How Sam Harris Lost Me

Political Morality & Moral Politicking

A lot of my liberal friends communicate to me that they never stopped being Democrats, it is that the Democrats stopped being Democrats. Back when I was Conservative, but never got de-friended on Facebook (when Facebook used to matter because Candidate Obama ‘got it’), I often wondered about how the Democrats ceased to be the loyal opposition. It seemed instead that they were just insistent on being oppositional.

Bipartisanship used to matter, but I think that went screwy. If you ask me, I’d have to say that Newt Gingrich was to blame. Back in the day, Gingrich whom I haven’t thought about for a while and don’t generally, came up with his Contract with America. But you know, now that I think about it, maybe the two most prominent media celebrities in America were to blame. Can you remember anyone who listened to both Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh? I did. Both with a sense of “OK is this what the stupid people listen to?” But I got addicted because both of them had a rebellious kind of outsider wisdom. This was in the time when Hollywood, well HBO, was embracing the idea that there were people who were faking their entire hideous lives in order to present a clean face to the public. It worked primarily because we could all accept that Tony Soprano knew that he was mentally unstable and he was trying to get help. So there we had this establishment of the route to power and influence only had, at bottom, the integrity of the protagonist. Limbaugh had his flavor, Stern had his flavor and Tony had his flavor. So why couldn’t we all have our own flavor? Life is too complicated and stressful not to dismiss and mock everybody else. Or in Tony Soprano’s case, kill them.

Newt Gingrich thus was fine being strangely and nihilistically brilliant like the other three and was ready to kill government. Just burn Congress to the ground. Accept the Contract with America or nobody gets paid. Now, shutting down government is an annual panto. The Democrats became ‘librulz’, not representatives of the American people. And as that charmless midwit Tom DeLay perfected the machinations of the absolute destruction of bipartisanship, a cascade of parliamentary hijinks naturally proceeded, from cloture to filibuster to ‘the nuclear option’ most famously employed by Obama in getting that thing called Obamacare baked in the Congressional microwave. If you don’t believe me, ask Chadt. That’s my new name for all of the LLMs engaged in pseudo-intellectual banter on the interwebz.

BTW. Here’s something you should try with Chadt, aka The Algorithm. Sign out of YouTube and see what it presents you. Bubble popped?

So… A bunch of people, especially Limbaugh, got comfortable with terms like ‘feminazi’ and basically became the secular equivalent of Father Coughlin, for an uppity and put-upon middle class who began to think of themselves as, well whatever it is they think they are.

Those of us who remember the failure that was Air America, and all of the Janeane Garofalo wannabes joined the party. But instead of my favorite Punks, they decided that only their political enemies were the real idiot fascists. Who indeed are the fascists?

Stronger Together Weaponized
Wanna hear something crazy?

Fascism is viewed in Marxism as a reactionary form of capitalist government that arises during crises in capitalism, often characterized by extreme nationalism, authoritarianism, and the suppression of opposition. Marxists argue that fascism serves the interests of the capitalist class by diverting attention from class struggle and uniting various social groups against perceived enemies, particularly the working class and leftist movements.

I think the Marxists are right about fascism. But I’m just saying so because the logic of the etymology of the fasces. Now I’m recently aware that if you read Wikipedia, it suggests that the most ancient definitions of the fasces had everything to do with the power of the Roman empire, but that Aesop’s fables confounded this definition. It makes sense to consider the emblem. The Roman definition would fixate on the cutting edge of the blade, the Aesopian definition would fixate on the bundle of sticks. For me, it has always been the bundle of sticks which individually are easily broken, but bundled, are not.

In short the very definition of fascism is: The people, united will never be defeated.

Here’s Mussolini:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts.

Then again, you may have to read the whole thing for yourself.

But if the Democrats are to be in substance what they claim to be in rhetoric, namely anti-fascist, then they must take the Marxist definition to heart. They should fight against extreme nationalism, authoritarianism and the suppression of opposition. They must reject Mussolini. They must reject racial fascism. What is racial fascism? Paraphrasing Mussolini, it is the idea that the Race accepts the individual only so far as his interests coincide with those of the Race which stands for the conscience and the universal will of the Race as a historic entity.

That should be simple enough to understand, except that there are things that any believer in individualism must hold against the Marxist, who cannot be blithely dismissed. The historicism of Marxism cast human suffering as owing primarily to class struggle.

So the question finally is whether or not that which has become of the Republican Party is indeed a reactionary form of capitalism arising during a crisis of capitalism. From what I can see, the crisis is one of Federal deficit spending. Trillions of debt, as I said before. And the clear and present contradiction is that that’s not the capitalists in debt.

Moreover, is the Democrat Party motivated by the failure of capitalism? Certainly not the Neoliberals. They require the tax sacrifices of the great revenue generating engines of our society. Indeed that is their method of regulatory capture, which is to incentivize and then legislate them into the American moat. There is no clearer example of this than that of the Military Industrial Complex, and what I would call the Healthcare Industrial Complex, both of which are vital to the health and welfare of America, both of which are oligopolies that do as they please. I’m not saying Democrats are alone in the creation and sustaining of these Goliaths of the American economy. I’m suggesting as a former Republican that I am not comfortable that only one party handle what both used to be more responsible for.

What has any of this got to do with Sam Harris?

Harris was, for quite some time, a voice of calm reason. The kind of person who seemed to have it all together, and now I’m starting to think he’s bounder. Like he’s a one man wrecking crew on a moral mission to save the hearts and minds of America. I liked him better when he was smaller, in his own head, than Jon Stewart, Bill Maher and Tucker Carlson. But now I think that he believes he’s on the same platform playing the same game, and perhaps he is. I’d bet that Sam Harris is as big as such people get and he’s right in the middle of blinding hubris. Moreover, I think he’s pissed that everyone within the sound of his voice of reason has let America fall into the grubby mitts of the Orange Man.

