Matriarchy at New Ruskin College
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 03-15-05 Betrayal
"From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles," he wrote at the time in a Jesuit magazine, "there is one unmistakble lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos." ---- and then on the floor of the Senate he added: “And it is very richly deserved.” ---- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Senator John Kerry appeared on the floor of the Senate several years later, this was around 1991, and attempted to quote Senator Moynihan, however he substituted “never acquiring any stable relationship to adult authority”. Always the politician.
Yet Senator Moynihan did not say “adult authority” he said “male authority.”
And unlike me, Senator Moynihan was a real scholar. If he said male you can bet he meant male. If he had meant adult he would have said adult. (With me you can never be too sure why I choose one word over another. (Don’t read too much into it. Just try for the gist of the idea.))
So why did Moynihan say male --- not adult authority?
In Men and Marriage, George Gilder asks why the feminists who are so pleased to cite Margaret Meade and others for evidence of the existence of matriarchy and draw out from these observations whole visionary theories of a future society; why do they never ask themselves this one simple question: Why are the only existent examples of matriarchy limited to a few small hunter gatherer tribes in rain forests on remote South Pacific islands, or various equatorial rainforests?
Where are all the other examples of matriarchy?
One word answer: destroyed.
I have been watching the news babes reporting the recent judge murders and the killing of a pastor because of a dispute about the sermon. How uncomprehending.
Each new crime is reported as if it were a sole exception. There are the usual cries for swift punishment, and yet there seems to be a willful refusal to consider if there is any larger explanation, a pattern, a theory that can unite the various apparently random events and organize them into an intelligible whole.
A clue can be found in the unpublished paper by two professors, (Stanford and the University of Chicago), on the relationship between crime in various States and the availability of abortions 15 to 18 years earlier. [Link: Crime and Abortion]
The suggestion is that distressed families produce larger numbers of criminals. The fewer children, males, born into these families results in lower crime rates. The paper is unpublished for the same reason that Gilder’s question why the scarcity of matriarchies is never examined, has not been answered. To answer this question would be politically incorrect. It is the same reason that Senator John Kerry knew that it was more politically correct to substitute “adult authority” for Moynihan’s male authority. The same reason the Bell Curve is still disputed.
As one National Review author noted at the time the Bell Curve was first published, it is all perfectly true, but one should not say so. Not only can one never trust that author again, one can not trust National Review. Now when they say something or other is not true is it because they think it so, or because one “should not say so?”
This is the problem with political correctness. It is a lie. And how do we know when the lying has stopped?
* * *
What the news babes fail to comprehend, possibly because no one has ever suggested the possibility to them, because politically incorrect, is that all these apparently random examples of violence, largely male violence, are all of them related to the failure of our society to socialize males into the social system, structure, the community. This criminal has this history, and that criminal has another history, this one had a dispute over a divorce, another over a sermon, and this one went wee, wee, wee all the way home. But do you not notice a common element?
If this sounds familiar, if you are thinking that this sounds like the liberal’s ‘society is to blame not the criminal,’ you are partly correct. It is similar but not the same. What conservatives know that liberals do not know, according to the Moynihan Theorem, is that conservatives know that culture is more important than politics.
Conservatives also want to control crime however, we want to control crime through our culture, using the whole society, not just throw some new spending into a program dreamed up by the former editors of the Harvard Crimson. For example, one can not say enough good things about President Bush’s Faith Based Initiative. Culture is more important than politics. And using culture, engaging the entire person at a deep level, not merely as a sociological abstraction, but heart and soul, is far more powerful than anything a bureaucrat in the municipal building downtown could ever do, or would ever want to do.
It is easy to favor spending more on parole officers, or Head Start Programs, or Night Basketball “counselors and mentors,” partly because for most of you the actual cost, taxes are borne by others, those with lesser ability to raise their prices and pass their taxes on to others. But mainly these “liberal” solutions’ true costs, the true costs being the inevitable failure of this limited, big government program, approach, this true cost, the cost paid in actual lives behind bars or in chalk outlines on the pavement, is borne by the people, who are not former editors of the Harvard Crimson, who have zero ability to pass on their taxes by raising their prices, the people whose society is in steep and accelerating decline.
It is harder to set up censor boards for CDs and movies, or even, and this is much harder, to use “social opprobrium” to control the merchants who produce the violence and smut oozing out of the mass media sewers. School rules which might require students to dress appropriately, sit attentively, work assiduously, etc. are not possible because liberal politicians find it too difficult to uphold a standard. It is much easier to raise the parcel tax. Raise the tax for what?
