Of course—such people don't belong in any civilized space. Sometimes I wonder where and how they even learned to think such behavior was okay. Social media, maybe.
(Substack is the only thing resembling social media that I've had in maybe 15 years; this place feels like almost an ideal version of what the Internet could have been.)
" . . . what the internet could have been." I feel the same about Substack. But the Internet turned out no different than the magazine rack at your supermarket - 53 covers featuring Taylor Swift.
I actually think Taylor Swift isn’t that bad (she does indie rock songs with bands I like), but other than that, yeah—agreed. This is what people choose to make.
"in fact, negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. In order to avoid misery we have to admit that certain actions and choices are actually in and of themselves undesirable— single parenthood, obesity, substance abuse, crime, and so on—and not simply in need of normalization."
We used to call those the Ten Commandments . . . .
Yes, Henderson rightly articulates that self-disciple and a moral code are a scaffolding that helps build a happy, productive, and successful life. People continue to suffer as long as the cultural standard-bearers are stunted adolescents who promote a rudderless libertine existence as the ideal. An ideal they, in most cases, never participate in, *or* when they do, they have the money to offset and disarm the truly chaotic consequences of their selfishness. Can’t everybody just do what they want, all the time? Let them eat cake, indeed.
These people have evidently never heard of second-order desires, or desires about your own desires: "I want to get drunk, but actually, I don't want to want to get drunk," et cetera. Their approach traps people at the basest level and actively inhibits the achievement of higher desires, which can only be fulfilled via self-discipline and the sacrifice of the lesser for the greater.
I'd rewrite it to "Temptation really is tempting: but here are 10 steps to not ending up in a gutter." Sin is more or less easy (the devil makes sure of that); goodness is hard.
The so-called Success Sequence ("Finish high school. Get a full-time job once you finish school. Get married before you have children.") isn't in the Ten Commandments. More broadly religious faith is not about a path to worldly goods. Let's leave that heresy to Joel Osteen and his ilk.
I agree with the quote with one quibble -- the lumping of obesity in with single parenthood, drugs, and crime is not a fair way to categorize it. Obesity is not just a matter of moral choice. It's a complex, hormonally driven problem (leptin/grehlin, etc.) Many women struggle with their weight after multiple pregnancies. Again, not a moral defect, but a problem that takes a lot of trial and error, and individually tailored solutions to solve.
People do tend to gain pounds as they age, except maybe in the final phase of life when chronic ill health can lead to weight loss. But the current explosion of obesity isn't just about pregnancies and aging.
Jesus came and taught that each person has immeasurable value. When this is forgotten, people begin to drift. The rich can still manage to keep things relative normal because they can maintain a culture of positivity that simply isn’t being tested by material want. In other words, as long as there is enough to go around, things are okay. When things get bad enough, there is no material reinforcement to compensate for loss of faith.
I did not grow up well-off. In some ways, the poor of today were better off than my family was when I was a kid, at least in material terms. The surplus of a materialist society does trickle down. But there was still Jesus present in mind to show our lives had worth. I have seen the same thing so many times in people who were poor or on the edge of it. If your family is centered around Jesus, the material aspects don’t matter as much, because your life has worth in your eyes. When you are poor and don’t have Jesus, you don’t have that same outlook.
The loss of faith has so many ramifications for a culture, but this might be the most meaningful.
Let's not forget that the cultural anarchy the American working poor (or non-working poor) now find themselves living in was first championed and normalized in popular culture through popular media owned and controlled by the Ruling Class Elites. If the poor still had strong, in tact families they would be a force to be reckoned with (as they were throughout history). This focus on radical individualism instead of family loyalty and class solidarity robbed the poor of the political power they once wielded in America. It's the same in the UK. That's why alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity and criminality are constantly promoted to the working (and non working) poor. Union jobs, intact families and Sunday Church attendance are the antidotes to these social ills.
But it’s a funny kind of radical individualism. It doesn’t promote genuine non conformity. Look, you “individually “ express yourself in a manner unacceptable to the “enlightened “ ruling class and you will get pilloried.And the concept of individual responsibility is quite absent. Radical individualism is quite alright as long as it expresses itself in a manner that is antithetical to traditional norms. Underlying all this , is a belief that a benevolent state should have a net with which to catch when you fall and help perpetuate your bad choices.Samuel Francis came up with the wonderful term, Anarcho- Tyranny. Sure individualism runs rampant on personal relationships but underneath is state structure supervising this . So in family relations, you don’t get married, you have numerous out of wedlock children from different men and the state steps in to manage things for you. The state will determine support levels, visitation, who lives where etc.The state will provide subsidized care of various sorts. Who needs a family? It’s obviously not a recipe for a good life and promotes mental instability and anti social behavior but the general attitude is there’s nothing that can be done.
Birth rates have fallen precipitously among the poor and working class too. People are no longer having umpteen kids and living off welfare as in the days of the stereotypical welfare queen. Meanwhile one thing the poor are good at is helping one another, within kin and friendship networks. In fact that's a reason they have such trouble accumulating savings. The moment anyone in these demographics gets any extra money it's expected they will share it with less fortunate relatives and friends.
That research about the incest hits pretty close to home.
When I was in undergrad at an elite West Coast school, I was debating people in the dorm about various points of morality (being one of the only Christians there, and most certainly one of the only conservative Christians). I remember the topic of incest was brought up--I point blank asked them if they thought incest was unethical. They said they were really uncomfortable with the idea, but that honestly, they had no way to say that it was immoral in any way. Just had no vocabulary to argue against it.
A few years later, I was having dinner with my parents at a ritzy neighborhood in Bethesda, MD. We overheard a little girl asking her dad why it was wrong to be a cannibal. His exact response: "Hmm I don't know sweetie, I don't think we as a species can really answer that question..."
Over and over again I am astounded at how the upper echelon has absolutely no moral compass. Not even so much that they are amoral, it's that they have a primitive understanding of moral issues
There are three ways in which one can sin: (1) against oneself, (2) against others, (3) against God. (Obviously, all sin is against God in one sense, but something like, say, blasphemy or despair is specifically against God.) Modern morality understands only (2), against others, as being wrong; thus any sexual practice, from incest to sado-masochism, is only wrong if one partner doesn't consent, and cannibalism is equally hard to argue against, since one of the participating individuals is dead. Equally, suicide (a sin against oneself) is no longer condemned, except insofar as it hurts the suicide's family and friends. (Hence, too, the growing approval of euthanasia.) And it's very, very hard to argue against people who think these things are OK, because their basic axioms, their first principles, exclude (1) and (3); and one can only argue with someone when there's some common ground. to start from (Newman is very good on that.) So I wouldn't say that "the upper echelon has absolutely no moral compass", but that their moral compass is stuck in one direction.
Yup—it's always about the axioms. And axioms are intuitive and pre-rational (as in, epistemologically prior to and more foundational than reason), so people can't be argued into them. We don't think to axioms, we think from them.
Axioms only change as a result of a "conversion" experience, understood in either religious or simply philosophical terms. And people tend to only have such experiences under crisis or stress, or when it becomes clear that their current axioms will no longer enable them to pursue a fruitful existence.
In fact I would expand the scope of the observation to note that the main reason we have such a bitter polarization in our society currently on almost all levels (cultural, political, moral, etc) is that the disagreements are about first principles, and not second principles -- and that no society can last with an extended, persistent disagreement about first principles. It simply doesn't work, because there is no way to resolve them -- they are not "debatable", they are mental wallpaper, and so all of the cultural and political institutions just increasingly fail because they cannot manage disputes about first principles -- because none can.
The most benign projection from that is that at some not too distant future a new consensus on first principles will emerge, and the polarization will die down, and the level and kind of disputes will be "normal" because the disputes will be mostly about second principles (ie, not about the nature of what the goal is, but rather what the best way to reach the mutually agreed goal is), with perhaps a persistently outvoted and dwindling group of first principles dissenters. This is, in fact, the case currently among the "professional managerial class" itself -- there are dissenters from the PMC consensus on first principles, but largely consensus reigns in that group on first principles. The issue is that this doesn't translate to the culture as a whole, where there is wide disagreement about first principles, leading to the kind of deep, persistent polarization we see across the board.
The internet, and especially the rise of social media, has really hamstrung the ability of the "elite class" to make its consensus first principles "stick" throughout the population to a greater degree by controlling the narrative the way that it did in, say, 1980. Attempts are being made to try to claw back that power (ranging from the rise of "anti-disinformation" NGOs and QUANGOs to the new spectre of jury-rigged AI taking over information provision on the internet), but it remains to be seen how successful these will be, short of a Chinese firewall type of approach, which is hard to implement in a theoretically "open" society. So, stay tuned, I guess.
I suppose that this is is also why federalism would be the best hope for preserving the union over the long run, since that would involve the strong devolution of authority to smaller communities that have greater agreement about first principles (while also giving people the chance to self-select and vote with their feet).
In theory, yes, but in practice the spectre of the civil war, and what led to it, kind of makes the logical answer of greater federalism a bete-noire for around half of the population -- the idea being that "well, if you take that route, you just end up with a neo-Confederacy, didn't we fight a bloody war because we realized you can't actually have fundamental disagreements like that under one national roof, one side has to prevail in the end for everyone?".
One can argue that slavery was a unique issue (and it was), but the shadow cast by the civil war over the legitimacy of two different first principles systems being allowed to coexist on the basis of federalist ideas is a long one in the eyes of roughly half the population (or, if not half, some non-trivial subset) -- it's deeply suspected, to say the least (even though, of course, both "sides" play the federalism game in practice ... the difference in perspective is about seeing this as a long-term solution to the existence of difference and disagreement).
