What’s Wrong with the World

Compare and contrast, that is, two comics originating from opposite ends of the sociological and ideological spectra, that nonetheless manifest a curious dispositional similarity: Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Inhospitable Political Environments, a graphic novel detailing the exploits of Choice Girl (perhaps Mark Shea's coinage; I''ll not be purchasing a copy for verification...) against fundamentalists and other anti-abortion retrogrades, who are portrayed as stereotyped African natives (select images at Shea's blog), and this, er, classic of Protestant anti-Catholic bigotry, which lingers over the damnation of all those Christians who have not trusted in the proper verbal formulae.

Numerous are the ways in which these two specimens could be analogized and disanalogized to one another. I'll just mention their longing for a sort of Summing Up, a Great Reckoning, at which the reprobate will be requited with the damnation that is theirs - a will to eschatological finality, and the belief that one already possesses the understanding thereof. It is an atmosphere alien to fine literature of orthodox Christian extraction.

Five years ago this day, President Bush executed a landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, following the exploit with a speech delivered before a banner reading "Mission Accomplished". The speech proclaimed the end of combat operations.

In commemoration of this august occasion, Clark Stooksbury treats the reader to a selection of delectable quotes, which adjudge Bush to be one of our greatest Presidents, and express the hope that other similar deeds of world-historical greatness will be performed throughout the Near East. It wasn't, though, merely the Respectable Right which swooned that day, but the media much more generally, as Leon Hadar reminds us. Kool-Aid was an exceedingly popular commodity in those days, which demonstrates that the hubris and hegemonism the left would like to pin on Bush and the Republicans is a bipartisan phenomenon, the veritable world-image of the establishment.

Only the far left (and this perhaps incidentally; in politics, one can begin with dodgy premises and yet arrive at the correct conclusions) and the so-called unpatriotic conservatives possessed both conviction and prescience, the latter ridiculed at the time as the oldthought of those who could not grasp that Bush's bold policies created their own realities. Frum himself was shortly to retreat from the implications of his own malodorous effusion, effectively defining a lack of patriotism down into mere defeatism, a euphemism meaning 'skepticism concerning the wisdom and prudence of administration policies, and their prospects of success.' There was something inadvertently prophetic in that elision, something all too characteristic of what the Respectable Right became in the Bush years, when one's loyalty to, and love of, country could be deconstructed because one opposed government policy; government and country were identified; no, more than this, country and president were identified.

That carrier landing was profoundly symbolic, not only of the world-historical folly of an administration, but of the entire atmosphere of those times, in which support for the policies of one man (and the machiavels advisors behind him) could be made a synecdoche for the country. What is disquieting is the realization that present distempers may not be due to the recognition of the folly of such things, but rather to the dispelling of the illusion. We relish that Kool-Aid, and resent mornings-after for coming.

The Senate has passed legislation ostensibly banning discrimination on the basis of genetic testing results. I suppose that the devil will lie in wait in the details, as always, but I must confess to some degree of bafflement at Richard Spencer's reaction:

The fact is, genes affect susceptibility to disease, and genetic testing can help pinpoint just how and to what degree and thus help insurance companies design specific regimes for specific clients. Washington’s banning of testing simply means that we’ll all be paying higher premiums in order to account for the added risk companies bear due to their taking on certain patients who could easily have been put on different plans.

As I've suggested, this will defeat the rationale of insurance in principle, and increasingly in practice; let's say that this shift will constitute an ideal which increasing precision will enable us to approach. Now, as I've also suggested in numerous discussions, we're not about to go all Dickensian, abolishing all forms of social provision and solidarity (at least, I won't bet on it), and if the 'private' insurance industry prices large percentages of the population out of its services (and there is no way that genetic testing will not do this), pressures for political provision will mount, as they are presently, even in the absence of widespread anxiety over genetic testing. This legislation may be horridly crafted, for all I know; I might even wager on that. However, something like it may be a bulwark against the eventual imposition of socialized medicine, in this case an explicit dual system, such as exists in Britain: private physicians for the well-to-do and well, public clinics for the poor and ill.

