Self-Hatred Isn't Virtuous

Maybe you remember from junior high or high school, the girl (maybe it was you) who believed all kinds of negative things about herself: her thighs were fat; her tummy bulged, her hair was stringy (or too curly or frizzy); she had a gap between her teeth that she thought everyone was aware of; she wasn’t smart enough; her clothes never fit right, or looked cool enough. The list goes on. But you looked at her and wondered where this was coming from, because what you saw was a girl who was pretty enough, maybe even very pretty. And she was friendly and sweet and thoughtful of others. And you had to wonder where all that anti-self negativity was coming from.

It's not uncommon among early teens, girls especially. There may be attached to it an erroneous belief that it’s not right to like yourself; that means you’re conceited and narcissistic. So putting yourself down is only proper. But you, looking from the outside, can see she’s not only wrong; she’s harming herself and limiting the good she could do in the world, if only she stopped worrying about her flaws and started growing herself and sharing her potential with the world.

Even this cute girl (our daughter, Social Sphere)
had a few brief moments of not realizing
how beautiful she was, but we got her over
that using some reality.

The cure seems to be growing up, gaining confidence, and getting a clearer picture of self. And maybe cutting out the comparisons of only her personal flaws with only the admirable qualities of her peers.

In other words, she’s wrong, and she needs to come to learn that. Because tearing herself down is just making herself miserable with no good purpose.

If you’re any kind of friend, or even a decent person, you do what you can to get her to see herself more accurately and to stop tearing herself down.

So, how does this relate to the Spherical Model and what we talk about here?

Take a look at this quote of yesterday from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: “We're not going to make America great again. It was never that great." 

And can we forget that former first lady Michelle Obama who, in 2008, said, “For the first time in my adult life, I’m proud of my country”? That was, of course, related to her husband’s election to fundamentally transform the most free and prosperous country in human history into—something else. 

It’s symptomatic of a rather large segment of our society that looks at the United States and doesn’t see what Reagan metaphorically called the “shining city on a hill.” Instead they see a dung heap. A garbage dump. A deteriorating ghetto. We should be more like Sweden. Or Finland. Or Denmark. Or almost anywhere else.

Are they right? I believe they’re like that middle school girl, thinking it’s virtuous somehow to denigrate their own country—seeing only bad here, while seeing good everywhere else but missing their bad. So, no, they’re not accurate. And they’re not more virtuous for being “open-minded” enough to “see” their country as flawed.

Of course there are flaws. But they aren’t the flaws these people claim. And their blindness to the astounding good in "this greatest nation on God’s green earth,” as Michael Medved says on his show every day, is so dense as to be willful.

In the spirit of teenage girl magazines, maybe it’s time for a self-assessment quiz, to determine whether you (or a friend or frenemy you’re assessing while reading this) are suffering from this self-disparagement syndrome.

1.       T of F: The Founding Fathers were a bunch of racist old slaveholders, so that means the country they founded is fatally flawed to begin with.

2.       T or F: The phrase in the Constitution about slaves being counted as 3/5ths of a person was to institutionalize and endorse racist slavery.

3.       T or F: The imperialist United States stole most of the Southwest from Mexico.

4.       T or F: The rights in the Constitution are granted by government, and they can be taken away by government if a majority decides they’re not good to have—like freedom of religion if it’s offensive, or freedom of speech if it’s offensive.

5.       T or F: Racism is every bit as bad today as it was during slavery or the Jim Crow eras.

6.       Which Superman slogan do you prefer?

a.  The original classic, from comic books, television series, and older movies: “truth, justice, and the American way.”

b. The updated version (from the movie Superman Returns): “truth, justice, and all that stuff.”

7.       Agree or Disagree: A country that doesn’t provide free health care and free education through college is out of step with the rest of the world and should step up.

8.       Agree or Disagree: America should never have gotten involved in the war in Iraq—or, for that matter, Vietnam, or any other war since WWII.

9.       Agree or Disagree: America should intervene with food supplies and anything else to rescue people in failing economies such as Venezuela.