Interesting, I never thought of it quite that way. My take was that 100 years of progressivism and the resultant growth of Leviathan was an organic process, and of course now people with power in the "4th branch" are never going to voluntarily give up that power. Your take is more fundamental.
Either way or both, the conclusion is the same - we are highly unlikely to try the pressure relief valve of increased federalism / a return to the intended vision of Constitutional order and states vs. federal govt. So the pressure will continue to build until … who knows.
Also, given that the wokies do not believe in the principle of live and let live, I doubt that they would ever be content with such an arrangement. From their standpoint, their obsession du jour (whatever it is) may seem just as serious as slavery, seeing as these new puritans have no sense of perspective and crank the volume to 11 on every damn thing. "Transgender rights is the civil rights struggle of our time," as our dotard-in-chief declares—and so on.
I agree. Make a case for federalism, and you’ll get some knucklehead who will claim that you’re arguing for the toleration of slavery. I’ve had that happen to me more than once. To me, it’s a variant on the “But, Hitler…” fallacy.
Yes, though it can also happen when someone realises that two of the axioms they've taken for granted contradict each other. Mind you, that is an epistemological crisis in itself, so you're still correct.
Once you have dismissed both religion and what Adam Smith called "moral sentiments," then yes, the pain of others is the only source of morality left. And that explains so much about our culture, from sexuality to criminal justice to cancel culture.
And to say that points 1 or 3 of your list are important makes people angry. I just did this recently, dared to say what I really believe. It is going to break my family ties to one extent or another. Even nice liberals can't bear real faith that includes any kinds of limits.
And that is not even getting into friends. My Benedict Option involves making new friends, because the people who I thought were my friends just aren't going to come along without a conversion experience. I learned it a long time ago to an extent, but I was waiting things out. Instead things got worse. The only advantage is people bragging about their deviancy shows me where they stand.
I am working on praying for people, and at the same time mostly moving on, all without excessively hardening my heart. It's hard to do it all at once.
Actually, what they have is *opposite to* a primitive understanding of moral issues. Primitive cultures typically learn to feel horror before certain acts. Incest for instance. But look at these postmoderns. If they can’t articulate a “scientific” reason not to commit incest or cannibalism, they will feel it must be mere “superstition” that makes us condemn them. And thus, given their “progressivism”, they’ll eventually start to argue that incest should be championed, “liberated” from the bigotry of the past.
So the truth is that these people are significantly *worse than* primitives. I’d say they are also more dangerous than primitives.
Nonetheless, incest has been and is practiced along all class and economic lines. Mayella Ewing's father; the Snapes family in Faulkner's work; the grandfather up here in SD who raped all of his grandchildren, knocked up one, and got away with probation "because he didn't have a criminal record." It's not just the elites who do it. I learned that one very early.
My point isn’t that incest doesn’t happen, or that it’s characteristic of this or that class. My point is rather this: Among global cultures past and present, only a very specific demographic (postmodern westerners) has somehow “discovered” that incest might not be ethically wrong. Given that many anthropologists concluded in the 20th c. that the incest taboo is one of the few fundamentals separating humans from animals, this is surely noteworthy.
Egyptian pharaohs married their sisters and even their daughters. The incest taboo is not quite universal. (I am certainly not saying that was OK-- Tutankamun's mummy shows evidence of genetic disease, and the guy died at just 18)
In Europe there were a number of uncle-niece marriages, greenlit by the Church and as late as the 19th century. I find that almost as creepy as sibling marriage.
Henry VIII is supposed to have considered seeking a dispensation to marry his illegitimate son to his daughter Mary (a half sibling match) in order to pass the crown to the boy though he chose instead to secede from the Church and marry again in
I think that Haidt's work on this exposes how deficient the "harm" principle is when confronted with evils like incest. In "The Righteous Mind" he shows how those with that as essentially their only moral foundation can answer questions about incest, cannibalism, bestiality, necropolia according to this principle, but they're usually very uncomfortable with their answers, because they know things like having sex with a dead chicken are just plain wrong and sick, but that their moral foundation prevents them from saying so.
That's college students, for the most part--those who usually participate in psychological and sociological studies, because researchers can find them pretty easily. When talking to blue collar workers or people in India, however, the results were quite different.
Of course, that was a few years back. I suspect non-college educated in this country have shifted (,
to their detriment), and Lord knows we're trying to shift those bigoted third-worlders. But I suspect that the Indians aren't quite as corrupted as we are in the west.
The "harm" principles covers about 95% of our interpersonal relationships. One can come up with really outré situations like incest but that's quite rare. Very few people are lusting after their siblings. In most matters that public law can and should concern itself with the harm principle is an entirely useful basis.
It's useful, but it rarely stands alone. Haidt identifies a total of six concerns, of which "Care/harm" is but one:
*Care/harm
*Libery/Oppression
*Fairness/Cheating
*Loyalty/Betrayal
*Authority/Subversion
*Sanctity/Degredation
Liberal Westerners tend to focus mainly on Care/Harm, and a little bit on Liberty/Opression, and some on Fairness/Cheating--and pretty much ignore the other three.
Libertarians tend to focus on Liberty/Opression and a little bit on Fairness/Cheating, but not much on the other four.
Conservatives--and by and large, non-westerners--tend to focus more on all six.
I love that you brought up moral foundations theory. If I remember right, even though liberals and conservatives share fairness/cheating, their concepts of fairness are quite different. If you’ve ever wondered why the west seems so crazy it’s probably because we’re missing half of our moral senses.
Interesting how you bring up the west's insanity. On my backlog is Sass' "Madness and Modernism" that brings this into focus...and I'm currently reading Izetbegovic's (the first President of Bosnia) "Islam Between East and West" that brings up some of these same ideas.
Hiroyuki, that reminds me of a funny incident I witnessed here in the small town we moved to a few years ago. We have a spectacular salmon run up the river that runs through the centre of town (you can see the town and the river in the new Stephen King "It" movies), which attracts busloads of tourists every year. One day I was crossing the bridge over the river and heard a child ask her (painfully woke white) mother to explain the difference between the male and female salmon. The answer was obvious--I mean you can see the difference from ten feet away--but the mom insisted that there was no "biological difference" between male and female salmon! She believed it, so it's true!
It's interesting how AI mirrors the aspirations of the ruling class -- eating foie gras is unethical because of animal cruelty but (human) cannibalism is merely "complicated."
I'm reminded of the later rambling, largely plotless novels of Robert Heinlein, in which a large extended family traveled the universe, often having sex with each other, because once they removed the genetic risks of incest, they found no reason to be against family members having sex with each other. Our upper echelons, both sci-fi loving libertarians and counterculture progressives, took cues from the suggestion that morality made sense only until science superseded it.
In the mid-1980s, I had a similar experience about the morality of cannibalism. The subject came up in a small discussion group for grad students in medieval studies. While we were talking about witch-hunting, I cited CS Lewis's argument that if witches actually had been kidnapping and eating infants, it would have been right to execute them. Out of the half-dozen or so people present, only the serious Lutheran woman and I thought cannibalism was wrong. I never felt quite comfortable in the group afterward. . . .
A dear friend of mine tells a funny story about her granddaughter. My friend was explaining the Last Supper to her grandkids when they were little….apparently, she did too good a job, because when the bread was passed the little girl said “No thank you, Grandma, I don’t eat people.”
Yes, isn't Henderson a gem? He taught me the "luxury beliefs" concept a year or so ago and I wrote about it in an *American Mind* article re: climate extremism and its impact. Glad to see he's published a memoir so more people can learn from him.
Kudos to Henderson. His coinage “luxury beliefs” hits our virtue signalling elites right where it hurts. Which is probably why they are mostly ignoring his book.
Our problem is a breakdown in 1) family and 2) education. A devastating one-two punch, sure to sink any thriving republic.
The truth is “The kids aren’t alright” and haven’t been for some time, and now those kids are adults. The Yale Christakis show trials years back helped reveal that among the kids that *especially* aren’t alright are those being coddled in our woke universities. Everything since has only driven the point home. The better the university, the worse the university. At least in some metrics.
Check out the piece below on Yale student culture and how class differences play out there. I don’t agree with some of the writer’s points, but it’s instructive. Our elites learn early to signal elite status by LARPing victimhood, some Yale rich kids pretending to be broke, hungry.
What this mindset is slowly bringing about is what we see: Governance by cry-bullying.
“For many kids, having the kind of childhood I had takes a toll in ways that a college degree will never fix.” Right there with you, Rob. Pretty much nothing can "fix" it, one simply muddles through life as best one can. Mashed the Order Now button on Troubled with the swiftness.
I grew up pretty poor economically but had loving parents and an amazing extended family and it made all the difference. They weren’t perfect, of course, but having grandparents and aunts, uncles, and cousins to fall back on for support paid tremendous dividends in my life.
We talk a lot about missing fathers in today’s culture, but I think our young boys are also suffering from missing uncles and male cousins who, along with their dads, set an early example and of how men should act. Nowadays boys grow up with single moms, surrounded by grandma and aunts, and maybe a grandpa somewhere in the picture if they’re lucky. No wonder all our boys are suffering.
Yes, the problem isn't just fathers-- after all, in times past some kids grew up without fathers because those fathers died too young. But there were other men in the community who filled the roll, relatives and friends. In too many of today's poor communities, the men are either in jail or else they're sunk in addictions, mental illness and homelessness. The only "functrional" males are the gang guys.
" It takes a village to raise a child" was grating when it came from Hillary Clinton since she was really saying "it takes a government" (and that's not entirely wrong either: anarchy is not conducive to child rearing), but it really is true that once kids are beyond the toddler phase they do need a larger community to thrive and to guide them.
