Isegoria

The Confederate secretary of state, who appeared on its two-dollar bill, was perhaps the 19th Century’s most prominent American Jew, Judah P. Benjamin:

Benjamin was born a British subject on St. Croix in 1811 to a family of Sephardic Jews. In 1822, the Benjamin family immigrated to America, seeking their fortune in what was then the nation’s most Jewish city: Charleston, S.C.

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As a Charleston schoolboy, Judah was adored by his teachers for his quick mind. He was packed off to Yale at age 14 where he became the sole Jew in his class. In New Haven, Judah distinguished himself as a debater, engaging the questions that he would eventually argue on the Senate floor, including “Ought the government of the U. States to take immediate measures for the Manumission of the slaves of our country?” and, ominously, “Is it probable that our country will continue united under its present form of government for a century?”

But the little big man on campus—Benjamin stood just over five feet tall—never graduated. In 1827, he was expelled from the university for “ungentlemanly conduct” of an unspecified nature. Rumors that the tempest in New Haven involved gambling, carousing, or kleptomania dogged him the rest of his life, particularly during the Civil War when the Northern press rehashed the scandal to tar the man they called the South’s “evil genius.”

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By 1852, “the Little Jew from New Orleans” had made enough of a name for himself as a state legislator to be sent to the U.S. Senate, chosen, as was then customary, not by popular election but by statehouse pols. On the Senate floor, Benjamin flourished as an orator of the Southern cause, a master of the secessionist rhetoric that cast slaveholders as victims. After Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, with the war looming, Benjamin intoned in a speech to his Northern Senate colleagues, “You may carry desolation into our peaceful land, and with torch and fire you may set our cities in flames … but you never can subjugate us; you never can convert the free sons of the soil into vassals, paying tribute to your power; and you never, never can degrade them to the level of an inferior and servile race. Never! Never!” When an abolitionist senator, citing the Book of Exodus, called Benjamin out for the signal hypocrisy of a Jew shilling for slavery—he tarred him as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles”—Benjamin cried anti-Semitism and refused to answer the charge on the merits.

With Louisiana’s secession from the Union in 1861, Benjamin, having turned down the chance to be the first Jew nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, was tapped by Confederate President Jefferson Davis as his right-hand man. During the war, Benjamin rotated through a series of Cabinet positions, first attorney general, then secretary of war, and finally secretary of state. Because of Benjamin’s Jewishness, Davis presumably figured he could never challenge him for the presidency should the South succeed in its bid for independence. (Unlike the United States Constitution, the Confederate Constitution permitted immigrants to become president provided they were Confederate citizens at the time of its ratification.) Secretary of State Benjamin was given the daunting diplomatic task of trying to obtain international recognition for the South as an independent country—a hopeless endeavor he pursued with such zeal he was later dubbed the “Confederate Kissinger.”

When the war ended, Benjamin fled Richmond posing as a French farmer who spoke only broken English. The short, fat attorney eluded a U.S. Army manhunt through the swamps of Florida before setting sail for London, where he began his legal practice anew from scratch. Soon counted among Britain’s most successful barristers, he built his wife a trophy home on the Rue d’Iéna in Paris and threw a lavish wedding for his daughter. In 1884, Benjamin died a wealthy man. Against his wishes, his wife had him buried in a Catholic cemetery, the famed Père Lachaise, where he rests today in obscurity, ignored by tourists tramping from Marcel Proust’s grave to Jim Morrison’s.

Oh, and he might have been gay, too.

(Hat tip to Steve Sailer.)

Outsiders discredit themselves when they make accusations of conscious conspiracy:

Some government bureaucracies have the very nasty dynamic that when they screw up, they create bigger problems, and thus get more funding to solve the bigger problem. Often, no one gets fired. The leaders of the problem-creating department now have more employees and thus more status and authority. Thus the system actively rewards those who work against the stated goals of the institution (again, they are not intentionally subverting the institution, they are often deluded).

The word “intent” breaks down because we do not have a handy English word to describe subconscious, institutional, or evolutionary intent. Many low-status outsiders observe the institution acting like a vampire, but they do not understand the internal dynamic, so they assume that the selfishness is conscious, when it is not. Their mistaken analysis of the internal dynamic makes them look like cranks, even though the overall observation is correct.

Because intent is so complicated, it hardly makes sense to even analyze it. To judge an institution, watch what it does. Look at the pressure that shapes its decisions.