Mr. Gates recently described the American High School as “obsolete.” Will liberals use the increased money, (by law California must spend 50% of the State’s budget on the schools), on technology for example? Use technology so the students can work independently if they must be “excused” from the class on account of their misconduct? Of course not, the teacher’s unions have opposed any use of technology that might compete with their strangle hold over the school budget. (California recently withdrew from the Western Governor’s University, which it helped found, (under a Republican), because of the political influence of the Community College faculty, which feared a loss of students and therefore funding.)
Of course the real reason liberal politicians can not agree to a high standard in our schools, can not agree to use our schools to socialize the young men in our society, is because they know that these higher standards, whether academic standards, or higher standards of personal conduct would result in large numbers of students, mainly poor and black, to be expelled. A disparate impact. That dreaded phrase.
And so once again on examination it turns out that liberal politicians and their policies are not chosen because they are thought to be the best approach but rather because they are found to be the easier, safest, most politically correct approach.
The easiest way to create schools of a high standard in academics and student conduct, (socialization), is with vouchers. In a voucher scheme the parents themselves could select the school that best contributes to the creation, (instilling), of the values they seek for their children. There is no reason why a large high school could not be subdivided into four or five different schools all sharing the same campus, the parents free to specify their preference.
In this approach if parents really prefer schools where their children are not disciplined, where academics are not stressed, where drug use and crime are common, then, by all means they can continue to send their children to the traditional high school. Rather than impose our standards we can simply allow the parents to decide for themselves. Who could object to this?
And because this is the clearest example; the failure of vouchers, market choice, in education we can see hear why I call this : Betrayal.
For their comes a point when you must stop and reflect on your assumptions. If vouchers are a good idea, if empowering parents to socialize their children by selecting schools that are in accord with their values is a good idea, if free market choice is the best way to create excellence and allocate resources, if all of this is true, and yet still vouchers in education, choice in education, has not been implemented we must ask: Why not?
Here and in example after example, we can see that a dark hand has intervened in public policy, a malevolent force has time and again blocked the good and assisted the bad. Of this evil malignant force, betrayal seems the least we can say.
For example over the last twenty years we have watched as one apartment block after another has been abandoned and dynamited. These public housing buildings, built at the cost of billions of dollars, were destroyed because the liberal politicians did not want to have to impose a standard of conduct on the residents. These large “projects” are being replace with “low rise” small scale structures of “dispersed” housing. Why dispersed?
Because it is the hope that the new neighbors, who are themselves not residents of public housing will assist society in socializing the young male residents of the new “projects.” The idea is that the surrounding culture will have a greater impact than could be brought to bear inside the now destroyed large, high rise, structures.
But what is this but a frank admission that the liberal politicians, and their bureaucrats, having gotten all they asked for during the Johnson Great Society, and during Nixon and Ford, and Carter, having condemned and acquired the land, cleared the land, designed and built these huge structures of their own choice, from one end of the country to the other, having filled these structures with the residents of their choice, finally admitted that they could not in fact administer their ambitious housing program, could not direct the residents to a better upwardly mobile life, could not engage with the people to establish "any set of rational expectations about the future.”
Consider for example that in Singapore, or Shanghai, or Paris, or Berlin, all around the world there are similar large structures, that have not been spectacularly dynamited, but which continue to house millions of residents. Why is it that Americans can not live in high rise buildings, or anyway in publicly owned high rise buildings? (If they are owned by the “public” they are not owned by anyone.)
Is it not again, as we have seen in example after example, because the liberal politicians were unwilling to impose a standard of conduct on the residents of public housing projects? Is it not again that the liberal politicians took the easy way out of their own policies? In Singapore for example, third world immigrants from Malaysia also had difficulty living in the high rise apartment buildings.
But in Singapore rather than dynamite the buildings the officials altered the behavior of the residents. There, in Singapore, also young boys liked urinating in the elevators just like the boys in America’s public housing high rise buildings, but in Singapore they installed moisture detectors on the floors of the elevator cars and automatically locked the elevator door. Boys learned not to urinate in the elevators. They were socialized. Male authority. Problem solved.
But in America billions of dollars have been wasted, high rise buildings have been replaced with low rise buildings because American liberal politicians and their bureaucrats did not really want to engage with the people, not heart and soul, not at all.
Do you think the Oakland California Police do not know where the drug dealers live and conduct business? Do you not think that they could, for example, install mobile police stations, containers with steel plates welded to the walls for protection, with air conditioners, and bullet proof windows, with flood lights and with cameras inside to watch suspects? Park one of these behemoths in front of a suspect’s home and people would start to pay attention.
