I see that a lot of items from John Derbyshire have crept onto this site over the years.
Derbyshire is a staunch conservative, with whom I often disagree and whom I rather respect. I cannot read a week's worth of his writings without seeing something impressive and trenchant, and cannot read a month's worth without seeing something that makes me think he deserves to be pilloried.
For me, one of those frustrating and enlightening people:
"I agree with this guy about facts A, B, and C.
So how come I don't agree with him about conclusion D?"
Derbyshire is sometimes called a racist, homophobe, and/or imperialist. He seems to me to be definitely lacking in compassion for those outside of his "me and mine" group.
In some of his earlier columns, Derbyshire mentioned his agreement with Auberon Waugh's definition of his profession as "the vituperative arts". Derbyshire's style owes a certain debt to his roots in England, "where the journalistic culture is much more spirited, much less top-heavy with stuffy self-important bores, and much less deferential to public figures, than it is here in what Florence King calls 'The Republic of Nice'", and where though the climate is damp, the sense of humor is exceedingly dry. This means that he sometimes strikes his non-British readers (including, I suspect, myself) as mean or unfunny, when they are simply out of the joke.
Update: My respect for Derbyshire was high before (with the very definite caveats mentioned), but has somewhat increased over the last few years as he seems to be showing signs of mellowing. (I suppose that this may be actual mellowing or only an increased evidence of previously concealed mellowness.)
I'm starting to think of Derbyshire as in many ways the voice of Middle America. He's "a Christian" (Update: "was" -- see below), but thinks that the theologues and theocrats are nuts. He's uncomfortable about homosexuality, but a lot of people are uncomfortable about homosexuality. Etc, etc.
Update: I think that Derbyshire could also be called the Last Imperialist (I think that, perhaps with a few caveats, he'd be happy to accept this title.) He is flatly an advocate of Empire over Republic, and an admirer of the old British Empire in particular. Personally, as I've said elsewhere; I think that the British Empire had a lot of serious flaws, as did all the European colonial efforts, but that the British Empire manifested these to a much lesser degree than did the rest.
Update: I have since run across a couple of comments made (not recently) by Derbyshire which strike me as exceedingly reprehensible (see "pilloried" above). I've felt it logical to create a separate page / John Derbyshire: Criticism Of /. For me, the Derbyshire box o' chocolates definitely includes an Anthrax Ripple or two.
Update: In his Notes: My review of The Culture of Critique, Derbyshire mentions a few aspects of his personality:- "I approach all the human sciences with an opening attitude of deep skepticism — though I am always willing to be convinced."
- "As strongly as I believe in anything, I believe in free enquiry and open debate."
- "I certainly do contradict myself sometimes."
Update: During the course of the year 2004, Derbyshire, formerly a "mild, not very observant, Anglican" ( Some Reader Comments on Political and Religious References in Prime Obsession OCT 2003) lost his faith and has become, as nearly as I can determine, a Deist.
Now, if a person can change his mind about something so fundamental as religion, I see no reason to doubt that he is, as he says, "always willing to be convinced" about other subjects as well.
John Derbyshire
Defiant Normality
National Review Online,
03 SEP 2002
Derbyshire himself links this to
Situation Normal
National Review,
11 JUN 2001
John Derbyshire
FAQs
National Review Online,
07 JUN 2001
Irrational Exuberance?
by John Derbyshire
National Review Online,
10 MAR 2005
"I have not the slightest doubt that I am a conservative by thought, feeling and instinct, yet on a lot of the issues that define American conservatism, I barely move the needle from the zero mark on the dial. I have guns but only fire them down at the range once a month, for the satisfaction of it, and to develop confidence in handling them. I have never hunted with guns. I am only feebly religious — feebly Episcopalian, in fact, which is feebleness squared! Homosexuality? I don't like it, and have got myself in a lot of trouble for saying so rather bluntly, but I wouldn't criminalize it. Abortion? Pretty much the same. Creationism? Sorry, I think it's pseudoscience. I'm fine with evolution.-- Links are mine -- ed.
So — What kind of conservative am I? ... I think the answer is: I'm a metropolitan conservative."
