Only belatedly did some major media figure—Ted Koppel on “Nightline”—actually confront Mitch Snyder and ask the source of his statistic. Snyder then admitted that it was something he made up, in order to satisfy media inquiries. Moreover, homeless advocates defended what Snyder had done and called it “lying for justice.”
People have been lying for centuries. What makes their statistical lies so dangerous today is that so many people in the media are ready to accept and broadcast statistics turned out by activist groups with an axe to grind—when those groups share the liberal-left orientation of the media.
Considering how many millions of dollars the TV networks pay their anchormen, surely they could spare a few bucks to hire some professional statisticians to examine the statistics that are constantly being turned out by activists, before broadcasting them as “facts.” But don't hold your breath waiting for the networks to become responsible.
Hysteria sells—and accuracy takes time, which could make the news stale by the time the statisticians check it out. However, some of the claims are so ridiculous that all it would take would be to do what Ted Koppel did, ask what the data are based on.
Meanwhile, whole organizations and movements are in the business of trying to alarm the public—radical feminists, environmental extremists, race hustlers, “consumer advocates” and many more. Wild statistics help them get free publicity in the media and help stampede politicians to “do something,” usually by spending the taxpayers' money to deal with a manufactured “crisis.”
False statistics are only part of the problem. Even accurate statistics can be given misleading emphasis. The U.S. Bureau of the Census seems dedicated to producing statistics that emphasize differences between groups—black and white, men and women, etc.—and far less interested in statistics which indicate how much all Americans have progressed over time.
For example, in the Census' Current Population Report number 60-209, with voluminous statistics on all sorts of “income inequality,” there is just one sentence saying that the real per capita income of whites increased by 13 percent in a decade, while that of blacks increased by 24 percent. That, apparently, is not a “politically correct” message about American society.
Perhaps the greatest distortions of statistics involve comparisons between “the rich” and “the poor”—who are mostly the same people at different stages of their lives. Most of those who were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were also in the top 20 percent at some point over the next 17 years. That too is not a “politically correct” message, so you seldom hear it.
The one thing that all these distortions and falsifications of statistics have in common is their thrust in the direction of creating artificial “problems” and “crises” to be dealt with by imposing government “solutions.” That is apparently what makes them so attractive to the media that these shaky numbers are uncritically accepted and proclaimed to the public.
ARE WE STILL AMERICANS?
There was a time when Americans valued their independence and their privacy—and resented anyone who threatened either. Today, however, we put up with an incredible amount of snooping and hassles from people we could stop from bothering us if we wanted to.
Unwanted phone calls from people we don't know have now become part of the American way of life. It doesn't matter whether we are eating dinner, sleeping, sick or making love, the phone rings and interrupts us for the benefit of some stranger who wants to sell us something, solicit our money or our votes or just conduct a survey.
The simplest way to stop this would be for people to start refusing to listen to any stranger who phones them. If enough people just hang up, it will no longer pay the telemarketers to keep pestering us.
In some states, there are already laws to prevent unsolicited calls to people who have registered themselves as not wanting such calls. Why not a national law covering everybody?
It should also be against the law to sell anyone's name, address or phone number without that person's express permission. Some banks may send you some fine-print gobbledygook that most people are not going to read—and buried in all these tedious words is a notice that your personal information will be sold to others by the bank unless you specifically object. But why should the burden be on you? Where did the banks get the right to sell your privacy?
Then there are still the old-fashioned door-to-door solicitors, who want to sell, beg or get your signature for their pet crusade. Just refuse to talk to them and they too will find that it is no longer worth their while.
The electronic age has increased the number of ways that strangers can intrude on you. Some fax you their advertisements. Who gave them the right to use up other people's paper?
Perhaps the most insidious intruders are those who plant their messages in your computer, without your even being aware of it, and monitor what you are doing on the Internet. These planted items are called “cookies” for some reason. And while they are gathering information about you, you don't even know who they are or what they are up to.
You can get your computer set up to block cookies, but then the anonymous cookie monsters can bombard you with notices that another cookie is available—and that they will keep plastering this notice across your screen every time you go on the Internet, unless you accept it. One of these announcements on my computer said that they will keep showing it until the year 2009. I have to put up with this nuisance for years!
There is no point saying that we are helpless, which seems to be a big cop-out these days. Every one of us has a Congressman and two Senators. Let them know that you are sick and tired of these invasions of our privacy by people you don't even know.
No doubt the telemarketers make campaign contributions to politicians but the bottom line is that votes are what get the pols elected. If they don't get our votes, money from special interests will not save their jobs.