I totally agree with this. There have been several people I knew who grew up with absent or semi absent weak fathers and because of strong other male role models turned out well. It is that male authority figure that makes all the difference.
Yes this is exactly one the biggest issues. Christians unfortunately see the symptoms first and go all out to fix that. Meanwhile the problem lies much deeper.
The elites don't preach what they practice. But given the consumerist nature of their beliefs they always reserve the right to slumming if they choose. Their internalization of Seinfeld's "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" as a trump card always on offer makes them doubly hypocritical. They would NEVER do that (whatever 'that' may be) but at the same time insist on having the freedom to do it should their minds ever change. You may not like the looks of something at a China Buffet, but you're never prohibited from trying it on your next trip up. And it's the prohibition of the prohibition that's key.
Charles Murray made this specific point in his book "Coming Apart" a number of years ago. He was ignored then and I suspect Henderson will be ignored now.
Talking about "policy fixes" is futile because the problem is not that this or that went the wrong way. It is because an entire cultural world was destroyed over the last few decades. With that world intact, even when there was the occasional family instability problem there was a community there to take up the slack. My grandmother was born around 1912 or so in a small town in Iowa. When she was a young girl her father, due to mental illness, abandoned the family of 7 or 8 children. They were desperately poor but their church and community helped them through. Eventually, through the help of their church ( a branch of Dunker Brethren I believe) and its associated institutions, every single one of those children achieved at least college degrees and beyond. I think my grandmother's younger brothers may have gotten help through GI bills after WW2 ( I think one survived his ship getting sunk at Pearl Harbor.) If her situation happened in the last few decades who knows were the family would be. The world she grew up in is gone and will take generations to rebuild if at all.
Your white friend who said "nothing" about what Whites could do that would help the Black community was mostly right, but there are some things we can do--one of the biggest is probably doing our part to not support a corrupt entertainment industry that glamorizes evil and denigrated the good: music, movies, and television help reinforce the utter lies that are "luxury beliefs". And don't support corrupt politicians who support policies that destroy the family--or, for that matter, policies that destroy the only "escape valve" that Vance and Henderson had: the US Military.
The "luxury beliefs" that let some think stuff like "fat positivity" or "alternate lifestyles" are equally good at character formation should be pushed back at, hard.
Oh, and not sending Black soldiers into Syria to get killed for "allies" like Israel might help a little, too. Might help White folks, too, who often come back from such adventures changed--and not for the better.
No, White America can't change Black America's culture, but at a bare minimum we can get our own house in order and stop subsidizing evil that affects all of us.
You're right to point to the entertainment industry. It isn't the "elite" in general who influence poor and working class people--- it's largely the "entertainers"-- rock and rap stars, actors, athletes. Maybe the occasional unclassified creepazoid like Andrew Tate. Poor people have no contact with self-inflated academics, they rarely if ever read books or opinion journals, and they likely have not even heard of the main business titans.
Brilliant writing. Henderson is wise beyond his years. Having grown up in Prince George's County MD and worked in Washington DC for forty years, I experienced to a small degree the desolation of the black family. I don't know if family formation can be repaired. The decline of the black family is multi-generational now. More than perhaps any other peoples, blacks are hyper-defensive about their culture even the elements, like family formation, that are in demonstrative decline. Blacks certainly don't want whites to tell them how to behave.
I don't know if the black family or the lower white family(plenty of them here in West Virginia) can be repaired. Chaotic social situations are difficult to mend unless an individual wants to mend them. I do have three suggestions, probably futile. First, pay a couple $20,000 a year for just being married. That may not be "fair" to the unmarried but so be it. To pay for this marriage subsidy, just take it out of the defense budget. Second, pay a $50,000 bonus for military enlistments for young men 25 and younger. The enlistment would last four years. Perhaps the discipline the military demands might mold better people. Third, bring back the old Conservation Corps for teenagers.
You know what, I’d support that if I thought it had a chance of working but I don’t think it would. People would take the subsidy and just get it on , on the side.The problem really is profound cultural rot and I don’t see marriage subsidies helping. On bonuses for the military, what if it turns into no more than a subsidy to create a force fighting for a non gendered non binary future.Ditto any conservation corps. Absent a cultural revolution , decline and more decline and the barbarians are the solution and the inevitable.
My step-son benefited from the Americorps. It was fully his choice to avoid boxing himself in to a dead-end future. I rail against government agencies but up close the Americorps had a lot going for it.
What you describe here with the chaos kids grow up in is nothing new. Living in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, it was just around all the time. Even the rare kid who had an intact family, like this girl my sister was friends with... She got pregnant at 12, and her (married) parents were so okay with it that they all conspired to keep the name of the 21-year-old father off the birth certificate because he was "such a nice guy". Kids getting passed around between relatives, and two-year-olds in diapers running around at 10pm or later because when the idiot parents are out til 4am, 10 is still early! Boyfriends and baby mamas and the total victim mentality. Henderson's story is "exotic" in that it features a lesbian mother, but the general chaos is nothing particularly different that what I grew up around.
I think there was an evolution... pre 1960s, there was a general condemnation of the ghetto lifestyle, then there was the "let's help these people lift themselves up through urban renewal" or what have you, and when that didn't work the 1980s, "Live and Let Live" to the 90s "There are parts of ghetto culture that are vibrant and should be celebrated" to the "We have no right to tell anyone that this is wrong" to "If you can't say that this is as right as anything else, and should be evangelized to the rest of the world, you're a hater and a bigot."
The relativism of the elite and celebration of the “other “ has been incredibly destructive. But I want to cite a genuinely comical example of this. At one of Denis Hoppers marriages , he apparently had a Jewish wedding where the glasses were crushed. Guest Candace Bergen positively gushed - it’s so vibrant and unWASP y. That amused me so much as kid that I still haven’t forgotten it.
I'm glad I'm in my 60s with no kids. I don't think I want to be around once this becomes the norm everywhere. Democratic norms cannot possibly survive this level of disintegration. Like Rome, we may keep the trappings of the old republic, but under authoritarian rule, to bring some semblance of order out of anarchy, which is how the Chinese Communist Party justifies its regime, conveniently forgetting and wanting to squash the glaring counter-example just across the Taiwan Straits. The American experiment, as envisioned by the founders will be as long gone and forgotten as the concept of the intact family. Welcome to the new Dark Age.
Well, it's the reason we've got to build and support the counterculture, because who knew even when I was a kid that living a "normal" life was something radical! :)
So many people look at it all and get discouraged, and it's not that they're not right - but especially for the young, there's a huge opportunity and adventure to be found in resisting, and part of where, say, the "establishment" church or Republican Party has gone astray has been being content to manage the decline instead of inspiring and fostering that way of looking at things.
Does Henderson touch on the effects of the Great Society incentivizing the culture of poverty by making single-mom 'households' possible? I'm a white working class trailer park boy myself, grew up with my parents' conservatism, abandoned it for progressivism in my very early twenties, and by the time I left college I was already moving away from the progressives on economic grounds: I ran Thomas Sowell's 'Black Rednecks & White Liberals" and it destroyed a lot of the narrative I'd already begun embracing. I'm one of those rare ducks who stumbled into libertarianism on social justice grounds, believing that government intervention frequently hurts the working class more than it helps it -- by creating barriers to employment, starting a business, etc. (I'm more of a Kirk/Burke-esque conservative with a strong libertarian mixer these days, though.)
Yeah: like with how heavy regulations help the large corporations, since not only do such entities have the resources to cope with the burden, they also have their lobbyists in the halls of power, ensuring that the regulations are written to their advantage. The little guys can't really compete against that.
Absolutely. Regulatory capture. Big Dairy goes to DC and says "Oh, yeah, milk quality is an issue, we need a law that says you need this and this and this equipment" -- turns out Big Dairy already has that stuff, but the Browns and the Parnells and the Schofields in their little CSA don't. Bye-bye organic CSA milk offerings.
Or just adding on more and more laws. Something bad happens we need a law against that. A good tell that a society is collapsing is by the increasing number of laws we have to regulate behavior.
This reminds me of something that Chesterton (I think) wrote. Paraphrasing: we should choose to follow the "big laws" (the Ten Commandments) or we will end up having to follow a thousand little laws. As a teacher, I always explain this principle to my students using the bathroom as an example. If they follow the "big law" of speaking truthfully, I will allow them to leave class to use the bathroom. If I find out that they are just leaving to wander the halls, check their phones, etc, then I will limit them to all the little laws: one bathroom visit per semester, they must carry a bathroom hall pass, they only have a certain amount of time to return before getting a detention, etc, etc. It's actually easier to live under the "big laws"!
This is great. I used a similar practice during my years of supervising mostly young men. Sometimes an unpopular guy would break a minor rule, and his sanctimonious "brothers" would come to me with torches and pitchforks.(popular guys would be covered for and could get away with murder)
"Oh, now you guys want to go by THE RULES. We can definitely do that, you won't like the results since technically, 2 of you are out of uniform, one of you came in late this morning.......etc".
It goes beyond "possible." Our social welfare and benefits systems, from Medicaid to SNAP to the EITC, all strongly disincentivize marriage.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about this in the 60s and was pilloried for it. Now, liberals don't want to fix it because that would imply single motherhood is bad and marriage is good for kids*, while conservatives don't want to fix it because it would be expensive.
*liberals agree that marriage is good; they wouldn't have fought so hard for gay marriage if they didn't; the luxury belief part is where they claim marriage doesn't benefit kids, and is only good as a form of self actualization and expression of love.