10.   Agree or Disagree: America is unfair because it doesn’t just open its borders and let anyone in who wants to come in.

11.   Agree or Disagree: Businesses should be forced to pay their people enough to live on (housing, food, clothing, transportation) for even an entry-level job.

12.   Agree or Disagree: Inequality is the worst thing about America; money should be taken from the rich and redistributed to the poor.

13.   Agree or Disagree: People who don’t do as well as others are being oppressed.

Scoring

The T or F questions are all False. So count one point for each T you answered. (See discussion of answers below.)

If you answered B on 6, count one point. For question 7-13, count one point for each statement you Agree with.

If you got 0-3 points, pretty good (but if you don’t have 0, you need to do some soul searching).

If you got 4-7 points, you’re probably suffering from some bad information in schools and media, and you need to get some better sources. (See suggestions below.)

If you got 8+ points, you’re an America hater for no good reason. In fact, your reasons aren’t just random opinions; you have chosen to buy in to the America hating rhetoric of false history teachings, much of it based on the history/propaganda of Howard Zinn that has made its way into our education system. You need to do some de-programming to get yourself in touch with reality before you harm yourself and others—and your country.

Discussion of Answers

Question 1: While there were slaveholders among the Founders, they all agreed it was an evil that needed to be done away—something that was a new idea in world history, since slavery was the norm throughout history up until the Founders started this nation based on an idea, rather than on a geography or tribalism. The idea: that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, related to life, liberty, and property.

Question 2: The purpose of the 3/5 phrase in the Constitution was to prevent the perpetuation of slavery. The slaveholding states wanted to count their slaves in order to boost their population and give them more representation, thus ensuring the continuation of slavery. But the Founders, including those from southern states who were representing their states’ interests but were also looking for ways to end the practice, used this compromise to reduce the power of slaveholding states. PragerU has a good discussion: “Why the 3/5ths Compromise Was Anti-Slavery.” 

Historian Carol Swain,
screenshot from this PragerU video

Question 3: The Tejanos who fought with the Texians (that is, the Hispanic people living in current Texas along with the Americans who immigrated to what was then part of Mexico) fought long and hard for independence from the tyrannical dictator who had taken over Mexico and deprived them of their rights. And further, the later war that led to New Mexico, Arizona, and California becoming parts of the United States—Mexico was the aggressor, lost, and in fact lost most of what is current Mexico today, but that was given back, unfortunately for them, because they’d have been better off joining America. Dinesh D’Souza has a good discussion of this in America: Imagine a World without Her, pp. 107-119.

Question 4: “Being endowed by their Creator” means being given by God, and “unalienable,” or “inalienable,” depending on who’s spelling it today, means that it can’t be taken. Government doesn’t grant those rights; government is tasked with protecting those rights. The Bill of Rights, which consists of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, weren’t originally included, because they were considered so obvious and so well understood, that they went without saying. But then several states worried that later generations might not find them so obvious, so they spelled them out and included them in the Constitution before it was ratified.

Question 5: Another PragerU video is helpful here: “Is America Racist?” 

The remaining questions are opinions, but there’s good information on these as well. I’ll offer just a few.

About foreign wars, there are a number of helpful PragerU videos:

·         “Why America Invaded Iraq” and “How Iraq Was Won and Lost”   

·         “The Truth about the Vietnam War”  and “Why Did America Fight the Vietnam War”

·         “Why Did America Fight the Korean War” 

·         “What Was the Cold War?” 

There are PragerU videos on a great many other topics as well, including some economic ones. For other sources with a more America loving presentation of reality, you might finish Dinesh D’Souza’s book America: Imagine a World without Her, and also Mark Steyn’s America Alone, Glenn Beck’s The Real America, and W. Cleon Skousen’s The Five Thousand Year Leap.

For education, try the free online Hillsdale College courses. Start with Constitution 101 and 201.

For daily information doses, try podcasts of Ben Shapiro and Andrew Klavan, and maybe even Michael Knowles.