Genetics cannot be banned; neither will the advance of the science be halted. However, neither can every human good, and every aspect of human fate, be subjected to the unmediated discipline of market mechanisms, as Karl Polanyi would say. The attempt to do so would not only cause enormous suffering, but would actually increase pressures for overtly socialistic measures, which will... cause suffering. Some goods are at least partly public, in other words, and this reality cannot be expunged. It is only the sick who need a physician, and not the healthy.

Following up on the previous post, I should note that Morning's Minion of Vox Nova takes aim at John McCain's health-care proposals, and that on grounds virtually identical to those I cited in opposition to genetic screening as a condition of coverage:

As Ezra Klein notes, this is health insurance for people who don’t need health care. It relies on the idea that insurance should be based on actuarial principles, tying cost to individual risk. Therefore the private market (with products like health savings accounts) can be a very good deal to the young and the healthy, but does very little to those in most need of health care. It is a classic example of where the free market simply does not work, and can be highly unethical. Instead of actuarial insurance, we should strive for social insurance, which is basically risk pooling: the young and healthy subsidize the old and sick, secure in the knowledge that they will be taken care of in a similar situation.

Part of the reason genetic testing is controversial is because by providing greater information granularity it is detrimental to 'insurance' understood under one voice (that of providing low-cost health care to people who otherwise could not afford it) and yet beneficial to 'insurance' under other voices (that of providing on-average-more-expensive care but with protection from catastrophic loss, sometimes employing diagnostic/preventive measures).

I am a 1978 graduate of Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. Soon after I returned to the Catholic Church in May 2007, I was invited by Gorman's Faith Formation Committee to speak to the school's students, parents, teachers and administrators about my spiritual journey. I will be giving that talk next Wednesday on May 7, 2008 at Gorman's new campus in Summerlin (a suburb of Las Vegas). Information about the talk can be found here.

If you are in the Las Vegas area, I encourage you to attend. It is free and open to the public.

This is as good a time as any to announce that I have signed a contract with Brazos Press to publish a book about my pilgrimage. I am just about finished with the nearly 65,000 word manuscript. It will be released in November 2008, with the tentative title, Confessions of a Vain Philosopher: Reflections on My Return to the Catholic Church.

It is impossible not to be sympathetic to the idea that when someone does manifest damage to the commons, he ought to pay for that damage. Environmental regulations can of course be a subterfuge, a political tool used on false pretenses to sieze power for other purposes. But the fact that a thing can be misused does not dismiss it from public discourse tout court. When the damage to the commons is particularly acute and particularly manifest, it seems to me that it is not unreasonable to place the cost burden for that damage on those who, through their own deliberate and free choices in pursuit of their own benefit, do violence to what is not their own but rather belongs to us all.

For that reason, I suggest that divorced people should pay higher taxes - say a 5% kicker on top of their income taxes - than those who are childlessly single and those who are married to their first spouse. If fault is found in a particular divorce the higher tax rates could apply to the at-fault spouse. If the divorce is no-fault, the higher tax rates could apply to either or both spouses: to whomever chose to pursue the divorce.

How long should the higher tax rate last? Ideally it would last for as long as the damage inflicted on the commons lasted. But given the realities of life in this fallen and mortal world, we are unable to levy taxes on the dead.

It's because g-ddamn Charles Murray always seems to say all that needs saying about everything that really matters to me before I can get my posterior in gear to say it myself.

I'm looking for something to add to his essay on the utter insanity of "No Child Left Behind": "The age of educational romanticism" - and, perhaps, in due course, I'll come up with a relevant anecdote or two, since I was working in the trenches of the public schools, while he observed from on high.

But, in the meantime, all I can say is: read the whole thing.