"(In "Confessions of a Metropolitan Conservative" ) ... I tried to argue that conservatism, in common with most other large social phenomena, has an urban manifestation — subtle, cerebral, intellectual, tending towards decadence — and a rustic one — plain, active, instinctual, tending towards fanaticism — and that the two factions ought to strive to get along in pursuit of their common goals, and in hopes that their negative tendencies will cancel each other out."Hmm ... Urban vs Rustic -- how do I stack up?
"... I speak as a particular and perhaps peculiar type of conservative, an irreligious “National Question” Tory pessimist."- Links here are mine -- ed.
"... thinking about things that are necessary but impossible. ...A rather good quick intro to where Mr. Derbyshire is located on the political spectrum.
There are rather a lot of things like that .... I thought of ten in less than that number of minutes, without popping any arteries."
"I was a sedentary, bookish, unsporting kind of child. Still, somehow, my school years (I mean, up to age 18) managed to include the following things: boxing, horse riding, rugby every week through the winter months, cross-country running, rifle shooting, “arduous training” with the school cadet force (this mainly involved running up and down Scottish mountains in the pouring rain and pitching tents in mud), rock climbing, cutter sailing (eight men to a boat, and generally more rowing than sailing), canoeing, and various kinds of assault courses (generally including a 12-foot wall to be got over, and a high rope bridge to be walked). Souls more adventurous than me did air-sea rescue courses (being lowered from a helicopter by rope), took flying lessons (we had an Air Force cadet contingent too -- you could get a pilot’s license at age 17), or went on the school’s Easter ski trip to Switzerland. In our leisure hours we climbed trees, skated on frozen ponds, dived into canals, rode bikes for miles out into the countryside, and on Guy Fawkes Night lit huge bonfires we’d been assembling for weeks, and stood around throwing firecrackers at each other."
Derbyshire's tongue-in-cheek description of himself as of April 2002 --Incidentally, you should very definitely read this article if (a) You are curious about why Derbyshire is leery of "lefties" and authoritarians and strongly pro-USA, or (b) You are a human being.
"... cynical, crusty, stiff-upper-lip Brit, snarling reactionary Derb, pitiless scourge of the Left, of feminists, of poofs, of the Irish Republican Army, of 21-year-old ex-Presidential daughters and of the Chinese Communist Party, fearless bren-toting weekend warrior and skydiver, this cold-blooded curmudgeon...
"Q. Are you a Christian?Links are a mix of mine and Derbyshire's -- ed.
A. No. I take the minimal definition of a Christian to be a person who is sure that Jesus of Nazareth was divine, or part-divine, and that the Resurrection was a real event. I don’t believe either of those things.
Have I ever? Well, up to about three years ago there were moments when I would have answered that question with a hesitant 'Yes.' For the most part, though, I would rather not have been asked. My Christianity was of the watery, behavioral Anglican variety (see below) — an occasional consolation and a habit, not a core feature of what neuroscientists call my 'BDIs' — that is, my mental system of beliefs, desires, and intentions — and certainly not a waterproof philosophical system that I relied on in decision-making and opinion-forming. My ability to reply 'yes' to this question, even occasionally, ended sometime early in 2004. Since about the end of that year I’ve been coming clean with myself, and quit going to church. No, I am not a Christian.
Q. Do you believe in God?
A. Yes, to my own satisfaction, though not necessarily to yours. ...
I belong to the 16 percent of Americans who, in the classification used for a recent survey, believe in a 'Critical God.' ... I am, in short, a Mysterian. ...
Conservatism, including (including especially, I think) religious conservatism, has at its core an acceptance of, a respect for, human nature. We conservatives are the people who see humanity plain, or strive to, and who wish to keep our society in harmony with what we see. Paul Johnson has noted how leftists always used to talk about building socialism. Capitalism doesn't require building. It's just what happens if you leave people alone. It arises, in short, from human nature, and only needs harmonizing under some mild, reasonable, laws and customary restraints. You don't have to build it by forging a New Capitalist Man, or anything like that.
Leaving people alone, I like. Capitalism, I like. Social harmony, I like. Human nature... Well, it has its unappealing side. I don't count religious feeling as necessarily on that side, though; and I do count religious feeling — stronger in some individuals, weaker in others, altogether absent in a few — a key component of the human personality at large. To be respected ipso facto."