For some economic truth, you might try anything by Thomas Sowell. Start with Basic Economics. Or, if you need to battle some of that social justice dogma, you might try Discrimination and Disparities or Wealth, Poverty and Politics.

At the very least be skeptical of self-hatred. What’s behind it? Do you really think it’s virtuous to be desperately ashamed of a nation with so many positives that people around the world want to become Americans? Or is it a dysfunctional delusion? 

Just like the 13-year-old girl who responds to your compliment with, “Really? But my shoes are awful, don’t you think?” maybe someone needs to stand her in front of a full-length mirror and let her see how beautiful she is. Take a look at America; she’s beautiful!

A Great America

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

The past couple of weeks have been a two-party contest about the greatness of America. One side says “Vote for me to make America great again.” The other side responds, “What do you mean ‘great again’? America is already great,” to paraphrase the very woman who claimed never to have been proud of her country until her husband became president—the very president who claims to be managing  the decline from Superpower status and has weakened America militarily, economically, and socially, and even racially.

Since there’s disagreement on the definition, I thought I might weigh in with a Spherical Model definition of what a great America looks like.

Here’s a mini-refresher: North is where you find freedom, prosperity, and civilization; South is where you find tyranny, poverty, and savagery—with chaotic tyranny in the southwest quadrant and statist tyranny in the southeast quadrant. 

Often you get people using chaos (sometimes even creating it) to call out, “Give me power, and I will rescue you from the chaos.” So when you’re choosing leaders, make sure you’re not giving power to just a different flavor of tyranny.

I was reminded of the quote at the top, which I thought was from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But when I went to look it up, I learned it isn’t really in there. It’s probably a paraphrase that was mistaken for a verbatim quote attributed to Tocqueville, dating back only to the early 1940s. Here’s the full supposed quote:

Alexis de Tocqueville
image from Wikipedia

In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. In the fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there. In her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits, aflame with righteousness, did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

It’s a good paragraph, even if it wasn’t written by Tocqueville. But he did say a number of actual things about America, which he observed as great around the end of the first half century of the Republic. Like this:

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage.

We’re seeing that now. We have our Constitution—the best laws. But without a moral people, laws fall short of maintaining civilization.

So what does a great America look like? We’ll do the list a sphere at a time.

Political Sphere

·         It limits government to the essentials of securing life, liberty, and property for all people.

·         It protects God-given rights for its citizens. To name a few: freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, freedom to speak even when it disagrees with others, freedom of the press, right to bear arms, property rights, protection from illegal searches and seizures, right to bring up and educate our children as we see fit.

·         It protects its sovereignty and borders from invasion or infringement.

·         It avoids entanglements in the world but supports and defends its loyal allies, never attacking in imperialist offense but defending itself with full force.

Economic Sphere

·         It has a free market economy, encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.

·         It encourages hard work and self-reliance, with the expectation that one gets to enjoy the fruits of one’s labors and risks.

·         It limits taxation to cover only essential governance and infrastructure.

·         It limits interference to protecting against monopoly and fraud, and managing fair use of publicly owned resources (e.g., mining rights, water rights on public lands).

·         It balances budgets and pays debts.

·         It does not take on charity or social engineering roles.

·         It avoids cronyism or favoritism among legal businesses.

Social Sphere

·         It has a critical mass of religious people who live their lives in a way to honor God, family, life, property, and truth.

·         It supports the family as the basic unit of civilization.

·         It has a critical mass of intact married mothers and fathers raising their children to be civilized, contributing adults.

·         It provides for the poor and infirm voluntarily through churches, charities, and philanthropies.

·         It expects and encourages chastity before marriage and complete fidelity within marriage.

·         It expects and encourages integrity, honesty, kindness, mutual respect, justice tempered with mercy, and other virtues of civilization.

·         Its people stand boldly against ideas that attempt to dilute the Constitutionally protected freedom.

·         Its people stand boldly against savage practices and beliefs in daily life as well as in entertainments.