Do you not think the Oakland Police could easily take down the license plates of the University of California at Berkeley students who drive into Oakland to visit these very same drug dealer homes? So why not?
The liberal politician who is Mayor of Oakland finds it easier to ignore the drug dealers, to disengage from the people. Once again the policy is chosen because it is easier not because it is the best policy. Ironically this liberal politician will now run for Attorney General of California.
Nor should it be supposed that the failure of public policy is limited to the domestic policy questions only. For years Air Force Generals and Navy Admirals have frankly admitted that pilotless air craft were superior for a great many missions and cheaper too. Yet they offered by way of explanation for their failure to develop this technology the fact that they had themselves been pilots and did not look forward to the replacement of the modern knight of the air by a machine. These admissions can be made because there is no constituency for pilotless air craft, no civic action groups, no rallies, vigils, demands for action.
President Bush stated after the Second Gulf War that he did not feel he had the right to “impose” the new government of Iraq. “Impose”? He marched three armored divisions into a foreign country, over threw its government, imprisoned the former head of state, all at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, but did not feel he had the right to “impose” a government?
The issue here is not self determination of peoples. The new government could have included a provision for a constitutional committee, elections, independent judiciary, free speech and assembly, but who were we, who after all only liberated the country, who were we to “impose”?
But were did Mr. Bush pick up such an idea? Could not impose? From Yale, Harvard . . . . and Stanford? Doesn’t this sound like something the Provost of Stanford would say? ‘We can not impose our form of government on another people.’ Yes. That sounds like just the sort of thing one hears on college campuses, controlled as they are by, the bastions of, the liberals.
And is it not very much like Yale, and Harvard, and Stanford, for the Administration to deny America the right to control our borders? Note that they do not want to raise the official numbers, they do not want to go on the record and say, ‘yes, not 170,000 Mexicans a year, we think it should be 1,000,000 Mexicans a year.’ They control the House, the Senate, the White House, yet they can not bring themselves to exercise this authority to set a legal immigration policy. For, no matter what level they set as the official, legal, number for immigration, then they would have to guard the borders and “impose” a rule and this they do not feel is their right.
They will not exercise male authority. If we can not control our national borders, the students in our schools, the residents of our public housing projects, even the prisoners in our prisons, how could we impose a democratic government on Iraq?
At a very profound level we have been betrayed.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
Lecture Notes: 03-15-05 Betrayal
"From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles," he wrote at the time in a Jesuit magazine, "there is one unmistakble lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future -- that community asks for and gets chaos." ---- and then on the floor of the Senate he added: “And it is very richly deserved.” ---- Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Senator John Kerry appeared on the floor of the Senate several years later, this was around 1991, and attempted to quote Senator Moynihan, however he substituted “never acquiring any stable relationship to adult authority”. Always the politician.
Yet Senator Moynihan did not say “adult authority” he said “male authority.”
And unlike me, Senator Moynihan was a real scholar. If he said male you can bet he meant male. If he had meant adult he would have said adult. (With me you can never be too sure why I choose one word over another. (Don’t read too much into it. Just try for the gist of the idea.))
So why did Moynihan say male --- not adult authority?
In Men and Marriage, George Gilder asks why the feminists who are so pleased to cite Margaret Meade and others for evidence of the existence of matriarchy and draw out from these observations whole visionary theories of a future society; why do they never ask themselves this one simple question: Why are the only existent examples of matriarchy limited to a few small hunter gatherer tribes in rain forests on remote South Pacific islands, or various equatorial rainforests?
Where are all the other examples of matriarchy?
One word answer: destroyed.
I have been watching the news babes reporting the recent judge murders and the killing of a pastor because of a dispute about the sermon. How uncomprehending.
Each new crime is reported as if it were a sole exception. There are the usual cries for swift punishment, and yet there seems to be a willful refusal to consider if there is any larger explanation, a pattern, a theory that can unite the various apparently random events and organize them into an intelligible whole.
A clue can be found in the unpublished paper by two professors, (Stanford and the University of Chicago), on the relationship between crime in various States and the availability of abortions 15 to 18 years earlier. [Link: Crime and Abortion]
The suggestion is that distressed families produce larger numbers of criminals. The fewer children, males, born into these families results in lower crime rates. The paper is unpublished for the same reason that Gilder’s question why the scarcity of matriarchies is never examined, has not been answered. To answer this question would be politically incorrect. It is the same reason that Senator John Kerry knew that it was more politically correct to substitute “adult authority” for Moynihan’s male authority. The same reason the Bell Curve is still disputed.
