Optimism, Pessimism, and Hypocrisy

Maintaining the image of two alien races, unable to even ponder learning from each other, a site maintained by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called “Red Feed, Blue Feed” claims to present Liberal Facebook vs Conservative Facebook rants side by side… and let YOU decide! 

At a glance, it clearly supports the Fox narrative, that we must choose between extreme narratives(!!!) And heaven-forbid actually negotiating with each other, finding middle ground like adults. 

This dichotomy-of-demonization is how politics -- one of our civilization's key problem-solving methods, along with free markets and individual endeavor -- has been deliberately killed in the United States. And it reveals the foremost (among many) reason why Rupert Murdoch is the principle enemy of any calm, rational and grownup American republic.

Let me restate that to be clear. If you believe the sole Murdochian agenda is to support an ever-more extreme confederate right-wing, then you only perceive the surface. Sure, the lobotomization of American conservatism commanded by Rupert and Clear Channel svengalis certainly did lead to today's frothing, hydrophobic GOP phenomenon. 

But no. The actual purpose is made clear by Red Feed, Blue Feed.

To destroy politics as an pragmatic, grownup American approach to negotiating and resolving new solutions to onrushing 21st Century problems. Stop focusing only on surfaces and slogans! Look at the actual, actual effects.   

The opposite of the Murdochs is not eloi liberalism, that is now rife with its own cynical dogmatists.  The opposite of crippling pessimism is...

When Did Optimism Become Uncool? In the New York Times, Gregg Easterbrook, author of “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse,” points out the corner into which we’ve painted ourselves, emphasizing and exaggerating bad news while frenetically ignoring any good. An irony since the latter arguably far outweighs the former. 

Subjectively - to heed all the carping and grousing from every end of the spectrum - we are in terrible times, with a “glass” that is nearly empty. Objectively, the glass turns out to be significantly more than half full.

Easterbrook writes, “Job growth has been strong for five years, with unemployment now below where it was for most of the 1990s, a period some extol as the “good old days.” The American economy is No. 1 by a huge margin, larger than Nos. 2 and 3 (China and Japan) combined. Americans are seven times as productive, per capita, as Chinese citizens. The dollar is the currency the world craves — which means other countries perceive America’s long-term prospects as very good.

“Pollution, discrimination, crime and most diseases are in an extended decline; living standards, longevity and education levels continue to rise. The American military is not only the world’s strongest, it is the strongest ever. The United States leads the world in science and engineering, in business innovation, in every aspect of creativity, including the arts. Terrorism is a serious concern, but in the last 15 years, even taking into account Sept. 11, an American is five times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be killed by a terrorist.

"Is the middle class in dire straits, as Mr. Sanders contends? Yes, inflation-adjusted middle-class household income peaked in 1998 and has dropped slightly since. But during the same period, federal income taxes on the middle class went down, while benefits went up. Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution has shown that when lower taxes and higher benefits are factored in, middle-class buying power has risen 36 percent in the current generation.

“Is American manufacturing in free fall, as Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump assert? Figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show industrial output a tad below an all-time record level, while nearly double the output of the Reagan presidency, another supposed golden age. It’s just that advancing technology allows more manufacturing with fewer workers — a change unrelated to foreign competition.”

To be clear, while I agree with most of Easterbrook’s points, and even with much of what the king of optimism - Peter Diamandis - says in his book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, that does not make me a Pollyanna without deep and fretful worries!

  It is not their lack of purchasing power that is demolishing the American middle class, but their perception that they’ve lost their central standing in American life.  To Trump supporters, the blame falls on rising immigrants.  To anyone sensible, it is blatantly because an uber-oligarchy has seized the reins, using lies like Supply Side “economics” to justify their hell-bent drive toward feudalism.

To re-parse Easterbrook’s point, things aren’t anywhere near as bad as we’re saying in mass media today… but they are nowhere near as good as they’d be if, say, high-velocity money were circulating through excellent middle class jobs repairing a decaying U.S. infrastructure… a flow vastly more (obviously) beneficial than trillions in outright gifts to the rich have been, since Reagan. 

And of course, that is exactly why the Republican Congress refuses to fund infrastructure repair.

Read the original article. Especially where Easterbrook lays into liberals for buying into these sick-alluring pessimism trips: “while addressing issues such as inequality, greenhouse emissions and the condition of public schools — will require optimism. Pessimists think in terms of rear-guard actions to turn back the clock. Optimists understand that where the nation has faults, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

Easterbrook concludes, “The lack of optimism in contemporary liberal and centrist thinking opens the door to Trump-style demagogy, since if the country really is going to hell, we do indeed need walls. 

