When the editor told me that it wasn’t nice to judge the foods of other cultures—including the rotten meat I saw being boiled in order to be fed to the prisoners at that Ecuadoran prison—she was, of course, implicitly accusing me of ethnocentrism, which is defined as judging other cultures by the standards of one’s own culture.
Notice that the accusation of ethnocentrism is self-defeating because it, too, is a form of ethnocentrism. You cannot accuse someone of ethnocentrism without forcing your own standards upon them—standards they do not share. Let me explain.
Ethnocentrism is a concept really only taught within the culture of sociology and anthropology departments at secular universities. The idea that you should not judge other cultures is itself a judgment, and the number of people who subscribe to it make up a very small percentage of the people on this planet. But they demand that we all live by their non-judgmental worldview, which flourishes only in certain departments of elite Western universities, even though that worldview really imposes harsh judgments on others outside their own culture.
Logic aside, there is also a serious practical reason to avoid falling into the trap of cultural relativism—it renders one completely incapable of addressing the problem of evil. It may seem chic to refrain from judging other cultures when it comes to something trivial like tastes in food or fashion. But what about something like genocide?
Are we really prepared to say that our culture today is not superior to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s? Does anyone consider such a view to be chic?
And is it really morally sophisticated to pretend that you don’t notice that the rotten meat being fed to prisoners in a hellhole of a prison smells badly? Or, coming closer to home, that you don’t see any difference between a talk show host whose politics you don’t agree with, and a man responsible for several gruesome murders?
We know from history that any society foolish enough to experiment with Marxism will find that the quest for equality results in a lower standard of living for all. Similarly, any society foolish enough to embrace cultural relativism will find that the quest for equality results in a lower overall standard of morality.
We all lose something when we try to place all individuals on an equal plane by embracing a general philosophy of moral relativism—or of moral equivalence, as progressives so often do in the political realm. When a progressive does something wrong, his fellow progressives blandly defend him by pointing out the flaws of the guys on the other side. If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
There was a reason why that professor said Charles Manson was a “poor little guy who got railroaded by the system.” The professor is a political liberal who bought into the free-love philosophy of the 1960s. What Manson and the members of his hippie “Family” did makes crystal clear what a failure and a sham that whole free-love movement became. The youths of the 1960s eventually proved themselves to be the worst generation this nation has ever produced.
Manson is a vicious murderer who induced others to murder by preying upon their fears. It is both silly and wrong to call him innocent. It is also silly to compare him to Glenn Beck—a man who, whatever his flaws, has never murdered anyone.
Moral relativism fails logically. But it’s very useful psychologically—for those who want to escape the possibility of ever feeling guilty, so that they may do as they please, whenever they please. I found moral relativism very convenient for this purpose when I was sleeping around and doing drugs.
But moral relativism and moral equivalence don’t just help you feel equal to other, better people when actually you ought to feel bad about yourself. They also help you feel superior when, actually, you ought to feel quite ordinary. Why is it so completely typical for college students (and professors) who have adopted the Marxist program of economic equality—and the moral relativism that tends to go with it—to feel so smugly superior? Somehow their new political stand for equality makes them feel like they’re better than other people—better than the families who are sending them to college, better than ordinary Americans, and, especially, better than Tea Party members, Rush Limbaugh fans, and people who watch Glenn Beck.
LETTER 3
“The Trees”
Zach,
Speaking of people to whom leftists feel smugly superior, I’m going to write you today about Ayn Rand. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her books.
After escaping from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Rand became a famous American playwright, philosopher, and novelist. She wrote many books, three of which I would urge you to read. The first, We the Living, based on her youth in early Soviet Russia, is a lot like Orwell’s 1984. The second, The Fountainhead, is a longer novel expounding her philosophy, which is known as objectivism. The third, Atlas Shrugged, is her most famous work and includes the most complete explanation of her views on economics and morality.
As a Christian, I reject a good bit of what Ayn Rand has to say. Because she doesn’t take the fall of man into account, I don’t think she has a complete explanation for why capitalism works better than socialism or communism.
But Rand defends capitalism eloquently by pointing out a key flaw in socialism, and I am not at all uncomfortable recommending her books. (In fact, I have made the case for reading books whose messages I completely reject, including the original works of Marx and of Hitler. There is much to be learned from studying the works of those with whom you disagree—and much to be missed by ignoring them.)
It could take you several weeks to read those three books. Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to a song that was written by a rock musician influenced by Ayn Rand. The artist’s name is Neil Peart—a member of the band Rush. Neil is arguably the greatest rock and roll drummer who has ever lived. He is also one of the greatest songwriters.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, “The Trees” was one of my favorite songs. I didn’t know at the time that the song was a stinging indictment of socialism and communism inspired by Neil’s reading of Ayn Rand novels. It’s literally a song about trees—maples who “want more sunlight” and oaks who “ignore their pleas.”