People who have tried to build or remodel a home discover that they are under the thumbs of a veritable army of bureaucrats, ranging from local inspectors, who can tell them what kinds of windows they can and cannot have, to the federal government which prescribes what kinds of toilets and shower heads are legal and what kinds are illegal.
When I asked a carpenter about replacing the aging deck on my house with a new one, he was horrified at the thought. A new deck would require notifying the local bureaucrats. This could then mean that, after he spent days of his time and I spent thousands of dollars, some inspector could come around and say that it had to be done all over again because of his interpretation of the local building codes. Far better to keep repairing the old deck forever.
At one time, a man's home was his castle. Today it is the bureaucrats' plaything.
Why does the public put up with this? Obviously we could vote elected officials out of office if they didn't fix the laws to get all these people off our backs. But too many of us have gotten used to being pushed around and are willing to accept it if it is washed down with pious rhetoric about safety, compassion or the environment. Why are we so ready to give up our rights for spin?
PACIFISM AND WAR
Although most Americans seem to understand the gravity of the situation that terrorism has put us in—and the need for some serious military response, even if that means dangers to the lives of us all—there are still those who insist on posturing, while on the edge of a volcano. In the forefront are college students who demand a “peaceful” response to an act of war. But there are others who are old enough to know better, who are still repeating the pacifist platitudes of the 1930s that contributed so much to bringing on World War II.
A former ambassador from the weak-kneed Carter administration says that we should look at the “root causes” behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We should understand the “alienation” and “sense of grievance” against us by various people in the Middle East.
It is astonishing to see the 1960s phrase “root causes” resurrected at this late date and in this contex
t. It was precisely this kind of thinking, which sought the “root causes of crime” during that decade, creating soft policies toward criminals, which led to skyrocketing crime rates. Moreover, these soaring crime rates came right after a period when crime rates were lower than they had been in decades.
On the international scene, trying to assuage aggressors' feelings and look at the world from their point of view has had an even more catastrophic track record. A typical sample of this kind of thinking can be found in a speech to the British Parliament by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938: “It has always seemed to me that in dealing with foreign countries we do not give ourselves a chance of success unless we try to understand their mentality, which is not always the same as our own, and it really is astonishing to contemplate how the identically same facts are regarded from two different angles.”
Like our former ambassador from the Carter era, Chamberlain sought to “remove the causes of strife or war.” He wanted “a general settlement of the grievances of the world without war.” In other words, the British prime minister approached Hitler with the attitude of someone negotiating a labor contract, where each side gives a little and everything gets worked out in the end. What Chamberlain did not understand was that all his concessions simply led to new demands from Hitler—and contempt for him by Hitler.
What Winston Churchill understood at the time, and Chamberlain did not, was that Hitler was driven by what Churchill called “currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them.” That was also what drove the men who drove the planes into the World Trade Center.
Pacifists of the 20th century had a lot of blood on their hands for weakening the Western democracies in the face of rising belligerence and military might in aggressor nations like Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. In Britain during the 1930s, Labor Party members of Parliament voted repeatedly against military spending, while Hitler built up the most powerful military machine in Europe. Students at leading British universities signed pledges to refuse to fight in the event of war.
All of this encouraged the Nazis and the Japanese toward war against countries that they knew had greater military potential than their own. Military potential only counts when there is the will to develop it and use it, and the fortitude to continue with a bloody war when it comes. This is what they did not believe the West had. And it was Western pacifists who led them to that belief.
Then as now, pacifism was a “statement” about one's ideals that paid little attention to actual consequences. At a Labor Party rally where Britain was being urged to disarm “as an example to others,” economist Roy Harrod asked one of the pacifists: “You think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to disarm?”
The reply was: “Oh, Roy, have you lost all your idealism?” In other words, the issue was about making a “statement”—that is, posturing on the edge of a volcano, with World War II threatening to erupt at any time. When disarmament advocate George Bernard Shaw was asked what Britons should do if the Nazis crossed the channel into Britain, the playwright replied, “Welcome them as tourists.”
What a shame our schools and colleges neglect history, which could save us from continuing to repeat the idiocies of the past, which are even more dangerous now in a nuclear age.
INTENDED CONSEQUENCES
Over the years, the phrase “unintended consequences” has come up with increasing frequency, as more and more wonderful-sounding ideas have led to disastrous results. By now, you might think that people with wonderful-sounding ideas would start to question what the consequences would turn out to be—and would devote as much time to discovering those consequences as to getting their ideas accepted and turned into laws and policies. But that seldom, if ever, happens.