"And because optimism has lost its standing in American public opinion, past reforms — among them environmental protection, anti-discrimination initiatives, income security for seniors, auto and aviation safety, interconnected global economics, improved policing and yes, Obamacare — don’t get credit for the good they have accomplished.”

Recently Warren Buffett said that because of the “negative drumbeat” of politics, “many Americans now believe their children will not live as well as they themselves do. That view is dead wrong: The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.”

Of course, one of the key books to arm you simmering optimists, so that you can finally rise up in rage and take back civilization from cynics of both right and left, is Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.  You will come away filled with righteous wrath against those who are weakening our can-do spirit, just when humanity seems on the verge of solving so many problems.

Oh, and a final note for this section: Nicolas Gruen on Adam Smith: “Smith was the original theorist of my subject—emergent public goods—explaining how language, culture and markets are all public goods; how they are an emergent property of life itself.  (Later, by design, we got) new largely government provided public goods enhancing public order, financial stability, scientific knowledge, public health, transport , communications and standards like weights and measures.” - Nicholas Gruen is Head of Lateral Economics, based in Melbourne. 

== Those who thrive on ultimate pessimism ==

I’ve long maintained that we should encourage the “henchman effect”… where villainous cabals are ruined from within, when some lackey gets fed-up and decides to tell-all. The Panama Papers leak is a major recent example.  Many would cite Edward Snowden. Better legislation could entice whistleblowers down pathways that both protect and offer the benefits of orderly due process.

Is the Alt-Right for real? The latest example worth pondering came when Colin Lokey confessed to Bloomberg that he had been running a supposedly populist online site called Zero Hedge that was actually a front for two wealthy financial analysts.  “Lokey was required to push certain basics: “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry= dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.” 

For Zero Hedge, Syria was a special obsession, a sign of the essential strength of authoritarian regimes and the weakness of democracies. (e.g. “Putin Is Winning the Final Chess Match with Obama.”)  In other words, ballsy-blatant propaganda to discourage citizens believing in themselves or our democratic Great Experiment.

(In fact, this cult of Putin-worship is hilarious.) 

This article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells (from the New Yorker) talks about the layers under Zero-Hedge. Uber-rich dudes who got their lucre parasitically, attempting to rile the rabble while skulking behind a populist mask, with Lokey as their ghost-writer… all of it in a core element of the movement that’s been called “alt-right” — which cranks the Limbaugh-Fox ethos to Trumpist levels and then beyond, to open and overt racism. Alt-right exists mostly online, and so it is shrouded in pseudonyms, but I know some of them personally and have found that their agenda goes all the way to weird — not just contempt for democracy and all its tainted works, but nostalgia for royalty! Yes, for kings n’ such.

The article hits things on the head, when it blames some of the raging assholery on a giggling eagerness to discover what they can get away with, like extolling Holocaust themes. But the drives go deeper. Both bored and resentful of the generous, gentle civilization that gave them everything, these fellows go beyond insipid ingratitude and hatred of fact-based innovations like science. Their deepest motivation is masturbatory fantasy. Knowing that a few males in the past got such things, they envision themselves owning harems, and draw consolation by declaring hatred of the kindliness and generosity they grew up in, but that now prevents them from enslaving nubile females and getting their due.

Of course, anyone who has met some of these fellows knows the truth.  That none of them would be post-apocalyptic kings… or top dogs in a dog-eat-dog world. Nor would they even likely become bitches. In truth, only one word describes what their role would be, these pimply-dreamy-whining ingrates.  Kibble.

And more....

Abortion rates have dropped dramatically in the past 25 years to historic lows in wealthy countries, but dipped only slightly in poorer developing nations, according to a global study published recently.  In other words… if you generously help to uplift poor women, the problem begins to solve itself. Educated and confident and empowered, they need or demand abortion with ever-greater rarity.

This incremental reduction is anathema to those who need the abortion issue as their one claim at moral high ground. It only reinforces their demand for total prohibition because “even one is too many.”  

Only… in that case why is every single abortion-limiting piece of legislation recently passed in Red America … incremental?  Nibbling at the credentials of abortion providing clinics and forcing women to drive farther, but having very little effect on rates? Sometimes hypocrisy lies in such details.

In Business Insider, Nick Hanauer reports on a new study of “78 years of minimum-wage hikes have produced zero evidence of the "job-killing" consequences headline writers want us to fear.”  See: Raise Wages, Kill Jobs? Seven Decades of Historical Data Find No Correlation Between Minimum Wage Increases and Employment Levels.  

