FRIDAY, NOV 05, 2021
There are two ways of getting things done:
persuasion or coercion. You either convince someone of the value of your ideas
or you hold a (literal or metaphorical) gun to their head. The latter has been
the norm throughout human history. Most of what we value about the contemporary
West is a shift toward the former occurring over the last 250 years or so.
However, there’s an important difference
between the despotisms of old and coercive governments in the modern era:
modern-day tyrants frame themselves as the righteous side in any conflict.
Think about it: Ancient Persian Emperors and
the German Kaiser didn’t paint themselves as the moral superiors of their
enemies. They simply wanted their stuff and, if they could, they took it. In
contrast, during the American Civil War or the Allied cause during World War
II, force didn’t justify itself. Instead, force was justified by the
righteousness of the cause.
(President
Lincoln openly, repeatedly stated more than a year into the Civil War that his
call to "end slavery" was a useful means by which to justify his real
objective: To preserve the Union.)
The need to justify force with righteousness is
not limited to wartime. Every new coercive law or regulation is justified not
on the basis of “I’m strong enough to take your stuff and so I think I will,”
but because “our cause is just.” While some who would take your freedom or your
life are motivated by their desire for power, the most vicious monsters in
human history were all motivated by righteousness. They seek to perfect
creation, no matter what the cost, rather than simply acquire power for its own
end - a philosophically important distinction.
It is this philosophy of using state power to
impose one's morality on others that in part has made American politics such a blood
sport nowadays. If you follow the thread from the Abolitionist movement (which
provided moral justification for the Union's invasion of the Confederacy)
through the Temperance movement (which culminated in Prohibition) to the
Progressivism movement as we detail below, you'll see why.
What Do We Mean by Righteousness?
Righteousness is simply the sense that one's
cause is so just that "the ends justify the means" – the ends could
be anything. A critical feature of righteousness is the belief in the
perfectibility of man and earth. It is often accompanied by philosophical
progressivism, the view that the world becomes a better place, morally
speaking, over time
Righteousness requires coercion. This
necessitates a large administrative state to enforce the prevailing diktats of
the secular-religious. An excellent example from recent history is the campaign
against tobacco, which in the span of a few years was chased from every public
place.
Righteousness is not simply progressivism. It
is a specific type of progressivism forged in America through the experience of
Pietist Protestant Christians. The Pietists were originally Scandinavian
Lutherans, but the posture of Pietism spread to most Protestant denominations
in the United States: The Northern Baptists and Methodists, the
Congregationalists, the Disciples of Christ, the Presbyterians, and others.
The Pietists rejected ritualistic or
"liturgical" religious practice in favor of an inner experience
expressed in one's daily life. Correct beliefs and proper living were the
focus, culminating in the Holiness Movement, which was an extreme and fundamentalist
expression of Pietism. Holiness tolerated no deviation from orthodoxy in either
thought or deed.
Righteousness, like its Pietist forebears,
isn't satisfied that you do and say the right things, you need to truly believe
the right things. Compliance is not enough. You have to love Big Brother.
Righteousness moved from the realm of the
deeply religious Protestant pietists of early America into the mainstream
progressive movement. The latter adopted this surety and energy, seeking to
expand their ersatz religion into every aspect of American life.
Righteousness is dangerous as a political force
because of how certain it makes those infected with it. What's more, political
righteousness makes the stakes increasingly apocalyptic, allowing the ends to
continually justify any means, up to and including the death camp.
This is not hyperbole: Righteousness does not
prohibit your political participation, it demands it, and it sees everything
else about you as superfluous.
Righteousness Enters the World Stage:
Abolitionism
It is often said that before the Civil War, the
United States "are," but after the War, the United States
"is." This is a reference to the formerly theoretically sovereign
nature of each state as compared to "one nation, indivisible" found
in the Pledge of Allegiance, which was created after the Civil War by a Union
war veteran.
Why does this distinction matter? Because it
was a distinction which the Confederacy, headed by Jefferson Davis, was willing
to test in the furnaces of war.
Righteousness + Force in America 1In the run-up
to the War, Davis repeatedly pointed out that the U.S. was a voluntary union of
states which delegated authority to Washington, as ratified in the U.S.
Constitution in the Bill of Rights #9 and #10. Thus if a state wanted to leave
the Union, it could do so. Despite the best efforts of the southern states to
maintain the Union, at the end of the day they voted to secede because their
differences with the northern states were irreconcilable. Was slavery one of
the issues over which they didn't agree? Yes, absolutely. Slavery was an issue
that plagued the Founders as well.
