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A Darwinian Reversal, or; “How He Gonna Get His Money?”
Aristotle believed that there were two basic types of virtue: intellectual virtue, which is taught, and moral virtue, which is the result of habit. “By being compelled to acquire good habits,” Bertrand Russell synopsized, “we shall in time, Aristotle thinks, come to find pleasure in performing good actions.” These are surely worthy positions to consider and debate, but the intrinsic connection of virtue with goodness was accepted as foundational.
Some 2,338 years after Aristotle’s death, however, virtue has been redefined by one Nautika Harris who explained the nobility of her cousin, Trevon Johnson, and his recent robbery of another person’s home as follows: “You have to understand, how he gonna get his money to have clothes to go to school?”
Never mind the process by which virtuous thoughts and actions are inculcated in the mind and heart. Never mind Aristotle’s further proposition that virtue is found in the “golden mean,” between two extremes, i.e., the virtue of courage residing somewhere between recklessness and cowardice, or the virtue of a ready wit being located somewhere between buffoonery and boorishness. No: Virtue is now reduced to breaking into another person’s home and taking their property because, otherwise, how you gonna get your money?
Under the circumstances, it’s tempting to reverse the Darwinian model and observe that instead of ascending from the lower animals, people are rapidly descending toward them. Meanwhile, Johnson’s exercise of this new virtue ended in his own death, as the lady whose home he was robbing shot and killed him in the act. He was 17 years old. “I don’t care if she have her gun license or any of that,” said Harris of the homeowner, “that is way beyond the law, way beyond.”
It’s embarrassing to have to explain this to Ms. Harris, and it ought to embarrass you to have to be instructed in such elementary distinctions, but while we mourn the loss of your cousin, it isn’t “way beyond the law,” for free people to defend their lives and property. The idea that anyone, anywhere, should surrender their home, their belongings, and their safety so that aggressors and thieves can invade and plunder is so breathtakingly ignorant that one can only marvel at the stunted mind and spirit capable of framing the words, “How he gonna get his money?” If it was “his money,” he wouldn’t have needed to break into another person’s home to get it, would he?
The larger question confronting those with a moral sense beyond that of the average two-year old who grabs another child’s pacifier, is how to address the rapid disintegration of civil society and its accompanying barbarism. In November 2014, the state of California formalized a novel approach, with Proposition 47, which reduced the number of felonies (and felons in prison) by — are you ready? — reclassifying some felony offenses as misdemeanors and springing former felons from the pokey.
Who knew it could be that easy? Why not outlaw Cs, Ds, and Fs in school while we’re at it, so that everyone is an A or B student? Why, we could reduce the prison population further still if we eliminated murder charges on the grounds that the deceased isn’t really dead — he’s just in a state of decompositional relaxation. Sentence? Forty-five days without video games, to include time served waiting for trial, followed by hot chocolate and sugary doughnuts with the parole officer once every six months if your social schedule will allow and thanks for shopping!
Meanwhile, California Dreamin’ has turned into a nightmare, as Marc Debbaudt explains in the San Francisco Chronicle, where that city has achieved the dubious honor of having the highest increase in property crimes in the United States. Car looting has increased some 31 percent since 2014, and has nearly tripled since 2010. Violent crimes are on the rise, with 48 cities in the California experiencing increases in their violent crime rates (34 of those cities seeing double-digit increases).
A 2015 article in the Los Angeles Times reported that the framers of Proposition 47 anticipated that “A drop in the state prison population because of Proposition 47 is expected to save about $100 million annually, according to a state estimate… [that] will go toward treatment and education programs beginning in late 2016.”
The results thus far? In San Francisco alone, the crime wave that Prop 47 sparked resulted in a $120 million loss in the first six months of 2015. In Los Angeles, the cost of increased crime over the same time frame was over $250 million. To recap, California’s paradigm-busting Coddle-and-Release Program, which was suppose to save taxpayers $100 million annually, has actually cost them over $370 million in just six months, and that’s just in two cities! What about the resident of the other 46 cities whose crime rate is on the rise, whose property is being looted and whose lives are at risk? Where do they go for answers?
Well, if they listened to a recent debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, they heard a question on the “mass incarceration” of African Americans that was prefaced with the following statement from a member or the panel: “As a black man in America, if I were born today I’d have a one in three chance of ending up in prison in my life.” A sane candidate would have immediately responded by asking how the gentleman how he hadn’t ended up in prison and gone on to suggest that the best way to avoid prison is to refrain from criminal acts. Instead, both candidates responded by promising to end “mass incarceration,” as if the authorities were going about rounding up entire black communities for an all-expense paid trip to Treblinka.
When we turn Martin Luther King’s dream around and disfigure it to the point that we focus not on the content of a person’s character, but the skin color of the perp, we’ve done more than just lose our footing on the slippery slope to cultural delinquency. We’ve discarded our dignity and performed great swan dive into the abyss.
A healthy society would measure justice not by the number of people incarcerated, nor even by their race, but by whether law abiding citizens could go out to dinner without being assaulted and mugged. Or, perhaps, by whether their home is being looted by a pack of imbeciles, all because some starry-eyed liberal decided to assuage his sense of self-loathing by letting criminals loose to prey on those who work hard and play by the rules.
