September 24, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:I've been having an ongoing
I've been having an ongoing conversation for the past couple of weeks that started in the Philadelphia Art Museum. The initial exchange was between a friend of mine, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, about American morality.
"Americans are too black and white about everything", she said. "If you grow up in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, you see shades of gray." She was talking about cheating the government, pulling small fast ones on corporations, that sort of thing. Americans are too rigid about their ethics, was the upshot; it makes them dangerously inflexible.
And she's right. We are hyper-rigid about our ethics. But I admire the hyper-rigidity. My answer to her was that, while I am not under the impression that I could have sustained an American style ethics system under, say, Soviet Russia, nonetheless, I think it is superior to the system in use in most of the world, which I would sum up as: one set of morals for "us" (family, friends) and another set of morals for "them".
Now, of course, America does not practice this ideal perfectly. But in other parts of the world, it's not even an ideal. There are large groups of people who do not consider it "wrong" in a moral sense to kill or cheat people outside the clan. It may have unpleasant repercussions, but it's not immoral. I, on the other hand, was marched five blocks back to the store I stole the tootsie roll from to hand it back to the merchant with a tearful apology. And I know I'm not the only one this happened to.
Americans, as a group, embrace the ideal that there is one contiguous set of morals for everyone. It's not okay to steal from your employer, not even to give it to your cousin who really needs it. It's not okay to attack, rape or kill people even if they're not related to you. These things do happen, but they're not widely accepted as the norm. That's huge. That's what makes America work.
Really, a remarkable number of people don't cheat on their taxes, steal when they can, fiddle their expense reports, divide themselves into ethnic interest groups, or violate, in a hundred different ways, the trust our society places in them, which in other countries is available only to family members. It's an idea that's unique, I think, to Western Europe, and I think that the Puritannical values, for which we're everywhere derided, are it's purest form. And I think that that is what makes America so successful. This is what Ralph Peters meant when he said that the clan or extended family as the basic social/political unit is the kiss of death to becoming an economic superstar. A clear set of values, and the notion that those values apply to everyone, is a key part of the "Operating System" on which capitalism has to be installed.
But what about Asia, I was asked. Well, we eradicated those notions in Japan, and until recently, Britain controlled the operating environment in Hong Kong. And lo, Japan and Hong Kong are the only countries with high rates of Total Factor Productivity growth. I'll explain that concept another time; the important point is that while Japan
has massively increased the productivity of its inputs (labor and capital), other Asian "miracles" have dismal growth in this key indicator. They haven't increased the productivity of their resources; they've just raised the inputs, through extremely high rates of forced savings. As their economies mature, the return on investment will decline, and the miracle will start to look mighty soggy.
That's why the relativist morality of the sixties radicals was so destructive to the inner cities. Martin Luther King was the standard bearer of middle class blacks who wanted to live with dignity. He was standing against a racialism that hurt the interests of everyone who practiced it. After Malcolm X, however, it was Us against Them, and as usual, it was Us who got hurt. You do not build a stable middle-class environment when the leaders are telling everyone that it's okay to assault, batter, rob, or kill, as long as you do it to "them" -- and isn't that what Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are saying when they take the side of the thugs in their community against "The Man? Not that they invented this practice; my ancestors were pretty good at it themselves, and you'll note how long it took them to get out of the ghetto.
That sounds awfully paternalistic, doesn't it? Of course, it's a two way street, just as it was with the Irish; they closed in on themselves because the WASPs closed them out. But the sad thing is, it doesn't matter. You can't build a middle class society -- stable, orderly, decent, with a modicum of happiness thrown in for the majority of folks -- without those values. The Nation of Islam understands this; that's why they enforce those values within the larger community, which allows them to build a pretty high-functioning little economic community. That's why no amount of tax breaks will revitalize a high crime area; nor any amount of foreign aid build a capitalist miracle out of a society still mired in tribal wars.
So the next time someone tells you that Americans are too black and white, just remember to thank your lucky stars that it's so.
Update I've been accused of saying that blacks are immoral. No, no, no. That's not what I meant at all. I was speaking on the community level, to a breakdown of reciprocal morality. And I was speaking of the inner cities. I used Malcolm X and Martin Luther King because they're widely known; parallel processes occurred in all sorts of inner cities, including white areas. Blacks in the middle class behave pretty much like everyone else in the middle class. Poor whites in high-crime communities behave pretty much like everyone else in a high-crime area where community norm enforcement has broken down -- "Screw you, I want mine." The point about Malcom X was not that he was angry; it was that his separatist tendencies paved the way for the Black Panthers, MOVE, and other groups who, first of all, saw the poor and criminals as their target audience, and second of all, combined their ideology with the radical poverty ideology of the era that said it wasn't wrong to steal, or engage in violence, as long as it was against those richer than you, or those outside your race.
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were born in that era. They make excuses for egregious black criminals -- but only those whose crimes are committed on whites. Sharpton not only comes within a hair's breadth of encouraging lynching, as he did with the stores in Harlem, or the motorist who accidentally killed a little black girl; he then refuses to condemn those who commit them. Both Jackson and Sharpton excused the Reginald Denny mob on the basis of race. Message: go ahead, attack people. Steal from merchants. Just not your own kind. Obviously, this message isn't played to the middle class, though it probably touches a sense of angry justice in some. It's aimed at the poor and disaffected, who form the political base of inner city leaders.
It's not just reprehensible; it's a major barrier to building a sustainable community. The inner cities have few mechanisms for capital formation; they need outside entrepreneurs to come in and provide jobs, services, and a critical mass of commerce into which local entrepreneurs can grow.
But this has nothing to do with the majority of blacks who are in the middle class, any more than a riot in South Boston has to do with me. Nor is it somehow characteristic of the black underclass. It happened in Russia. It happens in most countries in most parts of the world. After all, it was my ancestors, the Irish, who invented the race riot in America; it was they who perfected an interlocking system of family obligations that had its fullest flower in the corruption of Richard Daley. All oppressed minorities are tempted to it, understandably. In many places, the majority does it. I'm just saying that you can't build a middle class community until you abandon it.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 24, 2002 9:41 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links