Angina Monologue 23

His Majesty has been somewhat sullen at breakfast lately. Part of it was the widespread perception in the media that Cthulu did better than His Majesty in the last debate. Part of it was the season of the year: I think His Majesty suffers from a touch of SAD (Sith Affective Disorder), which flares up around this time of year, but usually passes around early January. And I figured part of it was that the Imperial tummy has been unhappy. For several days, His Majesty could hardly choke down his meals, which left him feeling bloated and suffering with heartburn for hours afterwards. He convinced himself that it was gastroparesis, which he knows has been making life miserable for a young friend of mine.

But, no; this morning, he was clearly in a better mood, with that old malicious twinkle back in his bloodshot eyes. And when I brought him his corn flakes, porridge, and kefir, he consumed them with obvious relish.

So nice to have my appetite back. I think it was just a passing virus, after all.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, while I was praying for Olivia, I put in a word for him as well. Yes, I know. But I figure if Luke could finally learn to feel compassion for me, perhaps I could learn to feel compassion for the old monster.

Still, I am fortunate to have a competent and professional doctor. One who is not yet entirely in thrall to the bureaucracy. One who understands what it means to be a professional.

And the first thing to remember about professionalism is that the oldest profession is anything but.

George Bernard Shaw stumbled over the truth when he declared that every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. Of course, being George Bernard Shaw, he picked himself up, dusted himself off, and moved on. A professional, in the older and better sense of the word, was not merely someone who had mastered a trade (learned or otherwise) to the point of making good money from it. He was someone who adhered to a creed that required him to ignore certain market signals. He was answerable to gods other than those of the market place.

Back in the day, physicians answered to a creed that forbade them to administer an abortifacient no matter how much the customer was willing to pay; that forbade them to prepare poisons, no matter how much the customer was willing to pay; that forbade euthanasia, no matter how much the customer was willing to pay; that put restrictions and requirements on teaching medicine to others, no matter how much the customer was willing to pay. Such professionalism has taken a beating lately, but enough remains to make physicians potentially the strongest center of resistance to single-payer health care.

But I fear the resistance will collapse once single-payer health care is in place. When that happens, the government becomes the customer, not the patient. Professionalism, in the sense of refusing certain things to the customer in the name of the old gods, will fade. Employer-provided insurance has already had a seriously corrosive effect in this regard.

A lawyer is not supposed to lie to the court on behalf of his client, no matter how much the client is willing to pay. A lawyer is not supposed to conceal material evidence on behalf of his client, no matter how much the client is willing to pay. A lawyer is especially not supposed to conceal exculpatory DNA evidence in order to maintain the prosecution of a trio falsely accused of rape in order to get himself reelected as district attorney. There’s some evidence this old creed still has some force.

Which is why I oppose public funding of lawyers, even though the counterargument (one’s access to justice should not depend on one’s ability to pay) is an extremely powerful one.

I found myself wondering what relevance this might have to the political campaign. It sounded like empty musings.

Not at all, Lord Vader. You hear that the public are tired of  professional politicians. In fact, there is nothing this country needs worse at the moment than professional politicians — statesmen who answer to a creed that does not always agree with the passing mood of the electorate. “I’d rather be right than be President” was admirable, though, sadly, more than half correct. “History is on our side” would be quite admirable, if it had not been so regularly and badly misused by politicians whose creeds are actually destined for the ash heap. But then the most repugnant form of unprofessionalism is the attempt to co-opt the old gods in the name of new.

I am, of course, an old professional politician. “Reality is not optional” may be nontheistic but it is nonetheless a creed, one often at odds with the market.

Are you actually saying you’d rather be right than President?

If it’s any help for keeping your Weltanschauung from collapsing, you can take comfort in my assurance that this does not reflect any great virtue on my part, but rather an old Sith’s conviction that being right about politics can actually be a lot more entertaining than trying to run the asylum.

I have, incidentally, had some more thoughts on immigration. I have discovered an argument against open immigration that is based on sound conservative principles.

Sigh. So have most of the Republican candidates this time around. (Some of the Democratic candidates are likewise discovering arguments against open immigration. Theirs are not so much conservative as national socialist, though.)