"Bear in mind please that I come from the strongly empirical, anti-ideological Tory-Brit-Anglican position that disdains all "isms" and all claims to capital-letter Truth, and that nurses low expectations of human life, human knowledge, and the human race. It seems absurd to stick a label on the clutter and ambiguity of my own thoughts, but if you strap me down to a rack and apply the electrodes, I'll call myself a Mysterian."
Of Mr Derbyshire and his wife:
"Are we racists? Depends what you mean. Just like everybody else, except for a small fringe of lunatics, I deal with individual people as they come, and hold off forming individual judgments about them till I’ve had some experience of their character and abilities, as I assume they do with me. My wife, who never even saw a black person till she was 24 years old (born and raised in China), is the same. On the other hand, no, I don’t want to live in a black neighborhood, not even a middle-class one. ... For American blacks, the percentages — school performance, crime, drugs, illegitimacy — are terrible.
This is not a big secret."
On race:
"The principal non-respectable ingredients of my views about this topic are my convictions that race is (a) real, and (b) important. It is a measure of the height to which the waters of hypocrisy have risen that these beliefs are, by themselves, sufficient to put me beyond the pale of polite discourse. ...
In the world of practical politics, as revealed most recently in l'affaire Lott, the dishonesty is at a level I simply cannot handle. It just makes me gag. All American politicians are liars and hypocrites about race, from Democrats like Hillary Clinton posing as champions of the downtrodden black masses while buying a house in the whitest town they can find, to Republicans pretending not to know that (a) many millions of nonblack Americans seriously dislike black people, (b) well-nigh every one of those people votes Republican, and (c) without those votes no Republican would ever win any election above the county level. (Am I being beeped out yet?)
I should like to be able to tell you that I am going to ride out to war against this horrid tyranny of cant, that I am going to join with those brave souls who have taken it as their mission in life to try to get us talking in an intelligent, honest, forward-looking, and optimistic manner about race, like the heirs to a great rational and scientific tradition that we are. I should like to, but I can't. I don't go looking for trouble. I have children to feed, and there are a great many more things to write about. If you want to call me a coward, I'm fine with it; in this line of work, I get called far worse things. ... So no more about race."
"A liberal, in the current sense of the term, is a person who favors a massive welfare state, expansive and intrusive government, high taxation, preferential allocation of social goods to designated “victim” groups, and deference to international bureaucracies in matters of foreign policy.My own views:
It is not difficult to see why such a person would favor lax policies towards both legal and illegal immigration. Immigration, legal or otherwise, concerns the crossing of borders, and a liberal regards borders, along with all other manifestations of the nation-state, with distaste. ... The preferences a citizen might have for his own countrymen over foreigners, for his own language over other tongues, for his own traditions and folkways over imported ones, are all, in the minds of a modern liberal, manifestations of ugly, primitive, and outdated notions -- nativism, xenophobia, racism. The liberal proudly declares himself a citizen of the world, and looks with scorn and contempt on those narrow souls who limit their citizenly affections to just one nation.
And in the realities of the world today, immigrants to the USA are mostly people of color, who can be recruited into those cohorts of designated “victims” that form such a key legion in the modern liberal alliance. ... Any expression of unhappiness with mass illegal immigration can therefore easily be construed as racism, the most shameful of all sins in the liberal lexicon -- a form of mental illness, according to some.
Further, modern liberals have come to an understanding with capitalism. The modern liberal is not a socialist. He understands perfectly well that common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange is a total no-hoper. The lavish government programs he favors need to be financed, and socialism is not capable of financing them .... Only a thriving capitalism can fund all the programs, all the departments, all the bureaucrats that modern liberalism wants.
How, then, can capitalism thrive in such a way as to necessitate a huge welfare establishment? Simple: privatize profits, socialize costs.