As one National Review author noted at the time the Bell Curve was first published, it is all perfectly true, but one should not say so. Not only can one never trust that author again, one can not trust National Review. Now when they say something or other is not true is it because they think it so, or because one “should not say so?”
This is the problem with political correctness. It is a lie. And how do we know when the lying has stopped?
* * *
What the news babes fail to comprehend, possibly because no one has ever suggested the possibility to them, because politically incorrect, is that all these apparently random examples of violence, largely male violence, are all of them related to the failure of our society to socialize males into the social system, structure, the community. This criminal has this history, and that criminal has another history, this one had a dispute over a divorce, another over a sermon, and this one went wee, wee, wee all the way home. But do you not notice a common element?
If this sounds familiar, if you are thinking that this sounds like the liberal’s ‘society is to blame not the criminal,’ you are partly correct. It is similar but not the same. What conservatives know that liberals do not know, according to the Moynihan Theorem, is that conservatives know that culture is more important than politics.
Conservatives also want to control crime however, we want to control crime through our culture, using the whole society, not just throw some new spending into a program dreamed up by the former editors of the Harvard Crimson. For example, one can not say enough good things about President Bush’s Faith Based Initiative. Culture is more important than politics. And using culture, engaging the entire person at a deep level, not merely as a sociological abstraction, but heart and soul, is far more powerful than anything a bureaucrat in the municipal building downtown could ever do, or would ever want to do.
It is easy to favor spending more on parole officers, or Head Start Programs, or Night Basketball “counselors and mentors,” partly because for most of you the actual cost, taxes are borne by others, those with lesser ability to raise their prices and pass their taxes on to others. But mainly these “liberal” solutions’ true costs, the true costs being the inevitable failure of this limited, big government program, approach, this true cost, the cost paid in actual lives behind bars or in chalk outlines on the pavement, is borne by the people, who are not former editors of the Harvard Crimson, who have zero ability to pass on their taxes by raising their prices, the people whose society is in steep and accelerating decline.
It is harder to set up censor boards for CDs and movies, or even, and this is much harder, to use “social opprobrium” to control the merchants who produce the violence and smut oozing out of the mass media sewers. School rules which might require students to dress appropriately, sit attentively, work assiduously, etc. are not possible because liberal politicians find it too difficult to uphold a standard. It is much easier to raise the parcel tax. Raise the tax for what?
Mr. Gates recently described the American High School as “obsolete.” Will liberals use the increased money, (by law California must spend 50% of the State’s budget on the schools), on technology for example? Use technology so the students can work independently if they must be “excused” from the class on account of their misconduct? Of course not, the teacher’s unions have opposed any use of technology that might compete with their strangle hold over the school budget. (California recently withdrew from the Western Governor’s University, which it helped found, (under a Republican), because of the political influence of the Community College faculty, which feared a loss of students and therefore funding.)
Of course the real reason liberal politicians can not agree to a high standard in our schools, can not agree to use our schools to socialize the young men in our society, is because they know that these higher standards, whether academic standards, or higher standards of personal conduct would result in large numbers of students, mainly poor and black, to be expelled. A disparate impact. That dreaded phrase.
And so once again on examination it turns out that liberal politicians and their policies are not chosen because they are thought to be the best approach but rather because they are found to be the easier, safest, most politically correct approach.
The easiest way to create schools of a high standard in academics and student conduct, (socialization), is with vouchers. In a voucher scheme the parents themselves could select the school that best contributes to the creation, (instilling), of the values they seek for their children. There is no reason why a large high school could not be subdivided into four or five different schools all sharing the same campus, the parents free to specify their preference.
In this approach if parents really prefer schools where their children are not disciplined, where academics are not stressed, where drug use and crime are common, then, by all means they can continue to send their children to the traditional high school. Rather than impose our standards we can simply allow the parents to decide for themselves. Who could object to this?
And because this is the clearest example; the failure of vouchers, market choice, in education we can see hear why I call this : Betrayal.
For their comes a point when you must stop and reflect on your assumptions. If vouchers are a good idea, if empowering parents to socialize their children by selecting schools that are in accord with their values is a good idea, if free market choice is the best way to create excellence and allocate resources, if all of this is true, and yet still vouchers in education, choice in education, has not been implemented we must ask: Why not?
Here and in example after example, we can see that a dark hand has intervened in public policy, a malevolent force has time and again blocked the good and assisted the bad. Of this evil malignant force, betrayal seems the least we can say.
For example over the last twenty years we have watched as one apartment block after another has been abandoned and dynamited. These public housing buildings, built at the cost of billions of dollars, were destroyed because the liberal politicians did not want to have to impose a standard of conduct on the residents. These large “projects” are being replace with “low rise” small scale structures of “dispersed” housing. Why dispersed?
