David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

The greatest endorsement of my Grandparents’ immigrant generation was “He is my landsman.” Which was to say, “He comes from my shtetl and my lodge (my culture), and I can, thus, predict how he will act.” This is not to say that the landsman was perfect, or that the prediction was infallible, but that, sharing a culture, one could take a large amount of energy which otherwise would have been expended on self-defense, and utilize it more productively. (Cf. the locker room of a jiujitsu academy, where one may safely leave one’s valuables unlocked and in the open; as the more skilled could easily overcome the neophytes, and skill has been gained only through attendance and study—status awarded not only for physical accomplishment, but, as per the tenets of this particular tribe, for honorable behavior.)

The grave error of multiculturalism is the assumption that reason can modify a process which has taken place without reason, and with inputs astronomically greater than those reason might provide.

Sowell, in Ethnic America , points out that the behavior of ethnic groups in America predates their immigration (or transplantation) to this country; and may be seen as growing out of the ancient necessities facing these groups in their original lands. For example, the Jews are an historically stateless people, and so had to invest their time and wealth in that which could be transported without confiscation—education; the Irish, living for centuries under foreign rule and at the whim of invaders, had to form their own hermetic state-within-a-state, to provide support, protection, and justice, hence their introduction of and success with what became known here as ward politics.

These cultural adaptations predate and are the basis for that more conscious, more sophisticated agglomeration called society, which might be said to be the appurtenances growing out of culture. 5Thus, as Sowell writes, the communal culture is a real possession, available to all through the efforts of all, not only in the present day, but historically. This possession, as per Veblen (as above) is little different from the individual inheritance of an actual, material tool—though it is not material, it is a tool, and an inheritance.

The tool of culture is the capacity to predict the operation of the social environment—a property right little different from a right in land or wealth. This cultural right exists not limitlessly—for any property right is limited, by chance, death, inflation, erosion, theft, laws, confiscation, etc. but, as with a material property right, founded upon an abstract concept: predictability , which differs from omniscience, but is of immeasurably greater worth than ignorance. Culture exists and evolves to relegate to habit categories of interactions the constant conscious reference to which would make human interaction impossible.

We have all experienced, for example, the phenomenon of the First Night in a New Home. The myriad bits of information in our possession of which we were unaware: the location and operation of the light switch, the steps-to-the-couch, the meaning of a creak in the floor (is it the house settling, or is it the step of an intruder?), these countless accommodations, worked out over time, and without the individual’s conscious knowledge either of their content or of their presence, are, in the new home, brought to consciousness, and demand energy, consideration, and response. The cultural cursor has been put back to zero, and the mind and spirit complain, “I can’t do all these things at once,” and indeed, we cannot. And the first nights in the new home are spent without sleep, and longing for peace.

See The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (to take another idea and a title from Hayek), prime among which is the misconception that the human mind can (a) conceive, and (b) implement a better way of accomplishing a process worked out over millennia by a mechanism infinitely more suited to the task than the human mind (that process being the interaction of human beings, each of whom want something from the other, and all of whom must live together, which is to say, adapt, which is to say, arrive at a solution).

Our current societal (as opposed to cultural) development is burdened by the presence of “Good Ideas.” These ideas are called Good not because their implementation has led to the betterment of life, but in homage to the supposed goodwill or intellectual status of their instigators. Examples will come to mind based upon the individual reader’s political or moral complexion, but, for the purposes of illustration in this essay, they may be said to include feminism, birth control, “diversity,” free love, and the profusion of “counter-cultural” innovations spawned in the 1960s. 6

This joyous extemporizing of a “new social vision” has brought about an effect not unlike the first night in the new home. It exacts a great cost in bringing to the conscious (unprepared and unskilled) mind those decisions worked out over time. One cost is confusion: angry feminists, lonely aging males, full divorce courts, broken families, grieving children, and a growing disbelief not only in the possibility of domestic accord, but of the efficacy of the free market.

The millennia-long evolution of the human family as a means of dealing with the environment was discarded by my generation of fantasists, in favor of a concept not only artificial, but inchoate : “freedom”—the pursuit of which has led to misery. See today’s film and television love stories. They, almost universally, feature a man and a woman who despise each other, but come, at the end of the piece, to see that, nonetheless, they, somehow “belong” together, and will “make a go of it.”

This is a sad inversion of the traditional story of a man and a woman who love each other, and are kept apart by (and eventually united by their ability to overcome), circumstance. (That is, they are awarded happiness through the exercise of their will.)

The “Good Idea” (the unimplementable concept), fails, for it is the product of a consciousness incapable of recognizing let alone assessing possible variables. When it fails, the conscious mind balks at the necessity of spending further energy on that which was once free; which is to say, unconscious: the culture. 7The enlightened, socially aware individual, however, a believer in the primacy of the Individual Mind, now affronted by defeat, regresses to that realm which once supported but has now failed him—his unconscious—and takes revenge. He becomes angry.

One might ask not why mass shootings are happening, but why they are happening in schools. Troubled youngsters from troubled families have, traditionally, had the possibility of solace in those institutions operating in loco parentis . The child and adolescent, denied order and predictability in the home, might find it on offer in the rules of the school; learn your lesson, dress and act appropriately, sit down, shut up. Though the child complains, these are, to him a comfort. For they are predictable, and they are impersonal , and, so, he need not (in contradistinction to the enormities of life at home) take them personally. As such they are the perfect inculcator of a respect for law, tradition, and property without which the child can have no success in the wider, less predictable world beyond the school.

If the school and its subjects, rules and regulations, and expectations are unpredictable, eventual autonomy becomes, to the young, unimaginable, and the wider world which the adolescent knows himself incapable of dealing with becomes not a phenomenon to be faced after the acquisition of skills, but an immediate and frightening exigency. School, in teaching the mastery of skills (the three Rs) gives the child faith in his ability to master other skills—schools devoted to the debatable (social studies, multiculturalism, and other moot topics) weaken the child—for, even as they seem to endorse some inchoate sense of “social justice,” they offer the adolescent hungering for certainty a curriculum of pabulum, and reward him for regurgitating the school’s positions. 8