A Plague of Outrage

A while back, I referred to this book: “The Outrage Industry: Political Opinion Media and the New Incivility” by Jeffrey M. Barry and Sarah Sobieraj.  An interesting rumination on how political disagreements unfold in American media can be found in Salon Online: How Right-wing Media Spiraled out of control, excerpted from the book. Skim past a lengthy and somewhat tendentious introduction about Michelle Bachman, and head to the meat, where the authors suggest that our current Era of Outrage is rather unprecedented and driven by deliberate incitement in media that are out of all proportion or control.

Especially interesting is a historical survey of how TV news used to be a forum for consensus and how shows like William F. Buckley's Firing Line encouraged debate that was constructive and mostly civil:

"Firing Line emerged in the context of these dramatic and often divisive events. The program was a one-hour debate-style public affairs show hosted by conservative William F. Buckley, during which Buckley posed challenging questions of the day to high-profile guests ranging from Hugh Hefner to Noam Chomsky. The interviews were interesting, with a more adversarial tone than found in network news and yet markedly more civilized than today’s cable news analysis shows. Questions were thoughtful, answers tended to be substantive, and those involved treated one another respectfully. Disagreement was ever present, but disparagement was rare.

“Firing Line” is noteworthy not only because it created space for extended exchange of political opinion on television, but also because it aired for over 30 years. “Agronsky and Company,” which debuted a few years later, but had less durability, also began to offer opinion-laden public affairs programming on television with a recurring slate of combatants who would reliably disagree with more personality than was typical of other news-based content of the time, though still in a far more respectful manner than is characteristic in similar formats in the outrage era."

It is an interesting essay by Berry and Sobieraj -- a chapter from their book -- though I might demur from some of its assertions… e.g. that there was not an Outrage Industry in earlier eras.  One has only to look at the almost uniformly noxious press that fomented treason in the South before the Civil War. (Newspapers that drifted from the Slave-o-crats' party line were burned.  Indeed, the principal complaint and grievance mentioned in nearly all documents declaring secession was fury over the stubborn refusal of Northern states to quell freedom of press and close down abolitionist papers.)

Other periods saw the swell and fume of "yellow journalism"  that stoked bitter rage and stymied sober debate. Indeed, one of these intervals encompassed the first two decades of the American Republic.

Still, the authors' point is well-made. We boomers grew up in a golden age of journalism that, ironically, was undermined by the generally wondrous advances in electronic media that have freed us to wander out of the paternalistic firelight of journalist-professionals.  Inevitably, along with the good aspects (e.g. being able to research any topic independently and gather points of view from all over the globe) we have also seen wretched things like the consolidation of millions of rivetted followers, stoked on monochrome opinion and hate, via subsidized cable and radio "news." Systems that create, in effect diatribe-based  "nuremberg rallies". Given the addictive allure of indignation -- and freed from any Fairness Doctrine requirement to show all sides -- we had all the ingredients for a genuine plague of outrage.

Have a look and then grasp that this destruction of adult discourse in the United States was almost entirely deliberate, sabotaging the political negotiation and problem-solving systems that had served the republic for two centuries.  There is no clearer case of treason.

== A case in point ==

David Frum is far from the cleverest of the high-IQ-but-dingbat students of Leo Strauss who came to be known as "neo-cons" in the late 1990s and early 2000s,  members of an arrogant-triumphalist wing of conservatism who thought they ruled the roost, amid the dawning years of the George W. Bush presidency. In those heady times, especially right after the events of 9/11 filled them with a bracing sense of mission and empowerment, men like Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman concocted grand rationalizations for why America should rush to do what it had sworn never to do again, after Vietnam -- plunging into vast, decadal, land-wars of insurgency in Asia. Two such wars, pouring arterial gushers of national wealth, prestige, honor and lives into distant desert sands. Wars that left the battlefield s owned by bitter foes of the U.S.

It was the coterie of neocons who provided grand, Straussian incantations, proclaiming for America a sense of imperial mission -- not the mild-consensus Pax Americana designed by Marshall, Acheson, Truman and Eisenhower, but an aggressively-resolute, romanesque imperium, unashamedly applying Manichaean power to transform the world any way their dear leader - George Bush - desired.

And if those lunges into middle-eastern quicksand happened to be exactly what Osama bin Laden and every enemy of the U.S. wanted us to do? Especially a certain petro-kingdom whose influence over the Dear Leader was near-total, and who also provided most of the 9/11 attackers?  No matter.  It is a tragedy of human existence that (as we also saw among the communists) high IQs and the ability to craft polysyllabic conjurations offer no protection against irony.

