The Artful Dilettante is a native of Pittsburgh, PA, and a graduate of Penn State University. He is a lover of liberty and a lifelong and passionate student of the same. He is voracious reader of books on the Enlightenment and the American colonial and revolutionary periods. He is a student of libertarian and Objectivist philosophies. He collects revolutionary war and period currency, books, and newspapers. He is married and the father of one teenage son. He is kind, witty, generous to a fault, and unjustifiably proud of himself. He is the life of the party and an unparalleled raconteur.
Big Government allies with Big Business to the detriment of everyone else. This is a simple fact that everyone had better start taking to heart. Crony capitalists, high-powered lawyers, Hollywood studios/moguls, lobbyists, and Big Labor are all solidly and incestuously in this camp of the powerful. Big Education (where there are now often more administrators than instructors) and the rest of Big Media sycophantically and symbiotically cuddle with Big Government even as they attempt to persuade, misinform and help regulate the rest of us. Individuals, small businesses and the middle class as a whole get walloped. Bigger isn’t always better, especially for the little guy.
Worse, Big Labor, through Big Government, takes our taxpayers money and uses it to lobby those in government to give more to Big Labor, even if it is expressly against our wishes. What’s more, much of the money they take from us goes into often slick but always deceiving/misleading ads and commercials to convince us to vote for those candidates and/or policies that are detrimental to us andthe nation as a whole…but good for them in the near-term! Candidates and policies that always expand government’s- and its public-sector unions- power. Their power over us.
The government responds to these factions that are “sophisticated” and wealthy enough to understand and utilize the government’s complexity for their own gain. Hence Democrats, largely responsible for the immensity and complexity of government, receive over 70% of lawyers’ political contributions, as well as the vast majority of contributions from those in Big Media, Big Education and Big Labor, of course. The largest U.S. companies, particularly the global giants with no particular or unique love for the U.S. (after all, China, India, etc. are bigger or potentially bigger markets) are more and more flooding the Democratic coffers with cash. They are “too big to fail” and might need a government bailout at some point in the future.
Starting to see the big picture? Angry yet?
This is why the former community organizer Barack Obama, not the famously wealthy Mitt Romney, carried 8 of America’s 10 wealthiest counties in 2012. And also why Trump’s message and policies resonated so well with working people in both 2016 and 2020.
It is the Democrats that proclaim their love for the “little guy” that in reality pee all over the working class. It is the coastal elites that look down their noses at the rubes clinging to their God and their guns in fly-over country.
True conservatives don’t promise everything to everybody outside of the “one percent.” They don’t promise to give everyone “free” healthcare and college educations, “free” birth-control and abortions, “free” breakfast, lunch and dinner, and freedom from responsibility and guilt. They know that the money has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is taxpayers’ paychecks.
If the administrators, professors and media-types, et. al., truly dislike the capitalist system and those who make good money, and really believe that education should be free, why don’t they simply volunteer…refuse to accept a salary? Or at least take a pay cut? That way everyone could actually get as close to a free education as is realistically possible.
What a great idea! Right, educators? Well?
Thought so.
All conservatives promise is to give us back some of our freedom.
And therefore, our country.
They don’t stand a chance against someone promising “free” birth-to-grave healthcare for our pets.
Come to think of it, I hope nobody actually picks up on that idea…they would likely win in a landslide.
Graphic credit: licensed by CanStock Photo, order #6296267
To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.
For example, to be “systemically racist” means you are unconsciously racist. In fact, you are racist merely by virtue of being white. You’re born a racist, we are told, if you are white. This implies NON-responsibility on your part. Yet, in contradiction, we are told that if you are white and male, or in some other group deemed offensive, then you are irredeemably bad and must atone for the rest of your life. This implies responsibility. Atonement and punishment apply to people who have made wrong choices. Which is it? Is racism a choice, or an inescapable part of your DNA?
Ignorance is considered no excuse. Silence is considered just as offensive as saying non-woke things. Yet we’re preached at — often by multi-color signs in the front yards of people who wish to virtue-signal — that love, empathy, rationality, truth and justice are their only goals. So in practice, if you’re a dissenter — or even too quiet — you’re treated with ruthless condemnation and possibly, at some point, fines, imprisonment or worse. In theory, it’s all done in the name of peace, love, brotherhood, tolerance and what they used to claim was “liberalism”.
So many contradictions. That’s how you know every bit of it is FALSE.
We institute government, the Declaration says, to secure our unalienable rights; among them is the pursuit of happiness. Elaborating upon this straightforward idea, the Preamble to the Constitution informs us that our government is to “establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty”
So government has a role, a duty to ‘promote the general welfare.’ While there is certainly an element of ambiguity to the term, it cannot be far from the duty of our lawmakers to seek the betterment, the continual improvement of the civil society upon which all republics depend.
To this end, our national government is charged with promoting personal and public virtue. This isn’t to say the Framers envisioned morality police of any sort. In fact, at the federal convention they specifically rejected an enumeration of national sumptuary laws.
But the necessity of virtue in a republic was regarded as a precondition for happiness. Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson to the 1787 federal convention: “The cultivation and improvement of the human mind is the most noble object of government.” Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource to be relied upon for . . . promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.” From the Northwest Ordinance passed by the Confederation congress in 1787 a few months before completion of the Constitution: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
It was precisely to facilitate the wise selection of representatives that Thomas Jefferson again and again emphasized the importance of educating the people and of fostering a way of life conducive to the development of a virtuous citizenry. The government envisioned by the statesmen of the American Revolution would have, as its highest end, the education of an enlightened body of citizens. A people covetous of liberty would keep free government.
Unfortunately, this all-important duty of government lasted little longer than the age of John Dewey. The Left understands that just as the easiest way to topple a building over time is to undermine its foundation, the slow, continuing corruption of American civil society is certain to one day collapse the republic. To undermine society, soil the education of the young. In his enormously destructive An Economic Interpretation of the United States Constitution (1913), the historian Charles Beard questioned the Framers’ intentions, and left the reader wondering if the federal convention of 1787 was nothing more than a collection of self-serving, evil capitalists. Beard’s book inaugurated an academic open hunting season on our founding principles.
Subsequent Leftists conquered K-12 teachers unions, and the dues from these unions were so successful in electing Democrats, they were rewarded with an agency of their own, the loathsome Department of Education.
Rather than uplift students, rather than inculcate the fundamental values of the Declaration and Constitution, modern education works toward the degradation of mind and spirit. Heather has Two Mommies, moral relativism, math and reading fads, Common Core, ridicule and prohibition of Christianity, all illustrate an appeal to the worst of our nature.
This devastation to the foundation of the American republic did not rise up from the people. There has never been a movement to “Make my kid stupid and raise my school taxes to pay for it.” Parents do not wish ill for their children. They do not ask school boards to inculcate their students with hatred for America. These educational horrors were incrementally forced on an unwilling public over the last hundred years.
No society works to destroy itself. When given the opportunity, the American people reject Leftist nostrums.
We can continue to pretend that the electoral process, which has given us Leftist dominance of all major institutions, can somehow magically sweep away the corruption of our children’s education. On the other hand, we can finally shout “enough is enough,” and put our masters in Washington DC on notice.
Reform can only emerge from the bottom up, the sovereign, We The People. If this republic is to be saved, it can only occur if we demand it, and the vehicle to save our once free republic is Article V.
David Skrbina is a professional philosopher who was a senior lecturer at the University of Michigan from 2003–2018. In addition to the book under review, he has written and edited a number of books, including The Metaphysics of Technology (Routledge, 2014), Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press, 2017), and the anthology Confronting Technology (Creative Fire Press, 2020).
The Jesus Hoax attempts to convince the reader that there is no rational basis for Christianity and that the motivation for its main originator, St. Paul, was antagonism toward the Roman Empire. Within this framework, Paul was a Jewish nationalist whose goal was to recruit non-Jews to oppose the Roman imperium: “Since the biblical Jesus story is false, it was evidently constructed by Paul and his fellow Jews in order to sway the gullible Gentile masses to their side and away from Rome” (43). Indeed, Skrbina claims that Paul may have been a Zealot, i.e., a member of a Jewish sect dedicated to violent resistance against the Romans, concluding “it seems clear that he was an ardent Jewish nationalist opposed to Roman rule, as was the case with most elite Jews of the time” (37).
