Greyparrot

In ancient societies, the task of the educator was conceived in moral terms. Children were taught the difference between right and wrong, and required to love the one and hate the other. Any additional knowledge that they acquired was ancillary to this moral education, and judged to be worthless without it. Hence Quintilian’s insistence that the teaching of grammar should produce a certain kind of person – the vir bonus, dicendi peritus, the good man skilled in speech-and not just a certain kind of competence.

If morality enters the classroom today it is usually against a background of skepticism. “Right” and “wrong” have been eclipsed by a plurality of “values,” and morality is presented as a sphere not of certainty, but of doubt. Moral issues are “topics for debate,” and moral judgments appear in the curriculum only as opinions, which may be accepted or rejected without detriment to the individual or to the hard core of knowledge. Any other approach tends to be dismissed as “judgmental,” since it must assume the absolute validity of what is no more than a particular “culture” and a particular “point of view.” In place of such absolutism, we are told, children should be encouraged to “think for themselves,” to “question traditional values,” to be “open-minded” towards other “cultures” and other viewpoints. Since morality can be taught only as something absolute (or “unconditioned,” as Kant put it), morality is therefore no longer taught. And the result is just what the ancient philosophers feared.

Paradoxically, however, this jettisoning of moral education is usually presented as a moral necessity. Without it, we are told, we could not achieve the “inclusive” society to which education should aspire: the society in which everyone is accorded the respect and esteem that are due to him. The attack on morality is conducted, therefore, in the name of morality, and often with a puritanical zeal that stops little short of bigotry. In this paper I try to explain this new form of moral judgment – which one might describe as the “absolute commitment to relativism”- and to suggest a cure for it. My primary target will be “multiculturalism”: a movement in schools, universities and political institutions to make room for “other cultures,” besides the one that has prevailed in modern America.

Of course the picture I have just drawn is a stereotype. But this does not mean that it is false; only that it is a simplification, and leaves out the specific quality of ordinary American life. In any case, the stereotype that I have described is rapidly giving way, under the pressure of “multiculturalism,” to another and negative stereotype – a stereotype which is used to foster animosity and distrust. This new stereotype of American society derives from a philosophy which may be summarized in five propositions:

Young Americans seem to find no difficulty in believing those propositions, which are rapidly acquiring the character of prejudices – parts of the great prejudice against prejudice which animates the new curriculum. Yet they are false, and evidently so. American society is not a “culture” in the anthropologist’s sense, but a part of Western civilization. It was formed by legal rather than cultural forces, and has absorbed culture after culture without change to its fundamental structure of secular government. There are no “rival” cultures competing in the American market, and American education could never be in the business of providing or promoting them. Its purpose is simply to provide worthwhile knowledge, and if professors of literature teach Shakespeare rather than “Dynasty,” it is because a knowledge of Shakespeare is worth something more than a moment’s entertainment. Moreover, our grandparents already had a great many “cultures,” if you want to use that word, in the curriculum. They studied the languages, religions, history and literature of ancient Palestine, Greece, and Rome, and if they came across some other culture that seemed worthy of interest, they studied that as well. But the purpose was not to introduce a choice of cultures; it was to study universal human nature, as revealed in other tongues and other times.

As for the talk of “values,” it seems to me that either you have them or you don’t. And to have them is precisely to deny alternatives. Values are not freely chosen: on the contrary they set limits to choice, by distinguishing right from wrong, and surrounding us with prohibitions. If someone tells me that there is a “culture” in which people expose new-born infants, abandon women after seducing them, force their neighbors to worship idols, freely kill strangers from another tribe or another religion, keep slaves and concubines, and mount public spectacles of torture, then I do not say that these people have other “values.” I say that they are wicked. If I teach my students to study these people, then I should hope that they would find them wicked too.

“Multiculturalism” is an attempt to “pluralize” what is essentially singular – my identity as a social being. To regard the human world as a collection of equally valid “life-styles,” “cultures,” and “values” is to fabricate choices where there are none. To choose a culture or a set of values is precisely to have no culture and no values. If people do not see this, it is because they have a misguided conception of tolerance. The tolerant person is not the one who thinks that everything goes and nothing matters – such a person is not tolerant at all, but merely indifferent. The tolerant person is the one who puts up with that of which he disapproves, so as to avoid civil conflict. Tolerance has been a cornerstone of American society; but it is increasingly worn away by this new thing which merely pretends to be tolerant while being not tolerant at all.