His is the kind of criticism I might accept from Condoleeza Rice, an historian fluent in Russian with experience at the top of the US Government, but not from somebody who is supposed to be helping us meditate. Clearly Harris is out of that game, a game by the way that Tyler Cowen was never in. Nor do I get the feeling that Harris is in the same wheelhouse, where I used to put him, with Paul Kingsnorth or Douglas Murray.

Harris will probably pick his way clear, in his peculiarly apt and compleat fashion, of any particular argument. He’s rather quick to clarify what he does and does not mean to impute in his characterizations. I like that ability in him. But I don’t think he understands that words are not powerful, and how the means and ways of realpolitik power actually work. Harris is aghast and insulted. How bourgeois.

Too Much Time On My Hands
Because of this surfeit, I am reading Will Durant, as if it would help me in this job market. Yet I persist, and I have to own this weirdness. So I will be the only one this week who will be quoting Nietzsche via Durant. Here goes:

Here then were two contradictory valuations of human behavior, two ethical standpoints and criteria: a Herren-Moral and a Herden-Moral—a morality of masters and a morality of the herd. The former was the accepted standard in classical antiquity, especially among the Romans; even for the ordinary Roman, virtue was virtus—manhood, courage, enterprise, bravery. But from Asia, and especially from the Jews in the days of their political subjection, came the other standard; subjection breeds humility, helplessness breeds altruism—which is an appeal for help. Under this herd-morality love of danger and power gave way to love of security and peace; strength was replaced by cunning, open by secret revenge, sternness by pity, initiative by imitation, the pride of honor by the whip of conscience. Honor is pagan, Roman, feudal, aristocratic; conscience is Jewish, Christian, bourgeois, democratic. It was the eloquence of the prophets, from Amos to Jesus, that made the view of a subject class an almost universal ethic; the “world” and the “flesh” became synonyms of evil, and poverty a proof of virtue.

This valuation was brought to a peak by Jesus: with him every man was of equal worth, and had equal rights; out of his doctrine came democracy, utilitarianism, socialism; progress was now defined in terms of these plebeian philosophies, in terms of progressive equalization and vulgarization, in terms of decadence and descending life. The final stage in this decay is the exaltation of pity and self-sacrifice, the sentimental comforting of criminals, “the inability of a society to excrete.” Sympathy is legitimate if it is active; but pity is a paralyzing mental luxury, a waste of feeling for the irremediably botched, the incompetent, the defective, the vicious, the culpably diseased and the irrevocably criminal. There is a certain indelicacy and intrusiveness in pity; “‘visiting the sick’ is an orgasm of superiority in the contemplation of our neighbor’s helplessness.”

Behind all this “morality” is a secret will to power. Love itself is only a desire for possession; courtship is combat and mating is mastery: Don José kills Carmen to prevent her from becoming the property of another. “People imagine that they are unselfish in love because they seek the advantage of another being, often in opposition to their own. But for so doing they want to possess the other being... L’amour est de tous les sentiments le plus égoiste, et, par conséquent, lorsqu’il est blessé, le moins généreux.” Even in the love of truth is the desire to possess it, perhaps to be its first possessor, to find it virginal. Humility is the protective coloration of the will to power.

Against this passion for power, reason and morality are helpless; they are but weapons in its hands, dupes of its game. “Philosophical systems are shining mirages”;

Will Durant. The Story of Philosophy (pp. 484-486). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Subjugation breeds humility. Helplessness breeds altruism — which is an appeal for help.

So where indeed did our democracy go, and how did it come to be that the Great Power of the United States of America has buttloads of peasants mouthing off as if they’re going to have a revolution? A revolution of words? Are we trapped in rhetoric?

No. We are not. We simply pretend to be as we hide the beasts inside. I know this myself. I know what I do as a husband and father. I held out as long as I could before I carried myself and my bride over the threshold into domesticity. Suddenly the world didn’t matter as much and I wasn’t going to put myself into it so deeply. Now all I have are words. Perhaps they should be fighting words.

In a way I have discovered in myself the desire to be effortlessly cool, rich by the standards of my upbringing back in the day when we couldn’t afford lemon fresh Joy. Yet by the 8th grade I understood the fast neutrons of nuclear fission and the capacities of The Bomb. I never pretended that I could joke my way out of the crushing grasp of power. All I had to be thankful for was that M-16s wouldn’t be turned on me by the USMC or the Green Berets. I wouldn’t be an enemy of the USA.

Yet we peasants are enemies of ourselves and the Culture War is mutating into something altogether different. I don’t have time to be listening to pretenders who act like they’re smarter and therefore deserve to be more powerful than those who actually are. So today I have fourteen different bottles of single malt scotch and I sip them slowly and I sit in my leather chair, satisfied. I’m not pretending to have Krav Maga ‘Nazi’ punching skills. You other fools, knock yourselves out.

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This morning I listened to Matt Taibbi do a live thing. There were about 2500 of us listening, and his guest reminded me of something I heard before. Young American men spend a lot of time watching ex-special operators on podcasts who hype vitamin supplements. We shouldn’t forget that the budget for training those men is unlimited. They do actually know how to shoot, fight and kill; better than any of us will ever know. But they don’t know what it’s like to be deployed for three or four years in something like WW2. Very few of us alive know what kind of hell war actually is. We’re just engaged it petty skirmishes, all of us. So we live to tell the tale. And what tale is that? Get out your cellphones and find out.

Enjoy the comment section while you can. You’ll regret it in your old age when more than just eggs are scarce. Whisky doesn’t go bad.