A healthy society would equip young Trevon Johnson with the mental, cultural, and spiritual ability to draw upon the accumulated wisdom of human experience so he could get his money by earning it in exchange for contributing his unique talents and gifts to a community that fosters growth rather than victimhood and depraved entitlement.
A healthy society would — above all else — be honest with itself and dispense with pretentious, therapeutic pablum that absolves the miscreant of responsibility for his actions. After all, as Dostoyevsky reminded us a century and a half ago:
Published in Culture, Domestic PolicyA man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself.
This is all you needed to write, really.
But of course, the same people who would absolve the miscreant are the ones who also blame the likes of you and I, old Christian white guys, for the state of society.
As I’ve stated several times, our problems are not political and therefore will not be solved by politics or political solutions. We face a cultural problem which our current politics only enables and shields from real solutions. Further, I think we’re in a negative feedback loop with this. We’ll keep electing a worse government because it will reflect an ever degrading culture/people which will then enable/encourage/fund (through confiscatory taxation) more cultural degradation.
Wonderful piece as always Dave.
That is a breathtaking statement when you think about it. He has no moral agency, no ability to refrain from criminal acts, no personal input into his fate at all. It’s just a roll of the dice that prevents him from heading to prison.
As for Ms. Harris, if I were her neighbors I’d seriously consider moving. Anyone with that loose a concept of personal property probably has a fairly loose concept of the importance of others’ lives as well.
This is where we are in 2016. We’ve allowed right to be redefined as wrong, and visa versa. To try to reverse back to right being right will be hard, but what’s the alternative? Our leadership has played a major part in these re-definitions – giving permission to amoral behavior.
We’ve been complacent and afraid to stand up for what is good and right – especially when we are smeared into being labeled as racist, homophobic, not caring for the poor, it goes on and on, even though a conservative track record shows success when you combine moral values with society’s issues. Many of our problems have always been there; they were just handled differently. Now, we have to dig ourselves out of the mud, but it must be done.
The tragic reality is that, in some communities, no lives matter.
I’d like to believe that this is part of a self-correcting cycle. For example, after New York City’s succession of liberal mayors from the 1960s through the 1980s, the people finally had enough of the crime and lawlessness, and elected former prosecutor Rudy Giuliani to marshal the city’s resources and reestablish order. Today’s tolerance of crime and criminals is in some ways a testament to the success of law enforcement in recent decades. People don’t really remember what it’s like to live with high crime rates. When they’re reminded, they will reverse course.
However, there are two important differences today. First, our governments are deep in debt, both on-the-books and off-the-books. Liabilities for public pensions are ballooning (and usually actuarially understated). When the public decides it needs more and better police officers, it will find that the money isn’t there, because it’s all going to yesterday’s civil servants.
And second, the progressive social dysfunction from family breakdown is a genie that won’t go back in the bottle so easily. How can people learn right from wrong, when they don’t have stable families to teach it?
Something tells me that personal protection and self-defense will be growth industries in the years ahead.
At it’s core, this is just a street version of Socialism. Those who have enough OWE it to those who don’t, so it is moral to take it from those who have it when you want it.
I have a friend who immigrated from Russia soon after the wall fell, and he described the mindset of citizens there. If your (tiny) apartment needed some repairs, you looked for a construction site and, after dark, took what materials you needed. It wasn’t really stealing, because everything belongs to the people. If everyone owns everything collectively, no one owns anything. According to him, all projects used many times more materials than were actually needed, to allow for the ‘loss’.
Since the Democrat party and its Occupy Wall Street supporters have been selling this Socialist ideal for so long, is it surprising that many see it this way here in America now?
This is the core of it. This problem is why I can’t go full libertarian. It’s not that I want government to mandate stable families; rather, I want government to stop being a hindrance, discouragement, or drag on stable families. Government exists to protect liberty, including (and especially) the liberty to live virtuously.
It is also worth pointing out that there is no real material poverty in America today – except in the mind. Nobody is starving to death. Nobody with a fit mind is unclothed. No amount of “giving stuff” to the poor can solve the problem, because lack of material wealth is not the problem.
Poverty in America is all in the mind: too many Americans are unable to see themselves as capable of improving themselves and their circumstances through legal means.
This poverty is real, and deeply corrosive.
This is true, and not all that recent. Folks even romanticize the crime.
I recall a conversation I had in the late ’90s with a coworker. He complained that “Guliani cleaned up Times Square and I missed it!” I asked if this was his first job in the city. He said it was.
I told him “Bill, you have no (CoC)ing idea what this city was like. You only know how it is today. You look at Bryant Park, and see a wonderful place to spend a spring day. I look at it and remember how I was almost mugged by a crackhead in 1980. Thank G-d that Guliani had the will to clean up the city!”
New Yorkers (and the country) are now undergoing “The Great Re-Learning.” as Tom Wolfe put it.
Great piece, Dave. Keep it up, though, and you run the risk of getting treated like Moynihan (that is, before he turned tail and bowed to liberal shibboleths).