Because it is the hope that the new neighbors, who are themselves not residents of public housing will assist society in socializing the young male residents of the new “projects.” The idea is that the surrounding culture will have a greater impact than could be brought to bear inside the now destroyed large, high rise, structures.
But what is this but a frank admission that the liberal politicians, and their bureaucrats, having gotten all they asked for during the Johnson Great Society, and during Nixon and Ford, and Carter, having condemned and acquired the land, cleared the land, designed and built these huge structures of their own choice, from one end of the country to the other, having filled these structures with the residents of their choice, finally admitted that they could not in fact administer their ambitious housing program, could not direct the residents to a better upwardly mobile life, could not engage with the people to establish "any set of rational expectations about the future.”
Consider for example that in Singapore, or Shanghai, or Paris, or Berlin, all around the world there are similar large structures, that have not been spectacularly dynamited, but which continue to house millions of residents. Why is it that Americans can not live in high rise buildings, or anyway in publicly owned high rise buildings? (If they are owned by the “public” they are not owned by anyone.)
Is it not again, as we have seen in example after example, because the liberal politicians were unwilling to impose a standard of conduct on the residents of public housing projects? Is it not again that the liberal politicians took the easy way out of their own policies? In Singapore for example, third world immigrants from Malaysia also had difficulty living in the high rise apartment buildings.
But in Singapore rather than dynamite the buildings the officials altered the behavior of the residents. There, in Singapore, also young boys liked urinating in the elevators just like the boys in America’s public housing high rise buildings, but in Singapore they installed moisture detectors on the floors of the elevator cars and automatically locked the elevator door. Boys learned not to urinate in the elevators. They were socialized. Male authority. Problem solved.
But in America billions of dollars have been wasted, high rise buildings have been replaced with low rise buildings because American liberal politicians and their bureaucrats did not really want to engage with the people, not heart and soul, not at all.
Do you think the Oakland California Police do not know where the drug dealers live and conduct business? Do you not think that they could, for example, install mobile police stations, containers with steel plates welded to the walls for protection, with air conditioners, and bullet proof windows, with flood lights and with cameras inside to watch suspects? Park one of these behemoths in front of a suspect’s home and people would start to pay attention.
Do you not think the Oakland Police could easily take down the license plates of the University of California at Berkeley students who drive into Oakland to visit these very same drug dealer homes? So why not?
The liberal politician who is Mayor of Oakland finds it easier to ignore the drug dealers, to disengage from the people. Once again the policy is chosen because it is easier not because it is the best policy. Ironically this liberal politician will now run for Attorney General of California.
Nor should it be supposed that the failure of public policy is limited to the domestic policy questions only. For years Air Force Generals and Navy Admirals have frankly admitted that pilotless air craft were superior for a great many missions and cheaper too. Yet they offered by way of explanation for their failure to develop this technology the fact that they had themselves been pilots and did not look forward to the replacement of the modern knight of the air by a machine. These admissions can be made because there is no constituency for pilotless air craft, no civic action groups, no rallies, vigils, demands for action.
President Bush stated after the Second Gulf War that he did not feel he had the right to “impose” the new government of Iraq. “Impose”? He marched three armored divisions into a foreign country, over threw its government, imprisoned the former head of state, all at the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives, but did not feel he had the right to “impose” a government?
The issue here is not self determination of peoples. The new government could have included a provision for a constitutional committee, elections, independent judiciary, free speech and assembly, but who were we, who after all only liberated the country, who were we to “impose”?
But were did Mr. Bush pick up such an idea? Could not impose? From Yale, Harvard . . . . and Stanford? Doesn’t this sound like something the Provost of Stanford would say? ‘We can not impose our form of government on another people.’ Yes. That sounds like just the sort of thing one hears on college campuses, controlled as they are by, the bastions of, the liberals.
And is it not very much like Yale, and Harvard, and Stanford, for the Administration to deny America the right to control our borders? Note that they do not want to raise the official numbers, they do not want to go on the record and say, ‘yes, not 170,000 Mexicans a year, we think it should be 1,000,000 Mexicans a year.’ They control the House, the Senate, the White House, yet they can not bring themselves to exercise this authority to set a legal immigration policy. For, no matter what level they set as the official, legal, number for immigration, then they would have to guard the borders and “impose” a rule and this they do not feel is their right.
They will not exercise male authority. If we can not control our national borders, the students in our schools, the residents of our public housing projects, even the prisoners in our prisons, how could we impose a democratic government on Iraq?
At a very profound level we have been betrayed.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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