It can be hard to look back a whole ten years or more to the heyday and then sudden collapse of neoconservatism, but in retrospect we can see it as a shining era for the last intellectuals of the American Right. At last, they had their revenge upon those Che-tee-shirt-wearing leftist students who had trashed their offices and driven them away from real universities, into the welcoming arms of faux-academies like Heritage… where they willingly crafted whatever rationalizations that were asked of them.  In those heady times, they could ignore the grave spinning of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, as every principle of true, erudite conservatism was handily reversed.

Sic transit gloria. By 2004, the neocons had been tossed aside like used tissue, as their nerdiness grew vexing to Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. Verbose concoctions -- even crazy ones -- no longer fit the narrative that all smartypants types are enemies. From scientists to teachers, medical doctors, journalists, economists, civil servants, law professionals, skilled labor, professors… name one exception… the populist, know-nothing theme on Fox and Right-Radio became hate all elites except the rich.  And yes, that applied even to intellectual courtesans of the no-longer "neo" right. Most of whom slunk away into obscurity, once more --

-- but not David Frum, who has spent recent years inveighing against the lobotomization of his movement.  Far from converting to liberalism, Frum has been among those on the American right with the guts to stand up to Rupert Murdoch, joining others at The American Conservative in appraising what went wrong, how it all got hijacked, and how to rescue something from the murdochian flames.

Frum's latest sally is interesting, an appeal for the reader to look back to the roots of the "left-right" axis and terms like "liberal" and "conservative. In particular, he points to the debates between English parliamentarian Edmund Burke and Anglo-American polemicist Thomas Paine. Frum argues that gradually (I would say recently, and in large part because of the neocons) the entire meaning of Conservatism has undergone a process of reversal, so that many of the virtues professed by Burke are now rejected utterly, in Tea Party America.

I do not endorse all… or even most … of the insights offered by Mr. Frum.  But I found them interesting and a welcome (if brief) look back to days when "conservative" and "intellect" weren't antonyms.

== Conservative media in turmoil ==

Continuing on this… I oft remark that Arizona and New York are drawing copious electricity from coils arranged around the spinning in the graves of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr., both of whom growled and denounced the trends that were hijacking their beloved -- (and once-upon-a-time intellectual) -- movement.  Now it seems that New York can crank up their power draw a bit…

"The National Review magazine, longstanding house news organ of the establishment right, is facing a lawsuit that could shutter the publication (originally founded by Buckley with money he inherited) permanently. According to The Week, a suit by a climate scientist threatens to bankrupt the already financially shaky publication and its website, the National Review Online (NRO)."

So are we stuck with Fox News to represent the undead, were-thing that has taken over the American right?

As I mentioned above, have a look at the manifesto of The American Conservative, a journal that appears to be trying hard to resurrect the notion of a US conservative movement that argues constructively with their liberal neighbors, without kowtowing to a far right that is controlled by plutocrats and worshippers of aristocracy.

The American Conservative will not be a liberal's cup of tea! Indeed, it still lapses often into rants that betray its roots in a co-founder… one Patrick Buchanon. I do not promise more than one article in ten will rise above baloney.  But even that ratio 'be a blessing,' nowadays… and some of you, propelled (as I am) by curiosity and a desire to hear all sides, will drop in, now and then.

There are embers and glimmers of sanity among our neighbors over there!  Don't denigrate.  Help our "ostrich conservative" friends and neighbors to lift their heads and gradually move away from Fox-induced mania. Help fan the flames of a rebellion against the monsters who have hijacked the once intellectually cogent movement of Buckley and Goldwater.

== More on Divisive Politics ==

What's behind this modern plague of political wrath? Jonathan Haidt, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, best known for his “moral foundations” theory,  has applied science to  appraising why differences in personality and choice of moral foundations affect the more superficial political leanings of liberals, conservatives and libertarians.  It's actually quite fascinating and sufficiently neutral that most liberals and conservatives nod and say "yeah, that's me."

Climate change: another divisive topic. See this fascinating discussion of how the rapidly changing Arctic will provoke a cascade of secondary effects, from conflicts over resources in the Arctic Shelf to shipping changes to the release of trillions of pounds of methane from melting permafrost.  There are no Naval officers who deny climate change. All are aware that conservatism no longer connects to our strategic needs at any points of overlap.