On the serious side, I often wonder how far down we’ll go before a critical mass of liberals accept the need to correct the problems.
This is what happens when resentment becomes a moral virtue. Nietzschean slave morality has moved beyond the realm of basic anti-religious dogma and into anti-society values. If you feel you have no chance in society, then resenting its values becomes righteous. Thus simply taking what you don’t have from those that do is a right. It’s their fault because they made you feel that way.
Very, very well said.
I had all kinds of good reasons for departing California. Now they are inventing new reasons for departing – or even avoiding – California. It is starting to seem that California is a criminal endeavor, perhaps an enclave, rather like New Jersey or Illinois, which are other places I don’t want to live in.
In something that they have in common, they have been largely governed by Democrats, for whom governing is a downhill event of epic proportions. Does California permit concealed carry? Having given up on the use of prisons for felons, perhaps the citizens are permitted to protect themselves from the newly freed prisoners?
Maybe some of the judges responsible for pushing the state to this point might benefit from confrontations with their new friends?
Very well constructed essay, Dave, but terminally depressing.
The essential cause of the bleak scenario Dave so well describes is the replacement of Christian morality with the State’s rules. Worked for Hitler, for a while. Our society has been undermined by this fundamental lack of morality, and the only way to retrieve what we lost is through pursuit of and fidelity to truth. Truth as defined in our Judeo-Christian heritage is what is essential, not more black-robed dictators, idiot Social Justice Warriors, or preening sycophants with invented “moral” progressive opinions.
Pessimism is thus the sad reality. Amoral monsters like Obama, Jeh Johnson, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Huma Abedin, and on and on and on, have firm control over the population now. Even the current Pope is a SJW. Christian western civilization as currently defined is doomed. A new and more savage Dark Ages is coming, complete with A Canticle for Leibowitz.
It makes me wonder what they might have put on his tombstone in the days of the old west. Somehow I find the epithet (‘How He Gonna Get His Money?’) would be unlikely to make its way onto his tombstone, although it seems appropriate to describe the way he lived his life (and died).
Actual story: My brother, who was jobless and lives in an old house in Camden NJ (which was so broke it had to disband its police force), was awakened early one morning to the sound of people rummaging downstairs. He made his appearance at the top of the stairs in time to see a couple of the city’s residents walking out the front door with a ladder they found in the basement.
But all is not hopeless. Upon seeing my brother at the top of the stairs, one of the thugs elected to leave behind an animal trap he was in the process of procuring.
I guess when they saw your brother, he didn’t look as rich as they had imagined, so they only took half of what they otherwise would have. Charity!
Dave,
I love your writing, but just could not finish the piece. The subject of your essay was oozing so much stupid that I was afraid she might be contagious.
Me too. But it’s not.
Stop wondering. A: when the dead-cat stops bouncing. And a little while longer waiting to see if Hollywood can re-animate it.
I am not shocked by the Trayvons of the world. They’ve always existed. I’ve known plenty of folk, of all ethnicities, who justify their own petty larceny by arguing necessity. This is nothing new. Been going on for thousands of years. Nobody likes to think of themselves as “the bad guy”, so they’ll always be able to devise some justification for their own crapulence.
What’s odd is the defense of that mindset by others. It’s one thing for the criminal to defend themselves by arguing necessity. It’s something different entirely for others to defend the criminal by arguing necessity. That is a political statement. Pure Marxism.
Look at that. An entire long post about crime in California with no mention of illegal immigrants.
Not to detract from the article and with full knowledge that this is very tangential I never the less feel obliged for the sake of my Biological neurosis to point out that the view of evolution as a “Progressive” process is a miss characterization of the theory. Evolution is a process of change, with no goal or trajectory. The loss of complexity may be as common as its gain. Though loss may be less observable while gain tends to stand out.
Okay, other than that one non-issue I agree with all of this. Our sympathy to the incarcerated should not blind us to what has put them there. If they are in fact unjustly convicted then that is a problem that needs immediate rectification. On the other hand if we simply wish to lessen the punishment for what is still antisocial behavior we should not be surprised that we will get more of it. Perhaps steps can be taken earlier in the lives of these people to urge them on to a truer path. But, to remove all agency from them for their circumstances is to treat them as nothing more than beasts. They are men (and women) who make choices, not animals following their instincts.
I have come to the conclusion that the solution to mass incarcerations is to allow discretionary police brutality.
Everybody would be better off, if we just whooped that butt and then sent them home without a record.
Or at least bring back corporal punishment.
Are you not at all concerned about abuse of that level of abandonment of due process? I mean, what kind of control would you include to prevent police abuse of personal rivals or political opponents?
I have a similar problem with libertarians. They don’t seem to realize that a society with a strong culture based on traditional values is a bulwark against expansion of the state.
Not sure.
Not really.
Jonah Goldberg wrote a column (or several) many years ago about the [I forget the exact term he used] extra-judicial enforcement of public order.
Just for an example, look at what the abandonment of due process has done at colleges lately. It doesn’t matter if there is evidence of guilt, accusations are sufficient for punishment. And it is directed at a political target ( men ).
That isn’t justice, that is totalitarianism.