Skrbina argues that there is no convincing evidence for the truth of the Jesus story, either within the canonical New Testament or from non-Christian sources. The earliest reference from a non-Christian source is a paragraph from the Jewish writer Josephus dated to 93 recounting the basic story, that Jesus was crucified “upon the accusation of the principal men among us”—i.e., the elite Jews of the period. Here Skrbina raises a general issue: the earliest source for the passage from Josephus is from the Christian apologist Eusebius in the fourth century, and the oldest sources for the gospels themselves are dated much later than they were supposedly written (70–95), leaving open the possibility of redactions and interpolations. For example, the oldest copy of the complete Gospel of Matthew, which, as noted below, contains the most inflammatory anti-Jewish passage of all, dates from the mid-fourth century, well after Constantine had legalized Christianity in the Empire and anti-Jewish attitudes were rife among intellectuals like Eusebius and the Church fathers such as St. John Chrysostom.”[1] The extent of redaction and interpolation remains unknown and presents obvious problems of interpretation.
The first Romans to comment on Christianity were Tacitus and Pliny (~115), both of whom disliked Christianity. As Skrbina notes, “the Romans were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this group” (60).
And Skrbina is well aware that an analysis of the entire early Christian movement must be aware of Jewish issues, quoting Nietzsche: “The first thing to be remembered, if we do not wish to lose the scent here, is that we are among Jews” (34). He is quite accurate in his assessment of Jewish ethnocentrism: Jews “saw themselves as special, different, ‘select,’ and thus they put these ideas into the mouth of their God. Certainly, no one would deny a people pride in themselves. But these extreme statements go far beyond normal bounds. They indicate a kind of self-absorption, a self-glorification, perhaps a narcissism, perhaps a conceit. To be chosen by the creator of the universe, and to be granted the right to rule, ruthlessly, over all other nations, bespeaks a kind of megalomania that is unprecedented in history” (63).
Not surprisingly, such a people have often been hated by others, and Skrbina recounts the many examples of anti-Jewish attitudes and actions in the ancient world: “where the Jews settled amongst other peoples, they seem to have made enemies” (65), noting particularly the recurrent theme—a theme that continued long past the ancient world—of Jews allying themselves with ruling elites against the native population. I was particularly struck by a passage Skrbina quotes from recent scholarship referring to advice given in 134 BC to King Antiochus VII, the Greek ruler of the Seleucid Empire, to exterminate the Jews: “for they alone among all the peoples refused all relations with other races, and saw everyone as their enemy; their forebears, impious and cursed by the gods, had been driven out of Egypt. The counselors [cited] the Jews’ hatred of all mankind, sanctioned by their very laws, which forbade them to share their table with a Gentile or give any sign of benevolence.”[2]
Skrbina concludes that there is a “deeply-embedded misanthropic streak” in Jews that continues into the contemporary era, quoting the famous passage from Rabbi Yosef who, in 2010 stated, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world—only to serve the people of Israel. They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi [a man of high social standing] and eat” (Jerusalem Post, October 18, 2010). Skrbina: “There is something about Jewish culture that inspires disgust and hatred” (79).
Based on the extensive citations to the Old Testament, Skrbina concludes that the Gospels, commonly dated well after Paul’s writing, were also likely written by Jews. Skrbina notes that the latest-dated gospel, John, is addressed to “intra-Jewish squabbling” (41) over the issue of Jesus being the Messiah—obviously a view rejected by Orthodox Jews. In other words, John identifies as a Jew but as a Jew battling the Orthodox Jewish establishment. Importantly, John contains anti-Jewish passages that would echo down the centuries: Jews “sought to kill Jesus,” and the gospel represents Jesus as saying, “You [Jews] are of your father the devil… He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) (41). Many contemporary scholars accept the view that anti-Jewish statements in the Gospels are intramural disputes about whether Jews or Christians were the chosen people of God.
Of course, there are many other anti-Jewish statements:
John 5:18: For this reason the Jews were seeking all the more to kill [Jesus], because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God.
John 7:1: After these things Jesus walked in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.
John 7:12–13: And there was considerable complaining about him among the crowds. While some were saying, “He is a good man,” others were saying, “No, he is deceiving the crowd.” Yet no one would speak openly about him for fear of the Jews.
John 8:37: I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word.
And the most influential of all:
Matthew 27:25–26: When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but thatrather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.
Such sentiments are not only found in the Gospels. St. Paul:
1Thess 2:14–15: For ye, brethren, became followers of the churches of God which in Judaea are in Christ Jesus: for ye also have suffered like things of your own countrymen, even as they haveof the Jews: Who both killed the Lord Jesus, and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.
Skrbina, discussing the Gospel of Mark, notes that Paul et al. had two enemies, the Romans and non-believing Jews like the Pharisees who “wanted to kill Jesus” (95). Mark therefore blamed both, and Skrbina concludes that “Mark’s anger against his fellow Jews … got the better of him; for centuries afterward, Christians would blame the Jews for killing Christ, not realizing that the whole tale was a Jewish construction in the first place” (95).
Later in Matthew and Luke, “the anti-Jewish rhetoric heats up a bit; the Jews are called ‘a brood of vipers’ (Mat 3:7, 12:34, 23:33) and ‘lovers of money’ (Lu 16:14). And there are repetitions of the message of revolution, including armed confrontation (“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” [Mat. 10:34]) and it depicts that the coming confrontation would split families.
Skrbina’s reconstruction of the trajectory of Christianity is presented as tentative (“I’ll not claim certainty here”[81]). For example, he imagines a soliloquy by Jewish patriot Paul asking, “What message could our ‘Jesus’ take to the masses,” answering “we need them to be pro-Jewish, not make them Jews–no, that would never work. We need something new, a ‘third way’ between Judaism and paganism. Maybe for a start, we could get them to worship our God Jehovah, and not that absurd Roman pantheon” (84; emphasis in text). And the whole point was to encourage revolt: “Throughout [Paul’s] letters we find numerous references to enslavement, revolution, insurrection, war, the importance of the disempowered masses, and so on. In the early Galatians we read of the need for Jesus to ‘deliver us from the present evil age’ ([Galatians] 1:4)” (90). Skrbina considers the following passage, from 1Corinthians 1:4 “decisive” (92):
For consider your call, brethren, not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are. (Skrbina’s emphasis)
Militancy increases in Luke and Matthew, both dated to 85. Matthew (10:34): “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
If one agrees with Skrbina on all this, then he suggests that you “go to your local church leaders and confront them with the evidence (or lack thereof). Their response will confirm everything you need to know. Then, make it clear to them that you have been swindled” (112). And: “Christians need to own up the fact that they have been swindled, and then see if anything can be salvaged of their religion. Keep the social club, do charity work, help the poor—just dump the bogus metaphysics” (116).
Discussion
Since I am not a believer and since I am quite cognizant of Jewish efforts to manipulate the beliefs and attitudes of non-Jews—the thesis, after all, of The Culture of Critique—I am quite open to Skrbina’s interpretation. However, there are a few things that bother me.
Liars? In Skrbina’s view, the entire project was based on lies, lies made possible by Jewish contempt for non-Jews. In a section titled “Paul, Liar Supreme,” we find “The Gentiles were always treated by the Jews with contempt. … They could be manipulated, harassed, assaulted, beaten, even killed if it served Jewish interests” (99). The gospel writers were also likely liars: “Even in ancient times, people were not idiots. How could Mark accept without any apparent evidence or confirmation, such fantastic tales? And accept them so completely that he would write them down as factual truth, as real and actual events? And then how could the same thing happen three more times, to three different individuals?” (106). And Paul is even more unlikely to have actually believed what he was writing because he was so close to the events he wrote about, and because he was a “clever man. How could he possibly have fallen so completely for a bogus Jewish messiah that he would dedicate his life to spreading the story?” (106).
