By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 21, 2018
On my many travels this year (I am writing this quickly
from the bar and lounge area at the Fort Worth Hilton), I have made what I
believe to be many crucial observations. For instance, have you noticed that,
increasingly, most Starbucks only put out the carafe of half-and-half these
days, not bothering with whole milk or that semi-translucent bluish saccharine
filth known as “skim milk”? This is fine with me, as I only use half-and-half.
And, at home, we use heavy cream in our coffee because nutritionally skim milk
is sugary garbage water that literally looks and tastes like the liquid that
accumulates at the bottom of dumpsters.
But none of that is important right now. I’ve also
noticed that there’s a whole lot of crazy out there (“Right, unlike here in
your head where it’s totally normal” — The Couch).
I wrote my column yesterday (sitting under a tree outside
the Oklahoma City Policy Center so that I could smoke a cigar) on how the
Kavanaugh hearing is causing the Democrats to throw out millennia of moral and
political progress in the name of tribal passion.
I’m not going to rehash all of that here. But there are a
few points I’d like to explore further. I saw this tweet last night:
I’m hearing a lot of “so men are
just supposed to be scared of women now?” I mean, if that’s what needs to
happen for you to be cool to us, maybe. We’ve been scared of you for like six
thousand years. You’ll get used to it after a while.
- Whitney Cummings
Like the man said when he went to the vet to pick up his
dog only to be given an aardvark on a leash, “I have questions.”
What does Ms. Cummings think the state of mind of women
6,001 years ago was? And where exactly are we talking about? Is this some
feminist Rousseauian idea that, prior to some “wrong turn” in Western
civilization or the Judeo-Christian tradition, women lived an idyllic life free
of fear of men?
More to the point, does she really think that society
would be better off if men live in fear of women? Why?
It seems that the answer for many people is, Yes.
It’s like we’re living in one giant feminized version of Seinfeld, where all manner of things can
be justified for spite.
I know this one tweet isn’t worth dwelling on when it is
but one drop in an ocean of intellectual skim milk. But look at one of the
popular replies:
When guys have to carry their keys
fanned out between each finger when they walk to their car at night — then
we’ll call it even
Yes, that will
be a much better society.
I find the concept of historic grievances fascinating.
There is something very “sticky,” in an evolutionary sense, to the idea of
getting payback for the crimes committed against your ancestors. If you find
this to be an astonishingly novel insight, here’s a list of history books you
should read: all of them.
The human — never mind the Hebrew — in me can relate to
some of this (Damn Jebusites, you haven’t suffered nearly enough!). But a Jew
born in, say, 1980 shouldn’t have any hate in his heart for a German born the
same year, never mind an Egyptian. A German born four decades after the
Holocaust isn’t responsible for the Holocaust any more than an Egyptian today
is responsible for Hebrew bondage millennia ago.
I am making a moral point rather than a political or
geopolitical one. Nation-states, for example, can hold grievances against other
nation-states on all sorts of issues. It is right for Armenians to demand an
apology from Turkey for the Armenian genocide, even if it was long ago.
But at the ground level, intergenerational guilt is one
of the oldest and nastiest bigotries, because it is among the most natural. For
much of human history, people were born into communities that were in large
part defined by their hatred for other communities.
We see it all over the place on the issue of race. Some
argue that white people today should carry some of the guilt for slavery. Never
mind that many white people today are descended from people who: did not
immigrate here until after slavery ended, were not slaveholders in the first
place, were not considered “white” when they moved here, etc.
But, as much as I find such arguments unpersuasive and
often ludicrous, I can at least understand them on an emotional level.
I can’t quite get my head around the idea that men today
should suffer or be treated unjustly to make amends for how men, now long dead,
treated women, now long dead.
And yet, this is now the very definition of a woke take.
Enough with the “he said, she said”
storyline. If this is he said, she said, then let’s believe the she in these
scenarios. She has nothing to gain, and everything to lose. For 250 years we
have believed the he in these scenarios. Enough is enough.
- Matthew Dowd
Someone get Matt a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird stat!
One common response among the more asinine rejoinders to
my column is that I am arguing for “men’s rights” or some such. I’m not. First
of all, I don’t believe in men’s rights, because I don’t believe in group
rights. I believe in things such as natural rights, human rights, American
rights, or, simply, individual rights. I understand that this can get tricky
when whole groups or classes of people are denied rights wholesale. This is
why, for example, it was perfectly proper for suffragettes and early feminists
to talk about “women’s rights.” But while the bigotry that is associated with
the denial of group rights is offensive, the bigotry itself isn’t the crime or
injustice, the denial of individual rights is.
Second, whenever I see a man receive a Nobel prize or win
an election, I don’t pump my fist in the air and yell, “Yes! Another win for
the Penis People!” Nor do I wave my “Men No. 1” foam finger in the air.
I understand that many people, not just women, do have
this kind of reaction when women achieve important things, and that’s usually
fine by me. But what I really don’t get is the zero-sum thinking that says men
must suffer or be punished simply because they are men.
It shows you how frayed or even severed our connections
to traditional — or simply, normal – forms of identity and association have
become that we can demonize whole categories of people who are our fellow
citizens, co-religionists, and, most importantly, our fathers, sons, and
brothers.
Maybe liberals have sent their Rawlsian veil out to the
cleaners, but a big part of the rule of law and justice is the idea that, when
you walk into a court of law, your class, your heritage, and your connections
should not matter. That’s why judges wear black robes and sit up on a high
bench — to signal they are partisans of no cause or class. It is absolutely
right to say that we do not always live up to that ideal; it is quite another
to say we should discard that ideal to get some payback.
The notion that we should automatically believe the
accuser because the accuser is white, black, male, female, or whatever is
wrong, full stop. To argue that we should be wrong in the “other direction” to
make amends for past wrongs is a perfect distillation of the tribal thinking
running amok in Washington and the country.
What is really remarkable is how easily people can turn
this thinking off and on as the moment requires. Yesterday, my friend and
colleague Ed Whelan, justifiably furious at the effort to destroy Kavanaugh
with unverified allegations, made a mistake by making unverified allegations
against someone else. Ed, to his credit, realized his mistake and apologized.
I wish Ed hadn’t done it, but judged purely on its merits
as trolling, it was spectacular. The very people who have been insisting that
it is not only acceptable but morally necessary to destroy someone with
unverified allegations were suddenly aghast by the use of unverified
allegations.
We live in an age where any rule, custom, or norm that benefits
the people we hate is wrong or irrelevant and any rule, custom, or norm that
benefits the people we support is vital to the health of our democracy.
Last week, I ended this “news”letter with a quote from
Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons.
I should have saved it for this week. But since I can do whatever I want in
this space, I’ll just use it again:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil
benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a
great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in
England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was
down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws
all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s
laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it —
do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.
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