Hear me out. The key was something I read at NRO, by Kevin D. Williamson. Speaking of nation building, he noted:

Cult is the first word in culture, which bears some consideration: The American revolutionaries emerged from a Puritan-Quaker culture shaped by the hardships of colonial life with the savage frontier in front of them and the Atlantic Ocean at their backs; the French revolutionaries emerged from a decadent Catholic culture shaped by court life and European rivalries. Both parties cried “Liberty!” but one produced the Bill of Rights and the other produced the Terror. The cultural distance between 21st-century Anglo-American liberals and tribal jihadis in the Hindu Kush is rather greater than was the distance between Thomas Jefferson and the Abbé Sieyès.

So the principled conservative argument on limiting immigration is: How many of these immigrants will be able to adapt to our cultural institutions? Or, to put it another way, how well can our cultural institutions retain their meaning and significance if a large segment of the underlying population were not raised in the culture that gave rise to these institutions?

This is, incidentally, a pretty solid non-racist justification for matching immigration quotas to the current ethnic makeup of the country. We can absorb more Englishmen than Kurds because the cultural background is much closer. And we can absorb a black Englishman better than we can absorb a white Russian.

Of course, this arguments assumes some things a lot of liberals will never concede: That culture is neither arbitrary nor synthetic, but is developed organically over centuries. That political and social institutions arise from culture, and not the reverse. In fairness, I’m not 100% sure of these assumptions myself. Japan adopted Western culture with remarkable rapidity and success.

And Japan isn’t necessarily doing so well, either. And the cultural changes may be more superficial than you supose. Some of the more bizarrely distinctive forms of Japanese pornography, for instance, have clear roots back centuries.

I had no idea you were an expert on Japanese porn, Lord Vader. I must say I’m as impressed as I am startled.

Sigh. I once foolishly took up a dare to look up “tentacle hentai” without realizing what it was. And I discovered that it really is true that what has been seen cannot be unseen.

(Note to readers: That was not a dare. That was a warning. Think of the worst anime you’ve ever encountered and ask yourself why you’d want to discover something even more perverse about Japanese culture.)

Very well, it sounds like you are on board with me here.

Another thing I have been reflecting on is the Fed. This is not so clearly an issue with Republican voters as immigration, the mythical Republican Establishment, and Obamacare, but it might pop up.

The Fed really only has one job, and that is to keep the money supply stable. The Fed can screw up the economy, by failing to perform this one task (simple to articulate; somewhat more difficult to actually achieve) but it cannot help an economy whose problems lie elsewhere. Monetary policy cannot compensate for deficit spending, or overregulation, or misregulation, or failures in education. Furthermore, a Federal Reserve Board whose governors understand that their only job is to keep the money supply stable can focus on that fairly nontrivial task, and if the public also understands that that is their only task, they will become politically uninteresting — and the jobs that are presently being done best in this country are the politically uninteresting ones.

Would that more jobs were politically uninteresting.

Given that the Democratic Party is rapidly discarding any pretense of being anything but America’s Social Democrats; and given that socialists insist that everything is political, it is clear that you will not get your wish.

That’s not a terribly optimistic take.

Reality is not optional.

His Majesty wiped the last traces of kefir from his lips and headed into the television room. Lately he’s been watching a lot of film noir.

I can’t argue with him about professionalism, though I have mixed feelings about democracy versus autocracy. I suppose that’s why I keep looking to republicanism as the third way. But it seems like our Democratic Party simultaneously caters to the aspects of both autocracy and democracy that the Founders most feared, while the Republicans can never seem to pull their act together. Where on earth did Trump come from?

I think I just answered my own question.

Culture is important, but our ability to absorb immigrants depends on how much of culture is universal. There’s no really good evidence I’m aware of that my brain is wired that much differently from a Kurd’s, or for that matter, an Australian aborigine. I think there’s more commonality to traditional culture than His Majesty acknowledges. I think it’s modern engineered culture that wanders all over the landscape, because it has no roots in what Man actually is.

Reality really is not optional.