The other day, I wrote, beginning with a quote from a Mississippi conservative portrayed in Alexandra Pelosi’s short clip as a redneck:

“We would rather go broke and die hungry than to give up our moral beliefs. … I’m gonna stand up for what I believe in even if I go broke doing it.”

Isn’t that a noble sentiment? The idea that you would rather suffer materially to stand up for what you believe is right? Why is that evidence of backwardness? I think it’s heroic, actually. Now, depending on what this guy believes in, it may also be tragic. That is, if the beliefs for which he is willing to suffer are immoral. But if you ask me, this Mississippian who stands ready to endure privation for the sake of principle has more integrity than those who would mock him.

I thought of that guy just now when I read UVA social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s NYT essay about how if you really want to know what motivates voters, don’t follow the money — follow what they believe to be sacred. Excerpt:

Self-interest, political scientists have found, is a surprisingly weak predictor of people’s views on specific issues. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens. People without health insurance are not more likely to favor government-provided health insurance than are people who are fully insured.

Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation.

Read the whole thing.  I like especially his analysis of how Reagan created a compelling conservative narrative that managed to unite social conservatives and libertarians against liberals. The important thing to take away from this essay is the idea that the culture war is not a pseudo-war, nor is it something waged only by one side. Both sides have their sacred objects and sacred principles. The Mississippi redneck perfectly articulated what Haidt is trying to explain. I am certain you could find on the left people who would rather go broke and die hungry than compromise on some belief that’s sacred to them. I find it a source of constant irritation to find people on the left who believe that the culture war is some kind of phony scheme cooked up to bamboozle right-wing yokels out of voting their interest. They fail to see that people on the right who vote on “values” rather than economics have direct counterparts on the left, some of whom were the object of the quip that Jews live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. Nowadays, in much of the country, Episcopalians live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans.

“Here, Dad, read this story,” said my son Matthew. “It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read.”

The story was “Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes, a celebrated piece of short fiction from 1958. I had heard about it before, but never read it. The story, in short, is written as the diary of a mentally disabled man, Charlie, who is the subject of a neuroscience experiment. Scientists perform an operation on him that triples his intelligence. Charlie finds that the dawning of a superior consciousness makes him, in fact, miserable. He becomes aware for the first time that the good old boys at the factory where he mopped floors don’t like him, as he thought, but actually make fun of him. With greater intelligence comes alienation. The factory folks present a petition to their foreman, demanding that Charlie be fired. His difference makes them feel uneasy. He is sent away. Yet he is also coming to feel resentment at those who aren’t as smart as he is — which, given the effect of his operation, is everybody, even the scientists who gave him this brilliance — as if their limited intellect were some sort of moral defect. Charlie comes to have the same sort of scorn for those beneath his cognitive level as the good old boys at the factory once held for him.

I won’t tell you how the story ends, but I will say it raises difficult questions about intelligence, morality, and community. I finished the story five minutes ago, and wanted to bring it up here as relevant to our discussion about Charles Murray, elites, class, and community. Murray, as you know, is concerned that our meritocratic society has led to a cultural chasm between cognitive elites and the working classes — a chasm maintained and even expanded by geographical patterns of segregation. He suggests — with wild implausibility, to my mind, for reasons I’ve discussed earlier — that the way to build bridges and help improve the dysfunctional behavior of the lower classes is for elites to leave their enclaves and settle among the poor and working classes.

“Flowers for Algernon,” with brutal elegance (which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but in this case is not), illuminates the folly of Murray’s suggestion. It is against human nature. People tend to fear and resent intelligence, in part because it makes them feel inferior. On the other end, the intelligent tend to fear and resent those who don’t have their abilities. I know, I know, this is hardly news; what “Flowers for Algernon” points out, though, is how difficult it can be to empathize, to see those unlike oneself as human beings, not subjects for mockery, experimentation, or in some way the object of one’s spite, amusement, resentment, or some other form of objectification.

Maybe the cognitive elite prefers to live apart because they don’t want to be subject to the scorn of the others. Maybe the others want the cognitive elite to live apart so they don’t have to be reminded, by the presence of these “snobs,” of the things they lack. People are tribal by nature, and instinctively react against those who threaten the tribe, its values, and its cohesion.

Anyway, this story made me think of the Charles Murray issue, and I wanted to throw it out there for discussion.

