won’t.
We live in the moment that change will be decided. However epochal genetic evolution is generally it isn’t always only about that long slow process. Something like that happens with us, to us, as well.