Private profit is of course the essence of capitalism; but how to socialize costs? The cost of your labor force is their remuneration, which ought to be sufficient to allow them to pay for their housing, health care, children’s education, and so on. To the degree that your workers’ remuneration is not sufficient for those things, you are throwing your workers on the mercy of the welfare state -- socializing your costs. Thus, in an odd historical reversal, liberals are keen on a capitalism that pays the lowest possible wages. To its everlasting shame, the labor movement, dominated nowadays by public-sector and welfare-state unions, is similarly inclined. The political Left is now the party of low wages kept down by endless mass immigration."
"It is those wreckers that most concern me: the arrogant judges, the academic deconstructors, the teacher-union multiculturalists, the media guilt-mongers, the love-the-world pacifists, the criminal-lovers and family-breakers, the inventors of bogus rights and destroyers of cherished traditions, the haters of normality and scoffers at restraint, the enterprise-destroying litigators and pain-feelers. ...
I do fear that this country (i.e. the USA) might be made unfit to live in, as the country of my birth (the UK) has been, by a misguided and corrupt humanitarianism, sentimental wallowing in past wrongs both real and imagined, and class and race resentment petted and nurtured by opportunistic tax-eaters.
There is some of that nation-killing poison in George W. Bush’s absurd 'compassionate conservatism.' ... The poison’s natural home, though, is in John Kerry’s liberalism; while all the forces that might keep it at bay, every millinewton of them, are in the Republican Party, George W. Bush’s party."
"Well, I use the terms loosely and carelessly (pace David Hume) to refer to:-- Links are mine -- ed.
Paleos
----Suspicious of state power
----Determined to restrain the growth of the state
----Fearful for the ancient liberties (This term apparently refers to the personal rights advocated by the Enlightenment philosophers and Founders of the USA. At the time, some sought to give such rights legitimacy by seeing an ancient pedigree for them in English and Germanic tradition, but such was apparently largely a pious fiction) under increased state power
----Inclined to anthropomorphize the state, imagining it to be a beast with a will of its own, seeking to extend its reach, sometimes by trickery, e.g. staging wars just so it can grab more power over citizens' lives
----Inclined not to believe that the US really needs any serious involvement with other nations
----Inclined to think that when such involvements occur, they do so as a result of rich & powerful groups (Foreign-policy elites, business interests, Jews) seeking to further enrich or empower themselves at the expense of poor Americans ("trade follows the flag")
----Sustained, fundamentally, by an image of national self-sufficiency
----Believe that if you hit a rattlesnake, he'll bite you
----Believing in American goodness and in the beauty of the American vision, but wishing it to be only "a light unto the gentiles," which other nations can emulate or disdain as they please
Neos (Neo Conservatives; Weekly Standard)
----Suspicious of state power
----Determined to restrain the growth of the state
----Fearful for the ancient liberties under increased state power
----Inclined to see the state as a loose collection of human beings, many with different interests & agendas, who can be appealed to individually with effect
----Inclined to believe that the US has no choice but to be involved with other nations, and determined to derive maximum advantage for the US from all such involvements
----Inclined to think that such involvements are a natural consequence of commercial activity and sometimes need defending militarily to preserve US prosperity ("the flag follows trade")
----Believe that if you hit a rattlesnake and he bites you, you didn't hit him hard enough
----Believes that national self-sufficiency is a pleasant fantasy
----Believing in American goodness and in the beauty of the American vision, and that the world will be safer and more prosperous, the more nations catch on to those things; and that judicious activities to promote that process are justified.
The first three points make us all conservatives. The rest we can discuss.
"(This off the top of my head.)
...this was some off-the-cuff "talking points" to serve as the basis of a discussion, not any part of a carefully-crafted essay.
I see I didn't even mention immigration, for e.g., which tends to be a strong "marker" for the neo-paleo split. Not an infallible one, though: I consider myself a firm neo, favor US intervention & even take-over of failed states ... but I am a strong immigration restrictionist. So are most of the NR (National Review) crowd (main exception Larry Kudlow)."
"... I don’t mind Paleos. I understand the appeal of their vision: a busy commercial republic, minding her own business, with no troops stationed beyond her shores, the champion of liberty in every land, but never its guarantor. Heck, I used to belong to a Paleo email list. ...
I dropped off that Paleo list, after much thought, because I just didn’t share that vision. I say again, I see its appeal, and I have a lot of sympathy for it: I just don’t share it.
... there are some strong practical reasons to favor American interventionism....