Consider the pro-immigration Silicon Valley capitalists. I doubt Paul Graham fantasizes about bringing in hordes of programmers to push down wages, so that he can make an extra buck. That is ridiculous. But, he spends most of his time with startup founders and other investors. His grand thesis is that what is good for startups, is good for the country where the startups live (I generally agree with this thesis). So naturally, out of pure empathy, he feels pain when the founders recount some trouble getting a visa for themselves or a key employee. The social circle of elites like Graham, Zuckerberg and Gates include few workers who have been squeezed out of their jobs by H1B’s. So their concerns are reduced to a footnote and omitted from the FWD.us plan-of-action.2

Consider the Yale president. President Salovey will want to champion some noble new initiatives. That is the role he was hired for. But how to pay for it? If he cuts funding for some diversity program he will have protesters at his door. If he cuts a department, professors will be outraged. If he cuts the new gymnasium renovations, they’ll lose out on matriculation from rich and prestigious elite students. Thus the pressure is always to get more money, to grow, to expand. The pressure is to raise tuition, seek more government grants, seek more tax benefits from running a giant real estate conglomerate. Does President Salovey ever lie in bed, trying to sleep, thinking to himself, “You know, the primary benefit of Yale is really having a monopoly on a social network. It is wrong to exploit that social network, to make parents take out second mortgages to get access to it. Maybe we should charge less. We could do without the new electronic media center.” Perhaps he does think that. But there is no pressure to make him act on such thoughts.

Consider the Federal Reserve. It is incorrect to claim that the Federal Reserve is run by the banking industry in a command and control manner. But the two are very cozy. The door revolves. And even if you eliminated the revolving door, the banking industry has real power because of the information asymmetry. The bankers know the mechanics of the financial system, and thus when the system breaks, the bankers get to make the plan to fix it.3 Thus policy plans that originate in the banking sector are often the policy plans that get passed. And look at the results. There were trillions in bailouts for Wall Street. Many financiers net gained from the entire boom-bust cycle, while the ordinary tax payer has net lost. Inflation has run higher than the interest on CD’s, thus taking away money from ordinary Americans each year. Favored institutions get loans at low rates to buy up coveted property. Local banks and shops struggle to compete. If you observe the results, the conspiracy theorists have a point.

Consider media companies. Do journalists get promoted for making good predictions and fired for making wrong predictions? Do clicks and advertising dollars correlate with truth value? Do foundation grants and donations from the wealthy correlate with truth value? If not, why should we expect these institutions to be giving us an accurate view of reality?

The bottom line is do not judge any person or institution by what they say. Watch what they do. Find where the pressure is. Trace their social network. Who gives them advice? Who do they want to impress? Examine where the incentives lie. Examine the selection process by which people or departments or ideas get promoted. In the long term, an institution is forged by pressure, not by lofty goals and intentions. Thus the conspiracy critique is often simplistic and naive, but effectively true.

The prevailing ideology of the West – a liberalism that aims at abolishing identity and replacing it with individualism – is actually the third such attempt to stop dividing humanity into Them and Us, Jonathan Sacks writes:

‘The first was Pauline Christianity. Paul famously said, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (NIV, Gal. 3:28). Historically, Christianity has been the most successful attempt in history to convert the world to a single faith. Today a third of the population of the world is Christian. But nations continued to exist. So did non- monotheistic faiths. Another monotheism arose, Islam, with a similar aspiration to win the world to its understanding of the will of God. Within Christianity itself there was schism, first between West and East, then between Catholic and Protestant. Within Islam there were Sunni and Shia. The result was that war did not end. There were crusades, jihads, holy wars and civil strife. These led some people to believe that religion is not a way of curing violence but of intensifying it.

‘The second attempt was the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. After a devastating series of religious wars there was a genuine belief among European intellectuals that the divisions brought about by faith and dogma could be transcended by the universal truths of reason, philosophy and science. Kant produced a secular equivalent of the idea that we are all in the image of God. He said: treat others as ends, not only means. He also revived the prophetic dream of Isaiah, turning it into a secular programme for ‘perpetual peace’ (1795). Its most famous expression was Beethoven’s setting in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony of Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’, with its vision of a time when Alle Menschen werden Brüder – “All men become brothers”.’

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‘The first two attempts were universalist: a universal religion or a universal culture. The third attempt, the one we have been living through for the past half-century, is the opposite. It is the effort to eliminate identity by abolishing groups altogether and instead enthroning the individual. The contemporary West is the most individualistic era of all time. Its central values are in ethics, autonomy; in politics, individual rights; in culture, post- modernism; and in religion, “spirituality”. Its idol is the self, its icon the “selfie”, and its operating systems the free market and the post-ideological, managerial liberal democratic state. In place of national identities we have global cosmopolitanism. In place of communities we have flash-mobs. We are no longer pilgrims but tourists. We no longer know who we are or why.