The traditional conservative James Kalb gets all theoretical about why conservatism in any real sense is not possible in contemporary America. Excerpt:

The only authority conservatives could appeal to in opposition to the antitraditional features of American life that carried weight in national public discussions was reason. They could claim to be logical and realistic in opposition to la-di-da liberals. In the long run though that claim leads nowhere, because liberalism is entirely logical given the accepted basis for serious mainstream public discussion today.

That basis is a stripped-down and basically technocratic view that says that at bottom that there’s no God and no objective moral order that can be relied on, just atoms, the void, and free-floating human desires and sensations. As a result, nothing has an essence, natural goal, or reason for being, since there are no intrinsic natures or goods. The only meaning things can have for us is the meaning we give them. It follows that wanting to do something is what makes it worth doing, and the good is simply the satisfaction of preferences.

That view also tells us that all preferences, and all actors, are equally preferences and actors, with no higher standard to make one better than the other. It follows that each has an equal claim to satisfaction. Morality therefore becomes a system that has nothing to say about how to live but only tells us to stay out of each other’s way and support arrangements that help everyone reach whatever his goals happen to be. The uniquely rational approach to social order, it turns out, is to treat it as a sort of machine—a soulless technically-rational arrangement—for maximizing equal satisfaction of preferences.

But that’s liberalism. The basic liberal standard of equal freedom—that is, equal preference satisfaction—turns out to be simply rational given current understandings of what’s rational, real, and moral. So if someone notices that there are problems with the actual liberalism we see around us, the conclusion is always going to be that we need a freer freedom and more equal equality. A present-day movement that wants to engage public discussion on its own terms must support or reinvent liberalism if it wants to be coherent and rational.

Incoherence and irrationality aren’t very effective in the long run, so conservatism has repeatedly ended up reinventing or rebranding liberalism. There’s nothing else it can do if it goes along with the basic picture of reality that provides the setting for public discussion today. It can point out practical problems, in line with the claim it once made to be logical and realistic, but it has to accept liberal goals, and if it wants to be American it also has to adopt a can-do attitude. The result is that in the long run it has to treat the problems it points out as things it can solve. It has to give up the appeal to logic and realism in favor of an appeal to faith in America.

Read the whole thing.

From the Washington Post:

The Army soldier who allegedly killed 16 Afghan villagers in a shooting spree was identified Friday as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, according to a U.S. official.

The suspect was being flown to a U.S. military prison Friday to await possible criminal charges, the Pentagon said earlier in the day.

Navy Capt. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman, would not immediately identify the military prison, citing security concerns. But the U.S. official said later that Bales was being flown from Kuwait to a military detention center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

Bales, a 38-year-old father of two, served three tours in Iraq and was badly injured there before being deployed in December to Afghanistan, according to his attorney. It was his fourth deployment in 10 years.

The attorney, John Henry Browne, said Thursday night that the soldier is “highly decorated” and suffered a concussion in Iraq as well as an injury that resulted in the loss of part of his foot.

Browne said his client, now known to be Bales, had been told after his Iraq service that he would not be deployed to a war zone again.

“He and his family were not happy” when he got word he was going to Afghanistan, the lawyer said.

Read the whole thing. Here is a bit from the New York Times’s report:

A decorated soldier who grew up in the Midwest, the man enlisted within a week of the terrorist attacks of 2001, he said.

“He felt it was his duty to stand up for the United States,” said [his lawyer] Mr. Browne, who has handled many high-profile cases in the Northwest, including the recent defense of the teenage fugitive known as the Barefoot Bandit, Colton Harris-Moore.

Mr. Browne, who said he met with “a very large group of family members” on Wednesday and spoke with the soldier by telephone on Thursday, said the man had “been decorated many, many times. He’s been to Iraq twice. He was injured twice and he was deployed back to Afghanistan. He is a career military man.”

He added, “He was injured in Iraq in two places on his body, so he wasn’t certain he was healthy enough to go back, physically.”

Mr. Browne said the soldier suffered a concussion during a vehicle rollover accident caused by a roadside bomb. He also lost part of a foot in another episode.

Please don’t read this as me excusing Sgt. Bales for what he (allegedly) did. It is inexcusable, and he must pay for his crime, if he is found guilty.

But think: here is a man — a father of two little children — who has served three tours of duty in a war zone, who was badly injured on his last tour, and who was promised that he wouldn’t have to go back into the war zone again. What kind of military sends a man like that back into combat? What kind of civilian government allows its soldiers to be treated that way?