I was wondering if any of the commenters would say anything that was relevant to the underlying problem and as far as I can see, only you and Stephen (comment above) have done so. LBJ's Great Society (as badly named as anything in our history) and its aftermath are primarily (I believe solely but I won't quibble) for the sad state of primarily black children and whites as well. In 1970, out-of-wedlock births for blacks were 24% and for whites 3%, by 1990, blacks were 69% and whites18%,, What happened in between - The Great Society. I believe black out-of- wedlock births are now over 70%. Moynihan, as you correctly stated, focused on the damaging effect of black out-of-wedlock births on blacks and was excoriated for it. Even then, the sole cause of black failure was RACISM in the eyes of the left and frankly, the GOP as well. We weren't any smarter 50 years ago then we are now. Thomas Sowell , the brightest black this country has ever known, on the other hand praised Moynihan's analysis. As always the federal government was and is s the principle cause of a problem. The idea that printing money and handing it out to
"needy" people - which unbelievably now includes illegal immigrants - is the most destructive domestic policy this country has ever undertaken.
I don't see how Medicaid (after the ACA changes) harms marriage. Some of our public benefits however do since people who might otherwise wed would lose their benefits if they married. The obvious fix is to double the income eligibility limits for married couples. We could even find ways to incentivize marriage in these situations. Meanwhile it's a brute reality that most jobs do not pay enough to live on, let alone raise kids and that will not change absent some Black Death level of population die off to create a massive labor shortage to force wages up where they need to be for family formation to really work, and we're going to need assistance for a large minority of the population.
If you're on disability, getting married reduces your SSI payments by 25%.
If you receive Medicaid, the asset limits and/or combined income are often the issue. If one spouse qualifies for Medicaid but they marry someone with assets that push them over the limit, or the combined income pushes them over the income limit, they will lose it. Primary residence counts towards the asset limit. The details vary a lot by state.
Here is a working paper showing that the ACA expansion of Medicaid reduced marriage rates:
The program design is frankly absurd. A true nationalized health care system would not have this problem. A system that just followed individuals regardless of marital status wouldn't either. But our Rube Goldberg means tested household based system creates this mess.
If you're on disability, getting married reduces your SSI payments by 25%.
If you receive Medicaid, the asset limits and/or combined income are often the issue. If one spouse qualifies for Medicaid but they marry someone with assets that push them over the limit, or the combined income pushes them over the income limit, they will lose it. Primary residence counts towards the asset limit. The details vary a lot by state.
Here is a working paper showing that the ACA expansion of Medicaid reduced marriage rates:
The program design is frankly absurd. A true nationalized health care system would not have this problem. A system that just followed individuals regardless of marital status wouldn't either. But our Rube Goldberg means tested household based system creates this mess.
Except in the 9 or 10 states that haven't implemented the ACA Medicaid reforms, there are no longer asset tests for Medicaid. And the old rules with their asset tests (which still exist here in Florida) create an even strong disincentive for marriage. I've read stories of people who had to divorce so a seriously ill spouse could obtain coverage.
Above I noted that the "marriage penalty" with other programs and suggested a very easy fix.
The fix is easy but expensive, and that's the problem. That was my point about why neither liberals nor conservatives want to fix it.
I'm not an expert and may be wrong about this, but I thought the asset limits still applied to those who qualify for Medicaid based on disability, even if their state expanded Medicaid under the ACA?
As far as I know there are no asset limits now under the ACA, though with a possible exception for senior citizens seeking funding for nursing homes. And even in non-ACA states like FL a house is left untouched if a spouse is still living in it (but will otherwise be taken by the state for sale)
I've been on ACA Medicaid three times, twice in MD and then in DE. Only my (lack of) income mattered.
I actually complimented your thoughts in my comment to Wafa1024 below. You two are the only people I've noticed that understand the problem. You two (maybe there are a few others)are the only people on this substack who think "horses" when they hear hoofbeats, not zebras. The rest including Rod hear zebras. The entire federal apparatus in particular its regulatory apparatus (and that of states as well) are designed to protect large corporations and businesses and to discourage competition and entrepreneurship.
I think people tend to view everything in terms of their specialties and particular interests, whereas some of us are generalists. As an example, I remember after Ferguson happened, listening to an urbanist podcast and listening to them analyze and even attribute the riots to the deteriorating cityscape. That's not in itself a bad thing -- specialist evaluations can shed light on angles other people wouldn't see -- but if the specialist angle is seen as The Angle, then it leads us into error.
You're much kinder than I am. The fact the people tend to view everything in terms of their specialties is a reflection of their lack of knowledge outside their specialties or to put it in a less pleasant way, they don't know very much and/or they refuse to accept the true causes of the problem for a variety of reasons, none of them good. Your Ferguson riots reference is a perfect example. And contrary to you, I believe this is a very bad thing. Instead of shedding additional light on the causes of a problem, they obscure its true causes. That's been our history for the past 50 years or so.
Unlike most of the commenters here, you have a broader view of the cause of America's problems and, since I am only going to be on this substack for a few days, I thought you might be interested in a perfect example of why the federal government is incapable of solving problems but perfect at creating them. I'm attaching a cite to an article from the Bloomberg website (one of the truly worst websites extant) that describes how a program that is intended to stimulate conversion of empty business buildings, a rapidly growing problem, into residential and mixed use usage- certainly a worthwhile direction. As the article points out, the regulations built into the program have essentially destroyed its utility. I thought you might be interested.
Oh, preaching to the choir! Thanks for the article. Surprised no one on Strong Towns has looked at it yet. This sort of thing is how I moved into libertarian thinking from the progressives: I was reading about housing, energy, and food and became noticing a pattern wherein government attempts to "help" made things worse, or created new, worse problems. Suburban sprawl was created by government housing policies, for instance, not the free market, and the obesity crisis and prevalence of metabolic syndrome owes much to Nixon's subsidizing HFCS. There's a series Reason has on youtube called "Great Intentions, Bad Results" that examines cases like these. I fear we're getting a little off-topic, though.
I know I'm preaching to the choir but the choir on this substack is not enough for a Minyan (10 men required in the Jewish religion for a religious observance) even if Christians could make up the difference so I'm having a bit of fun. . I just found it pleasant in my last few days on the substack to find a libertarian, someone who understands that the government creates problems but never solves them, only makes them worse. As to getting off topic, so what. I'm dropping out because the majority of Rod's topics have no interest for me and for those that do, his secular comments are superficial and unknowledgeable.
You are welcomed to stay. I am not a Christian as are many others here are not. I used to be very strict libertarian but I have drifted away from the party line. In the field of American politics/economics , the men that I respect most (avoiding the word 'Heroes') are Milton Friedman, Robert Taft Jr., and Ron Paul. I stay more for the comments that anything else. I find the Christian perspective interesting as something that I am not much exposed to. If it the religion gets too thick in the comments, I skip them. About 1 in 3 of Rod's articles are of interest to me. YMMV.
Funny, I have known plenty of black people who have said the same thing. Also, most of them were not rude jerks like you.
That bad, huh? Glad I missed it.
I am happy to host people who disagree, and disagree strongly, with me ... but not people who come on to gratuitously insult me or my family members.
Of course—such people don't belong in any civilized space. Sometimes I wonder where and how they even learned to think such behavior was okay. Social media, maybe.
(Substack is the only thing resembling social media that I've had in maybe 15 years; this place feels like almost an ideal version of what the Internet could have been.)
" . . . what the internet could have been." I feel the same about Substack. But the Internet turned out no different than the magazine rack at your supermarket - 53 covers featuring Taylor Swift.
I actually think Taylor Swift isn’t that bad (she does indie rock songs with bands I like), but other than that, yeah—agreed. This is what people choose to make.
I invite you to unsubscribe.
"in fact, negative social judgments often serve as guardrails to deter detrimental decisions that lead to unhappiness. In order to avoid misery we have to admit that certain actions and choices are actually in and of themselves undesirable— single parenthood, obesity, substance abuse, crime, and so on—and not simply in need of normalization."
We used to call those the Ten Commandments . . . .
Yes, Henderson rightly articulates that self-disciple and a moral code are a scaffolding that helps build a happy, productive, and successful life. People continue to suffer as long as the cultural standard-bearers are stunted adolescents who promote a rudderless libertine existence as the ideal. An ideal they, in most cases, never participate in, *or* when they do, they have the money to offset and disarm the truly chaotic consequences of their selfishness. Can’t everybody just do what they want, all the time? Let them eat cake, indeed.
These people have evidently never heard of second-order desires, or desires about your own desires: "I want to get drunk, but actually, I don't want to want to get drunk," et cetera. Their approach traps people at the basest level and actively inhibits the achievement of higher desires, which can only be fulfilled via self-discipline and the sacrifice of the lesser for the greater.
The Ten Commandments need better marketing. They ought to be called "Here's how to live a happy life."
"10 easy steps for not ending up dead in a gutter."
I'd rewrite it to "Temptation really is tempting: but here are 10 steps to not ending up in a gutter." Sin is more or less easy (the devil makes sure of that); goodness is hard.
Yes, but is it really a good marketing slogan if it doesn't include a feel-good fib? . . . Okay, fine: 10 *simple* steps.
You have a point...
The Tao of Life. C.S. Lewis used the term in The Abolition of Man for a reason.
The so-called Success Sequence ("Finish high school. Get a full-time job once you finish school. Get married before you have children.") isn't in the Ten Commandments. More broadly religious faith is not about a path to worldly goods. Let's leave that heresy to Joel Osteen and his ilk.