It took a thousand years (give or take) for Western civilization to ascend from this:

to this:

Back in March, in response to a discussion that unfolded here at W4, as well as a typically thoughtful essay written by Jim Manzi and published in the dead-tree and digital editions of National Review (though not NR Online), I postulated that the intersection of globalization and our cultural superstitions and taboos about intelligence and education was precipitating a legitimation crisis, in which the downward mobility of the below-average, average, and even many of the above-average would collide with fabulist visions of universal upward mobility in the New Economy. Among other things, I wrote that

As regards the new economy of services, high finance, and god-king CEOs, highly remunerative compensation ultimately correlates with cognitive ability - this was the primary thesis of The Bell Curve, for those who remember - and this fact, operating in tandem with deindustrialization and globalization, both increases the rewards accruing to the cognitive elite and decreases returns to the average, who increasingly find themselves in competition with the average masses of nations at much lower levels of economic development. Education can do nothing to alter this reality, inasmuch as cognitive ability is only marginally malleable under environmental influences, if at all. An emphasis upon educational reform in this connection could actually have perverse effects, such as the devaluation of credentials, leading to market demands for ever more credentialization as a condition of employment, and the erection of additional financial barriers to economic advancement, as the demand for higher education drives up the cost, relentlessly. (Snip)

In the end, the circle cannot be squared, and the dilemmas of globalization still hold. Structural factors dictate the exacerbation of the new inequality, with all that this entails, and this because those structural factors have essentially marketized heritable qualities not amenable to amelioration; simultaneously, those structural factors have developed concurrently with an increasing pursuit of efficiency through arbitrage and labour substitution.

Yahoo "News" "reports":

Obama rises from political obscurity to verge of history

By CHARLES BABINGTON, Associated Press Writer

"The amazement was on their faces. Hundreds waited for Barack Obama on that evening in South Carolina, 15 weeks ago, to claim victory — a surprising victory, surprisingly large.

"And amazing it was. It made it possible for him to stand today on the verge of being the first black person ever nominated for president by a major party.

Somehow I missed until today the fact that What's Wrong with the World has just passed its first birthday. We went official and public on May 1, 2007. One of our first posts, perhaps the first, as near as I can figure, was this very fine piece by our editor, Paul Cella. It was put up just before we invited everyone over. I think of it often.

I want to thank Paul for his leadership and my fellow contributors for all your work. And thanks to our readers, without whom, etc. And once again a hearty thanks and three cheers to Todd McKimmey, our generous site owner.

A happy Mother's Day to all the moms in sound of my cybervoice. And a blessed Pentecost to everyone, too.

The purpose of this notice is to announce that the comments feature of my earlier post, At What Point Does This Slot Into a Larger Narrative, has been disabled, not as a means of foreclosing upon discussion, but because, the discussion having arrived at first principles, it will be more fruitful for it to continue in a new thread. A new entry elaborating on that earlier discussion should be posted later today, although it will probably have to wait until I have prepared dinner for my wife and my mother - it being Mother's Day, after all.

Lest anyone should think that I've grown tepid in my enthusiasm for the free market from any of my recent comments or from any coming soon, here is a post at my own blog on the greatness of ziploc bags and of the "supply creates its own demand" phenomenon. Please feel free to leave comments on the post. I apologize for the moderation at the personal site and hope it will not be forever, but I do moderate quickly.

Somewhat astonishingly (though why I continue to find this astonishing, at my age, remains a mystery), recent discussions of health care as a type of social provision have precipitated impassioned declarations of (what certainly sounds like) libertarian ethical norms: the (allegedly - this is the locus of a begged question) mere fact that someone is suffering from a malady, the treatment for which he cannot afford out of his personal resources, does not imply, create, or impose, let alone entail, an obligation on the part of any other individual to remedy that want. So strong is this libertarian principle that it is not merely 'socialized medicine' that traduces it, but the very vaunted private health care system itself, which, through the mechanisms of mandated insurance coverages, risk-pooling, and the proscription of genetic screening, ensures the extension of coverage to many who would be excluded were risks to be individualized. The sick do not have a right to our money, in order to procure treatment, not even the comparative pittance factored into an insurance premium so that such higher risks might be adequately underwritten. Presumably, a starving man would not have a right to our bread, either.

Moreover, in accordance with such principles, those risks should be socialized on a purely voluntary basis, in and through families, churches, and other voluntary institutions established for charitable purposes; there obtain no enforceable claims upon such benefactions, which should alight upon the sick and infirm only insofar as those possessed of health and wealth will it, and only to that degree made possible by the gratuitous movements of their sovereign wills.