This is presented as an issue of cleverness, and it is certainly true that there is a small but consistent negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity.[3] But the weakness of the association—explaining around four percent of the variance—indicates that there are plenty of intelligent people who are quite religious. This would have been even more likely in the ancient world—a context in which religion was taken very seriously, where miraculous events were taken for granted by many, and where there wasn’t already a long history of philosophical skepticism about religion, as there is in the contemporary West. Or consider the medieval period in the West that produced highly intelligent believers, such as St. Thomas Aquinas or William of Occam. Or the ultra-religious but very intelligent Puritans who settled New England and quickly founded Harvard University and the other elite Ivy League universities. We live in an age where science has become the height of respectability—hence the attempts to manipulate what can pass as scientific to serve other interests and have a dramatic impact on contemporary culture. However, the cultural context has been much different in the past, and I suspect that correlations between intelligence and religiosity would have been approximately zero in many historical periods.
Another issue related to lying is martyrdom. The proposal that Paul and the gospel writers were liars must deal with the issue of “Who would die for a lie? … as Jews, they were all, already, under persecution from the Romans. As extremist, fanatical Jews they were willing to do anything and suffer any punishment, in order to help ‘Israel’” (110). It’s certainly true that Jews died and were enslaved in droves when the Romans put down the Jewish uprisings, and this was presumably on the minds of the putative gospel writers (the first Roman-Jewish war was in 70), so the extreme altruism of martyrdom for the benefit of the group seems possible, particularly among Jews—there is a long tradition of Jewish martyrdom that continues to be an important aspect of Jewish identity. However, stories of martyrdom in both the Christian and Jewish traditions may well be at least exaggerated if not entirely apocryphal (e.g., here) because of their usefulness in creating a strong sense of ingroup identity.
Again, there are the questions of who wrote the New Testament and when was it written, including possible redactions and interpolations. I am not at all a scholar on the New Testament, but I note that a recent scholar, Robert Price, dates the first collection of St. Paul’s letters from Marcion in the second century, with the authorship of some letters highly contested, and a strong possibility of interpolations by later collectors:
The question of authorship would have little bearing here one way or the other. In this process, interpolations were made and then gradually permeated the text tradition of each letter until final canonization of the Pastoral edition (and concurrent burning of its rivals) put a stop to all that. … But the first collector of the Pauline Epistles had been Marcion. No one else we know of would be a good candidate, certainly not the essentially fictive Luke, Timothy, and Onesimus. And Marcion, as Burkitt and Bauer show, fills the bill perfectly. Of the epistles themselves, he is probably the original author of Laodiceans (the Vorlage [i.e., original version] of Ephesians) and perhaps of Galatians, too. Like Muhammad in the Koran, he would have read his own struggles back into the careers of his biblical predecessors.
But there are other scholars who continue to uphold the view that the New Testament is a reliable account, or at least reliable enough (see, e.g., Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs). I am certainly not in any position to evaluate what continues to be a very contentious area which has been covered in minute deal for at least 200 years, often by highly motivated scholars. At this late stage of scholarship, it seems unlikely that a consensus will ever be reached, especially because a great deal of the scholarship may well be motivated by a desire to defend deeply held religious beliefs—or dispute them; e.g., Blomberg describes himself as “a Christian believer of an evangelical persuasion” (xxv), which doesn’t mean that he is incorrect, but indicates that he would be motivated to defend his beliefs.
Given all this complexity I take that path of humility in trying to assess these issues, resulting in my being an agnostic about the historicity of the New Testament, whether whoever wrote it were liars, and what their real agendas were. I am persuaded that there is no consensus on what was actually written in the first century, and I accept the possibility that the writings that survive as the canonical writings of Christianity may well include later redactions and interpolations that reflect very different perceptions and interests from those of the putative first-century writers .
The Anti-Jewish Statements in the New Testament. I noted above that there are quite a few anti-Jewish passages in the New Testament, including from St. Paul himself. Skrbina claims that “The scattered anti-Jewish statements in all the Gospels—especially John—more reflect an internal Jewish battle over ideology than an external, Gentile attack” (107–108). This is a common scholarly view, but if you are trying to recruit Gentiles to your movement to serve Jewish interests, would you really want to litter your writing with anti-Jewish statements? In fact, these statements, particularly the claim that Jews committed deicide, have been used by Christians against Jews throughout the succeeding centuries, most notably “His blood be on us, and on our children.” Although the major outbreaks of anti-Semitism have always involved far more than Christian religious beliefs—they have typically occurred during periods of resource competition of various sorts (MacDonald, 1998)—I have no doubt that Christian beliefs about Jews fed into and exacerbated anti-Jewish attitudes, especially in the past when vast sections of the European population were deeply religious—e.g., during the Middle Ages when religious beliefs motivated the Crusades and long, arduous pilgrimages to sites where miracles were said to have occurred. It was a period when, e.g., Notre Dame de Paris, the symbol of traditional France, was adorned with anti-Jewish imagery.
Ecclesia (right) and Synagoga, illustrating Jewish blindness in rejecting Christianity
Indeed, Jewish perceptions of the anti-Jewish nature of Christian theology have resulted in Jewish activism to essentially rewrite or reinterpret the New Testament in their interests. Antonius J. Patrick summarizes this strand of Jewish activism in his review of Vicomte Léon de Poncins’ Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion:
The pronouncements on non-Christian religions and the declaration Nostra aetate passed in the Fourth Session of the Council (1965) accomplished almost all that the Modernists had hoped for. In effect, these pronouncements repudiated nearly two thousand years of Catholic teaching on the Jews. Ever since, the Church has continually bowed to Jewish pressure in regard to its liturgy, the naming of saints, and in the political realm—its most infamous decision in the latter being the recognition of the state of Israel in 1994.
Poncins, who closely covered the Vatican II proceedings, wrote of the declaration:
. . . a number of Jewish organizations and personalities are behind the reforms which were proposed at the Council with a view to modifying the Church’s attitude and time-honored teaching about Judaism: Jules Isaac, Label Katz, President of the B’nai B’rith, Nahum Goldman, President of the World Jewish Congress, etc. . . . These reforms are very important because they suggest that for two thousand years the Church had been mistaken and that she must make amends and completely reconsider her attitude to the Jews.
The leading figure in the years prior to the Council was the virulent anti-Catholic writer Jules Isaac, and he played an active role during the Counsel. “Isaac,” Poncins describes, “turned the Council to advantage, having found there considerable support among progressive bishops. In fact, he became the principal theorist and promoter of the campaign being waged against the traditional teaching of the Church.”
Isaac had long before begun his hostile campaign to overturn Catholic teaching on the Jews with his two most important books on the subject: Jésus et Israel (1946) and Genése de l’Antisémitisme (1948). Poncins accurately summarizes the main thrust of these works:
In these books Jules Isaac fiercely censures Christian teaching, which he says has been the source of modern anti-Semitism, and preaches, though it would be more correct to say he demands, the ‘purification’ and ‘amendment’ of doctrines two thousand years old.
Moreover, whatever the beliefs and motives of St. Paul and the Gospel writers, the Church had essentially become an anti-Jewish movement by the fourth century when Catholicism became the official religion of the Roman Empire:
The proposal here is that in this period of enhanced group conflict, anti-Jewish leaders such as [St. John] Chrysostom [who retains a chapel named after him at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome] attempted to convey a very negative view of Jews. Jews were to be conceptualized not as harmless practitioners of exotic, entertaining religious practices, or as magicians, fortune tellers, or healers [as had been the case previously], but as the very embodiment of evil. The entire thrust of the legislation that emerged during this period was to erect walls of separation between Jews and gentiles, to solidify the gentile group, and to make all gentiles aware of who the “enemy” was. Whereas these walls had been established and maintained previously only by Jews, in this new period of intergroup conflict the gentiles were raising walls between themselves and Jews….