I agree with the quote with one quibble -- the lumping of obesity in with single parenthood, drugs, and crime is not a fair way to categorize it. Obesity is not just a matter of moral choice. It's a complex, hormonally driven problem (leptin/grehlin, etc.) Many women struggle with their weight after multiple pregnancies. Again, not a moral defect, but a problem that takes a lot of trial and error, and individually tailored solutions to solve.
People do tend to gain pounds as they age, except maybe in the final phase of life when chronic ill health can lead to weight loss. But the current explosion of obesity isn't just about pregnancies and aging.
Jesus came and taught that each person has immeasurable value. When this is forgotten, people begin to drift. The rich can still manage to keep things relative normal because they can maintain a culture of positivity that simply isn’t being tested by material want. In other words, as long as there is enough to go around, things are okay. When things get bad enough, there is no material reinforcement to compensate for loss of faith.
I did not grow up well-off. In some ways, the poor of today were better off than my family was when I was a kid, at least in material terms. The surplus of a materialist society does trickle down. But there was still Jesus present in mind to show our lives had worth. I have seen the same thing so many times in people who were poor or on the edge of it. If your family is centered around Jesus, the material aspects don’t matter as much, because your life has worth in your eyes. When you are poor and don’t have Jesus, you don’t have that same outlook.
The loss of faith has so many ramifications for a culture, but this might be the most meaningful.
Let's not forget that the cultural anarchy the American working poor (or non-working poor) now find themselves living in was first championed and normalized in popular culture through popular media owned and controlled by the Ruling Class Elites. If the poor still had strong, in tact families they would be a force to be reckoned with (as they were throughout history). This focus on radical individualism instead of family loyalty and class solidarity robbed the poor of the political power they once wielded in America. It's the same in the UK. That's why alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity and criminality are constantly promoted to the working (and non working) poor. Union jobs, intact families and Sunday Church attendance are the antidotes to these social ills.
But it’s a funny kind of radical individualism. It doesn’t promote genuine non conformity. Look, you “individually “ express yourself in a manner unacceptable to the “enlightened “ ruling class and you will get pilloried.And the concept of individual responsibility is quite absent. Radical individualism is quite alright as long as it expresses itself in a manner that is antithetical to traditional norms. Underlying all this , is a belief that a benevolent state should have a net with which to catch when you fall and help perpetuate your bad choices.Samuel Francis came up with the wonderful term, Anarcho- Tyranny. Sure individualism runs rampant on personal relationships but underneath is state structure supervising this . So in family relations, you don’t get married, you have numerous out of wedlock children from different men and the state steps in to manage things for you. The state will determine support levels, visitation, who lives where etc.The state will provide subsidized care of various sorts. Who needs a family? It’s obviously not a recipe for a good life and promotes mental instability and anti social behavior but the general attitude is there’s nothing that can be done.
Birth rates have fallen precipitously among the poor and working class too. People are no longer having umpteen kids and living off welfare as in the days of the stereotypical welfare queen. Meanwhile one thing the poor are good at is helping one another, within kin and friendship networks. In fact that's a reason they have such trouble accumulating savings. The moment anyone in these demographics gets any extra money it's expected they will share it with less fortunate relatives and friends.
It's a capitalist plot.
That research about the incest hits pretty close to home.
When I was in undergrad at an elite West Coast school, I was debating people in the dorm about various points of morality (being one of the only Christians there, and most certainly one of the only conservative Christians). I remember the topic of incest was brought up--I point blank asked them if they thought incest was unethical. They said they were really uncomfortable with the idea, but that honestly, they had no way to say that it was immoral in any way. Just had no vocabulary to argue against it.
A few years later, I was having dinner with my parents at a ritzy neighborhood in Bethesda, MD. We overheard a little girl asking her dad why it was wrong to be a cannibal. His exact response: "Hmm I don't know sweetie, I don't think we as a species can really answer that question..."
Over and over again I am astounded at how the upper echelon has absolutely no moral compass. Not even so much that they are amoral, it's that they have a primitive understanding of moral issues
There are three ways in which one can sin: (1) against oneself, (2) against others, (3) against God. (Obviously, all sin is against God in one sense, but something like, say, blasphemy or despair is specifically against God.) Modern morality understands only (2), against others, as being wrong; thus any sexual practice, from incest to sado-masochism, is only wrong if one partner doesn't consent, and cannibalism is equally hard to argue against, since one of the participating individuals is dead. Equally, suicide (a sin against oneself) is no longer condemned, except insofar as it hurts the suicide's family and friends. (Hence, too, the growing approval of euthanasia.) And it's very, very hard to argue against people who think these things are OK, because their basic axioms, their first principles, exclude (1) and (3); and one can only argue with someone when there's some common ground. to start from (Newman is very good on that.) So I wouldn't say that "the upper echelon has absolutely no moral compass", but that their moral compass is stuck in one direction.
Yup—it's always about the axioms. And axioms are intuitive and pre-rational (as in, epistemologically prior to and more foundational than reason), so people can't be argued into them. We don't think to axioms, we think from them.
Axioms only change as a result of a "conversion" experience, understood in either religious or simply philosophical terms. And people tend to only have such experiences under crisis or stress, or when it becomes clear that their current axioms will no longer enable them to pursue a fruitful existence.
Yes, precisely.
In fact I would expand the scope of the observation to note that the main reason we have such a bitter polarization in our society currently on almost all levels (cultural, political, moral, etc) is that the disagreements are about first principles, and not second principles -- and that no society can last with an extended, persistent disagreement about first principles. It simply doesn't work, because there is no way to resolve them -- they are not "debatable", they are mental wallpaper, and so all of the cultural and political institutions just increasingly fail because they cannot manage disputes about first principles -- because none can.
The most benign projection from that is that at some not too distant future a new consensus on first principles will emerge, and the polarization will die down, and the level and kind of disputes will be "normal" because the disputes will be mostly about second principles (ie, not about the nature of what the goal is, but rather what the best way to reach the mutually agreed goal is), with perhaps a persistently outvoted and dwindling group of first principles dissenters. This is, in fact, the case currently among the "professional managerial class" itself -- there are dissenters from the PMC consensus on first principles, but largely consensus reigns in that group on first principles. The issue is that this doesn't translate to the culture as a whole, where there is wide disagreement about first principles, leading to the kind of deep, persistent polarization we see across the board.
The internet, and especially the rise of social media, has really hamstrung the ability of the "elite class" to make its consensus first principles "stick" throughout the population to a greater degree by controlling the narrative the way that it did in, say, 1980. Attempts are being made to try to claw back that power (ranging from the rise of "anti-disinformation" NGOs and QUANGOs to the new spectre of jury-rigged AI taking over information provision on the internet), but it remains to be seen how successful these will be, short of a Chinese firewall type of approach, which is hard to implement in a theoretically "open" society. So, stay tuned, I guess.
I suppose that this is is also why federalism would be the best hope for preserving the union over the long run, since that would involve the strong devolution of authority to smaller communities that have greater agreement about first principles (while also giving people the chance to self-select and vote with their feet).
In theory, yes, but in practice the spectre of the civil war, and what led to it, kind of makes the logical answer of greater federalism a bete-noire for around half of the population -- the idea being that "well, if you take that route, you just end up with a neo-Confederacy, didn't we fight a bloody war because we realized you can't actually have fundamental disagreements like that under one national roof, one side has to prevail in the end for everyone?".
One can argue that slavery was a unique issue (and it was), but the shadow cast by the civil war over the legitimacy of two different first principles systems being allowed to coexist on the basis of federalist ideas is a long one in the eyes of roughly half the population (or, if not half, some non-trivial subset) -- it's deeply suspected, to say the least (even though, of course, both "sides" play the federalism game in practice ... the difference in perspective is about seeing this as a long-term solution to the existence of difference and disagreement).
Interesting, I never thought of it quite that way. My take was that 100 years of progressivism and the resultant growth of Leviathan was an organic process, and of course now people with power in the "4th branch" are never going to voluntarily give up that power. Your take is more fundamental.
Either way or both, the conclusion is the same - we are highly unlikely to try the pressure relief valve of increased federalism / a return to the intended vision of Constitutional order and states vs. federal govt. So the pressure will continue to build until … who knows.
Also, given that the wokies do not believe in the principle of live and let live, I doubt that they would ever be content with such an arrangement. From their standpoint, their obsession du jour (whatever it is) may seem just as serious as slavery, seeing as these new puritans have no sense of perspective and crank the volume to 11 on every damn thing. "Transgender rights is the civil rights struggle of our time," as our dotard-in-chief declares—and so on.
I agree. Make a case for federalism, and you’ll get some knucklehead who will claim that you’re arguing for the toleration of slavery. I’ve had that happen to me more than once. To me, it’s a variant on the “But, Hitler…” fallacy.
Yes, though it can also happen when someone realises that two of the axioms they've taken for granted contradict each other. Mind you, that is an epistemological crisis in itself, so you're still correct.
Once you have dismissed both religion and what Adam Smith called "moral sentiments," then yes, the pain of others is the only source of morality left. And that explains so much about our culture, from sexuality to criminal justice to cancel culture.
And to say that points 1 or 3 of your list are important makes people angry. I just did this recently, dared to say what I really believe. It is going to break my family ties to one extent or another. Even nice liberals can't bear real faith that includes any kinds of limits.
And that is not even getting into friends. My Benedict Option involves making new friends, because the people who I thought were my friends just aren't going to come along without a conversion experience. I learned it a long time ago to an extent, but I was waiting things out. Instead things got worse. The only advantage is people bragging about their deviancy shows me where they stand.
I am working on praying for people, and at the same time mostly moving on, all without excessively hardening my heart. It's hard to do it all at once.
