Monthly Archives: May 2018

Jonah Goldberg on Ingratitude: What Goes Around, Comes Around

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This is the third part of a three-part review:
Part I: Jonah Goldberg, Darwin and Unnatural Capitalism.
Part II: The Corruption of Jonah Goldberg.

A typewriter with the phrase

National Review, “Arts and Manners” column, 11 July 1956:

“The incitement to the lowbrow’s rebellion against the ‘mass media’ was one Elvis Presley, a pimply and thoroughly nasty young man who rotates his abdominal muscles on TV screens with the abandon of an old strip-teaser and the elegance of a waterfront slattern. He also sings. And one has to hear this pathetic wail of vulgarity to believe it. At any rate, Mr. Presley is at the moment the hottest thing on TV.”

Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West, 2018:

Rock and roll is the primitive drumbeat hooked up to killer amps…. Nowhere is the romantic mixture of pantheism, primitivism, and the primacy of inner feelings than in rock’s appeal to inner authority and authenticity…. It is no accident that drugs and rock and roll are so linked in the popular imagination. Both promise to take us out of the realm of daily concerns and rational priorities…. Nor is it coincidence that rock appeals most directly to adolescents…. It is when glandular desires are most powerful and our faculties of reason are the most susceptible to all manner of seduction..

Sigh. I suppose it could have been worse. He could have gone off about Marlon Brando or EC comics.

And thus we come (at last) to the third and least original of Jonah Goldberg’s themes in his book, Suicide of the West. In previous posts, I have described and critiqued his first two themes: that capitalism is unnatural and that it is particularly vulnerable to corruption. In this, my final post (promise!) about Goldberg’s book, I will address his final theme, ingratitude:

We are shot through with ingratitude for the Miracle. Our schools and universities, to the extent that they teach the Western tradition at all, do so from a perspective of resentful hostility toward our accomplishments. (p. 16)

Uh oh. He’s going after the university, or as we call it in my house, “Daddy’s paycheck!”  I’d better spring into action! Honey? Where’s my super suit?

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The Corruption of Jonah Goldberg

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This is the second part of a three-part review:

Part I: Jonah Goldberg, Darwin and Unnatural Capitalism.
Part III Jonah Goldberg on Ingratitude: What Goes Around, Comes Around.

Cover of a pulp novel entitled

Goldberg constantly smuggles in ideas he claims he has abandoned.

In 1938, rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke published a review of Thurman W. Arnold’s book, The Folklore of Capitalism.  Entitled “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking,” Burke held that the debunker “covertly restores important ingredients of thought that he has overtly annihilated” which describes Jonah Goldberg’s new book, The Suicide of the West, perfectly. Goldberg attempts to put forth a number of big ideas which recast the history of capitalism in a new light, by drawing on evolutionary psychology among other things, but he cannot build his argument without re-enrolling ideas which he has told us he has abandoned. The result is a book that is completely incoherent. The most serious consequence of Goldberg’s covertly smuggling ideas back into his argument is when he addresses the tangled history of capitalism, racism, and slavery.

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Jonah Goldberg, Darwin and Unnatural Capitalism

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This is the first part of a three-part review:

Part II: The Corruption of Jonah Goldberg.
Part III Jonah Goldberg on Ingratitude: What Goes Around, Comes Around.

 

A drawing of a classical figure labeled

Anyone who claims, “There is a human nature” inevitably follows it with, “and I know what it is!” In his new book, Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg thinks he knows that there is “human nature” is and, unsurprisingly, claims to know what it is. “Human nature is real” he declares (p. 23) and is the result of “innate programming” we acquired 200,000-300,000 years ago and has held constant ever since.  We are programmed to live in small groups that max out at about 150 people–Dunbar’s number (p. 63). Because of this “genetic programming” (p. 63) we tend toward a sense of unity within our group and hostility toward strangers which are “universal human tendencies” (p. 25). In other words, “Violence is the natural way to get what you want from strangers” (p. 11). This tendency toward ingroup unity and outgroup of hostility is only a sample of the extensive list of universals that Goldberg claims have been documented by “thousands of researchers” (p. 26).  Capitalism and its concomitant individualism have proven to be the best way to overwrite our natural tendencies toward distrust since they demand we see individuals, not groups, and that peaceful exchange is mutually beneficial.

Despite its blustery assurance Suicide of the West is based on some very suspect evidence and equally poor argumentation. My task here is to explain why he is wrong about human nature. Subsequent posts will take up other claims he makes.

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