Paul Adams
I am not much given to optimism, neither the “unscrupulous”
kind so brilliantly exposed by Roger Scruton, nor the complacent kind that
assumes all is already well as it is. The first deplores present evils, it is
true. It calls for revolution and the rule of an enlightened, progressive elite
or party. But then, after its victory, all will be well. If it turns out not to be, as
inevitably happens, that will be the fault of reactionaries or traitors in the
party itself. The revolution devours its own young. The second kind of
optimism, proclaiming that we already live in the best of all possible worlds –
a view with which many pessimists will concur - underestimates both the need
for and possibilities of change.
The unscrupulous optimist foments dissatisfaction, even an
indignation addiction, if not moral panic, in order to motivate social change.
The solution always involves expanding state power over civil society, ever
more control and coercion of families, churches and communities of conscience,
businesses and markets. There ought to be a law, the offended and outraged cry.
The informal sources of care and control, safety and order in families and
communities, must be replaced by bureaucrats and professionals.
So what to make of this past year? It was a year besmirched
by a rising tide of vocal and violent anti-Semitism in Europe and on American
campuses; of religious persecution, kidnappings, beheadings and enslavement in
the Middle East and Nigeria, with the control by ISIS (staggeringly
underestimated by Obama as a junior team version of Al Qaeda) of territory the
size of Great Britain. We witnessed the fall into lawlessness and violence of
some African-American communities, with police use of force provoking riots,
looting, and the destruction of economic life. NYPD, at the time of writing, is on a slowdown that is close
to a strike in response to the murder of two officers in New York and the
failure of the mayor there to support the police. The destruction of marriage by liberal elites through the
courts, egged on by media and academia, continues apace, as the sexual
revolution and the raising of unprecedented millions of children without one or
either of their own parents continued to wreck the lives of whole communities
where father absence was the norm.
There is much to lament even without the bogus indignation
of statists who want the state to increase its management of the economy in
order to impose its version of a more equitable distribution of resources, to
restrict freedom of speech, religion, and conscience, and to impose on campuses
ever more restrictions on what can be thought, said, and done while denying due
process and assuming guilt.
But let us not lose sight, in our addiction to indignation, of
the fact that 2014 was a year in which health and longevity improved worldwide,
dire poverty continued its steep decline as capitalism, for all the continuing
distortions of cronyism and corruption, lifted average living standards
worldwide. War became less frequent and less violent, rates of murder and
violent crime plummeted, and racism and discrimination declined (with the major
exception of resurgence of the ancient prejudice of Jew hatred, now often in
liberal disguise, in Europe).
In a column on campus sexual assault: real and
imagined, Anne Hendershott cites a government
study that flatly contradicts the narrative of rampant sexual assault on campus
that feeds the moral panic used by other government agencies and
indignant-liberal media to call for ever tighter control of campus life by
government and through its agencies of faculty, staff, and students. The study,
released last month by the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, shows that the
…rate of
rape and other sexual assault over the past two decades was 1.2 times higher
for non-students of college age than for students on college campuses. In fact,
campus sexual assault has actually declined from 9.2 per 1,000 college students
in 1997 to 4.4 per 1,000 in 2013. Far from being a site of violence, the study
found that female college students are safer from sexual assault while in
college than at any other time in their lives.
Hendershott describes how the promoters of panic have
pilloried and denied platforms to anyone who questions their bogus statistics –
yet another example of social liberals’ seeking to close the American mind to
rational or open debate.
So the threats to freedom – political, economic, and
cultural – are real and serious. But let us not be panicked by the purveyors of
moral panic into statist solutions that make matters worse and undermine civil
society. Nor should we be discouraged from doing what can and needs to be done
to strengthen families and communities, to resist terrorism, and to eradicate
poverty worldwide and remove the obstacles to the poor’s use of their
creativity and initiative to improve their condition.
Happy 2015!