Actually, what they have is *opposite to* a primitive understanding of moral issues. Primitive cultures typically learn to feel horror before certain acts. Incest for instance. But look at these postmoderns. If they can’t articulate a “scientific” reason not to commit incest or cannibalism, they will feel it must be mere “superstition” that makes us condemn them. And thus, given their “progressivism”, they’ll eventually start to argue that incest should be championed, “liberated” from the bigotry of the past.
So the truth is that these people are significantly *worse than* primitives. I’d say they are also more dangerous than primitives.
Nonetheless, incest has been and is practiced along all class and economic lines. Mayella Ewing's father; the Snapes family in Faulkner's work; the grandfather up here in SD who raped all of his grandchildren, knocked up one, and got away with probation "because he didn't have a criminal record." It's not just the elites who do it. I learned that one very early.
My point isn’t that incest doesn’t happen, or that it’s characteristic of this or that class. My point is rather this: Among global cultures past and present, only a very specific demographic (postmodern westerners) has somehow “discovered” that incest might not be ethically wrong. Given that many anthropologists concluded in the 20th c. that the incest taboo is one of the few fundamentals separating humans from animals, this is surely noteworthy.
Egyptian pharaohs married their sisters and even their daughters. The incest taboo is not quite universal. (I am certainly not saying that was OK-- Tutankamun's mummy shows evidence of genetic disease, and the guy died at just 18)
The taboo is universal. Egyptian pharaohs were considered divine and so could ignore the taboo. This is a case of exception proving the rule.
In Europe there were a number of uncle-niece marriages, greenlit by the Church and as late as the 19th century. I find that almost as creepy as sibling marriage.
Henry VIII is supposed to have considered seeking a dispensation to marry his illegitimate son to his daughter Mary (a half sibling match) in order to pass the crown to the boy though he chose instead to secede from the Church and marry again in
hopes of getting a legitimate son
Though Henry was not any sort of moral exemplar.
The Haspbergs intermarried to the point of the extinction of some lines.
I think that Haidt's work on this exposes how deficient the "harm" principle is when confronted with evils like incest. In "The Righteous Mind" he shows how those with that as essentially their only moral foundation can answer questions about incest, cannibalism, bestiality, necropolia according to this principle, but they're usually very uncomfortable with their answers, because they know things like having sex with a dead chicken are just plain wrong and sick, but that their moral foundation prevents them from saying so.
That's college students, for the most part--those who usually participate in psychological and sociological studies, because researchers can find them pretty easily. When talking to blue collar workers or people in India, however, the results were quite different.
Of course, that was a few years back. I suspect non-college educated in this country have shifted (,
to their detriment), and Lord knows we're trying to shift those bigoted third-worlders. But I suspect that the Indians aren't quite as corrupted as we are in the west.
The new white man's burden: they cannot rest content so long as a single soul in the world still groans under the yoke of moral sanity.
Brilliant quip.
The "harm" principles covers about 95% of our interpersonal relationships. One can come up with really outré situations like incest but that's quite rare. Very few people are lusting after their siblings. In most matters that public law can and should concern itself with the harm principle is an entirely useful basis.
It's useful, but it rarely stands alone. Haidt identifies a total of six concerns, of which "Care/harm" is but one:
*Care/harm
*Libery/Oppression
*Fairness/Cheating
*Loyalty/Betrayal
*Authority/Subversion
*Sanctity/Degredation
Liberal Westerners tend to focus mainly on Care/Harm, and a little bit on Liberty/Opression, and some on Fairness/Cheating--and pretty much ignore the other three.
Libertarians tend to focus on Liberty/Opression and a little bit on Fairness/Cheating, but not much on the other four.
Conservatives--and by and large, non-westerners--tend to focus more on all six.
To clarify I was talking about laws not moral codes which are, and should be, more capacious and based on multiple principles.
I love that you brought up moral foundations theory. If I remember right, even though liberals and conservatives share fairness/cheating, their concepts of fairness are quite different. If you’ve ever wondered why the west seems so crazy it’s probably because we’re missing half of our moral senses.
Interesting how you bring up the west's insanity. On my backlog is Sass' "Madness and Modernism" that brings this into focus...and I'm currently reading Izetbegovic's (the first President of Bosnia) "Islam Between East and West" that brings up some of these same ideas.
Hiroyuki, that reminds me of a funny incident I witnessed here in the small town we moved to a few years ago. We have a spectacular salmon run up the river that runs through the centre of town (you can see the town and the river in the new Stephen King "It" movies), which attracts busloads of tourists every year. One day I was crossing the bridge over the river and heard a child ask her (painfully woke white) mother to explain the difference between the male and female salmon. The answer was obvious--I mean you can see the difference from ten feet away--but the mom insisted that there was no "biological difference" between male and female salmon! She believed it, so it's true!
It's interesting how AI mirrors the aspirations of the ruling class -- eating foie gras is unethical because of animal cruelty but (human) cannibalism is merely "complicated."
I'm reminded of the later rambling, largely plotless novels of Robert Heinlein, in which a large extended family traveled the universe, often having sex with each other, because once they removed the genetic risks of incest, they found no reason to be against family members having sex with each other. Our upper echelons, both sci-fi loving libertarians and counterculture progressives, took cues from the suggestion that morality made sense only until science superseded it.
I loved RAH's juveniles, ate them up as a kid and still love them. "Have Spacesuit-Will Travel" and "Starship Troopers" we're two of his best, IMO.
The later stuff, like SIASL or "Time Enough for Love"? Not do much.
Robert Heinlein got to be a impossibility weird teenager the older he got.
In the mid-1980s, I had a similar experience about the morality of cannibalism. The subject came up in a small discussion group for grad students in medieval studies. While we were talking about witch-hunting, I cited CS Lewis's argument that if witches actually had been kidnapping and eating infants, it would have been right to execute them. Out of the half-dozen or so people present, only the serious Lutheran woman and I thought cannibalism was wrong. I never felt quite comfortable in the group afterward. . . .
Perhaps you were thinking of Hannibal’s farewell to Clarice: “I’m having an old friend for dinner”.😬
I sometimes like to spook the heathens by informing them that I belong to a cannibal cult—which is to say, I believe in the Eucharist.
Yes, and Jesus certainly got the full attention of his audience when He spoke the words recorded in St. John 6: 53 - 56!
A lot of them sure were spooked (John 6:66—oh, I just noticed that the verse about them turning away is an interesting number).
Not to read too much into that, of course. Our divisions into chapters and verses came centuries later, and can be quite arbitrary in places.
A dear friend of mine tells a funny story about her granddaughter. My friend was explaining the Last Supper to her grandkids when they were little….apparently, she did too good a job, because when the bread was passed the little girl said “No thank you, Grandma, I don’t eat people.”
Yes, isn't Henderson a gem? He taught me the "luxury beliefs" concept a year or so ago and I wrote about it in an *American Mind* article re: climate extremism and its impact. Glad to see he's published a memoir so more people can learn from him.
"Luxury Beliefs" is a wonderful term.
Luxury beliefs for the champagne socialists.
Ethically-sourced, non-GMO, vegan, cruelty-free, gluten-free, small-batch, artisanal champagne.
Did I forget anything?
You forgot fermented by lesbian people of color.
I knew I was missing something.
Kudos to Henderson. His coinage “luxury beliefs” hits our virtue signalling elites right where it hurts. Which is probably why they are mostly ignoring his book.
Our problem is a breakdown in 1) family and 2) education. A devastating one-two punch, sure to sink any thriving republic.
The truth is “The kids aren’t alright” and haven’t been for some time, and now those kids are adults. The Yale Christakis show trials years back helped reveal that among the kids that *especially* aren’t alright are those being coddled in our woke universities. Everything since has only driven the point home. The better the university, the worse the university. At least in some metrics.
Check out the piece below on Yale student culture and how class differences play out there. I don’t agree with some of the writer’s points, but it’s instructive. Our elites learn early to signal elite status by LARPing victimhood, some Yale rich kids pretending to be broke, hungry.
What this mindset is slowly bringing about is what we see: Governance by cry-bullying.
https://letter.palladiummag.com/p/the-real-problem-at-yale-is-not-free?
That is an excellent piece, thank you for recommend it.
I am convinced that some of the dirty "homesless" I see are really college kids "going to The People". [A term from Russian history]
“For many kids, having the kind of childhood I had takes a toll in ways that a college degree will never fix.” Right there with you, Rob. Pretty much nothing can "fix" it, one simply muddles through life as best one can. Mashed the Order Now button on Troubled with the swiftness.
I grew up pretty poor economically but had loving parents and an amazing extended family and it made all the difference. They weren’t perfect, of course, but having grandparents and aunts, uncles, and cousins to fall back on for support paid tremendous dividends in my life.
We talk a lot about missing fathers in today’s culture, but I think our young boys are also suffering from missing uncles and male cousins who, along with their dads, set an early example and of how men should act. Nowadays boys grow up with single moms, surrounded by grandma and aunts, and maybe a grandpa somewhere in the picture if they’re lucky. No wonder all our boys are suffering.
Yes, the problem isn't just fathers-- after all, in times past some kids grew up without fathers because those fathers died too young. But there were other men in the community who filled the roll, relatives and friends. In too many of today's poor communities, the men are either in jail or else they're sunk in addictions, mental illness and homelessness. The only "functrional" males are the gang guys.
I’m grateful every day for the men in or church family who’ve stepped up in 1,000 small ways they don’t even realize to show our boy how to be a man.
" It takes a village to raise a child" was grating when it came from Hillary Clinton since she was really saying "it takes a government" (and that's not entirely wrong either: anarchy is not conducive to child rearing), but it really is true that once kids are beyond the toddler phase they do need a larger community to thrive and to guide them.