There are a bunch of dead Afghan children, and two American children who will probably lose their father to prison. I may be wrong about this, but I find it hard to believe that even if Sgt. Bales is guilty of this massacre, that it was entirely his fault.

We should leave, and we should leave right now.

Goodbye Fishtown

At first you lured me in with your promises of “Up and Coming” and “Hipster Youngsters”. You lulled me with thoughts of big city life, Postcards from the edge, Neighborhood Connections and progressive thinking. It didn’t take you long to show me your true colors. Angry Self Important Dirty Single-minded, Narrow-minded drug dealing and using pigs that have never lived more than 2 miles from where you grew up, and where your parents grew up, and their parents, each generation more suspicious and useless than the last. You throw garbage on the ground, trashing your own neighborhoods right from your own hands, the garbage collecting in piles on the streets and sewer grates. Your children follow suit while you watch and encourage. You use your outside hollering loud voices inside, screaming at each other in restaurants, into cell phones and at grocery stores like you’re at a Rodeo, using at best, 4th grade 3rd world country grammar. You all wear the uniform; Nike sandals and socks on every man, woman and child, your too-tight sweats with Juicy on your cheesy ass with a tee shirt that is doing little to hide your flabby belly.. or baggy asscrack and boxer’s revealing jeans and Eagles jersey. Your aimless pointless meme tattoos, and your bad attitudes. City of Brotherly Love? I beg to differ. I’ve never in my life felt so unwelcome in a community like I have in Fishtown. (Having lived in 12 different communities in 3 states, this is no small feat.) The street I chose to live on was fraught with parking wars (garbage cans to ‘reserve’ your spot in front of your house every day, rain or shine? REALLY?) to reserve a spot for yourself in front of your own house when you own 4 cars, that’s a tall order for everyone to just sit back and accept; but accept everyone does because of the probable personal property damage if we move your playground equipment or garbage can to use the spot! No, we’d rather park 3 blocks away to avoid your Parking Punishments. The theft is amazing, straight off front porches in a matter of seconds, Right out of a car, in a matter of minutes! Like a bunch of vultures just waiting to nab whatever catches your eye. Stealing for the sake of stealing – destruction for the sake of destroying. No respect for persons, personal property or city property. I won’t miss your over priced corner stores (where overweight slugs stand around slurping down over- priced sodas and complain about threats of extra tax on that soda, never thinking that, as to they toss the bottle into the sewer grate, that SOMEONE , SOMEWHERE has to clean up after your lazy fat ass). I won’t miss the Pizza Truck and it’s subsequent trash and fodder, or the corner pub every 3 blocks that vomit out drunkards to wander the street at 2am …only to wander by to vomit on my front stoop. I won’ t miss the assholes every Friday, rummaging through my trash. In short, Fishtown. You suck. You probably have sucked for the past 30 years as more and more of you stay to live off your grandma’s inheritance, which really consists of all the Social Security payments she saved for your lazy fat broken sluggish nasty pasty stupid ass. Good Bye!

Angelina Stanford tells me something I did not know about two daughters of famous women. Excerpt:

At age 39, Alexis Stewart, daughter of Martha Stewart decided that the time was right at last to have a child. Sadly, her body disagreed, and she was unable to conceive. Alexis was shocked to discover the biological truth: by age 30 a woman’s fertility decreases by 7 percent; by age 45 it declines by 87 percent.

She is downright angry when she discusses the ways in which women have been hoodwinked. Magazines herald celebrities giving birth to their firstborn in their forties or beyond. No one tells you what her gynecologist told her about those celebrities—those aren’t their eggs.

She was dismayed to discover how rare it is for a woman to conceive naturally in her forties. Even those who can afford fertility treatments are often turned away because of their age. At forty, you are too old, the clinic insists.

Alexis Stewart’s story has a somewhat happy ending. After painful and expensive (she was paying $27,000 a month) fertility treatments, she did conceive and have a child.

Actually, that’s not quite how it happened. Wealthy Alexis Stewart rented a surrogate’s womb. Several of them, in fact. Sicko stuff.  But yes, she has a baby, at last, and will be raising the child without a daddy.

