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[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE.]
Last week several Congresswomen went toe-to-toe in an exchange of insults during the House Oversight and Accountability Committee Hearings. The pugnacious Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) took on Democrat firebrand Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), with Brooklyn Dem Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an aggressive interlocutor, piling on.
This unseemly brawl is a litmus test for how we think about the state of our government and how it should work. Many people see such vulgar exchanges of harsh rhetoric and personal attacks as a failure of our system of partisan faction who sacrifice the good of the public to their parochial ideological interests, instead of “reaching across the aisle” to “solve problems.”
But such passionate confrontations are nothing new, and do not bespeak a breakdown in our Constitutional order. Rather, they are signs of James Madison’s Constitutional guardrail that “ambition must be made to counter ambition,” that in the political tournaments of power, the efforts of one faction to aggrandize more control and influence will be checked by those of other factions who possess the same political rights. The goal is not to “solve problems,” which is the job of citizens, civil society, churches, families and states. Rather, protecting our freedom by checking and balancing power is how our political freedom and equality can be fortified against tyranny.
This fundamental feature of our Constitutional architecture reflects another dimension of human nature. Not only is faction “sown in the nature of man,” as Madison said, but also reflects the reality of diversity in the settlement of the original colonies. Our Diversity Inc. industry ignores these true variations that comprise America’s complex identities, and instead reduces it to crude, racist categories primarily expressing physical traits and characteristic.
Such caricatures, moreover, have kept alive stereotypes predicated on victimhood and grievance, and embodied them in fictive cultural narratives, all at the expense of our most important identity––that of unique individuals who exist on this earth only once. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut points out, “Like the racists before them, contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extremes, and in the name of a multiplicity of specific causalities destroy any possibility of cultural community among peoples.” Hence, we end up with imperialistic homogeneity and an intellectual and political monoculture rather than diversity.
The Founding generation acknowledged the diversity of ethnicity, regional cultures and mores, dialectics of English, distributions of wealth and status, notions of honor, habits of deference, various Christian denominations, a penchant for physical violence and verbal crudity, not to mention conflicting attitudes toward social and economic institutions, most obviously slavery and loyalty to England.
This acceptance of genuine diversity, moreover, had various social and political consequences. As happened in ancient Athens, allowing this intricate complexity of diversity, and the inclusion a broad-based citizenry, a role in running the state–– public participation in voting, public debate and deliberation, and holding office––meant that citizens all had to tolerate this diversity.
Thus, our First Amendment says nothing about decorum, “norms,” manners, vulgarity, slang, grammar, politesse, or communication skills. Citizens must be free to speak as they see fit, no matter how offensive others may find them. After all, the manners and decorum of elites whether of birth or wealth too often become a form of gate-keeping dissenters from the town square, thus effectively censoring alternative points of view.
The world of the 18th century, however, has radically changed. The growth of science and technology unforeseen by the Founders has fostered the conceit that human beings can be improved. But the Founders believed that our problems are caused by a flawed, permanent human nature beyond improvement by science that identifies material causes, and develops new technologies or knowledge that can mitigate or even eliminate those dysfunctions that cause conflicts, oppression, and injustice.
From this set of assumptions has arisen the progressive technocracy that order and manage society more justly than common sense, tradition, or religious doctrines. Now, as progressive Walter Lippman wrote in 1914, “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its methods, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means.”
This paean to the technocratic ideal, remember, appeared the year the First World War erupted, a conflict in which, as Winston Churchill wrote, “When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and these were of doubtful utility.”
But in the following years, such graphic and horrific scenes of human savagery could not check the progressive project to transform our Constitutional order–– designed to protect our freedom and unalienable rights–– into technocratic, government bureaucracies. These agencies “of skilled, economic administration,” as Woodrow Wilson put it, would be staffed by the “hundreds who are wise” empowered by the federal government and its coercive powers to guide the thousands who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish,” that is, the mass of ordinary, uncredentialed citizens.
With the tenets of faith driven from the town square, for the cognitive elite science, or more often scientism, bestows status and social authority, as we see in the supercilious arrogance of progressive who call themselves “brights” and order hoi polloi to “follow the science.”
If the past century of mass violence, from the industrialized slaughter of Verdun to the genocidal savagery of Hamas’ attacks on Israel; if all that carnage and suffering can’t make us think more critically about our dangerous technophilia, we should consider the recent news about the crisis in scientific research.
For a while there have been reports about a “replication crisis,” the failure of researchers to reproduce the same results as the original researcher reported, the “cornerstone of science.” More recently, Nidhi Subbaraman reported in The Wall Street Journal, “Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which [announced] that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.”
Such news shouldn’t surprise us, given our own experience with the Covid debacle, with the politicized and ineffective information about its origins, lethality, transmission, treatments, and mitigation protocols like lockdowns, social distancing, and masks, all of which were touted as “following the science,” but now have been exposed as dangerously wrong.
Even more telling is the continuing squandering of billions of dollars in pursuit of “renewable energy” and “zero carbon” policies based on an incomplete understanding of global climate, a gap papered over with dubious computer models riddled with confirmation bias, and serially unable to comport with observed temperature changes in the real world.
These failures of bad science, along with the persistence of global mass violence, tyranny, slavery, and torture, explodes the pretensions of technocracy to improve human beings enough to eliminate their destructive, irrational passions and actions, and achieve the utopia that has been promised by modernity’s most violent and destructive political ideologies.