Yet Davis made an important point: Just because
one doesn't like slavery (and we don't like slavery, let's be clear) that does
not then automatically mean that one supports President Lincoln using the U.S.
Army to roll into the Confederacy in order to occupy them and make them behave
the way we'd like them to. This is persuasion vs. coercion in action.
(One
of the reasons Jefferson Davis was never tried for treason following the Civil
War is that his case would've given him a platform to highlight the
Constitutional issues presented by the North's invasion of the South.)
Fast forward to the present day. If you're
reading this then you're likely a Unionist (i.e. happy that the U.S. is
intact), at least in spirit if not in name, and also a fan of President
Lincoln. Yet it was President Lincoln who said, in a widely publicized 1862
letter written more than a year into the War:
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not
either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing
any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I
would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I
would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because
I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I
do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do lesswhenever I shall
believe what I am doing hurts the cause (of saving the Union), and I shall do
more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause."
One can point this out without arguing in favor
of slavery as it's clear President Lincoln knew what he was doing - trying to
save the Union - and that picking up the moral banner of ending slavery was a
useful means by which to ally himself because it furthered his goal of saving
the Union. Machiavelli would've been proud, and so were the Abolitionists, who
got a taste of what righteousness and force can do once the reins of state
power are grasped.
It was these Abolitionists who not only claimed
the moral high ground for President Lincoln during the War but who, following
Appomattox, then went about the Reconstruction of the Southern state
governments, which was largely a disaster. During Reconstruction, the Northern
Republicans attempted to form Southern state governments with people who either
had no experience in governance or had no connections to their constituents
because the righteousness of their cause, "reconstructing" the South,
would make it all work in the end.
Note that this is not a condemnation of the
abolitionist cause, instead, it is a condemnation of the social phenomenon of
righteousness, which generally sees political orthodoxy as trumping basic
competence.
The end of the Civil War led to a total war
against American citizens. Significant portions of Southern states were
stripped of the right to vote and the right to keep and bear arms. The Radical
Reconstructionist Congress was all too eager to ride roughshod over the
Southern states because they felt ideologically and morally justified in doing
so.
What caused the Civil War will always remain a
question of debate. What will not is that it represented a massive transfer of
power upward from sovereign individuals and states to a centralized federal
government, as Jefferson Davis warned. This provided later incarnations of
righteousness and force with a ready-made set of tools to increase the
efficiency of coercion.
The Reconstruction period did little to heal
the nation. It gave us the Klan and Jim Crow laws, but it stands as an example
of righteousness having a large effect on American politics.
Righteousness + Force in America 2Righteousness
must also be considered separately from the question of abolition itself, which
was a moot point by the time the Reconstruction governments came into power.
It's one thing to see slavery, which was the default mode of human production
throughout all of human history, as a great moral evil that must be ended at
once. It is another to dramatically punish, humiliate, and disenfranchise
people who participated in this economic system.
It is still another thing entirely to attempt
to dramatically remake the world into one's personal vision of Heaven on Earth.
The carpetbaggers flooding Southern states during the Reconstruction Era
believed that they simply needed to point the right guns in the right direction
to create their earthly paradise.
Righteousness, in addition to a tangible
ability of coercion through the military, cops, and courts, was the animating
force of Reconstruction; however, it didn't end there.
Righteousness Comes for Your Daily Life:
Temperance
The Prohibition Era and the Temperance Movement
that preceded it are oft-overlooked areas of American history; however, this is
our next stop on the tour of armed, militant righteousness.
Temperance was not originally in favor of
Prohibition. The Temperance Movement, as the name suggests, was originally
about moderate drinking. This was a time when the average American rarely
consumed water and instead hydrated with beer and spirits. Only later did
Temperance become synonymous with teetotaling and banning alcohol.
The pro-Prohibition or "dry" argument
is rarely given enough attention, with many dismissing the period as a brief
blip of madness requiring no further explanation. However, it's worth diving
into what the drys believed.
The drys believed that alcohol was not simply
an individual choice, but a highly corrosive social factor. They blamed the
decay of the family and a host of other social ills on demon alcohol.
Post-World War I urbanization added gas to the
fire. People were concerned about their children moving to cities and becoming
introduced to saloon life. It followed, for the drys, that banning alcohol
would end these social ills. In many cases, they believed the final result
would be the Second Coming.
Righteousness + Force in America 3The degree to
which Prohibition "worked" or could have is debatable, but we
definitively know that Prohibition drove the rise in organized crime and
militarized policing in a symbiotic relationship.