The interpretation proposed here is that group conflict between Jews and gentiles entered a new stage in the 4th century. It is of considerable interest that it was during this period that accusations of Jewish greed, wealth, love of luxury and of the pleasures of the table became common (Simon 1986, 213). Such accusations did not occur during earlier periods, when anti-Jewish writings concentrated instead on Jewish separatism. These new charges suggest that Jews had increasingly developed a reputation as wealthy, and they in turn suggest that anti-Semitism had entered a new phase in the ancient world, one centered around resource competition and concerns regarding Jewish economic success, domination of gentiles [especially enslaving gentiles], and relative reproductive success. …
Jews were increasingly entering the imperial and municipal service in the 4th century until being excluded from these occupations in the 5th century—an aspect of the wide range of economic, social, and legal prohibitions on Jews dating from this period [particularly prohibitions on Jews owning Christian slaves—itself an indication of the superior wealth of Jews]. These factors, in combination with traditional gentile hostility to Judaism (because of its separatist practices and perceptions of Jewish misanthropy and perhaps of Jewish wealth), set the stage for a major anti-Semitic movement. The proposal here is that this anti-Semitic movement crystallized in the Christian Church. (Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 3, 96, 98, 99)
It is quite possible that the anti-Jewish statements in the New Testament are interpolations made much later by anti-Jewish writers motivated by resource competition and Jews enslaving Christians. If so, the liars were not Paul and the Gospel writers, but Christians concerned about Jews in the third and fourth centuries. J. G. Gager suggests that the extant literature from the early Church was deliberately selected to emphasize anti-Jewish themes and exclude other voices, much as the priestly redaction of the Pentateuch retained from earlier writings only what was compatible with Judaism as a diaspora ideology (J. G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (Oxford, 1983), 7; N. deLange, “The origins of anti-Semitism: Ancient evidence and modern interpretation,” In Anti-SemitisminTimesofCrisis, S. L. Gilman & S. T. Katz (NYU Press, 1991, 30–31). It’s quite conceivable that, rather than reflecting real intra-Jewish squabbles in the first century, as suggested by Skrbina, these early works were deliberately embellished in order to emphasize anti-Jewish themes in the originals—or they were completely fabricated—at a time when these writers had become strongly anti-Jewish for reasons that would not have been salient in the first century. In any case, this possibility is highly compatible with the view that there was a qualitative shift toward the conscious construction of a fundamentally anti-Jewish version of history during the formative period of the Catholic Church.
Consequences of the Lies. Skrbina ends by claiming that Paul’s lies were successful: “It took a few hundred years, but when enough people fell for the hoax, it helped to bring down the Roman Empire” (122). And he describes the lies as a “mortal threat”: “eventually drawing in 2 billion people, becoming an enemy of truth and reason, and causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities” (101).
I have never seen a scholarly argument that the institutionalization of the Catholic Church contributed importantly to the fall of the Empire. The Eastern Empire, although losing substantial territory to the Muslims, was only overthrown in 1453 after centuries of battling them. However, it’s certainly a reasonable idea given that Christian religious ideology was the polar opposite of thoroughly militarized Indo-European culture upon which Rome was built. Ancient Greco-Roman culture was fundamentally aristocratic and based on ideas of natural inequality and natural hierarchy. Thus, Plato’s “just society” as depicted in The Republic was to be ruled by philosophers because they were truly rational, and he assumes there are natural differences in the capacity for rationality—a modern would phrase it in terms of the behavior genetics of IQ and personality. Aristotle believed that some people were slaves “by nature” (Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 52), i.e., that the hierarchy between masters and slaves was natural. Reflecting themes common in Indo-European culture emphasized by Ricardo Duchesne (The Uniqueness of Western Civilization), the ancients prized fame and glory (positive esteem from others) resulting from genuine virtue and military and political accomplishments—but not labor, because laborers were often slaves and the rightful booty of conquest.
So the Christian ethic of prizing meekness, humility, and labor was quite a change. Within Christian ideology the individual replaced the ancient Indo-European family as the seat of moral legitimacy. Christian ideology was intended for all humans, resulting in a sense of moral egalitarianism, at least within the Christian community, rather than seeing society as based on natural hierarchy. Individual souls were seen as having moral agency and equal value in the eyes of God—a theology that has had very negative effects in the contemporary world.
However, universalism and the Christian virtues of meekness and humility are not the only story and indeed, as Skrbina notes, the sword also makes an appearance in the New Testament. In the Middle Ages Christianity was Germanized (James Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, Oxford, 1996), making it much more compatible with an aristocratic warrior ethnic. And in the medieval period and beyond, Christianity facilitated Western individualism and essentially ushered in the modern age of science, technological progress, and territorial expansion (Joseph Henrich, The Weirdest People in the World, 2020; MacDonald, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019).
As a direct result, Christians who had a firm conviction about their beliefs eventually conquered the world and have been responsible for essentially all of the scientific and technological progress that created the modern world. Indeed, in his The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich argues that the medieval Church invented Western individualism by insisting on monogamous marriage and by “demolishing” extended kinship relations, presented by Henrich as an attempt to understand, as phrased in his subtitle, How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Harvard, 2020). I have quite a few objections to his approach (see here), but he is certainly correct that the Church was influential in opposing the power of extended kinship groups and preventing concubinage and polygyny among elites, thereby facilitating a relatively egalitarian marriage regime. Essentially Henrich ignores the ethnic basis of Western individualism that reaches back into pre-historic Western Europe and is certainly reflected in the classical Western civilizations of Greece and Rome. Henrich also ignores genetic influences on IQ and personality. But I agree with a much weaker version—that the Church facilitated Western individualism and so helped give rise to the modern world (Chapter 5 of Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, 2019 ).
So it’s not entirely a story of “causing deaths of millions of human beings via inquisitions, witch burnings, crusades, and other religious atrocities.” But the sad reality is that contemporary Christianity, or at least the vast majority of it, is utterly opposed to the interests of the people who have historically made it their religion. For example, Prof. Andrew Fraser has interpreted fundamental Christian texts in a manner consistent with an ethnic form of Christianity (e.g., “Global Jesus versus National Jesus”, and in The Sword of Christ (2020; this book seems to have been banned by Amazon), Giles Corey attempts to rescue an ethnically viable Christianity from the ruins of contemporary, leftist-dominated Christian theology. As I note in my preface:
Religious thinking is by its nature unbounded—it is infinitely malleable [so that, for example, redactions and interpolations on the New Testament could easily have been adapted to create a fundamentally new theology]. It is a dangerous sword that can be used to further legitimate interests of believers, or it can become a lethal weapon whereby believers adopt attitudes that are obviously maladaptive. One need only think of religiously based suicide cults, such as People’s Temple (Jonestown), Solar Temple and Heaven’s Gate. Mainstream Christianity from traditional Catholicism to mainstream Protestantism was fundamentally adaptive in terms of creating a healthy family life. It was compatible with a culture characterized by extraordinary scientific and technological creativity, [territorial expansion], and standards of living that have been much envied by the rest of the world. …
Corey is well aware that contemporary Christianity has been massively corrupted. Mainline Protestant and Catholic Churches have become little more than appendages for the various social justice movements of the left, avidly promoting the colonization of the West by other races and cultures, even as religious fervor and attendance dwindle and Christianity itself becomes ever more irrelevant to the national dialogue. [Guillaume Durocher notes that only 6–12 percent of the French population are practicing Catholics, indicating that Catholicism cannot be blamed for France’s current malaise.] On the other hand, [American] Evangelicals, a group that remains vigorously Christian, have been massively duped by the theology of Christian Zionism, their main focus being to promote Israel. [In general, they have rejected an explicit White identity or a sense of White interests.]
Until the twentieth century, Christianity served the West well. One need only think of the long history of Christians battling to prevent Muslims from establishing a caliphate throughout the West—Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours, the Spanish Reconquista, the defeat of the Turks at the gates of Vienna. The era of Western expansion was accomplished by Christian explorers and colonists. Until quite recently, the flourishing of science, technology, and art occurred entirely within a Christian context.