Republic or Empire? Empire, please."
"... what are the causes of homosexuality — the predilection, not the acts (which I assume to be caused by free will prompted by the predilection)? I can list a baker’s dozen of theories that I have heard or seen written up at one time or another. In very approximate order of scientific respectability, as best I can judge it, the theories are: --"Good intro to the discussion. Derbyshire is widely notorious as "anti-gay". As frequently happens, the truth appears to be non-simple.
"An interesting side-note here: I often get e-mails about articles I wrote ages ago. People google some name or phrase, and a link to one of my pieces pops up. Two or three times a week I get an e-mail from some homosexual who has been outraged by this, or this, or this. What's interesting is, that these little e-diatribes invariably accuse me of being "obsessed" with homosexuality. Well, let's see. Of the 250 pieces I have posted on NRO and other web magazines since March of 2000, just 4 have dealt with homosexuality, including one that was cheerfully non-hostile. That's 1.6 per cent. Of the 128 print-journalism pieces I have preserved on my website — and I preserve everything I remember to preserve, without selection, though with occasional minor editing to correct gross solecisms — one is about homosexuality. That's 0.8 percent. I don't say that I haven't taken a random swipe at homosexuality once in a while while addressing some other issue — here, for example — but even if you throw those in, I doubt it gets you up to three percent of my gross output. Some obsession!"This is, I think, a fair rebuttle to the criticism of Derbyshire as "obssessed" with this subject (though on the other hand 3 percent of an author's output is a non-negligible amount).
"Conservatism, to me, is the politics of the Cold Eye. It strives to see human beings as they are, not through a smeared lens of wishful thinking or abstract ideology. Conservatives have, or used to have, no patience with grand schemes of human improvement via government action. Improvements may happen, but they do so organically, through advances in understanding, or the softening of manners brought on by an easier, less arduous, less dangerous life. These things all rest, to a large degree, on scientific progress."
"It’s hard to say which faction is suffering the greater mental anguish right now: the Left, domestic and foreign ... or the paleo-Right, for whom Bush is the dupe of wily Sharonists and ideological globalizers.
Personally I feel more sorry for the paleos, largely because I count several of them as friends, and am a bit that way inclined myself. Leftists are just scum, and anything bad that happens to them is cause for celebration. Paleos (trust me here) are mostly very nice people, who are just afflicted with mild romantic tendencies -- sentimental fantasies of the old Jeffersonian farmer-republic financed from customs duties, or of that 1950s America in which non-Christians and non-whites knew their place and didn’t get ideas above their station, and in which there were lots of well-paid jobs not requiring a sheaf of college degrees. We all have our dreams, and the paleo dream is not at all an ignoble one.
In any case, the desire for the U.S.A. to mind her own business does not necessarily preclude happiness at seeing other nations emerge from barbarism into civilization, if that really is what we are seeing. There is no reason why a paleo shouldn’t say: 'God bless the Lebanese, Egyptians, Iraqis and Saudis, and all good luck to them! Now let’s bring our boys home. They have done all they can do.' Which is, in fact, pretty much my own state of mind. I told you I was that way inclined.
My pals on the neo-Right, of course, are beaming all over their faces. None of them is so dim as to think it’s game, set, and match in the Middle East, and they all have the phrase 'there are many things that could still go wrong' set up as a macro on their word processors, but let me tell you, in private they are pretty darn cheerful. The phrase “irrational exuberance” comes to mind.
A lot of this is relief. President Bush’s cheering squad here in the world of conservative journalism has not always been as brimful of optimism in private as their public writings might have suggested. No names, no pack drill, but I’ve heard stuff. Through the night of doubt and sorrow, however, onward went the pilgrim band. Now that the Celestial City is in sight at last -- though of course it might be a mirage; there are many things that could still go wrong -- the neocons are much more relaxing to hang out with. Yes, they are saying: Look! -- these nations are at last emerging from barbarism into civilization, and we helped it happen.
Are they? And, did we? There are fair reasons for doubt on both counts. Some political scientist should do a study to tally how many wide-franchise elections, in the history of the modern world, have ushered in a rational, constitutional political order. My guess would be less than 50 percent. (In Africa, surely less than ten percent.) It was nice to see Afghans, of all people, lining up to vote. Has Afghanistan really turned into Denmark, though? From what I have been reading, it looks more like Colombia."
