Will to Summers

George Will, baseball philosopher of the Beltway right, has weighed in on the Larry Summers controversy: the women-folk are overreacting. F$#&ing hysterics.

Interestingly, though, Will connects (certain) critics of Summers' talk to liberal critics of Bush's inaugural address, an oration which, he claims, shares "the Founders' philosophy" that "there is a universal human nature." Now, the Founders didn't believe any such thing: black slaves were distinctly and unalterably different from white men, for instance. But no mind. Will goes on to claim that

The vehemence of the political left's recoil from this idea is explained by the investment political radicalism has had for several centuries in the notion that human beings are essentially blank slates. What predominates in determining individuals' trajectories -- nature or nurture? The left says nature is negligible, nurturing is sovereign. So a properly governed society can write what it wishes on the blank slate of humanity. This maximizes the stakes of politics and the grandeur of government's role. And the importance of governing elites, who are the "progressive" vanguards of a perfected humanity.

This claim is both a commonplace pejorative by the right of the left and utter idiocy. First, no intelligent person on the right or the left who isn't also a freshman taking a philosophy class should apply a ridiculously false dichotomy like "nature versus nurture" to any serious social or cultural issue. It explains nothing, yet purports to explain all. (Chomsky - the real thinker, not the strawman of the unhinged right - does not think that humans are "blank slates," for instance: he thinks freedom is encoded in our brains.)

Second, look only to Burke to see that the right dependson the conservation of tradition, especially the retention of political and economic power by those who have accumulated it, not on the diffusion of such power to "the masses." Hence, George, the name: c-o-n-s-e-r-v-a-t-i-v-e. In a pinch, conservatives are willing to extend, say, political power to certain groups, as long as they can be trusted to vote right. Those blacks can't be so trusted.

Third, the right does, in fact, consider humans to be "blank slates," albeit ones on which can be inscribed the logic of individualism, self-interest, and, yeah, capitalism. What are we doing in Iraq, if not nurturing those cwazy Arabs in the benefits of democratic capitalism? We're not doing a good job, sure, but we're trying really hard. If only they'd stop shootin' and start listenin'.

More generally, it's a basic tenet of the modern GOP that private enterprise will pave the road to the future. (This is key difference between the Reagan-Bush party and, say, the Taft-Coolidge party, which couldn't even fathom a governmental counterweight to businesses.) QED, one task of the government is to accustom citizens to a society in which business institutions will predominate over governmental institutions, and that ye olde profit motive will have free rein. Viz, Social Security privatization. Perhaps the resolution of that debate will shed more light on whether humans, or at least the ones in the U.S., see windfalls for Wall Street as genetically foreordained.

(On the plus side, in his piece Will refers to "America's campus-based indignation industry," which is a useful phrase indeed. He's a bit off, though - I think the campuses are more like the non-profit sector of that industry; the phalangist media like Limbaugh and Fox News represent the larger, louder, and lewder for-profit sector of that industry.)