David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

Quantities may have different meanings. It is hard to divest oneself of their connotations. This may, I think, be accomplished in mathematics, where values are set, but, as the task of philosophy, it is certainly difficult to use reason to determine reason’s operations and their worth.

There is, historically, much rancor on the Left against the existence of the State of Israel. And frequent mention is made, and, more destructively, implied, of Israel’s “aggression.” But what does the State of Israel want? To be left in peace within its borders. What does the Arab world want? To destroy the State of Israel. Whatever allegations or sympathies may otherwise be adduced, these demands, as above, are observable, oft-proclaimed and incontrovertible; Western Sympathy for the Arab cause, then, can only rest upon a sliding scale of Humanity—the Arabs, and, thus, their demands, being of a weight sufficient to nullify those of Israel, though the former wants slaughter and the latter peace. How can we know? Return to the mathematic certainty: Israel has no territorial demands (or was willing in negotiations with Arafat and after to concede any scant and still-disputed land). The Arabs want all of Israel.

There can be a sentiment of sympathy with the Arabs only based upon a pre-facto assessment of them (rather than their cause) as “better” or more worthy than the Jews.

This illogical sentiment, which can only be called “racism,” is found again in the Liberal love of the idea of “apology”—that the Government should apologize for Slavery, Japanese Internment, Coolie Labor, and so on. But the Rabbis teach that no apology is legitimate unless the offender (a) expresses remorse stating specifically what he has done; (b) makes restitution; (c) refrains, in similar circumstances, from again committing the offense.

But upon even the first of these, a governmental apology founders. For who is the “we” and who the “they” of the apology?

Is the American Government of today guilty of slavery? If so, are those African American members of the Government equally guilty? Or, are the American People alive today guilty? If so, which citizens? The Black as well as the White? Is the guilt heritable, or not? If so, then would not those (the great majority of) Americans whose ancestors did not arrive until after slavery be exempt from apology? Are the ancestors of the 300,000 white males who died to defeat slavery excepted from apology? If not, on what basis are the descendants of slaves entitled to it?

Is one entitled to apology by genetics? If so, then those making the apology must be tainted by their own blood. Is this an American concept?

How is it that, sixty-some years after the West defeated Nazi Racism, we are enmeshed in a race-based culture, and making governmental decisions on the basis of genetics?

Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, had, as his second in command, Erhard Milch. It was pointed out that Milch had a Jewish father, and so should not be employed as a Nazi, but rather executed as a Jew. Goering replied, “In Germany I decide who is a Jew.” Equally, to indulge in any racial preferences is not to award to a Race, but to the State the power to create differing classes of citizens, and to rule on who shall belong in each class. For all our blood is mixed. Our country, like all in recorded history, engaged for a while in Slavery. It also produced the white, northern males who enlisted and died to eradicate Slavery during the Civil War, and fought it and, again, died during World War II; and the white males who voted in the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act. Is it not evident, after a clinical look, that the desire for Justice cannot be served quite so easily, and that a reduction of human beings to classes deserving differing grades of the same is the beginning of the end of Democracy? It costs politicians and legislators nothing to apologize, but costs us citizens much to award them or ourselves credit for the indulgence.

13

MAXWELL STREET

Her conclusion was that any human being lies nearer to the unseen than any organization, and from this she never varied.

—E. M. Forster, Howards End , 1910

Most legislation aimed at eliminating unhappiness and discontent has resulted in misery. Human beings are flawed, and as unlikely to create contentment with amended or increased legislation as they were to create perfect legislation in the first place. The best we might do would be to create a set of laws which made allowance for the imperfection not only of the legislation but of the judges and the administrators who would pass and implement it, and, indeed, of the Electorate. 35

Within the memory of many, groups who believed in their own rationality voted for laws against miscegenation. They did not do so because they were white, but because they were human, which is to say, flawed—betrayed by their belief in their own rationality, and compromised by reliance on their own indignant and righteous feelings.

Government is an organic cultural organism. It lives by growing, and it grows by accretion. It will arrogate to itself all the power it can by the apparent mechanism of legislation and the less apparent but more virulent operation of bureaucratic growth, by usage, and precedent.

The Constitution reserves to the Congress the power to declare war. But Roosevelt declared war on Japan and asked the Congress to affirm that this state of war existed. The act was reasonable and defensible as a pro-forma inversion of the usual process. But ever since Korea and Vietnam and the War Powers Act and so on, the President has achieved the de facto power to declare war, enshrined not in law but in custom.

The Written Law says Congress has the power, but the Unwritten Law, by which the written law is understood, is that such power has become the Executive’s. But, defenders might say, the President may declare, not a “war” but a “police action,” or a “widening of the sphere of defense,” under such and such conditions and various new stipulations . Such an elaboration of detail may stem from a desire for Justice, or from a desire to protect the “spirit” of the Constitution, but it, by demanding an accompanying elaboration of oversight and bureaucracy, merely exacerbates the problem it pretends to address, for it entrenches a new, bigger, more powerful class of bureaucrats, paid by the State to deal magically with the issue of when it is acceptable for a President to declare a war by simply calling it something else (the answer, now, “always”); to enforce new rules, which is to say, to meddle and obstruct the possibility of simple rules of human interaction (e.g. “The Congress shall have the power to declare war”).

The Liberal state, in the worthy desire to exorcise greed, poverty, and unhappiness, has given birth to a radical view of the world: that it is the responsibility of the State to protect anyone who may claim to be powerless. But what check is upon these champions? And what inducement do they possess to refrain, since to refrain is to diminish their power and, so, their livelihoods? Is it not evident that to be accused before the bureaucrats of OSHA, Equal Opportunity Commission, FDA, Consumer Safety Board, and so on, is to be found guilty, for the organization’s first and only responsibility is to grow, and, in contrast to the free market, it is not the populace, but the government which characterizes failure and success, and that all government programs must not only expand after success, but expand after failure, in order “to bring about eventual success.” Note that all this hocus-pocus is taking place with the money actually earned by hardworking individuals.