Corey advocates a revitalization of Medieval Germanic Christianity based on, in the words of Samuel Francis, “social hierarchy, loyalty to tribe and place (blood and soil), world-acceptance rather than world-rejection, and an ethic that values heroism and military sacrifice.” This medieval Christianity preserved the aristocratic, fundamentally Indo-European culture of the Germanic tribes. This was an adaptive Christianity, a Christianity that was compatible with Western expansion, to the point that by the end of the nineteenth century, the West dominated the planet. Christianity per se is certainly not the problem.
The decline of adaptive Christianity coincides with the post-Enlightenment rise of the Jews throughout the West as an anti-Christian elite, and Corey has a great deal of very interesting material on traditional Christian views of Judaism. Traditional Christian theology viewed the Church as having superseded the Old Testament and that, by rejecting the Church, the Jews had not only rejected God, they were responsible for murdering Christ. …
In fact, intellectual movements of the left—disseminated throughout the educational system and by the elite media—have exploited the Western liberal tradition. The intellectuals who came to dominate American intellectual discourse and the media were quite aware of the need to appeal to Western proclivities toward individualism, egalitarianism, and moral universalism by essentially creating a moral community that appealed to these traits but also served their interests. A theme of The Culture of Critique is that moral indictments of their opponents have been prominent in the writings of the activist intellectuals reviewed there, including political radicals and those opposing biological perspectives on individual and group differences in IQ. A sense of moral superiority was also prevalent in the psychoanalytic movement, and the Frankfurt School developed the view that social science was to be judged by moral criteria.
The triumph of the cultural left to the point of substantial consensus in the West has created a moral community where people who do not subscribe to their beliefs are seen as not only intellectually deficient but as morally evil. Moral communities rather than kinship are the social glue of Western societies. Westerners, being individualists and relatively unconcerned about the prospects of their kin beyond their immediate family, willingly punish other Whites who oppose their moral community, even at cost to themselves (altruistic punishment). Their main concern is to have a good reputation in their moral community which is now defined by the media and the educational system—a moral community that was created by hostile elites out of fear and loathing of the traditional White American majority (see Culture of Critique, Ch. 7).
Finally, Skrbina asks, “Can it really be beneficial to accept a myth as truth? Can one really live a happy, successful, and meaningful life dedicated to a false story or a lie?” (16). I think that the answer is that yes it can. As an evolutionist, my working hypothesis is that when it comes to the realm of ideas, evolution does not aim for truth but rather for success in continuing one’s family and increasing the prospects of one’s tribe. Certainly the religious beliefs of other groups, say Muslims, Jews, or Mormons, may well be false and based on inventions. But the people believing in these lies have often done very well in evolutionary terms and are continuing to do so. Ashkenazi Jewish eugenics proceeded for centuries in a religious context, resulting in a highly intelligent elite able to wield vast influence throughout the West. Islam expanded over hundreds of years, controlling vast territories, with leaders rewarded by large harems and many descendants; Islam is now rapidly expanding in Europe and has higher fertility than native Europeans. It’s well known that seriously religious, fundamentalist Christians in the West have more children on average than non-Christian Europeans, which is certainly adaptive. But they are also more likely to swear fealty to the interests of Israel and in general they are entirely resistant to being informed about the negative effects of multiculturalism or about Jewish cultural influence (whose effects they despise) or even Jewish traditional hostility toward Christianity.
And it can scarcely be doubted that Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have been completely corrupted and actively subverted so that millions of White Americans have been swept up by the multiculturalism and replacement-level immigration as moral imperatives. Jewish activism has certainly been part of this, but traditional Christian universalism and moral egalitarianism are also part of the equation. One might say that Christianity, despite periods when it was highly adaptive, carried the seeds of its own destruction—a chink in its armor that made it relatively easy to subvert once the culture of the West had been subverted by our new hostile elite.
So, in my view, it’s a complex story, and one that is far from finished.
Here’s the big problem with leftism: It requires a victim. And it requires a victimizer. It appeals to the worst and weakest within human nature. It tells people something millions have always wanted to hear: “Life is miserable. But it’s not your fault. It’s someone else’s fault. And WE will fix it for you.”
Leftism NEEDS racism. If racism goes away, then it must be resurrected. If the economy booms while a hated conservative is President, then it must be destroyed. And even then, the economy must be kept weak so that leftists can claim to be the heroes by giving everyone a pittance to live on, plus free college.
The deeper issue: There will always be people, not just in government but everywhere, who NEED you to be sick, downtrodden or in need so that THEY can claim to rescue you and become powerful. One of the ugliest and most brutal forms this takes is under the form of government. Over the last century, we’ve called it Communism. But it doesn’t really matter what you call it. It’s psychopathological, and it takes two sick parties to buy into it. One sick party is the power hungry monster who NEEDS you to NEED him. The other sick party is the sad, neurotic and weak-spirited soul who needs to feel like a victim … “Because if I’m a victim, then nothing is my fault, I can blame someone else, and someone else will take care of me.”
Without such psychopathology, socialism and Communism would have no place to flourish.
I still vividly recall sitting with a high school friend on the evening of July 20, 1969 and watching on television as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of the moon, a few minutes before 8 p.m., west coast Pacific time, and saying his famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” My glance went back and forth from watching Armstrong make his first steps on the moon’s surface and looking out the window at what was a full moon in the clear night sky over Hollywood, California where I lived, and thinking how surrealistic it all seemed.
In our new era of Covid-19 Big Government, there are those who want that famous event of a little over a half-century ago to serve as inspiration and a model for a post-coronavirus epoch of renewed and expanded political paternalism through government-business partnerships to solve the earth-bound problems of humanity. The questions I would ask are, was it really worth it and is this the appropriate role for government in a free society?
Building Up the State for Expanded Political Paternalism
Mariana Mazzucato is a professor of economics at University College, London, and the chair of the World Health Organization’s Council on the Economics of Health for All. She is one of the prominent advocates of government taking on “big missions” in society as the political “big brother” that organizes and directs those in the private sector who are to follow and obey the lead of governmental paternalists like herself. All, of course, to make a better world. (See my article, “The Downsides and Dangers of Mission-Making”.)
Professor Mazzucato argues, in her recent article, “Build Back the State” (April 15, 2021), that the Apollo mission to the moon demonstrates how government should do things that can get big things done, such as combating climate change and reducing income inequality through political leadership. She tells us, “The task for the Biden administration is to provide leadership for the missions that will shape the decades ahead, starting with the fight against climate change.”
She makes it very clear that it must be those in political power who should be in charge of the future economic direction of the United States:
“We need top-down direction to catalyze innovation and investment across the economy. And the Apollo era’s example of government’s leadership, bold public interest contracts, and public sector dynamism offer a valuable template.”
In addition, there is no turning back from this. Professor Mazzucato points out that while President John F. Kennedy may have said in 1962 that going to the moon was a “choice,” today in the 21st century, the “same type of visionary leadership is not a choice, but a necessity.” By implication, denying or opposing such a more dominant role for government is to be on the “wrong side of history.” In other words, it’s either political paternalism on steroids or “curtains” for humankind.
The Political Mission-Makers Dictate to the Private Sector
Government must set the goals, determine the best way to get there, and then entice selected big business partners to go along with it through the offering of hundreds of millions, indeed, billions, of tax or borrowed dollars to do the investment and innovative work that the political leaders want them to take on. The private sector, therefore, is the “junior partner” who follows the directives and commands of those shoveling out the federal funds to the corporate coffers. To see that private self-interest never gets in the way of what and how the government wants things done, there should be imposed “fixed-price” contracts to prevent cost overruns, and at the same time to have strict regulations that assure the profits to be earned are what the political authorities consider reasonable and “fair.”