In early June I wrote about what my Dream Nation would look like, if I could invent one from scratch. That’s similar to what a great America looks like. I concluded:

Our original founders did everything right—except prevent us from ignoring the law and slipping southward. But that is not a problem with their system; that is a problem with the people.

So let's start with civilizing people, so that they naturally want—and work for—freedom and prosperity.

We have so much potential for freedom, prosperity, and civilization. But we’ve been sinking rapidly into the tyranny/poverty/savagery hemisphere. We can’t get back up north by following people who say, “I am the way to a great America” while they’re heading south. We might just need to head the right direction on our own. And maybe when people notice how we thrive up north on our own, enough people will want to join us.

Why Civilizations Die: Part III

This series on David P. Goldman’s book How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) starts with Part I on population decline, and Part II on the connection between secularization and population decline. Today we’ll cover what works for a lasting civilization.

Goldman proposes that religion is important in “culture,” because “culture” is about dealing with our own mortality.

Why have so many branches of the human family lost the will to live? They have lost the cultural resources that enabled them to cope with their own mortality. From awareness that we will die arises culture—the capacity to order our behavior consciously rather than by instinct. Culture is the stuff we weave out of the perception of immortality, the bridge between generations. Every echo of our earthly footsteps will die out unless those who follow us inherit more than our genes. To speak of a “search for meaning” is pointless unless that “meaning” endures beyond our lifetime. With sad frequency, ethnic groups will die rather than abandon their culture. And their culture is failing many peoples in the modern world (p. 20).

Religion, Goldman says, isn’t just an aspect of sociology; it is the primary factor; he uses the word theopolitics. But there is a difference between pagan religion and the covenant God of Jews and Christians. In pagan religions, faith in their god(s) is tentative, depending on success. As Goldman puts it,

Pagans worship their own image in the person of gods who are like them, only better. Pagan faith is everywhere and always fragile, according to Spengler’s [his online columnist name] Universal Law #15: When we worship ourselves, eventually we become the god that failed. The function of pagan gods is not to redeem us from death, but to bring us success. Pagan gods do not love men and women…. Absent success, pagan societies lose their faith; the religion of the ancient world is a carnival-parade of new gods introduced by winners to replace the failed gods of the losers, as defeated tribes were absorbed into their conquerors (p. 122).

He adds, in Spengler’s Universal Law #19: “Pagan faith, however powerful, turns into Stygian nihilism when disappointed.” In the modern world, pagan gods may not be the same as in ancient religions; they might be the tribe, the culture [Kultur was the word used in Nazi Germany], or self. All are fallible, and therefore will eventually fail.

But the Judeo-Christian God makes a covenant with man. “The American founding notion of ‘inalienable rights’ stems from the Hebrew concept of covenant: a grant of rights implies a Grantor, and an irreversible grant implies a God who limits his own sovereignty in covenant with mankind” (p. 80). This difference means that God isn’t available depending on specific seasonal outcomes, but is there throughout life and into eternities. And there is hope for peace and happiness beyond this life if we obey God’s laws in this life.

Goldman spends a fair amount of time explaining why he sees the Muslim God as more “pagan” than “covenant.” He says the idea that Allah would limit his powers for the sake of a human is repugnant to Muslims. They do not have a relationship with their creator; they rather simply try to appease and hope for good fortune. But their behavior doesn’t affect what happens; all is Allah’s will. I do not understand Islam enough to know whether this assessment is true. But the evidence of cultural failure when moving from traditional (agrarian) societies to modern (urban) societies is evident in the Muslim world as it is in Europe and Japan.

But America hasn’t failed. Its fertility rate holds steady at replacement. Israel is another exception. What makes the difference? Faith.

It is not that Americans in general are having children, but that Americans of faith are having children, and there are more Americans of faith than citizens of any other industrial country. According to a 2002 survey by the Pew Research Institute, 59 percent of Americans said that religion was important to them, against 11 percent in France, 21 percent in Germany, 27 percent in Italy, 33 percent in Great Britain, and 36 percent in Poland. In both Europe and America, people who practice a religion have far more children than those who do not. It’s just that there are far more Americans than Europeans practicing a faith (pp. 191-192).