"... the question a reviewer should tackle is not: 'Why did the guy write this book?' The question is: 'Does he make the case he has set out to make?' People write books from all sorts of motives, some of them disreputable. (Vanity and greed predominate.) A book that has obviously been written with great care, after long research, deserves to be taken on its own terms, as an extended argument. Does the author prove his case? That is the main question a reviewer should try to answer.
As strongly as I believe in anything, I believe in free enquiry and open debate. I believe in the marketplace of ideas. I believe that 'sunlight is the best disinfectant.' I don't like the idea that there are certain things we should not talk about. ...
Science is "cold." That is, it doesn't care about the researcher's feelings.
... I certainly do contradict myself sometimes. In calendar year 2002 I published over 194,000 words of commentary and review on a wide array of topics. That is considerably more words than there are in the New Testament. (And that was a slack year for my journalism, as I also produced a 400-page book.) You try writing 194,000 words of commentary without contradicting yourself. I am generally unembarrassed about contradictions.
... my own early training — my first degree, in fact — was in mathematics. Now, studying math at the higher levels makes you a terrible intellectual snob. No other discipline has the standards of rigor required in mathematics. Of course, none really can have, so this is a very unfair point of view. It is, though, one that mathematicians find hard to avoid. 'When you've worked on a farm, nothing else ever seems like work,' said J.K. Galbraith. Similarly, when you've studied higher math, nothing else really seems like study. For this reason, I approach all the human sciences with an opening attitude of deep skepticism — though I am always willing to be convinced. I guess this attitude shows in my review. ...
Some of my personal heroes were reactionaries. Chesterton was a reactionary; Evelyn Waugh was certainly a reactionary. George Orwell was a reactionary, though of a subtle and contradictory kind. 'In love with 1910,' said one of his friends. Kevin MacDonald is in love with 1950. As I said in my review (and as he confirms in his response to my review), Kevin would like to restore the white-Gentile ethnic dominance of American society, as it was fifty years ago. I don't (again, as I said in my review) find this particularly objectionable. I just think it's a fantasy — ain't gonna happen. Kevin's entitled to his dreams, though; and he is certainly entitled to argue that the social arrangements of fifty years ago were superior to those of today. In some respects, I agree with him about this."
-"I am proud to call myself a philosemite" - The Jews and I
"I thought a little triumphalism wouldn’t hurt to begin with. A natural contrarian, when I see grave figures on the TV, senior mucky-mucks from the D.o.D. and the Pentagon, telling me with slow-shaking head and furrowed brow that there are tough battles still ahead... it’s too soon to say... substantial resistance remains...' I naturally jump up out of my chair and whoop: 'We licked the buggers! Yeee-hah!'Won the battle against Saddam Hussein and his armed forces and regime, certainly. Won the battle for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, as well as the larger Arab and Muslim worlds -- no. As of 2007, "jubilation" and "complacency" seem hardly the appropriate words for the general mood.
This may, of course, be premature. I am writing this on Monday afternoon. It is wellnigh certain that brave young troopers from the Coalition forces — aye, and brave young Iraqis, and poor helpless non-combatants too — will be maimed and killed before the business is wrapped up and done. It is possible something large and ghastly will happen. I hope you will forgive me for setting these things aside and saying: even so, we have won. There is nothing so large and ghastly it could change that. The Saddam Hussein regime is done for. Its military assets are smoldering heaps of scrap. Its palaces are rubble. Its leaders are cowering in holes under the ground. The Ba’athists are finished. The D.o.D. and Pentagon types say so, for all their furrowed brows. So does the fellow from Abu Dhabi TV. Everyone knows it. We’ve won.
... (However,) I am already worrying about what comes after. Now, what you think will come after depends on your opinion about what kind of war this was. ...