I totally agree with this. There have been several people I knew who grew up with absent or semi absent weak fathers and because of strong other male role models turned out well. It is that male authority figure that makes all the difference.
The "Grandpa" is literally in the picture as he has long left this life and may not be a biological relative in any case.
Great review Rod! When we as Christians are taught about caring for the poor at Church… I wonder how many of us have this context in our minds?
Yes this is exactly one the biggest issues. Christians unfortunately see the symptoms first and go all out to fix that. Meanwhile the problem lies much deeper.
Very often it's the symptoms that kill you. One must ameliorate dangerous symptoms before one can work on the underlying causes.
The elites don't preach what they practice. But given the consumerist nature of their beliefs they always reserve the right to slumming if they choose. Their internalization of Seinfeld's "Not that there's anything wrong with that!" as a trump card always on offer makes them doubly hypocritical. They would NEVER do that (whatever 'that' may be) but at the same time insist on having the freedom to do it should their minds ever change. You may not like the looks of something at a China Buffet, but you're never prohibited from trying it on your next trip up. And it's the prohibition of the prohibition that's key.
Charles Murray made this specific point in his book "Coming Apart" a number of years ago. He was ignored then and I suspect Henderson will be ignored now.
Murray was writing for people who aren't part of the problem.
Talking about "policy fixes" is futile because the problem is not that this or that went the wrong way. It is because an entire cultural world was destroyed over the last few decades. With that world intact, even when there was the occasional family instability problem there was a community there to take up the slack. My grandmother was born around 1912 or so in a small town in Iowa. When she was a young girl her father, due to mental illness, abandoned the family of 7 or 8 children. They were desperately poor but their church and community helped them through. Eventually, through the help of their church ( a branch of Dunker Brethren I believe) and its associated institutions, every single one of those children achieved at least college degrees and beyond. I think my grandmother's younger brothers may have gotten help through GI bills after WW2 ( I think one survived his ship getting sunk at Pearl Harbor.) If her situation happened in the last few decades who knows were the family would be. The world she grew up in is gone and will take generations to rebuild if at all.
Your white friend who said "nothing" about what Whites could do that would help the Black community was mostly right, but there are some things we can do--one of the biggest is probably doing our part to not support a corrupt entertainment industry that glamorizes evil and denigrated the good: music, movies, and television help reinforce the utter lies that are "luxury beliefs". And don't support corrupt politicians who support policies that destroy the family--or, for that matter, policies that destroy the only "escape valve" that Vance and Henderson had: the US Military.
The "luxury beliefs" that let some think stuff like "fat positivity" or "alternate lifestyles" are equally good at character formation should be pushed back at, hard.
Oh, and not sending Black soldiers into Syria to get killed for "allies" like Israel might help a little, too. Might help White folks, too, who often come back from such adventures changed--and not for the better.
No, White America can't change Black America's culture, but at a bare minimum we can get our own house in order and stop subsidizing evil that affects all of us.
Add to this: Stop making excuses for criminal behavior, and hold everyone to high standards.
You're right to point to the entertainment industry. It isn't the "elite" in general who influence poor and working class people--- it's largely the "entertainers"-- rock and rap stars, actors, athletes. Maybe the occasional unclassified creepazoid like Andrew Tate. Poor people have no contact with self-inflated academics, they rarely if ever read books or opinion journals, and they likely have not even heard of the main business titans.
"corrupt entertainment industry" This.
Brilliant writing. Henderson is wise beyond his years. Having grown up in Prince George's County MD and worked in Washington DC for forty years, I experienced to a small degree the desolation of the black family. I don't know if family formation can be repaired. The decline of the black family is multi-generational now. More than perhaps any other peoples, blacks are hyper-defensive about their culture even the elements, like family formation, that are in demonstrative decline. Blacks certainly don't want whites to tell them how to behave.
I don't know if the black family or the lower white family(plenty of them here in West Virginia) can be repaired. Chaotic social situations are difficult to mend unless an individual wants to mend them. I do have three suggestions, probably futile. First, pay a couple $20,000 a year for just being married. That may not be "fair" to the unmarried but so be it. To pay for this marriage subsidy, just take it out of the defense budget. Second, pay a $50,000 bonus for military enlistments for young men 25 and younger. The enlistment would last four years. Perhaps the discipline the military demands might mold better people. Third, bring back the old Conservation Corps for teenagers.
You know what, I’d support that if I thought it had a chance of working but I don’t think it would. People would take the subsidy and just get it on , on the side.The problem really is profound cultural rot and I don’t see marriage subsidies helping. On bonuses for the military, what if it turns into no more than a subsidy to create a force fighting for a non gendered non binary future.Ditto any conservation corps. Absent a cultural revolution , decline and more decline and the barbarians are the solution and the inevitable.
My step-son benefited from the Americorps. It was fully his choice to avoid boxing himself in to a dead-end future. I rail against government agencies but up close the Americorps had a lot going for it.
February is The Longest Month of The Year! Every Year . . .
Too many people would just blow the money. There woukd be an EXPLOSION of pick-up truck sales in the Dakotas.
What you describe here with the chaos kids grow up in is nothing new. Living in the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, it was just around all the time. Even the rare kid who had an intact family, like this girl my sister was friends with... She got pregnant at 12, and her (married) parents were so okay with it that they all conspired to keep the name of the 21-year-old father off the birth certificate because he was "such a nice guy". Kids getting passed around between relatives, and two-year-olds in diapers running around at 10pm or later because when the idiot parents are out til 4am, 10 is still early! Boyfriends and baby mamas and the total victim mentality. Henderson's story is "exotic" in that it features a lesbian mother, but the general chaos is nothing particularly different that what I grew up around.
I think it is the hugely increased percentage of the population that lives like this, and the elite psuedo-embrace of the lifestyle, that is new.
I think there was an evolution... pre 1960s, there was a general condemnation of the ghetto lifestyle, then there was the "let's help these people lift themselves up through urban renewal" or what have you, and when that didn't work the 1980s, "Live and Let Live" to the 90s "There are parts of ghetto culture that are vibrant and should be celebrated" to the "We have no right to tell anyone that this is wrong" to "If you can't say that this is as right as anything else, and should be evangelized to the rest of the world, you're a hater and a bigot."
I can just see today a woke white calling the 1968 Supremes' song "Love Child" RACIST.
Always second best. Different from the rest.
It’s amazing how “ out of date “ that song is. Not a criticism, merely an observation.
No criticism taken. But the song is an anachronism. Nonetheless, it is a very good song sung by one of the finest pop groups of the 60s.
Sheet, the woke would have a conniption listening to The Temptations' Papa Was A Rolling Stone.
I'm not sure that "evolution" is the right word for this sequence. Haha.
Devolution, to be sure! *L*
The wokies could find their own Bunyan and write a book called *The Pervert's Progress*.
This is the most concise summary of the changing cultural mantras of the last 60 years that I've ever seen.
The relativism of the elite and celebration of the “other “ has been incredibly destructive. But I want to cite a genuinely comical example of this. At one of Denis Hoppers marriages , he apparently had a Jewish wedding where the glasses were crushed. Guest Candace Bergen positively gushed - it’s so vibrant and unWASP y. That amused me so much as kid that I still haven’t forgotten it.
Candace Bergen, a brain surgeon there. Dennis Hopper, saw him and his groupies at a concert, a genuine zonked out of his mind Wild Man.
If you’re in a masochistic mood watch The Last Movie!
I was prime 60's. Some of it was necessary and some of it was harmless. Much of it was destructive of values that should have been retained.
I'm glad I'm in my 60s with no kids. I don't think I want to be around once this becomes the norm everywhere. Democratic norms cannot possibly survive this level of disintegration. Like Rome, we may keep the trappings of the old republic, but under authoritarian rule, to bring some semblance of order out of anarchy, which is how the Chinese Communist Party justifies its regime, conveniently forgetting and wanting to squash the glaring counter-example just across the Taiwan Straits. The American experiment, as envisioned by the founders will be as long gone and forgotten as the concept of the intact family. Welcome to the new Dark Age.
Well, it's the reason we've got to build and support the counterculture, because who knew even when I was a kid that living a "normal" life was something radical! :)
So many people look at it all and get discouraged, and it's not that they're not right - but especially for the young, there's a huge opportunity and adventure to be found in resisting, and part of where, say, the "establishment" church or Republican Party has gone astray has been being content to manage the decline instead of inspiring and fostering that way of looking at things.
Vote for Us! We are better at managing the decline!!!
Exhibit A: Mitch McConnell
Does Henderson touch on the effects of the Great Society incentivizing the culture of poverty by making single-mom 'households' possible? I'm a white working class trailer park boy myself, grew up with my parents' conservatism, abandoned it for progressivism in my very early twenties, and by the time I left college I was already moving away from the progressives on economic grounds: I ran Thomas Sowell's 'Black Rednecks & White Liberals" and it destroyed a lot of the narrative I'd already begun embracing. I'm one of those rare ducks who stumbled into libertarianism on social justice grounds, believing that government intervention frequently hurts the working class more than it helps it -- by creating barriers to employment, starting a business, etc. (I'm more of a Kirk/Burke-esque conservative with a strong libertarian mixer these days, though.)
Yeah: like with how heavy regulations help the large corporations, since not only do such entities have the resources to cope with the burden, they also have their lobbyists in the halls of power, ensuring that the regulations are written to their advantage. The little guys can't really compete against that.