The purpose of the price, cost and profit restraints, Professor Mazzucato tells us, is to ensure that what drives their private business partners is “scientific curiosity” and the public welfare rather than “greed or speculation.” To guarantee that those devious private enterprisers don’t pull a fast one on Uncle Sam, the government bureaucracies have to be filled with technical experts with the knowledge to keep the profit-seekers on the straight and narrow path of only doing what government knows to be best:
“By strengthening the public sector’s capabilities and outlining a clear purpose for public-private alliances, the Biden administration could both deliver growth and help tackle some of the greatest challenges of our age, from inequality and weak health systems to global warming. These problems are much more complex and multi-dimensional than sending a man to the moon. But the imperative is the same: effective strategic governance of the space where public funding meets private industry.”
The Apollo Project was not “the People’s” Preference
It is interesting to note that President Kennedy told the head of NASA at that time, “I’m not that interested in space.” It was based on a political decision that the U.S. had to get there before the Soviet Union, that is, “because we hope to beat them, and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.” In fact, Kennedy was more concerned that the cost of going to the moon might “wreck our budget.”
Nor were the American people all that excited and interested in the U.S. getting to the moon first. According to Gallup opinion surveys, in 1965, four years before Armstrong’s walk on the moon, only 39 percent of the respondents supported the moon project to get there before the Soviets, “whatever it costs.” In fact, throughout the 1960s, opinion polls said that cutting the space program was near the top of the list of those government programs respondents thought not to be worth funding. Even after the successful landing on the moon in 1969, public opinion surveys reported that only 53 percent thought it had been worth the cost. And in the 1970s, those in favor of the space program decreased well into the 40s percentage range.
Americans Even Less Excited about Paying to Stop Climate Change
While Professor Mazzucato understands that going to the moon was a “choice,” government directed and commanded leadership on climate change, inequality, and health care is now a “necessity.” But in whose eyes? An Associated Press poll in 2019 found that 57 percent of Americans were willing to pay $1 a month more in taxes to “fight” global warming. But when they were asked whether they would be willing to pay an extra $10 a month to stop the climate from changing, only 28 percent said “yes,” while 68 percent said they were opposed.
Clearly, once told that a cost comes attached to the politically hailed benefit of an “unchanged” climate (whatever that would mean!), the public’s enthusiasm falls precipitously. Once the actual price tags of higher gasoline costs at the pump, increased bills for heating and air conditioning, the inconveniences of mandated restrictions on air flights with increased ticket prices, along with possible mileage limits on driving your car to “save the planet,” the numbers of voters supporting a drastic reduction in the standard and quality of life to combat the climate change bogeyman will most likely become far less than what it may be today.
The entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s had a cost of an estimated $25 billion at the time, or about $157 billion in today’s dollars. That paid for all the equipment and material, and around 400,000 people working to help put a total of 12 astronauts on the moon. The Biden administration infrastructure and anti-climate change programs carry a combined price tag of upwards of $4 trillion over the next eight to ten years, if everything proposed were to be implemented and funded. It will require higher taxes and increased prices and reduced living standards far more than that $1 a month that 57 percent of the public said they were willing to pay to “save” the planet.
Exciting Missions for Those Planning to Be the Planners
When Professor Mazzucato says that what the White House is taking on is more complex and intricate than just getting men to the moon, she is telling the truth. The federal government would be basically taking over more direct decision-making for various forms of manufacturing methods, residential and business construction standards, and huge additions to expenditures on health care and welfare redistribution. There would be funding to support unionization of more of the labor force, and subsidies and grants to those in the private sector willing to do the government’s bidding. Not to mention the funding for electric cars and accompanying recharging facilities, along with more funding for Amtrak and broadband internet. Indeed, a number of analysts have made it fairly clear that only a fraction of these trillions would be allocated for what has traditionally been considered road and bridge repair and rebuilding.
The grand national “mission-making” that Professor Mazzucato happily and insistently endorses and demands from the Biden administration reeks with the pungent odor of political power-lusting, special interest corruption, and dictatorial direction of virtually every person’s life. It also carries with it the end to all reasonable and rational economic decision-making throughout the American economy.
One can only read the words of someone like Mariana Mazzucato and sense the euphoric excitement of those who dream dreams of planning the future of the world. Clearly, she views herself among those qualified and destined to tell everyone else how they should and will live. Place her in charge, or at least among the special ones whispering into the ears of those in power who give the “expert” advice without which the world is doomed to live in misery and injustice. (See my article, “If I Ruled the World: A Dangerous Dream”.)
Special Interest Politicking Grows with More and Bigger “Missions”
A spider’s web of government interventions, regulations and controls and commands of the type that must accompany a top-down system of government planning of economic and social life, as implied by Professor Mazzucato’s vision, will inescapably bring with it an intensified institutional setting of special interest favor-seeking and political profit-making.
To the extent to which private enterprises’ revenues and economic survivability is dependent on government spending and regulating and planning, every affected business will have an increased incentive to develop “relationships” with the agencies and its personnel – the overseeing “experts” in the bureaucracies – and with the politicians and their staffers whose decisions and permissions and contract privileges will determine a company’s success or failure. Political connections, and not market competitiveness, becomes increasingly central to every businessman’s attention and intention. (See my article, “Out-of-Control Government: How, Why, and What to Do”.)
More Political Planning Means Less Personal Choice and Freedom
How can the tentacles of government intervention and planning extend so far into the economic activities of every corner of society and not bring with it a decrease in the degree of liberty and freedom of choice of the citizenry in their roles as consumers and producers? As the “senior partner” in these government-business “mission” relationships, the autonomy of individuals on the producer side of the economy necessarily is confined within the targets and goals, the “carrots” and the “sticks” of what those in political authority demand and determine as the direction of economic activity.
Control and command over production by necessity narrows and dictates what is offered to the consuming public and on what terms. The loss of economic liberty carries with it a narrowing of personal choice and self-determination as to how we live and the options offered to us and at what expense; they are taken out of our own hands in the free associations of an open and competitive marketplace and shifted into the political hands of those imposing the top-down directives over all of our lives. In an earlier period of time not too long ago this would have been labeled tyranny and totalitarianism. (See my article, “‘Great National Purposes’ Mean Less Freedom”.)
The Mutual Benefits in Free Market Exchange
Finally, Professor Mazzucato’s government “mission-making” weakens and finally destroys all economic rationality concerning what is to be produced in the society, as well as how and for whom. Since the time of Adam Smith, the virtue of the liberal free-market economy has been understood as leaving each and every individual at liberty to make his own decisions as a consumer and producer. This is made possible due to the institutions of private property, freedom of association and exchange, and unrestricted peaceful and honest competition among all the participants in the social system of division of labor.
Self-interest is harnessed to the general well-being of all those in society by requiring everyone to creatively and effectively find niches for themselves in the arenas of production and trade by which they may acquire the things they want and desire by offering in exchange some good or service willingly taken by others in the agreed-upon buying and selling.
Prices Inform and Coordinate All That People Do
People express what they want and the values they place on the things they desire by the prices they are willing to pay for them. Sellers articulate what they may be willing to produce and sell through the prices at which they offer their goods and services to others in the market. At the same time, competing producers bid for the labor services and resources and capital equipment they may use in their respective lines of production, and those offering their means of production in the pursuit of employment evaluate the alternative prices and wages offered by the rival producers and decide which ones seem most attractive to negotiate over and accept.
The end result is that the prices for finished goods and the prices for the factors of production offer entrepreneurs, private enterprisers, and businessmen the means of determining what to produce and how to produce; that is, prices provide the tools for the “economic calculation” of deciding which lines of production and with what combination of inputs might bring a profit versus a loss, and if there exists potential for profitability; in what ways of producing the chosen good maximizes the net possible gain.
Production is guided into those directions reflecting the most highly valued wants of consumers, and supply-side competition sees to it that the scarce resources of society, including labor, are allocated and applied in ways that tend to utilize them in the most economically efficient and effective ways. Free markets supply what people, in their role as consumers, actually want and are willing to pay for, and each earns an income based on what the market says their services are considered to be worth in their respective roles as producers.
The entire competitive market process and price system sees to it that supplies and demands are tending to match, that information is provided to everyone about what, how and where to be doing things in ever-changing economic circumstances, and that each participant has a fairly wide latitude to make their own decisions in their joint roles as consumer and producer.