For this is what is most remarkable in the “multiculturalist” movement: it is unable to tolerate what it does not like – namely American “culture,” as it is called. It offers positive stereotypes of minorities, primitive cultures and “oppressed” groups, and only a negative stereotype of the so-called “majority culture,” which is variously described as materialist, patriarchal, racist, imperialist and obsessed with property and power. There is scarcely an insult in the book that is not thrown at American society by the advocates of “multiculturalism,” and the construction of the new negative stereotype has become a major occupation of the universities. To lake just one example: the new kind of radical feminist has, or seems to have, only one purpose, which is to create a negative stereotype of the traditional American male, and of the culture that he supposedly produced. With exemplary crudeness, the feminist critic moves from novel to novel, from poem to poem, in order to “prove” -what she in any case would never admit to be false – that the whole thing is a giant conspiracy, forged in the mind of the stereotypical male, in order to render women invisible. Such stereotyping would probably be regarded as a criminal offense if the victim were described in racial rather than sexual terms. But it is widely accepted as a legitimate academic pursuit, with departments of “women’s studies” devoted to nothing else.

And this is the meaning of “political correctness,” which should itself be seen as a form of enforced stereotyping, the purpose of which is to deprive the “majority culture” of its voice, by controlling the language of debate. You could describe the result as a kind of “capillary” censorship – a censorship which invades the very thought-processes of the victim, in the manner of Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984. Not only are you forced to use the “correct” language: you must distort your entire thought processes, lest you become guilty of “crimethink” by inadvertently uttering a remark which someone, somewhere, could construe as “racist,” “homophobic,” “sexist,” or whatever. As a result, language becomes distorted, crabbed, utterly deprived of all rhetorical devices and therefore incapable of real dialogue. Meanwhile, anyone who betrays an attachment to “Western culture” and a willingness to speak for it is regarded with the fiercest intolerance. He is the enemy among us, the one who is Other and who must be silenced or destroyed.

Whence comes the new negative stereotype of American society? The answer, I suggest, is this. The advocate of multiculturalism is in a state of rebellion against the established order; he is suffering from a pathological oikophobia, a hatred of home, which has been a frequent disease among intellectuals since the Enlightenment. He sees that which is his “own,” his inheritance, as alien; he has fallen out of communication with it and feels tainted by its claim on him. He wants to be free of that claim – free from the pressure to belong, to be with “us,” to love something, believe in something, accept something which is his. Therefore he portrays his home as something Other, by means of a stereotype that seems to free him from all obligation towards it.

At the same time he cultivates a promiscuous xenophilia – picking up other cultures in the supermarket of postmodernity and toying with them, as a child toys with the channels on a television set. Of course this is not real xenophilia: the other cultures are always seen through a sentimental haze and can be zapped off the screen the moment they begin to be disagreeable. Set him down in the midst of some cultural minority – in Harlem say, or in a Shi’ite village in Iran – and our “multicultural” intellectual will be overcome by nostalgia for the American way of life, and aware of America as his proper home. But so long as he can merely play with alternatives – a possibility which universities eminently provide – xenophiliac fantasies can drift unhindered through his mind, and he can wallow in a luxurious bath of nostalgia for a home that will never be his.

A peculiar frame of mind … has arisen throughout the Western world since the second world war, and which is particularly prevalent among the intellectual and political élites. No adequate word exists for this attitude, though its symptoms are instantly recognized: namely, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.

Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which some people—intellectuals especially—tend to become arrested. As George Orwell pointed out, intellectuals on the Left are especially prone to it, and this has often made them willing agents of foreign powers. The Cambridge spies offer a telling illustration of what oikophobia has meant for our country. And it is interesting to note that a recent BBC ‘docudrama’ constructed around that deplorable episode neither examined the realities of their treason nor addressed the suffering of the millions of their East European victims, but merely endorsed the oikophobia that had caused the spies to act as they did. The resulting portrait of English society, culture, nationhood and loyalty as both morally reprehensible and politically laughable is standard BBC fare—prolefeed, as Orwell described it in Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

After each major disaster, FEMA is criticized as having major failures at getting the goods and services into areas that people need.  This was not only true after Hurricane Katrina, but also after Hurricanes Hugo and Andrew, as well as the Northridge earthquakes. While some hope that FEMA reforms will improve disaster response, centuries of economics research suggest otherwise. Put simply, if FEMA insists on attempting to continue to both monopolize and centrally plan the economy (the goods and services supply process) of disaster areas, by inserting itself as a bottleneck through which suppliers and demanders must get permission, it is bound to fail. Economists from Adam Smith to Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman have stressed the inherent problems in central planning. After Hurricane Katrina, rather than promoting the type of entrepreneurial activity outlined above--they actively shut it down. 