Strange as it might sound, the "drys"
tended to be part of the Progressive Movement of the early 20th Century. They
too sought to cure social ills like child labor, dirty meat, women's
disenfranchisement, and the like using coercion rather than persuasion. Despite
the rather strange bedfellows, conservative Christian anti-liquor people allied
with labor activists and proto-feminists. We can now begin to see how
righteousness begins to move into the modern left.
Prohibition was also a dramatic intensification
of force.
Abolition wanted to remove a barbaric economic
system from America. Temperance, however, attempted to police the daily
behaviors of average Americans. It is frequently noted how few who fought for
the Southern cause were impacted by abolition. The abolitionists sought
systemic change. No one was ever thrown in jail for being a plantation owner.
Temperance, on the other hand, made tens of
millions of Americans into felons overnight.
The scale of Temperance is important to note as
it is a far more aggressive posture than the War on Drugs because it went after
a substance that had been widely used for centuries. Banning cocaine in 1920,
the year the Volstead Act took effect, would have impacted orders of magnitude
fewer people.
Abolitionists saw a system as the center of
great moral outrage. Abolitionism saw individuals as the engine. And so that's
who it targeted: Not a regional economic system, but individuals consuming the
world's most widely used substance in any amount.
Righteousness Comes For Everything: The
Progressive Era
The Progressive Era of the early 20th Century
offers insight because it is the first serious attempt to use righteousness
combined with coercion to take over every aspect of American society.
Unfortunately, it would not be the last.
Righteousness + Force in America 4The
Progressive Era saw righteousness rule America as a broad coalition of
suffragettes, Prohibitionists, labor reformers, child advocates, and other
interest groups. This was the era that gave us federal control over medicine,
the income tax, compulsory education of children, and a host of other measures
that curbed individual liberty.
People were not asked to live righteous lives.
They were forced to using state power.
The Era was wrapped up in religious zeal,
taking place at the same time as the Third Great Awakening, an uptick in
Holiness, Nazarene, and Pentecostal religious denominations, which were Pietist
Protestant movements emerging in the second half of the 19th Century. Much like
later movements, these religious groups sought to make heaven on earth by
reforming human behavior.
The social sciences also began in earnest
around this time. They offered secular solutions that mirrored their religious
alternatives. Man was broken, not by sin, but by socialization. Salvation was
not to be found in the Gospels but in the social sciences.
This secular view of man fits well with the
religious views of Social Gospel. Social Gospel believed that the Gospel held
answers not just for spiritual life, but for social problems as well:
alcoholism, urban crime, racial tensions, environmental concerns, and other
issues – common goals made for a common cause.
The Progressive Era was largely successful in
that it transformed a passive and largely benign federal government into an
all-pervasive bureaucracy. It formed the basis of the administrative state
which was greatly expanded, first under FDR, then under LBJ.
It was the first time in American history that
using righteousness and force seeking to coerce all non-believers into
compliance became a mass, mainstream political trend in American politics. The
parallels to the modern left are easy to draw in this context.
Righteousness Conquers the World: Wilson and
Progressivism
Woodrow Wilson was, by all accounts, the
progressive President. What he did at home pales in comparison to what he did
abroad. Much of the map of the modern world owes a lot to President Woodrow
Wilson.
Righteousness + Force in America 5Wilson was
the originator of the Wilsonian foreign policy, which broadly speaking means
that aggressive ideological aims are pursued abroad. For Wilson, this meant
forming the League of Nations, national sovereignty over ancient empires, and
the Western-liberal version of democracy.
Nations had long fought for their own freedom.
They had sometimes fought for the freedom of their allies, but it was thinly
veiled realpolitik. Wilson, however, demanded a specific vision of freedom for
the world.
It was not the riches of the colonial world or
geopolitical considerations fueling Wilson's drive to get into World War I,
something that he ran against. Wilson wanted to end the possibility of any
future war by remaking the world in such a way that war would be impossible.
Righteousness and coercion were no longer the
exclusive provinces of one set of religious do-gooders. It was the official
policy of the American Departments of State and War.
Why Righteousness Trends Toward Totalitarianism
Righteousness is always impossible to enforce
without tyrannical measures trending toward totalitarianism. This is because
righteousness attempts to tackle problems so large that massive state
intervention is required. The bigger the problem, the more state intervention,
coercion, is required.
This is why the current iteration of
righteousness and force is so insidious. It attempts to untangle the Gordian
knot of human inequality. Not equality before the law or equality of
opportunity. But human inequality as such.
The current crusade of righteousness is using
the levers of state power, which are now capable of reaching every corner of
the globe and monitoring virtually all private communication, to chase after a
totally flat, "equal" society without any divergence of the outcome.