Stanford also highlights the case of Rebecca Walker, daughter of the feminist novelist Alice Walker. The two are estranged because, according to Rebecca, her radical mother propagandized her against motherhood. From a NYT piece about Rebecca Walker’s embrace of motherhood:

“I keep telling these women in college, ‘You need to plan having a baby like you plan your career if it’s something that you want,’ ” she said. “Because we haven’t been told that, this generation. And they’re shocked when I say that. I’m supposed to be like this feminist telling them, ‘Go achieve, go achieve.’ And I’m sitting there saying, ‘For me, having a baby has been the most transformational experience of my life.’ ”

Reporter from Outside magazine travels around south Louisiana to see what the post-BP gumbo tastes like. He stops to talk to Dean Blanchard, a shrimp broker on Grand Isle:

“How are your shrimp?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t eat dat shit,” he said, rubbing his spiky gray hair.

“Really?”

“Dat water’s poison. Every day, dey haulin’ dead porpoises in front of my place. Wildlife says dey was dying before the oil spill. I say, Yeah? I musta been sleepin’. Cause I ain’t never seen y’all haul one in front of my place before. Now I see y’all haul a hundred of these motherfu*kers!”

It should be noted that Dean is one of the claimants in the class action angling for a massive settlement with BP. He therefore may not be the most objective source. But his story more or less checks out. NOAA reported some 80 abnormal dolphin deaths between January and April 2010. Since the spill, more than 450 dead dolphins have washed up on Gulf Coast beaches. Many were newborns or stillborns, leading some biologists to hypothesize that ingested oil had contributed to a wave of miscarriages. NOAA has declared the situation an “unusual mortality event.”

If none of the seafood tested by NOAA showed oil contamination, how could the Gulf’s marine life be so affected? A recent paper by LSU biologist Andrew Whitehead provides a clue. Whitehead examined Gulf killifish—minnows that live in the marshes and are an important food source for many species—before, during, and after the oil hit. He found that even tiny amounts of oil caused genetic abnormalities and tissue damage in the fish, enough to impair their reproductive abilities. And you wouldn’t have known this simply by testing them for contamination.

“Though the fish may be safe to eat,” Whitehead said, summarizing the report, “that doesn’t mean they are capable of reproducing normally.” This problem may extend to other marine life. And many fishermen blame low yields on BP’s dispersants, though the scientific jury is still out.

“The dispersant is biodegradable,” said Ralph Portier, professor of environmental science and oceanography at LSU. “The oil is biodegradable. So we’re not worried about their presence over a long period. The real issue is whether the mixture of dispersant  and oil made it to the marsh and had a catastrophic effect on key organisms. There are literally hundreds of scientists working on these problems, but right now there are too many variables and not enough data.”

More:

Perched on his dock at the very edge of the Gulf, Blanchard has a unique vantage point to speculate on such things. And what he wanted to tell me was that the white shrimp season was a bust. “White shrimp are born on the beach,” he said. “Dey ain’t got a chance to go nowhere. Dey layin’ in polluted fu*kin’ water. Dey dead! Unless dey like Jesus and can raise from the dead, dey ain’t comin’ back. Usually, I buy about 250,000 pounds opening day. This year I didn’t buy one. First time in my life.”

Again, Blanchard’s not lying. According to Clint Guidry, president of the Louisiana Shrimp Association, the white shrimp haul was down 80 percent across Louisiana in 2011. On November 30, in the face of overwhelming evidence of the poor season, Feinberg, the claims czar, announced that commercial crab and shrimp harvesters would be entitled to four times their documented 2010 losses, instead of two times, in exchange for waiving their right to sue. This was good news for the 1,000 or so shrimpers and crabbers still holding out but an affront to the 4,000 who had already accepted a settlement and were told that there would be no retroactive payments.

I asked Blanchard whom he blamed for the disaster. “The French media came and asked me whose fault it was. I told ’em Napoleon. He should’ve killed all the British at Waterloo. The German media came. I told ’em Hitler. He should’ve bombed ’em with the fu*kin’ Luftwaffe. The American media came. I told ’em it was George Washington’s fu*kin’ fault. We been fightin’ the British on this island since 1673.”

Having read that, I’m still going to Hot Tails for a shrimp poboy today. Sadly, the shrimp will probably be from China.

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is stepping down to become master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. That’s got to be a relief to him. More:

But he said: “It has certainly been a major nuisance. But in every job that you are in there are controversies and conflicts and this one isn’t going to go away in a hurry. I can’t say that it is a great sense of ‘free at last’.”

Charles Murray has called for wealthier Americans to help bridge the cultural chasm between themselves and citizens further down the class ladder by moving out of their enclaves and into less exclusive areas. There’s a name for at least some of this: gentrification.