‘No civilisational order like this has ever appeared before, and we can only understand it in the light of the traumatic failure of the three substitutes for religion: nationalism, communism and race. We are now living through the discontents of individualism and have been since the 1970s. Identity has returned. The tribes are back and fighting more fiercely than ever. The old sources of conflict, religion and ethnicity, are claiming new victims. The anti-modern radicals have learned that you can use the products of modernity without going through the process that produced them, namely Westernisation.’

The self-serving Leftist mythology is that it is a product of oppression, but, Bruce Charlton argues, the opposite is the case:

Leftism is always a product of increasing wealth and freedom — or indeed of established luxury and status.

The earliest Leftists were the industrial proletariat — who were probably the wealthiest and free-est working class group who existed in the world at that time. Early (middle to late 19th century) socialism became established, therefore, among the well-paid workers in the urban areas and among new industries such as coal mining, shipyards, steel making etc.

For example, the late 19th century miners in Newcastle upon Tyne were so wealthy (for their time) that they were renowned for their fancy clothes and expensive pastimes such as drinking, gambling and having fun. They were, indeed, so well-off that their wives did not need to earn any money — and it became a source of ‘macho’ pride to be a sufficiently successful bread-winner that the wife would stay at home and look after the house.

Socialist miners formed the backbone or shock-troops of British socialism until the unsuccessful strike of 1984.

Meanwhile, a few miles down the road, the farm workers remained extremely poor, with no money left over for fun and games, and their wives and children needed to work as much as possible simply to get enough to eat.

Yet Leftist parties almost always opposed the Industrial revolution, which — following Marx’s mistake/ deliberate error — they depicted as impoverishing the working class. In fact, as Greg Clark shows in A Farewell To Alms, the Industrial Revolution benefited the poor far more than the rich — and ended up by abolishing structural poverty altogether — fought every inch of the way by socialism, which afterwards re-wrote history and took the credit for the improvements.

If you read honest memoirs by the likes of Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, it can be seen that an analogous situation applied in the USA. The ‘civil rights’ era came after the great improvements in the wealth, status and freedom of the ex-slave population in the USA the situation. As usual, Leftism took credit for, and exploited, what had already been achieved without Leftism, and indeed most fought by the most Leftist parties.

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Thus Leftism is a phenomenon invariably associated with increasing wealth, freedom and status — because when people really are oppressed, poor and miserable they are too weak — when the laws and social practices really are against them, when they really are ‘minorities’ — people are much too frightened, vulnerable and exhausted (and with good reason!) to become Leftists and mount political campaigns.

Shelby Foote explains his thoughts on the Confederate battle flag:

The flag is a symbol my great grandfather fought under and in defense of. I am for flying it anywhere anybody wants to fly it. I do know perfectly well what pain it causes my black friends, but I think that pain is not necessary if they would read the confederate constitution and knew what the confederacy really stood for. This country has two grievous sins on its hands. One of them is slavery — whether we’ll ever be cured of it, I don’t know. The other one is emancipation — they told 4 million people, you’re free, hit the road, and they drifted back into a form of peonage that in some ways is worse than slavery. These things have got to be understood before they’re condemned. They’re condemned on the face of it because they take that flag to represent what those yahoos represent as — in their protest against civil rights things. But the people who knew what that flag really stood for should have stopped those yahoos from using it as a symbol of what they stood for. But we didn’t — and now you had this problem of the confederate flag being identified as sort of a roughneck thing, which it is not….

I don’t object to any individual hiding from history, but I do object to their hiding history from me. And that’s what seems to me to be going on here. There are a lot of terrible things that happened in American history, but we don’t wipe ’em out of the history books; we don’t destroy their symbols; we don’t forget they ever happened; we don’t resent anybody bringing it up. The confederate flag has been placed in that position that’s unique with an American symbol. I’ve never known one to be so despised.

(Hat tip to Foseti.)

So, why is the Confederate battle flag based on an X rather than a cross?

William Miles’s disappointment with the Stars and Bars went beyond his strong ideological objections to the Stars and Stripes. He had hoped that the Confederacy would adopt his own design for a national flag — the pattern that later generations mistakenly and ironically insisted on calling the Stars and Bars.… Charles Moise, a self-described “southerner of Jewish persuasion,” wrote Miles and other members of the South Carolina delegation asking that “the symbol of a particular religion” not be made the symbol of the nation.

In adapting his flag to take these criticisms into account, Miles removed the palmetto tree and crescent and substituted a diagonal cross for the St. George’s cross. Recalling (and sketching) his proposal a few months later, Miles explained that the diagonal cross was preferable because “it avoided the religious objection about the cross (from the Jews & many Protestant sects), because it did not stand out so conspicuously as if the cross had been placed upright thus.” … If Miles had not been eager to conciliate southern Jews, the traditional Latin (or St. George’s) cross would have adorned his flag.