 

FEMA's command and control approach requires that both demands for relief and offers of supply be communicated first to the agency for approval and allocation. Private individuals and local governments who attempted to circumvent this process quickly found that FEMA would not allow it after Katrina.  As Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco complained, "No one ... even those at the highest level, seems to be able to break through the bureaucracy." FEMA turned away generators needed by hospitals, refused Amtrak's offer to evacuate victims, and wouldn't return calls from the American Bus Association. Sheriff Dennis Randle of Carroll County, Indiana, who had a team ready to help, was never able to navigate FEMA's approval process to enter New Orleans. FEMA failures caused millions of pounds of ice to be shipped mistakenly to Maine and Arizona, and firefighters and rescue squads to be sent to areas where they were of little help. A mobile communications unit with a chartered private plane sat in Germany for nine days because FEMA didn't return its calls. FEMA confiscated medical supplies for Methodist Hospital and fuel purchased by Jefferson Parish, and even prevented the Red Cross from entering New Orleans. The day before Katrina, Coca-Cola needed no permission to deliver Dasani bottled water to New Orleans, so why would anyone want to erect hurdles preventing those deliveries when they were needed most?

Compare this to the private sector response to Katrina. Weeks before the storm, Home Depot transferred generators, flashlights, batteries and lumber to its distribution centers near the strike area. Phone companies readied mobile cell towers and sent in generators and fuel. Insurers flew in special teams and set up claim-processing hotlines. Wal-Mart's incredible response had even its staunchest critics praising the company.  Decentralized, market-based institutions utilize information and respond in a way that a centralized government planning agency simply can't.  FEMA stood in the way of enterprising individuals and companies who wanted to help bring the needed goods and services into the area. 

Central planning as a means to allocate resources has failed across the globe. Fixing disaster relief is simple—greater use of decentralized markets, and focusing government on its proper role. Government best supports the market system in normal times by providing law and order, contract enforcement, and major public works projects (infrastructure). The proper role of government after disasters is no different.

Effective Government disaster response should focus on:

(1) restoring law and order—protecting the life and property of citizens, and enforcing contracts and liability laws;

(2) providing emergency and rescue services;

(3) and quickly restoring infrastructure to open the channels of trade.

A FEMA that established free trade zones, in which all normal regulations, licensing, and taxes are suspended, but buyers and sellers felt secure and protected would better provide the goods and services victims need.  This isn't anarchy, all normal contract and legal liability rules are enforced, people can't promise things and not live up to them or sell things that are harmful or dangerous to others.  FEMA should be able to provide whatever it wants, but it should not be able to stand in the way of others providing things too.  If people want, they can wait on FEMA or other help.  But the victims of disasters shouldn't be actively prevented by their government form being able to contract with other private individuals for the goods and services they need, nor should entrepreneurial, enterprising Americans who want to help be actively prevented by their government from being able to offer help or to supply goods and services.  By no means should individuals be forced to participate in anything.  If you didn't want to go to into a free trade zone to buy ice you don't have to, but you should be allowed to if you want.  After disasters, government needs to quickly repair major infrastructure, roads, bridges, etc., that allow for trade to occur--open the channels of trade.  These policies EXPAND the options available to disaster victims, and EXPAND the resources flowing into the disaster areas.  At a minimum any meaningful FEMA reform would make it impossible for FEMA to confiscate private property or prevent private relief suppliers from entering disaster zones.

While the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, which coordinates millions of commodity exchanges a day, seems chaotic, it works to connect buyers in need with sellers who can supply. FEMA renting and employing the normal private resources of a trading floor could do more to coordinate relief efforts than FEMA internal command and control can. Such decentralized market mechanisms simply work better to make the best use of widely-dispersed local knowledge in the economy.  Who around the country has the extra supplies that are needed?  Where in the disaster area are they needed to be employed?  These types of questions simply cannot be solved by a centrally planned government agency.  The great weakness of central planning is its inability to respond quickly and adapt to changes and unforeseen circumstances. No centralized authority, no matter how well-intentioned its employees and well-functioning its internal operations, can overcome this problem. According to Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek "If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization."

In addition to private for-profit activities, the private non-profit sector should be allowed to play a greater role too. After Katrina the American Red Cross, and dozens of other non-profit providers were prevented from entering the disaster area by FEMA. But private non-profits, such as churches and other relief organizations simply deliver relief more effectively and should be allowed to do so as well.  Again the claim here is that FEMA should not restrict these activities.  FEMA is welcome to help as well, just not deter from the process in which enterprising and hard-working Americans want to help each other through voluntary, mutually-beneficial exchange.

Government should stick to what it does best, and creating a distribution network overnight in a shortsighted attempt to be superior to Wal-Mart’s isn’t it. After a disaster, government is and must be a productive and important part of the process—just as it is everyday in our economy—by ensuring the presence of the two things decentralized markets need to work effectively: unregulated prices and secure property rights.

Not bad since the Taliban destroyed Biden's military.