Why doesn't it? Because a lot depends on what it is you are trying to accomplish. If your purpose is to achieve the heady feeling of being one of the moral elite, then that can be accomplished without the long and tedious work of following up on results.
The worldwide crusade to ban the pesticide DDT is a classic example. This crusade was begun by the much revered Rachel Carson, whose best-selling book The Silent Spring was based on the premise that DDT's adverse effects on the eggs of song birds would end up wiping out these species. After that, springtime would no longer be marked by birds singing; hence the silent spring.
Rachel Carson and the environmentalists she inspired have succeeded in getting DDT banned in country after country, for which they have received the accolades of many, not least their own accolades. But, in terms of the actual consequences of that crusade, there has not been a mass murderer executed in the past half-century who has been responsible for as many deaths of human beings as the sainted Rachel Carson. The banning of DDT has led to a huge resurgence of malaria in the Third World, with deaths rising into the millions.
This pioneer of the environmental movement has not been judged by such consequences, but by the inspiring goals and political success of the movement she spawned. Still less are the environmentalists held responsible for the blackouts plaguing California, despite the key role of environmental extremists in preventing power plants from being built.
The greens have likewise obstructed access to the fuels needed to generate electricity, run automobiles and trucks, and perform innumerable other tasks in the economy. Nationwide, the greens have been so successful in preventing oil refineries from being built that the last one constructed anywhere in the United States was built during the Ford administration. But environmentalists are seldom mentioned among the reasons for today's short supplies of oil and the resulting skyrocketing prices of gasoline.
Advocates of rent control are not judged by the housing shortages that invariably follow, but by their professed desire to promote “affordable housing” for all. Nor are those who have promoted price controls on food in various countries being judged by the hunger, malnutrition or even starvation that have followed. They are judged by their laudable goal of seeking to make food affordable by the poor—even if the poor end up with less food than before.
Some try to argue against the evidence for these and other counterproductive consequences of high-sounding policies. But what is crucial is that those who advocated such policies usually never bothered to seek evidence on their own—and have resented the evidence presented by others. In short, what they advocated had the intended consequences for themselves—making them feel good—and there was far less interest in the unintended consequences for others.
Even before the rise of today's many social activist movements, T. S. Eliot understood such people and their priorities.
Writing in 1950, he said: “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
There is little hope of changing such people. But what the rest of us can do is stop gullibly accepting their ego trips as idealistic efforts for others. Above all, we need to stop letting them morally intimidate us into silence about the actual consequences of their crusades. The time is long overdue for us to insist that they put up or shut up, in terms of hard evidence about results, rather than the pious hopes that make them feel so good.
ISLAM AND THE WEST
Terrorist organizations in the Middle East are trying to bill the current crisis as a confrontation between Islam and the West—as in the Jihads and Crusades of centuries past. But there is no need for the rest of us to go along with that.
Six years ago, Professor Daniel Pipes of Harvard pointed out that terrorists described in the media as “Islamic fundamentalists” are often more Westernized than traditional Moslems. More recently, a leading scholar on the Middle East, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton, has pointed out that what these terrorists are doing—including the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center—goes counter to the teachings of Islam.
; This is not a religious war, on their side or on ours. The lives of American soldiers have been risked to try to save Moslems in Somalia and the Balkans, and American aid has been poured out to help Moslem countries around the world.
What we have witnessed among today's terrorists are some of the oldest and ugliest passions of human beings in general, based on envy and resentment, rather than on any religious teachings. Some fatuous people on college campuses, and in other enclaves of the intelligentsia and the glitterati, have tried to suggest that we must have done something to cause terrorists to attack us. What we have done is have achievements that dwarf theirs.
A thousand years ago, it was the other way around. The Islamic world at that time was far more advanced than the West. It was not only militarily stronger, but also more advanced in science, mathematics, and scholarship.
Contrary to the dogmas of the egalitarians, some portion of the human race has always been far in advance of others. In earlier centuries it was China and in later centuries it was Europe and America. The only egalitarian principle is that no one has been permanently superior.
As the human race has evolved over the millennia, some peoples have taken the lead during one era and others during other eras. Sometimes the reasons seem clear but at other times no one really knows why. The vast majority of people in all cultures are too busy with their own personal cares and concerns to give much thought to such things. Unfortunately, the rising prosperity of the world in general has supported the rise of increasing numbers of people who have the luxury of becoming preoccupied—or even obsessed—with such imponderables.
Controversial Essays Page 10