Here’s some of the data comparing religion among childless vs. large families:

·         33% of childless families say they are not religious; only 12.5% of families with 4+ children are not religious.

·         41% of childless families say grace before meals; 62% of families with 4+ children say grace.

·         45% of childless families “strongly agree” that there is a “God who watches over me”; 80% of adults with four children “strongly agree.”

·         50% of families that never take part in religious activities have no children, but only a third of families with 3+ children do not. (p. 194).

There are differences among different religions in America, even among different Christian religions. If we separate them into “mainline” and “fundamentalist” Christians, we see some patterns. Fundamentalists who attend services weekly have a fertility rate of 2.7 (27% higher than the national average). But mainline Christians, such as Episcopalians and Presbyterians, average 1.3 children—the same as failing European societies.

American Jews show similar differences. “Nine-tenths of American Jews belong to the liberal denominations (Reform and Conservative) or to none at all. A generation ago, the Orthodox Jews seemed like a vanishing remnant of old country life. An observer looking at the configuration of American religion circa 1970 well might have forecast the end of faith in America, for the churches and synagogues that embodied faith at that moment in time were in decline. But the fervor of the evangelical Protestants, Pentecostals, and others [Mormons] has filled the vacuum left by the mainline denominations, and Jewish Orthodoxy is growing rapidly in part by attracting adherents from liberal denominations, but mostly through its own fecundity. Although traditionally observant Jews remain a small minority in terms of overall numbers, a third of synagogue-going Jews below the age of thirty attend Orthodox services (p. 196).

In other words, growing by attrition includes some conversion, but it is fueled by large families. Similar growth is happening in Israel. Among secular Jews, fertility has increased in a generation to 2.6, the highest in the industrial world. Ultra- Orthodox Jews have a fertility rate of 8.5, bringing the national fertility rate to 2.9. Meanwhile, “Arabs births in Israel remain steady at around 39,000, while Jewish births rose from 80,000 in 1994 to 120,000” in 2009. In another 60 years (two generations), Israel’s population will be larger than Poland. Poland’s median age will be 57 (as many older as younger), while Israel’s will be 32 (p. 201). And in the wake of this fertility by more orthodox segments of society, the shift of the culture as a whole is toward orthodoxy. The desire to live, and to have the culture live on, is strong. It bodes well for that little nation.

But, back to America. If Europe was made up of Christian nations originally, why have they failed to remain Christian, and then also failed to continue the will to have their individual cultures live on? And why, facing the same modern world, has America remained Christian at its core? Goldman says,

America is different because it was founded to be different. America remains a Christian nation because it overcame the centrifugal forces of ethnic rivalry through a radical and unprecedented device: the creation of a new country founded on a proposition—rather than commonality of language, race, or history. At the moment of Europe’s most catastrophic failure, people of faith chose to risk everything to found the country that became the United States of America.

The proposition that America was founded on is that our Creator has granted us unalienable rights, among them: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property, and our own choice of ways of seeking it). And the Bill of Rights spells out what was understood at the founding, that God granted us freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to protect ourselves, freedom from oppressive government. We do not delegate to government powers beyond what is necessary to secure our rights.

The principles are eternal. They are based on promises from an unchanging, unfailing Creator. Unlike civilizations that base their meaning on love of something ethnic or otherwise ephemeral, the proposition will not fail. Only people fail in their understanding, and in their desire to value—to love—the covenant with God.

Goldman points out that we cannot export what we have in America, because it requires Americans—people who love the covenant with God. What we can do, and have done, is “evangelize,” or tell the world about the freedom concepts. Then, as has always happened, people select themselves out of the world to join the American covenant by immigrating, or to develop their own covenant based on God-given rights, as Israel has done.

This leads to a fair amount of foreign policy discussion. Goldman is persuasive and logical, but I don’t understand enough yet to know whether I can fully agree with his “therefore, we must” conclusions. Still, there is enough here to keep a person thinking a long time. And especially there is a lot that is hopeful about the long-time survival of the America that we love.