Welcome to the future? See: The Poor Deserve Equal Protection by the Law:  "Businesses and economic elites in developing countries left frustrated by incompetent police, clogged courts and hopelessly overburdened judges and prosecutors are increasingly circumventing these systems and buying their own protection. In India in late 2010 the private security industry already employed more than 5.5 million people — roughly four times the size of the entire Indian police force. A 2009 World Bank report showed roughly the same ratio in Kenya. The largest employer in all of Africa is a private security firm, Group4Securicor, and in Guatemala, private security forces outnumber public police 7 to 1."

Do we want that for our world?

Back to Modernism: Under Assault from All Sides (Part 11)

Departing from the spasmodic passion of political blogging (lest we despair over the blatant run-up toward unnecessary war with IRAN) let us now return to the serialized essay on modernism.

My detailed arguments about this administration's ideological and other motives can be found on two essay-sites: 

NeoConservatism, Islam and Ideology: The Real Culture War 

and 

War in the 21st Century: Maturity vs. Neocon Panic and the True Role of Pax Americana 


Modernism Part 11: Under Assault from All Sides

Last time, in Part 10: How Liberalism has betrayed Modernity I talked about the slow but steady alienation that has grown between two former allies, the liberal left and progressive modernism. This chasm is not as total and devastating (yet) as the one on the other side.

 The Democratic Party is still marginally led by modernist pragmatists. But the selection of Howard Dean as party chairman shows which way the wind is blowing. Soon, not a single national political institution will remain un-radicalized by one form or another of romanticism.

Of course we have seen extreme examples on the left, who at times make Jerry Falwell sound like a believer in tolerance and science! The latest poster boy for the "Romantic Che" complex is Ward Churchil, who compared denizens of the Twin Towers to Eichmann. The neocons love guys like this because they serve as wonderful strawmen-bogeymen, helping to consolidate their hypnotic hold over decent, conservative Americans who might otherwise notice their leaders' monstrous habits.

In my last posting, I spoke of how the growing romanticism of the left began banishing former allies - space, nuclear power, engineers, the military, the churches.

And then... "Liberalism began reflexively assuming that everything white, rural or suburban, bourgeois, American, or socially demure was automatically suspect, until people with those traits began responding with hostility of their own. The very word “liberal” became a weapon in the hands of its enemies. And when this happened, the movement’s elites only made things worse by diagnosing that the common citizens had been brainwashed by propaganda. Contempt for the masses, invigorating and satisfying, thereupon displayed its deadly side-effect -- political suicide."

Meanwhile, scientists were being driven off by conservatism. For that movement, too, had been taken over by dogmatists. By a triple alliance of groups who actively hate science and all that it represents.

  --By a clique of aristocratic kleptocrats who do not believe in economics.

  --By apocalyptic sects that reject geology and biology.

  --By neoconservative imperialists who repudiate climatology, ecology, chemistry, pharmacology and... ultimately... history.

Why has nobody commented on this? The Left has nothing but contempt for engineers, spurning can-do projects in favor of a single party line prescription for saving the world. Puritanical conservation. We must quickly abandon our cars and shiver in the dark. (Political suicide, but boy does it feel virtuous.)

Meanwhile, the Right - while willing to pay engineers for near-term guns and toys - will have no truck with ambitious research into technologies that might save a planet through assertive conservation -- vastly improved efficiency standards and sustainable energy supplies.

Neoconservatives smile and shrug at petitions signed by scores of Nobel Prize winners, since egghead boffins obviously cannot possess any common sense. The neocons’ oft-expressed contempt for objective reality -- as opposed to a subjective/ideological model of the world -- mimics that of the postmodernist left with eerie perfection. (Foucault or Leo Strauss? The common theme is a belief that elites can redefine reality however they like, as a matter of magical will.)

(As they have redefined "freedom." And now they are talking themselves into redefining IRAN….)


==Extremes of both Left and Right==

While rejecting science, both movements are infested with romantic nostalgia for a better past-that-never-was. The future cannot be a realm of promise and opportunity.

Oh, there are differences. The Left is certainly sincere in fretting about tomorrow’s dangers.

 But meanwhile, no one seems to notice how closely their dark forebodings of ecological collapse resemble the apocalyptic visions of right-wingers who confidently expect an imminent end to this world, amid a reckoning foretold in the Book of Revelation. (See my essay, Whose Rapture?)

These gloomy visions are not only eerily similar, they are chillingly compatible.

                                                                ***

... next in Part 12... Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood: fanaticism in fiction illustrates the alliance of romantics against science...

Or return to Part 1 of this series: The Radical Notion of Modernism: Is it relevant for the Twenty-first Century?

---

David Brin

Website: http://www.davidbrin.com

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