This type of equality means kneecapping some
people and is arguably the final result of the stages of righteousness and
force outlined above. Righteousness and force in America first attempted to
tackle an economic problem, Abolitionism; then a moral problem, Temperance;
followed by a political problem, Progressivism.
It now attempts to solve the problem of why
some people have more than others, more health, wealth, fame, beauty, etc...
Such radical leveling requires highly invasive
state power. Such power is dangerous on its own but also invites sociopathic
personalities to pursue it. The people who desire it most deserve it least.
Once this impulse is let out of the cage, it is
very hard to get the genie back in the bottle. History teaches us this with
outbursts of righteousness-driven force such as Mao's Red Guards or the violent
American radicalism of the 1970s.
Wokeness and the social justice movement are a
further intensification of the principle of righteousness armed with force because
of its attempt to level every aspect of society at the outcome level.
Its desire to enforce radical equality of
outcome is not limited to America's borders. Increasingly, since the Bush and
Obama Administrations, it views American military power as something to be
aggressively and proactively projected in its service.
Historically speaking, American intervention
was justified by American interests, not a specific set of values. This is why
America supported dictators around the world in the struggle against Communism.
It was not an endorsement of their views or actions, but a recognition of
realpolitik. America needed allies and found them where she could.
Compare with the post-9/11 view of American
intervention: America must turn Iraq into Japan in the desert, not because this
is good for America, but because liberal democracy is especially noble and
righteous.
Righteousness and force have become
universalist. Any deviation from a specific form of political organization or
way of life is seen as prima facie evidence of electoral chicanery or tyranny.
This offers insight into the $64,000 question:
Why can't San Francisco just leave Oklahoma City alone? For that matter, why
can't California cities leave the more rural, suburban, and conservative parts
of California alone? Because of this universalist drive for an extremely
abstract notion of human equality effectively without limits.
Any variance from their all-encompassing notion
of righteousness requires force, not persuasion, to correct.
"History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes" and this is a great example
of how that old historical cliche plays out in the real world. The
"protests" of summer 2020 aren't all that different from the protests
of the 1960s and 1970s, but there is more going on here than a simple
expression of popular rage or even the boredom of the young adults.
The riots of 2020 were not terribly different
from how death squads work in banana republics. The leftists were allowed to
burn, loot, pillage, and assault at will, but any response in defense would
result in arrest and criminal charges. Thus, there is the quasi-religious
nature to the movement, expressed in the exuberant fanatical violence of last
summer. These riots act as something of a victory dance and an act of war – is
it not clear that the righteous were able to increase their social and
political power in the United States by rioting?
Furthermore, there is a religious aspect to the
COVID-19 hysteria. It ignores actual data on the subject in favor of an
ever-shifting official "science." The adherents of this leverage
coercion through mask and vaccine mandates while also openly calling for
punishment or even death for those who do not comply.
The COVID cult introduces fear into the mix, a
form of coercion, with an eye toward gaining compliance and assistance from
those not otherwise predisposed toward ideological flights of fancy.
The pandemic provided an opportunity for
otherwise diffuse forces to band together in the name of controlling every
aspect of human behavior. It also provided insight into just how many
restrictions on human freedom people were willing to submit to.
Weaponized Righteousness Cannot Be Reasoned
With
It runs counter to the general sense of fair
play and open-mindedness that the Anglo-Saxon tradition is known for to say
that there is a person or group of people who are not worth communicating with.
But the righteous want total control over every
aspect of social and private life, and they are satisfied with nothing less and
will do anything to get it. Their desires for control are an insatiable black
hole, an endless quest for new dragons to slay.
Further, they do not respect the notion of
rights as you and I understand them. Rights, for the militantly righteous, are
positive values provided by the government in the service of moving the world
closer to their utopia. Rights are not boundaries to be respected but are
instead manipulated as a means to an end.
Finally, because their ideology has a
quasi-religious nature to it, there is no arguing with them. Arguing with the
righteous over whether or not America is an inherently racist country is a bit
like arguing with a brick wall over whether or not the moon is made of green
cheese.
Political righteousness has no sense of
"live and let live," let alone any sense that persuasion is better
than force.
The cynic can be reasoned with or even bribed.
For the true believer, there is no acceptable result except for total and
complete victory. Those seeking to ensure freedom for themselves, their family,
their community, and their future would do well to form a clear picture of how
militant, weaponized righteousness has worked in the past.
Righteousness and force didn't end last summer
– we can see it in the digital pages of our electronic newspapers almost every
day. The attempts to decide what is right for you and yours, and to enforce
such at gunpoint is the essence of armed righteousness. The reader will ignore
its ever-changing manifestations at his own peril
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