Well, here’s my answer: it has been a Vic Davis Hanson war. If you haven’t read VDH’s book Carnage and Culture, I urge you to do so. Though written two years ago, it describes Gulf War II very well: the creative, efficient, rational, disciplined and well-motived soldiery of a free civilization versus the ignorant driven levies of a despotism — a shambolic rabble motivated only by fear of their own leaders, or by a crazed desire for martyrdom, or by the certain knowledge that if they do not die at our hands, they will be torn to pieces by the enraged citizens they have tyrannized over for so many years. The fact of this having been a VDH war is what explains the body counts. As Hanson points out, free peoples go to war reluctantly, but when at last they go, they go with a cold determination to annihilate the enemy’s forces, and supported by the spirit, skill, will and technology that enables them to do so. The lop-sided body counts follow as a natural consequence. Sic semper tyrannis.
What we should now begin to think about are the after-effects of this encounter — on them, and on us.
... Our own perils are indeed the ones Kipling warned of -- arrogant civilizational triumphalism; careless indifference to the psychic toll defeat takes on the defeated; a slipping into the easy fallacy that their collective hopelessness means that they are inferior as persons; naive belief that we can pick them up as easily as we knocked them down. Also blindness to those aspects of our victory that are not strictly Hansonian -- for example, to the fact that our army is not a citizens’ army at all, but a professional force whose members are separated from their fellow-countrymen by considerable mistrust and misunderstanding, and from the upper elites of their society by, quite often, mutual contempt, with both kinds of separation probably increased by victories like this. Our danger is complacency, easy victory pushing us further in the direction of believing that all our problems with other nations can be solved by the application of military force, a thing which is not, never has been, and never will be the case."
"Did I support the 2003 invasion of Iraq? Yes I did. Do I support the continuing effort to get civil society going in Iraq? No I don’t, and haven’t for over two years. ...This last is something about which I'd like to see a lot more from Derbyshire, as I think that this is one of the places where we part ways.
Since the Iraq War was obviously a gross blunder, is it time for those of us who cheered on the war to offer some kind of apology? ... I, at any rate, am willing to eat some crow and say: I wish I had never given any support to this fool war. ...
The universalist dogmas that rule unchallenged in our media and educational institutions have fixed their grip on our foreign policy, too. When the founders of our nation said “all men” they had in mind Christian Anglo-Saxon men (I'm actually pretty skeptical about this. The theories of the Founders of the USA were a direct outgrowth of the Enlightenment, which thinkers maintained that principles of reason, and the natural rights which reason engendered, were universal to all humans [with natural variations between individuals and apparently between groups -- the Foobarians might not on the whole be as Enlightened as the French or English, but this could probably be remedied by a generation or two of education.]) Our leaders, though, want to bring the whole world under the scope of those grand Lockeian principles."
" (Derbyshire's dog) Boris is 15, a great age even for a small dog. The vet tells us that our beloved mutt is stone-deaf and 90-percent blind. He -- Boris, not the vet -- is still keen on his daily walk, but has slowed down noticeably the past few months, his hindquarters beginning to weaken. Soon, by the inexorable decrees of Nature, there will be no Boris. From thinking of that, I of course got to thinking about my own passing. I'm no spring chicken, either. I tried to summon up Horace's great ode "Eheu, fugaces," and found I could only remember the first stanza. That -- not the ode, the not being able to remember it all -- depressed me further.It is in moments such as these that I feel a great kinship with (if I may say it) brother Derbyshire.
Meanwhile, as these Saturnian thoughts were seeping in, the sun went on shining, the sky went on being cloudless, the blossoms went on blooming, and the birds went on trilling. I was overwhelmed by the glory, complexity, and mystery of creation. Trees! Stones! Grasses! Flowers! Creatures! Air! Light! All on a great ball of rock rolling around a star!"
"Following my three-parter on race and I.Q., some readers asked me what my I.Q. is. I actually, honestly don't know, not having taken a test. I can give you a pretty good estimate, though, via heuristic argument. ...
... I give my I.Q. at 135, with fair but utterly un-tested confidence. ...
For a normal distribution with mean 100 and standard deviation 15, a statistic of 135 also has the neat property that it's at pretty precisely the 99th percentile — the 99.0184671th, if you want to be picky. Put it another way, about three million Americans are smarter than me."
Stand There and Enjoy It
by John Derbyshire
National Review Online,
June 19th, 2000