Gentrification is what happens when wealthier people buy up property in blighted or at least scruffy parts of a city, and renovate the run-down housing. It’s also called “urban pioneering” — the idea that one is staking a claim to savage territory, and civilizing it by one’s presence. “Gentrification” is, to many people, a dirty word, because it displaces very poor people from those neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s a dirty word, frankly — but then again, I was a second-wave gentrifier once.

The neighborhood where we bought our house had been a drug-gang war zone in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, in the 1990s, the gentrifiers showed up. They loved those architecturally significant old houses, and saw value there. They took big risks to buy those properties up, even though they came cheap. Eventually the neighborhood started slowly getting better. By the time we arrived, it was a good place to live, though close enough to the danger zone that some nights you could hear gunshots in the near distance. As far as I knew, a Hispanic couple, both retirees, was the only couple from our block from the old days. They talked about how it was too dangerous to sit on your front porch at night back then. They were clearly happy that the neighborhood had turned around.

But here’s the thing. With the coming of the middle-class gentrifiers, their old neighbors — mostly working-class Hispanics like them, I believe — moved out. Property values went up — but that meant they had to pay higher property taxes. Because the gentrifiers moved there out of love for the historic quality of those old houses, they pushed to have the neighborhood declared an official Historic District. When this happened, it radically limited the freedom of homeowners to do what they wanted with their property. I remember our Hispanic neighbors running afoul of the city for some minor code violation thing in this regard. Eventually they decided they were going to try to sell their house and leave. I think they had several reasons for doing this, some having to do with grandchildren, but I’m fairly certain that they just got tired of living among people like, well, us. To be clear, there was no discord between them and the other neighbors. We got along fine. But I could see how they might have felt like for all the good that came to their neighborhood with gentrification, they also lost it.

Again, I don’t think gentrification is a bad thing, in principle, for reasons mentioned in this article. The reason I bring it up here, even though I don’t think Murray is talking only about gentrification, is because I think the same dynamic that we see with gentrification should make one skeptical of Murray’s idea that having members of various social and economic classes living together is going to bridge the cultural chasm. As long as people are free to buy and sell property as they wish, and there are laws forbidding covenants that keep classes of people from buying property in a particular place — two factors that we can all agree are good things — then people will try to live around people like themselves. This is normal human behavior. That means too that they will not want people too unlike themselves living around them. This is normal human behavior also.

Let’s say that a few SWPL hipsters with cash start buying up housing in a “vibrant” neighborhood, because they want to live around working-class people. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that these SWPLs are the children of the people in Belmont, the prosperous town Murray mentions in his book, “Coming Apart.” They get the idea that it’s cool to live in Fishtown, the working-class town also in his book, because they want the “authentic” experience, and they hate the stuffiness of Mom and Dad’s boring rich suburb. For starters, how likely do you think the people of Fishtown are to take to these outsiders moving in? Second, how likely do you think the SWPLs are to stay in Fishtown once they decide to start a family? Do they want their kids to grow up with Fishtown values? [I say that not to privilege Fishtown values over Belmont values, but only to point out that until and unless you’re willing to raise your kids in a place, living there is just tourism.]

Third, let’s say Fishtown gets a reputation among affluent SWPL types, and they start moving in, bidding up the real estate market. Before you know it, the working-class people who live in Fishtown may find they can’t afford to live there. Maybe they don’t want to live there, because the things that made it feel like home are going away. All these strangers are now living here, people with different habits, and different tastes. Maybe the poorest or at least the most disaffected working-class people of Fishtown leave, but others stay, and the neighborhood mix stabilizes. That could happen. But isn’t it possible too that Fishtown would, in time, return to a cultural homogeneity, except now the working class homogeneity has been exchanged for upper class/Bobo homogeneity?

In the end, I think what irritates me about Murray’s suggestion is the idea that working-class white people are eager to welcome upper-class white people to their neighborhoods, so they can learn how to behave from their example. That’s what Murray is calling for. Seriously, he wants upper-class whites to be secure in their bourgeois values, and to move in to working-class areas to educate the natives by setting a good example — and, in turn, gain the benefit of cultural diversity of living around people unlike themselves.

Good luck with that. Leaving the question of housing aside, I’m am pretty sure that the cultural gentrification Murray proposes would not go down well with the people the Murrayite missionaries are supposed to civilize.