Political Planning Making Decision-Making Irrational
Many, if not most or all of these free decisions are to be taken out of people’s hands and coercively transferred to the control of those in political power. The governmental “mission-makers” will now decide what shall be produced and in what ways and for which purposes. Goods produced and supplied will now reflect the ideas of how people like Mariana Mazzucato, in their roles as “experts” advising the government, think these things should be done.
By manipulating prices, setting profit margins, dictating what goods should be produced in what technological ways to meet what they think is good and needed by “society” and “the planet,” the entire economic system loses all reasonable footing for rational decision-making.
Let’s take Professor Mazzucato’s three areas of “mission” concern: the global environment, health care, and income inequality. How and by whom will it be decided that certain relative quantities of resources and labor will be devoted to infrastructure retrofitting versus wind-power turbine construction versus solar power manufacturing, and with what pieces of land for each of these two latter activities versus the uses of that land for residential housing, farming, wildlife preserves, retail shopping needs, or manufacturing sites of things that are considered useful and desirable to be produced by the “mission” planners?
How will these be weighed and considered versus allocations and uses of the scarce resources of the society for health care research, the servicing of patients, and the manufacturing of the medical devices and equipment and facilities connected with the provision of health care needs?
How will all these decisions be made versus a reallocation of income and wealth through tax transfers and in-kind services to those deemed “marginalized” and “unprivileged” and “underrepresented” in society? How will it be decided that not enough disposable income has been redistributed to “people of color” – and since “colors” come in a variety of shades, the determination of what and how much goes to each racial and ethnic “color” group? The same applies to those declaring their chosen gender and sexual orientation. How and who decides the proper “marginal” distribution of employments and relative incomes between “straight” people of color versus white people who are gay or handicapped and who come from differing family income and educational backgrounds?
Who Selects the “Experts” Like Mariana Mazzucato?
And who selects the “experts” like Professor Mazzucato, and on what bases and benchmarks, and how is it known that what they say are the necessary “mission” priorities are the ones to which all in society are to be made to conform? Oh, and by the way, Mariana Mazzucato’s Wikipedia page tells us that she is “Italian-American” and married, and, seemingly, “straight.” Her own home page tells us that she is “on a mission to save capitalism from itself” and that “this economist has a plan to fix capitalism. It is time we all listened.”
Straight? White? Italian-American? Clearly privileged and overrepresented. So what if she tells us how smart and important she is on her own home page? Where is the “person of color” or the gender-marginalized handicapped, gay or lesbian person who should be doing her jobs instead of her? Wait! Italian? Doesn’t that mean that some of her past family members may have been real fascists exploiting and oppressing Libyans and Ethiopians and Somalis in Africa during Mussolini’s time in power? Why has she not been culturally cancelled?
Decision-Making Is Taken Out of Real People’s Hands
All economic and social questions and problems are taken out of the peaceful, voluntary, and private arenas of market exchange and the nongovernmental institutions of civil society. Prices can no longer tell people what their fellow human beings actually want and how much they value it. Individuals cannot pursue ways of earning a living guided by what others might like to buy from them, and sort out how best to do it based on the agreed-up mutual terms of hiring and employing. “The people” are no longer allowed to freely speak to each other through prices, and associate with each other as they find best and most advantageous through the free bargaining and contracting that is otherwise central to an open and competitive free market. (See my article, “Price Controls Attack Freedom of Speech”.)
To the extent that climate changes may be occurring that have negative effects on people in different ways in different parts of the world, the advantage and benefit of the free market system is that changing demands, shifting resource and supply possibilities, and changing terms-of-trade in the relative price structures for inputs and outputs constantly and flexibly incorporates the relevant information and of all the worldwide changing circumstances. Individuals and private enterprises in each and every corner of the global division of labor then have profit-motivated incentives and the personal liberty to utilize their own unique and specialized types of knowledge to competitively discover and bring about the appropriate modifications in what people do, where and in what ways, and with the most cost-efficient uses of resources, capital investments and labor skills to do so. (See my article, “F. A. Hayek and Why Government Can’t Manage Society”.)
We all are, instead, under Professor Mazzucato’s scheme of things, reduced to those manipulated pawns on the great chessboard of society about which Adam Smith once spoke, with the social engineers and political paternalists moving us about and positioning each of us as they think we should be arranged and related to each other, instead of each of us deciding ourselves where we want to be and doing what, in collaborative associations with others, as we peacefully see fit. (See my article, “Adam Smith on Moral Sentiments, Division of Labor, and the Invisible Hand”.)
Yes, Mariana Mazzucato and Joe Biden are on “missions” with “big plans.” But their political missions and their big economic central plans require all of us to give up our own individual and personal plans to be straightjacketed into their compulsory designs for us. We need to remember Adam Smith’s words in The Wealth of Nations, “The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people . . . would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”
ABOUT RICHARD M. EBELINGDr. Richard M. Ebeling is the recently appointed BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel. He was formerly professor of Economics at Northwood University, president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).
It used to be called “State of the Union.” Now it’s a “congressional address”. Very Soviet-like.
His stupid address to the nation doesn’t matter. It’s all totalitarian Communism. There’s no news there. It’s all predictable. It will have to be undermined and fought outside the traditional channels like free elections and free speech BECAUSE WE NO LONGER HAVE THOSE. The healthy thing is to stop dignifying this rigged regime as a legitimate successor to real presidencies. That America is over. The republic has been dying a long time. Face the truth before the stormtroopers of the cabal propping up this demented miscreant literally or figuratively come knocking on your door. Facing the truth, that our republic is dead, does not automatically lead to a solution; but it’s an entirely necessary condition for finding one. Remember: the reality and rationality of individual rights and the Bill of Rights once honored by the American government, more or less, will long outlive these outlaws disguised as “leaders”.
“I don’t remember a time in my lifetime people more divided than they are right now.” — Frank Luntz, long-time pollster
I agree. Why would anyone who cherishes his or her liberty want anything to do with people who don’t care if the Bill of Rights is obliterated — just so their guys are in charge? When I encounter people who support the Communists taking over our country, I am disgusted by them. I think, “YOU stole my freedom.” And that’s personal.
The past, we’re so often told, is a dystopia — a cauldron of backwardness and bigotryApril 28, 2021 | 11:19 pm
Are citizens of liberal societies permitted to question liberalism? In theory, the answer is yes, given liberalism’s commitment to ‘free thought’ and ‘the marketplace of ideas’. Such tolerance is rarely in evidence in practice, however — a reality illustrated in hilarious fashion by a writer for a Washington magazine who recently decried ‘cancel culture’ even as he insisted that: ‘It’s absolutely necessary to de-platform public intellectuals who object to liberal democracy.’
To the liberal mind, to question liberalism risks opening portals to the past, a place populated by tyrannical kings, Catholic inquisitors, Spanish conquistadores, religious warriors, zealous apparatchiks, ‘collectivists’, fascists and sundry other ghastlies. Over the past few years, as voters registered discontent with the global liberal consensus, an entire cottage industry of books, essays and charities has sprung up to warn against revivifying the past.
The past, we’re so often told, is a dystopia — a cauldron of backwardness and bigotry. One that must be repressed at all costs.
Liberals disagree over where exactly lies the line dividing the enlightened time and the dark time. ‘Classical’ liberals tend to mark 1789, whereas ‘progressive’ liberals — noting that much of reality since that watershed year has failed to conform to their own liberal ideal — are uncomfortable with anything not from the present or the future. Hence they now issue fatwas against even the avatars of liberalism’s own recent past (Cher, Dr Seuss, J.K. Rowling, etc).
The current tendency to see the past as a foreign land of endless horrors brings with it periodic bursts of purges and violent iconoclasm — most recently, the statue-toppling of last year. In the realm of ideas, we see the inability of even Christian liberals to tolerate any serious consideration of non-liberal political, economic and cultural arrangements. We see the growing discord in the Anglican Church over once-standard ideas about marriage and gender.