When I look back on it, I am somewhat embarrassed that it took me so long to figure out the symbolism behind the oak-versus-maple contrast. This is a classic Marxist over-simplification, which is intentional on Peart’s behalf. There are only two classes of people, according to the worldview of Karl Marx—the haves and the have-nots or, as he called them, the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat.” Here, the oaks are the “haves” or the “bourgeoisie,” and the maples are the “have-nots” or the “proletariat.”
The scenario in the song is interesting because it raises the issue of absolute versus relative poverty. When the maples claim that the oak trees grab up all the light, they are exaggerating—actually, the author of the song, Neil Peart, is exaggerating for effect. Oaks are big trees, to be sure. In my own yard, there is an oak that is 100 feet tall that will eventually grow to be about 125 feet tall. But maples are big trees, too. I have a sugar maple that is about 60 feet tall that will eventually grow about 80 feet.
Peart, quite ingeniously, shows that the have-nots are often better characterized as simply having less than others. Their problem is not really that they do not have enough to get by. The problem is that, in their view, the oaks are “too lofty.” In other words, others have much more than they do. That is the key phrase because it reveals that covetousness, rather than true need, is what is motivating the maples. In reality, that is what always motivates collectivism.
The results of collectivism are also always predictable. In the song, the maples start by complaining; accelerate their complaints to demands; and, in the end, settle upon force to obtain what they want. The “oppression” of the oaks is replaced by a regime of strict equality, enforced by “hatchet, axe, and saw.”
The end of the song is chilling because it reveals the truth about progressivism. To begin with, it’s not really progressive. It’s not about helping anyone get ah
ead, but instead about holding some people back. What’s “progressive” about retarding some people’s achievements?
Ayn Rand was not a Christian. She did not profess to believe in the Ten Commandments. Nonetheless, she understood that what is packaged as compassion is often really covetousness in disguise. We would do well to familiarize ourselves with her work in an age of “collective” historical amnesia.
LETTER 4
Social Security and Racism
Zach,
In this letter I’m going to focus on the subject of racism, which is, and has been for quite some time, a hot-button issue in America. Having grown up in the South—I was born in Mississippi and raised in Texas—I have thought about the issue a lot over the years.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the progressive worldview gets a lot of its moral authority from the issue of racism. Even if Marxism and moral relativism are discredited by history and logic, progressives still look like the good guys when the subject of race comes up, since racial equality obviously is the right answer.
The problem is that the definition of racism has changed a great deal in recent years. Racism once referred to an ideology that was based on a belief in certain races’ inferiority. This general inferiority was presumed to flow from inferior intellectual ability, often ascribed to genetic inferiority.
Genetic racism is a dangerous ideology. In the middle of the nineteenth century, it played a central role in America’s bloodiest war. In the twentieth century, it fueled the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. But, fortunately, in the twenty-first century, its popularity is waning.
In recent decades, as old-fashioned racism based on genetics has become more and more discredited, new types of racism have been making their way into the national discourse on race. One of those alternative forms of racism is called “institutional racism.”
Institutional racism is any form of racial disparity, whether created intentionally or not, that occurs within institutions. For example, if people of a given race are more likely to be imprisoned than those of other races, this would be considered a form of institutional racism—regardless of the reason for their incarceration, or the motives of the police officers and judges.
To anyone interested in understanding why racism seems, counterintuitively, to be increasing in recent years, I recommend reading When Prophecy Fails: Ᾱ Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World, by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter.
In this book, the authors found that a group who predicted that the world would end on a certain date did not disband after their predicted doomsday date passed and the prophecy failed to come true—as one would intuitively expect. Instead, they continued to set numerous new dates for the world to end, even as the world kept right on going each time.
Festinger and his colleagues explained these results in terms of “effort justification,” a concept flowing from cognitive dissonance theory. The idea is simple—people who had invested a lot of effort in a cause could not handle the idea that their efforts were in vain. So instead of disbanding the group, they simply set another date for the end of the world—and then another, and another.
Something similar has happened to civil rights organizations in America. After worthy goals such as school desegregation had been accomplished, civil rights groups set other goals, such as expanding affirmative action programs. As time went by, each successive goal became less significant and bore less resemblance to the original goals of the organization.
Eventually, after the Civil Rights Movement had made significant progress in eliminating individual racism, in order to remain relevant it had to create new forms of racism to eradicate—hence, concepts like “institutional racism.”