Absolutely. Regulatory capture. Big Dairy goes to DC and says "Oh, yeah, milk quality is an issue, we need a law that says you need this and this and this equipment" -- turns out Big Dairy already has that stuff, but the Browns and the Parnells and the Schofields in their little CSA don't. Bye-bye organic CSA milk offerings.
Or just adding on more and more laws. Something bad happens we need a law against that. A good tell that a society is collapsing is by the increasing number of laws we have to regulate behavior.
This reminds me of something that Chesterton (I think) wrote. Paraphrasing: we should choose to follow the "big laws" (the Ten Commandments) or we will end up having to follow a thousand little laws. As a teacher, I always explain this principle to my students using the bathroom as an example. If they follow the "big law" of speaking truthfully, I will allow them to leave class to use the bathroom. If I find out that they are just leaving to wander the halls, check their phones, etc, then I will limit them to all the little laws: one bathroom visit per semester, they must carry a bathroom hall pass, they only have a certain amount of time to return before getting a detention, etc, etc. It's actually easier to live under the "big laws"!
This is great. I used a similar practice during my years of supervising mostly young men. Sometimes an unpopular guy would break a minor rule, and his sanctimonious "brothers" would come to me with torches and pitchforks.(popular guys would be covered for and could get away with murder)
"Oh, now you guys want to go by THE RULES. We can definitely do that, you won't like the results since technically, 2 of you are out of uniform, one of you came in late this morning.......etc".
It goes beyond "possible." Our social welfare and benefits systems, from Medicaid to SNAP to the EITC, all strongly disincentivize marriage.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned about this in the 60s and was pilloried for it. Now, liberals don't want to fix it because that would imply single motherhood is bad and marriage is good for kids*, while conservatives don't want to fix it because it would be expensive.
*liberals agree that marriage is good; they wouldn't have fought so hard for gay marriage if they didn't; the luxury belief part is where they claim marriage doesn't benefit kids, and is only good as a form of self actualization and expression of love.
I was wondering if any of the commenters would say anything that was relevant to the underlying problem and as far as I can see, only you and Stephen (comment above) have done so. LBJ's Great Society (as badly named as anything in our history) and its aftermath are primarily (I believe solely but I won't quibble) for the sad state of primarily black children and whites as well. In 1970, out-of-wedlock births for blacks were 24% and for whites 3%, by 1990, blacks were 69% and whites18%,, What happened in between - The Great Society. I believe black out-of- wedlock births are now over 70%. Moynihan, as you correctly stated, focused on the damaging effect of black out-of-wedlock births on blacks and was excoriated for it. Even then, the sole cause of black failure was RACISM in the eyes of the left and frankly, the GOP as well. We weren't any smarter 50 years ago then we are now. Thomas Sowell , the brightest black this country has ever known, on the other hand praised Moynihan's analysis. As always the federal government was and is s the principle cause of a problem. The idea that printing money and handing it out to
"needy" people - which unbelievably now includes illegal immigrants - is the most destructive domestic policy this country has ever undertaken.
I don't see how Medicaid (after the ACA changes) harms marriage. Some of our public benefits however do since people who might otherwise wed would lose their benefits if they married. The obvious fix is to double the income eligibility limits for married couples. We could even find ways to incentivize marriage in these situations. Meanwhile it's a brute reality that most jobs do not pay enough to live on, let alone raise kids and that will not change absent some Black Death level of population die off to create a massive labor shortage to force wages up where they need to be for family formation to really work, and we're going to need assistance for a large minority of the population.
This article has a nice summary of the marriage penalty in SNAP and the EITC:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-tangled-welfare-programs-create-a-marriage-penalty-for-the-near-poor
If you're on disability, getting married reduces your SSI payments by 25%.
If you receive Medicaid, the asset limits and/or combined income are often the issue. If one spouse qualifies for Medicaid but they marry someone with assets that push them over the limit, or the combined income pushes them over the income limit, they will lose it. Primary residence counts towards the asset limit. The details vary a lot by state.
Here is a working paper showing that the ACA expansion of Medicaid reduced marriage rates:
https://www.thecgo.org/research/impact-of-the-affordable-care-act-medicaid-expansions-on-marriage-and-divorce-decisions/
The program design is frankly absurd. A true nationalized health care system would not have this problem. A system that just followed individuals regardless of marital status wouldn't either. But our Rube Goldberg means tested household based system creates this mess.
This article has a nice summary of the marriage penalty in SNAP and the EITC:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-tangled-welfare-programs-create-a-marriage-penalty-for-the-near-poor
If you're on disability, getting married reduces your SSI payments by 25%.
If you receive Medicaid, the asset limits and/or combined income are often the issue. If one spouse qualifies for Medicaid but they marry someone with assets that push them over the limit, or the combined income pushes them over the income limit, they will lose it. Primary residence counts towards the asset limit. The details vary a lot by state.
Here is a working paper showing that the ACA expansion of Medicaid reduced marriage rates:
https://www.thecgo.org/research/impact-of-the-affordable-care-act-medicaid-expansions-on-marriage-and-divorce-decisions/
The program design is frankly absurd. A true nationalized health care system would not have this problem. A system that just followed individuals regardless of marital status wouldn't either. But our Rube Goldberg means tested household based system creates this mess.
Except in the 9 or 10 states that haven't implemented the ACA Medicaid reforms, there are no longer asset tests for Medicaid. And the old rules with their asset tests (which still exist here in Florida) create an even strong disincentive for marriage. I've read stories of people who had to divorce so a seriously ill spouse could obtain coverage.
Above I noted that the "marriage penalty" with other programs and suggested a very easy fix.
The fix is easy but expensive, and that's the problem. That was my point about why neither liberals nor conservatives want to fix it.
I'm not an expert and may be wrong about this, but I thought the asset limits still applied to those who qualify for Medicaid based on disability, even if their state expanded Medicaid under the ACA?
As far as I know there are no asset limits now under the ACA, though with a possible exception for senior citizens seeking funding for nursing homes. And even in non-ACA states like FL a house is left untouched if a spouse is still living in it (but will otherwise be taken by the state for sale)
I've been on ACA Medicaid three times, twice in MD and then in DE. Only my (lack of) income mattered.
In California, at least, Medicaid (we call it MediCal) is not asset tested. For better or worst.
I actually complimented your thoughts in my comment to Wafa1024 below. You two are the only people I've noticed that understand the problem. You two (maybe there are a few others)are the only people on this substack who think "horses" when they hear hoofbeats, not zebras. The rest including Rod hear zebras. The entire federal apparatus in particular its regulatory apparatus (and that of states as well) are designed to protect large corporations and businesses and to discourage competition and entrepreneurship.
I think people tend to view everything in terms of their specialties and particular interests, whereas some of us are generalists. As an example, I remember after Ferguson happened, listening to an urbanist podcast and listening to them analyze and even attribute the riots to the deteriorating cityscape. That's not in itself a bad thing -- specialist evaluations can shed light on angles other people wouldn't see -- but if the specialist angle is seen as The Angle, then it leads us into error.
You're much kinder than I am. The fact the people tend to view everything in terms of their specialties is a reflection of their lack of knowledge outside their specialties or to put it in a less pleasant way, they don't know very much and/or they refuse to accept the true causes of the problem for a variety of reasons, none of them good. Your Ferguson riots reference is a perfect example. And contrary to you, I believe this is a very bad thing. Instead of shedding additional light on the causes of a problem, they obscure its true causes. That's been our history for the past 50 years or so.
Unlike most of the commenters here, you have a broader view of the cause of America's problems and, since I am only going to be on this substack for a few days, I thought you might be interested in a perfect example of why the federal government is incapable of solving problems but perfect at creating them. I'm attaching a cite to an article from the Bloomberg website (one of the truly worst websites extant) that describes how a program that is intended to stimulate conversion of empty business buildings, a rapidly growing problem, into residential and mixed use usage- certainly a worthwhile direction. As the article points out, the regulations built into the program have essentially destroyed its utility. I thought you might be interested.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-29/white-house-funds-to-convert-offices-to-housing-find-few-takers?cmpid=BBD022924_CITYLAB&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=240229&utm_campaign=citylabdaily
Oh, preaching to the choir! Thanks for the article. Surprised no one on Strong Towns has looked at it yet. This sort of thing is how I moved into libertarian thinking from the progressives: I was reading about housing, energy, and food and became noticing a pattern wherein government attempts to "help" made things worse, or created new, worse problems. Suburban sprawl was created by government housing policies, for instance, not the free market, and the obesity crisis and prevalence of metabolic syndrome owes much to Nixon's subsidizing HFCS. There's a series Reason has on youtube called "Great Intentions, Bad Results" that examines cases like these. I fear we're getting a little off-topic, though.
I know I'm preaching to the choir but the choir on this substack is not enough for a Minyan (10 men required in the Jewish religion for a religious observance) even if Christians could make up the difference so I'm having a bit of fun. . I just found it pleasant in my last few days on the substack to find a libertarian, someone who understands that the government creates problems but never solves them, only makes them worse. As to getting off topic, so what. I'm dropping out because the majority of Rod's topics have no interest for me and for those that do, his secular comments are superficial and unknowledgeable.
Are you sure you won't reconsider leaving us soon?
You are welcomed to stay. I am not a Christian as are many others here are not. I used to be very strict libertarian but I have drifted away from the party line. In the field of American politics/economics , the men that I respect most (avoiding the word 'Heroes') are Milton Friedman, Robert Taft Jr., and Ron Paul. I stay more for the comments that anything else. I find the Christian perspective interesting as something that I am not much exposed to. If it the religion gets too thick in the comments, I skip them. About 1 in 3 of Rod's articles are of interest to me. YMMV.