A Friend's Advice on Reading History

A friend of mine who enjoys reading history told me he tries to stick to books written before the 1960’s because he finds recent books to be inferior and less likely to be truthful.  That is a little too strong. There were bad, inaccurate, sloppy,  biased, and worthless books on history written in the old days, and there have been some good ones written lately, but my friend does have a point. The game often is being played differently  these days at least by academic historians. A lot of what has come out in the last fifty years is corrupted by leftist propaganda, multiculturalist special pleading, and a general post-modernist abandonment of objectivity, proportion, and intellectual honesty. Caveat lector is certainly good advice.    

The same thing is true for popular reference works, including  Wikipedia.  While it can be fine source on non-controversial  topics in fields such as mathematics and the physical sciences, Wikipedia often  is unreliable on topics with political content or relevance –including history.  The propaganda, special pleading, and lack of objectivity, proportion, and intellectual honesty mentioned above can show up  both in the articles and the selection of cited references. An old encyclopedia such as a Britannica from the mid-20^th Century sometimes will serve a curious reader better. Besides it never hurts to check more than one source even in casual reading or completing assignments for school. 

Pence and the Skater

A homosexual male figure skater on the American Olympic team made news this week by announcing he wanted nothing to do with Vice President Pence because he thought Pence supported so-called gay conversion therapy, i.e. therapy to change one’s sexual interests from homosexual to heterosexual.   It turned out that Pence said he didn’t, but why should it matter much if he had?  (It is  interesting that many on the left are in the unusual position of claiming that while wanting or pretending to alter one’s demonstrably genetically determined sex is a fine, admirable, and completely doable thing, any attempt to change one’s conjecturally genetically influenced sexual interests is both impossible and a black sin.) While no one should be coerced into entering any therapy, any adult wishing to change something about himself is free to get any sort of therapy he likes from anyone willing to provide it – quacks, charlatans, or otherwise. It is no one’s business including no other homosexual’s business if a homosexual decides to try such therapy. One may think doing so is pointless, futile, or wrong, but in a free country people get to do things others think are pointless, futile, or wrong.  

For centuries in Europe and for many decades after the founding of this country proponents of traditional Christian moral opinions made homosexuality illegal and homosexuals subject to persecution by officials.  The laws were often ignored or enforced only spottily, but the threat always was present.  Some homosexuals  were punished, and many or most had to be careful in public and lost some of  their freedom of association.  American libertarians and many liberals opposed these laws and supported the right of homosexuals for the same reasons  they supported the right of everyone to live peaceably as he chooses without the interference of officials, and eventually the laws were repealed or overturned. There has also been a change in the culture with many and probably most people now believing that condemning homosexuals as sinners or perverts is wrongheaded or even immoral.

While that cultural change is good, there is now a new problem as illustrated by such things as  attempts to outlaw voluntary conversion therapy or force unwilling florists and bakers to participate in same sex weddings.  Many people, homosexual and otherwise, now believe that  their superior moral  understanding  on such things gives them the right to suppress and punish a new class of sinners – those who either favor the traditional Christian belief that homosexuality is sinful or for reasons of  their own find it undesirable or risible.  This is wrong  for the same reasons punishing homosexuals was  wrong. It is also dangerous.  Homosexuals are a very small minority in this country, and there are many millions of traditional people. Political winds and fashions change. Worms turn. It is both right and safer to defend the right of  all people to think and behave peaceably as they like, whether one approves not, than to attempt to force people to conform.  To paraphrase a great man, those who deny tolerance to others, run the risk of not getting it for themselves.  Diversity of every sort is safer when there is not even the possibility of the power of the government being used to enforce conformity. Libertarians know this, and others should learn it. 

High Tax States

The  income tax bill recently passed limits the amount of taxes to state governments which can be deducted from a person’s income on federal taxes. It is understandable that taxpayers in states with very high state taxes such as California would not like this. It is also understandable that politicians in those states also would be displeased since this makes the taxes they collect more onerous to their citizens and also at the margin gives people an incentive to leave or avoid moving to their states.  Some arguments against that part of the bill make sense, but one of the most commonly used does not.

That is the assertion  that since California  (or New York or Connecticut or wherever) pays more per capita in federal income taxes than, say, Mississippi or New Mexico, it is a “donor” state to the federal government and is subsidizing all those slackers in fly over country who do not pay enough. Viewed on the surface and even assuming the claim about the averages (which I have not checked) is correct,  that is nonsense. The  state government of California is a tax exempt governmental entity and thus pays no federal income taxes at all. That of course is not what is usually meant. The point being made  is that Californians pay federal income taxes disproportionally.  

That is specious too. Californians as a group do not pay federal personal income taxes. Only individuals pay them.   Some individual Californians  - those with large taxable incomes - pay  large amounts of federal  personal income taxes. Some pay less, and many pay none at all.  They are all  taxed under the same rules as taxpayers in the other 49 states.  Having lots of residents with large incomes and thus large federal tax bills, does not mean the state, as personified by  its politicians and officials, is being treated unfairly. It means only that  it has lots of residents earning enough to get slammed really hard by the feds.

 

The real problem for taxpayers in states with high taxes is that their state taxes are too high, not that they now can deduct a smaller amount of them. That should be obvious, but it is unlikely the politicians or their flacks in the media will be mentioning it.  

Worrisome Stuff

A while back Robert Tracinski, an author I enjoy reading, wrote that the problem with our  culture is not that we have a Beyoncé but that we do not have a Beethoven  - that what he called  lowbrow popular culture is all we have. He did not mean that literally. He knows that there are people out there claiming to produce and widely  touted by the “official” artistic establishment  as  producing serious, high quality works in  paintings, music, and sculpture.  (He mentions  the agony of sitting through a performance of a modern opera.) His point  is that they are not any good, and that that says something worrisome about our times.  

  

It is a good point.  It would be unfair to disparage an  age for not having  a Beethoven or a Mozart. That standard is too high,  but  it is completely fair  to wonder why we do not (as far as we know based on publicly available information)  have at least a  Rossini  or a Dvorak. Similarly we can worry  not that we lack a Rembrandt but  that we  don’t have  a Turner or a Delacroix,   not that  we are without a Michelangelo but that there is not even a  Saint-Gaudens.  (Some people point to movies as a genre where our time has seen great works created, and certainly there have been some fine movies.  However most of the great or very good filmmakers belong to the past. Ford, Renoir, Hitchcock, Hawks, Welles, Kurosawa,   Wilder, Lang, Bergman, Kubrick, Lubitsch, Keaton, Donen,  Wellman, Wyler, Disney, Cukor,  Curtiz, and  Huston were  dead, no longer working working,  or past their prime by the late 1960’s, and that was fifty years ago. What we have seen lately is mainly not encouraging.) 

Actually  things are worse than that. It is not only that we are not seeing  many new  high quality works in painting, sculpture, and serious music. It is that  many people have lost sight of what  such things are.  People in the artistic establishment  have so long and so successfully  passed off minor, novelty, or  worthless stuff as great art that a lot of people either cannot tell the difference or have given up and decided that if this is art, you can have it.  We can hope we are in only  a lull, and better times are coming. But people such as  Tracinski are right to be concerned. For as Goethe told Eckermann in a similar context “in what  does barbarism consist, other than  not recognizing what is excellent?”