Much could be said of this, especially that a species of economistic dogmatism now impels some ranged along the right spectrum of our political culture to war against an inevitably flawed, but fundamentally decent, system, and this in the name of an ideological figment which cannot be translated into reality, and that this intransigence will eventually beget something far worse. The endeavour to fully marketize the domain of health provision, leaving the individual naked, with all of his weaknesses and frailties, before the utterly impersonal and unforgiving mechanisms of the market, petitioning those who clutch their wealth to their breasts like the misers of many a parable for relief, as a pious man might petition the Almighty, will shipwreck on the very structural foundations of modern society. Indeed, the argument has already been sketched:

...since the origin of any thing is, at a minimum, a clue to its nature or essence, we ought to attend to the fact that widespread health provision was originally a ministry of the Church, and founded as a charitable endeavour. Nevertheless, the Church or, more broadly, charitable institutions, can only assume such a tremendous burden - particularly in a more complex modern society - if they can command vastly more social authority than they do presently, exercise more overt social power on the basis of that authority, and command a greater percentage of adherents' resources than those adherents presently provide under our purely voluntaristic models of giving. One cannot recreate a social form without first recreating its conditions of existence.

In reality, total expenditures on health care exceed the wealth commanded by all churches combined; moreover, a perusal of the budgetary statements of the average church - say, a parish like my own - will confirm that there exists no fiscal fat that could be trimmed to pay for 'routine' cancer treatment, let alone every medical necessity that would portend the bankruptcy of a family. The counsel that 'we cannot know unless it has been tried' is not merely an exercise in ideological anachronism, but a declaration that folly is not folly until it has been performed.

It is not a frequent occurrence for me to find myself in agreement with David Frum. Nevertheless, when Frum writes of Doug Kmeic, a pro-life supporter of Obama, that he has descended into sheer foggy unintelligibility, I am compelled to agree. Consider this exercise in tumescent obfuscation:

Thus, as I see it, it is a choice between two less than sufficient courses:

(a) the continuation of an effort to appoint men and women to the Court who are thought willing to overturn Roe through divisive confirmation proceedings that undermine respect for law and understate the significance of non-abortion issues in a judicial candidate’s evaluation; or

(b) working with a new president who honestly concedes the abortion decision poses serious moral issues which he argues can only be fully and successfully resolved by the mother facing it with the primary obligation of the community seeing to it that she is as well informed as possible in the making of it.

It is a prudential judgment which course is more protective of life.

Frum observes:

Here's what's really going on: Doug Kmiec, a former dean at the Catholic University of America, has decided that quitting Iraq is more important to him than stopping abortion. Fine! His call! It's a free country!

Just say it, man: you oppose the war, and Obama is more likely to end it than McCain (not much more, in my judgment, but there you are). Please, though, abstain from acts of self-deception where abortion is concerned; at least let us be clear about that.

[Note: I posted this last week at Redstate. It provoked a considerable debate, which can be perused (with some amusement, I think) in the comments.]

We must allow for the possibility that Islam as such is a threat to this country. Even more bluntly: The question of the character of Islamic doctrine — whether it can be tolerated without fatal exposure to its war-making titles — must remain an open question if we are to remain a free people.

Here is the enigma with this whole business. Most Americans, Right and Left, will profess belief in a very robust principle of Free Speech. Thus the idea of curbing discussion on an important topic will arouse their repugnance. I have argued in the past for legislation embracing certain aspects of Islamic doctrine — the dogmas, specifically, of Holy War (jihad), Holy Subjugation (dhimma) and perhaps Sharia law itself — into our current sedition law: in other words, outlawing the promulgation of these dogmas. Even among people favorably deposed toward an aggressive posture vis-à-vis Islam, this is met with suspicion and hostility.

Fair enough — but why abandon this Free Speech principle when it comes to the character of the Islamic religion? There is the perplexity and the frustration. People jealous to preserve a “marketplace of ideas,” where true ideas will “out-compete” false ones in the end, while understandably hostile toward my proposal to proscribe certain forms of Islamic speech, yet exhibit an apparent insouciance about proposals (less overt than mine, to be sure) to proscribe certain forms of speech about Islam.