Technocratic arrogance, then, and government’s aggrandizement of more power that has taken place for a century is the real danger to our freedom and unalienable rights, not the insults, bickering or the “politics of personal destruction” that have typified American politics from its beginning.
Very insightful article. I am glad to know you are a university professor in California with the opportunity to share your “voice of reason” here in our beautiful state. Thanks for sharing this.
Good thing people no longer carry canes in congress!
Or that food is not allowed when in session. Although it would have been fun to watch…
But some punishment by caning seems needed in our House and best if done publicly when the level of stupidity rises beyond tolerance with graduates of Boston U.
The flogging should continue until morale improves!
If man is not morally perfectible, if man is doomed to moral corruption by his very nature (Original Sin), why should anyone listen to what you have to say Bruce Thornton?
You too are morally corrupt by your very nature. Just go kneel down, repent to God for your morally corrupt nature, and be silent.
Irrational passions and actions? Rationality is a CHOICE. Implicit in your attack on “irrational” human nature is that human nature can be rational, men can choose rationality or irrationality, men can choose moral perfection and they can choose moral corruption.
Moral perfection defined by a rational standard (not an irrational Christian standard), means that man is neither omniscient nor omnipotent, but that in any given situation, in a given context, within the limits of his knowledge at the time, a man can choose the good, a man can choose to be rational.
If man were truly inescapably doomed to moral corruption by his very nature, then a moral elite, a secular dictatorship, or a religious theocracy, would be necessary to curb man’s inescapable evil impulses.
Only if man is morally perfectible, morally perfectible by a rational standard, only if reason is an efficacious means of knowledge, of knowing the facts, can man be trusted to his freedom and liberty.
Confidence and trust in man, means confidence and trust in reason. Confidence and trust in reason, means confidence and trust in freedom and liberty. The reverse is also true.
“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority….
Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their “instincts,” but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.” – Ayn Rand
I think Thornton has got this right.
” ….exploding the pretensions of technocracy to improve human beings enough to eliminate their destructive, irrational passions and actions, and achieve the utopia that has been promised by modernity’s most violent and destructive political ideologies. ”
” Technocratic arrogance, then, and government’s aggrandizement of more power that has taken place for a century is the real danger to our freedom and unalienable rights, not the insults, bickering or the “politics of personal destruction” that have typified American politics from its beginning. “
Leaders promising paradise demand power. When paradise does not come, more power is demanded. The constant correction for the path to paradise is human sacrifice.
Aw, did Bruce make you mad? Because he has a bigger platform than you? And all you can do rant about his “moral corruption”.
Perhaps you should kneel down and ask ask the Dead Woman for moral guidance for the sake of your endless sin. You know, the one where you get to berate the rest of us because of our lack of moral Objectivist uprightness. That is what you do best, isn’t it. You get angry because no one cares what you write and that your posts are virtually unreadable.
If I read all of your crap each and every day I wouldn’t have the time to do anything else. So I don’t read any of it. I’m so much healthier in mind, body and spirit.
It’s funny how this outraged comment does nothing but bolster the author’s argument.
It is precisely because we cannot trust in men, but only in God, that Congress was conceived by the founders of our republic to exercise a few, specifically enumerated, powers granted it by the States.
The false dichotomy between rationalism and faith in Christ is a construct of atheists, not of Ms. Rand. She eschewed self-sacrifice, but honored manliness.
Atheists read the fifth chapter of Ephesians to claim falsely that Paul wrote a foolish screed about men dominating women, but the reality is that Paul honored marriage, told men to protect their families the way Christ sacrificed his human life to atone for our sins, and told women to keep the family holy – that is, apart from the evil of the world. Everyone is fallen, and anyone who denies this is worse than a fool. But we are also redeemed, and have the expectation of eternal life in the presence of our Creator when we accept His gift of grace.
“All rights rest on the ethics of egoism. Rights are an individual’s SELFISH possessions—HIS title to HIS life, HIS liberty, HIS property, the pursuit of HIS own happiness. Only a being who is an end in himself can claim a moral sanction to independent action. If man existed to serve an entity beyond himself, whether God or society, then he would not have rights, but only the duties of a servant.
Whoever understands the philosophy of Objectivism (or implicitly accepts an Aristotelian morality of self-interest, as was done by the political thinkers of the Enlightenment), can read off the proper human rights effortlessly; this may cause him to regard such rights, in the wording of the Declaration of Independence, as “self-evident.” Rights, however, are not self-evident. They are corollaries of ethics as applied to social organization—if one holds the right ethics. If one does not,
none of them stands.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
As usual, wracking up the down votes. I think you are really mad at the fact that Thornton has a successful life and you don’t.
I see Thorton’s “progressive technocracy” as just the most recent incarnation of the progressive movement that began flourishing at the beginning of the 20th century. It remains an ideology embraced by liberals, radicals, and various Marxist leaning individuals who believe that by employing science with government, you can transform the population into “better people.” Sometimes it looks like this country is turning into an H.G. Wells novel.
Yes, a Congressional cat spat tail has no rightful connection to wagging a good governance dog.
TY, Dr. Thornton. This is what Dr. Sowell calls “the vision of the anointed.” Their aim is to make the US a Marxist utopia, and they won’t stop until they’re made to stop.