For example, a congresswoman from Houston, Texas, once complained that too few hurricanes were named after black people. Of course, when this hypersensitive member of the Congressional Black Caucus made her claim, she was not really accusing meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center of operating out of a belief in the genetic inferiority of certain races. She was just claiming that the process of naming hurricanes tended to exclude African Americans disproportionately. In other words, she was claiming institutional racism—although most thought she was just blowing gale-force hot air.
But you know what’s interesting? No civil rights leader has ever claimed that our Social Security system is a form of institutional racism. And yet, according to the definition of “institutional racism,” Social Security is a deeply racist institution.
Everyone who works pays into the Social Security system through a lifetime of “contributions,” which are actually forcibly extracted by the government. But no one is allowed to draw full benefits until they turn sixty-five years of age. This is racially biased because white Americans have a greater life expectancy than black Americans—and an especially greater life expectancy than black men, who live, on average, shorter lives, while black women, white men, and white women all can expect to live past seventy years of age.
To make matters worse, the solvency of Social Security is in jeopardy. The result is that Congress will soon have to move the age of eligibility for full Social Security benefits to seventy years. This means that every demographic group within the population will be paying into the Social Security system, and everyone except the average black male will draw out.
Put simply, African American men are working all their lives to contribute to a system from which the average black man will never benefit. On top of that, he is not able to pass his contributions on to his offspring when he dies. Instead, the money—not just a simple majority of it but also a disproportionate share—will go toward creating a secure retirement for white people.
This could be compared to working on a plantation. The black man works, but the white man gets to keep the proceeds of the labor.
The Social Security system was established in 1935 by FDR. It was followed by a mass shift of African Americans to the Democratic Party. They had previously avoided the Democratic Party because the Republican Party was seen as more sympathetic to their plight as slaves.
But when FDR came along with the New Deal, which included Social Security, black voters returned to the Democratic Party. They thought FDR was more sympathetic to the poorer classes who were disproportionately black. Since then, African Americans have continued to vote Democratic. And, since then, no one seems to have discussed that strange paradox—at least not in the mainstream media.
The old form of slavery motivated by the old form of racism drove black voters away from the Democratic Party. Ᾱ new form of slavery that perfectly fits the definition of a new form of racism drove them back. The truth is often stranger than fiction. But it’s the only thing that will set men free.
LETTER 5
Roger Bannister and the Twenty-Five-Year Mile
Zach,
I assume you have heard of a man named Roger Bannister. Back in 1954, he did something everyone said was impossible. He ran a mile in under four minutes—breaking the barrier by only six-tenths of a second. No one in all of recorded human history had ever run a mile in less than four minutes. But soon afterwards (just forty-six days later), a man named John Landy broke Bannister’s record.
To date, it appears that well over 1,000 different people-perhaps 1,100, according to some sources—have recorded a sub-four-minute mile. In fact, no official consensus on the exact number seems to exist now that so many people have done it so often. The discrepancy between what was once thought impossible and what has now been achieved has implications for the current debate over affirmative action.
When we raise the bar for human achievement in any particular arena, human beings rise to the occasion. When we lower the bar, human beings simply exert less effort. Unfortunately, lowering the bar for human achievement is precisely what affirmative action does. My friend Larry Purdy, who served as trial counsel in the famous Grutter v. Bollinger case, said it best: “Those to whom a lower standa
rd is applied cannot possibly grow to their full height.”
If Larry Purdy is right, we have cause for great concern. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor spoke for the 5-4 majority in Grutter when she said, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”
The “interest” to which Justice O’Connor referred is called “diversity.” She assumes that racial preferences are needed to create racial diversity. But consider the following:• The state of Washington outlawed racial preferences in a voter initiative passed in 1998. In the fall of 1998, when race was still being considered in students’ applications, the flagship school University of Washington had 124 African Americans enrolled in its freshman class. The year after the initiative passed, black enrollment dropped dramatically. But the following year black enrollment rebounded back to 119.
• In the fall of 1996, when race was still being used to grant admissions to the University of Texas at Austin, 4.1 percent of the incoming freshman class was black. By the fall of 1999, Texas was using a system that did not take account of race—instead admitting the top 10 percent from every Texas high school regardless of race. In that year, 4.1 percent of the incoming freshman class at the University of Texas at Austin was black. Another stunning comeback was achieved.
• In the fall of 2004, Texas A&M University had a combined black/Hispanic enrollment of 15 percent without taking race into account in admissions. The University of Michigan, still relying on the race-based system it successfully defended in Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, had a combined black/Hispanic enrollment of just 12 percent in the fall of 2004.
Letters to a Young Progressive: How to Avoid Wasting Your Life Protesting Things You Don't Understand Page 2