Church and state have long been separated. The ideal is that a new liberal order ushers in a new, rational, tolerant and secular regime: cleaving apart day-to-day politics from religion and metaphysics. So instead of enshrining any one orthodoxy, a liberal neutral ground would be created, one that could be contested by rival accounts of the good life. The religious would be able to live happily beside the unbelievers, with all minorities protected. In this way, the advent of liberalism would — once and for all — put an end to the persecutions of the past.
But has that really come to pass? Given man’s inclination to worship, to build altars in the public square, our societies will always enshrine some orthodoxy or other (and, therefore, empower some clerisy or other). The only questions are: which orthodoxy? Which clerics? If the past couple of years have made anything clear, it is that there is to be no neutrality. The West must choose.
Do we enshrine the orthodoxy of the latest theories on race, sex and gender? Do we empower the woke clerisy, the army of blue-check Twitterati and HR managers who can destroy careers and lives in a matter of minutes over the smallest of ideological infractions, and whose judgments are subject to no reasoned appeal and no code of canon law? Do we live under their new blasphemy laws, ostensibly designed to prohibit ‘hate speech’?
Or do we choose the more forgiving, perhaps old-fashioned orthodoxy that sustained western culture for the better part of two millennia? The Judeo-Christian values and institutions that venerated natural reason, that by their discipline tamed the big and small would-be tyrants of Europe, reminding them that there exists a higher power than theirs? You don’t need to be religious to think that, on balance, this world view has put us in pretty good stead so far — and is worth keeping now.
It’s tempting to imagine that there is no choice — or to defer the choice for ever. This excuse for doing so is precisely that the present is the best of all possible worlds, while any attempt to preserve the past means clinging to unremitting horrors. For the liberal, to evoke a bedrock pre-modern concept such as the common good — much less the highest good — is to summon those various demons that good progressive liberal values were supposed to have vanquished.
Anyone, left or right, calling today’s progressive order into question — or daring to propose alternatives — is first asked to apologize for these horrors, stretching from antiquity to whenever enlightened time began (which may be as recently as a couple of years ago). This is a type of intellectual blackmail, and the best defense against it is to go on the offense: no, it’s the actually existing present that increasingly resembles a dystopia, and the onus is on the liberal to give account and apology. The non-liberal’s rejoinder can be summed up with three simple words: look around you.
Look around you: has liberalism delivered on its own terms, on its promise of neutrality between world views? How’s the liberty of the church faring amid lockdowns and renewed threats to force American nuns to pay for abortifacients? Why are churches told they can no longer run adoption services if they refuse to follow the liberal view on sexuality? Why was a Catholic priest expelled from a Glasgow university campus because he held a prayer meeting protest on the day of a Pride march? This is not a sign of neutrality, but one world view crushing another.
Look around you: if a 200-plus-year-old newspaper like the New York Post (where I work) can be censored ahead of an election for posting a true story about Hunter Biden, how safe are you from the censors and cancelers? Does it make any meaningful difference that in liberal societies, the repression is meted out by large, privately owned corporations, rather than a centralized state? Do a Silicon Valley dweeb’s Birkenstock sandals taste any better than a junta commandant’s boots?
Look around you: when was the last time you felt like you lived in a pluralistic, tolerant society? Does the Free World feel free? Four centuries or so since it was launched, has the liberal project delivered on its promise to make men and women free, by toppling all the old authorities? Or has the downfall of authority left us more vulnerable to more insidious and subtle forms of coercion, by woke demagogues, employers and advertisers?
Look around you: does our marketplace of ideas resemble anything like that promised by the bewigged liberals of the late-18th and 19th centuries? Does truth prevail over its cacophony of nonsense? Set aside the teaching of Genesis, whatever happened to the basic teachings of biology and genetics about the immutability of sex? (Don’t ask Richard Dawkins, just cancelled by the American Humanist Association for daring to question gender ideology.)
Look around you: do today’s eye-watering wealth and power inequalities suggest that liberalism has done away with social hierarchies? Or has it rather empowered an especially selfish class of owners and managers, their rapaciousness made all the more galling by their woke and ‘meritocratic’ pretensions?
It won’t do for the ‘classical’ liberal to insist that these phenomena are gross distortions of some aboriginal version of his ideology. After a while, he begins to sound like the Trotskyist circa 1936 who, as evidence mounted of show trials, camps and NKVD torture, insisted that none of these crimes could be laid at the feet of ‘original’ Marxism.
At some point, the liberal has to admit that the powdered-wig version of his ideology contained in it the seeds of its woke, repressive variety: that enshrining individual autonomy and choice as the highest goods of human life would eventually create the conditions for a kind of private tyranny, precisely what the common-good tradition of classical and Christian thought had always warned about and sought to restrain.
The past, in a realistic frame, is a mix of light and dark. Remove the rosy glasses of liberalism, however, and it is the present that looks more dark than
How can America unite again to do great things if we are led by people who believe America suffers from a great sickness of the soul, an original sin that dates back to her birth as a nation?
Consider.
After his long night of prayer for “the right verdict” to be pronounced — Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts — Joe Biden stepped before the White House cameras to tell us what it all meant.
George Floyd’s death, said Biden, “was a murder in the full light of day, and it ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism… that is a stain on our nation’s soul — the knee on the neck of justice for Black Americans.”
Astonishing. Biden is saying that when Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes as the life drained out of him, the world, for once, was getting a good, close look at the diseased soul of America.
What Chauvin was doing to Floyd, said the president of the United States, is a reflection of the kind of justice America delivers to Black Americans.
This is no aberration, Biden was saying. This is the routine reality.
Biden was introduced by Kamala Harris, who said much the same:
“America has a long history of systemic racism. Black Americans and Black men in particular have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human.”
At Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield delivered what The Wall Street Journal called, “a recitation of America’s sins (that) could have come from China’s Global Times.”
Said Thomas-Greenfield:
“I have… seen for myself how the original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles. … Racism is the problem of the racist. And it is the problem of the society that produces the racist.”
What our diplomat to the world is saying is that our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights are interwoven with white supremacy and that America, to this day, continues to breed racists.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at a Congressional Black Caucus event after the verdict, turned her eyes heavenward in gratitude:
“Thank you, George Floyd, for sacrificing your life for justice….For being there to call out to your mom — how heartbreaking was that … And because of you … your name will always be synonymous with justice.”
Implication: Floyd died to redeem America of her original sin of racism.
All in all, quite a commentary on our leaders.
For, again, our president and vice president are saying that this people and country still suffer from a sickness of the soul that dates back to its formative days.
The 1960s radicals who vilified our country as “Amerika” were rightly called “anti-American.” Today, the difference between what they said about America and what our highest elected leaders are saying is hard to discern.
Our enemies have picked up on this. In Anchorage, after Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Beijing out for repression in Hong Kong and “genocide” in Xinjiang, China’s foreign minister was right back in his face.
You Americans should look to your own sins and clean up your house before lecturing the world on political morality, he said. Today, that Chinese foreign minister could cite Biden and Harris as his chief witnesses that America is a nation sick in its soul.
We hear our leaders’ attacks on America. Where is their defense?
What other nation has provided the same measures of personal and political freedoms and material blessings for 40 million Black people as has the United States?
If people of color are treated “as less than human” in America, as Harris says, why are so many people of color seeking desperately to get across our Southern border to build their future here?
What is the real truth about race in America that goes unmentioned in the mainstream media’s endless hunt for encounters between Black men and white cops?
The main perpetrators of violent crimes against Black Americans — are other Black Americans. Black men, ages 16 to 40, are 3% of the U.S. population but commit roughly a third of America’s violent crimes.
Defund police, restrict police, remove police and you will get more of what the police prevent — crimes, especially violent crimes, in your community.
When Biden and Harris spoke of “systemic racism” afflicting our society, they were not describing their enlightened selves. And it was Hillary Clinton who identified the people the leftist elites have in mind:
“You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. … The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. … Some of those folks… are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”
What Clinton, Biden and Harris are all saying is that, though the moral sickness of racism pervades our society, we are the vaccinated ones.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 