Yet more proof, as if we needed it, that 'liberals' are insane. A Tucker Carlson tweet-storm preserved for posterity by Malcolm Pollack. Glad I found this. Now I don't have to talk about those damned racist Tamarisks.
Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness
It turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals. But why?
Conservative explanation. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.
Liberal explanation. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. They are oblivious to inequality. And when they do see it,they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss. Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.
As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.
Do we conservatives, ostrich-like, ignore injustice? The answer depends on what one takes justice to be. The liberal tendency is to see justice as fairness, and to understand fairness in terms of material equality, equality of wealth and equality of power. A just society for a liberal, then, is one in which material inequality is either eliminated or severely mitigated. Along these lines the prominent political philosopher John Rawls puts forth his famous Difference Principle the gist of which is that social and economic inequalities in a society are justified only if they benefit the worst off, i.e., only if the worst off are better of than they would have been without the inequality.
But why should my having more than you be considered unjust unless it benefits you? Of course, my having more than you will typically benefit you. "A rising tide lifts all boats."
My roof was leaking in two places. Now I could have done an amateur patch job myself: roofing ain't rocket science. But I decided to have the entire house professionally re-roofed with all that that entails in terms of new flashing, etc. My ability to afford such an expensive job gave support to a local company and all its jobbers, not to mention the crew of workers who had employment for a week. And having extra dough, I laid $60 in tips on the workers. I could give a hundred examples of how my having more than certain others benefited those others.
When's the last time a poor man made a loan to a friend, or a contribution to a charity? How many poor people give people jobs? And of course people like me who are modestly well-off due to hard work and the practice of the old virtues have been benefited in innumerable ways by people who are wealthy. Think of those who have endowed art museums and university chairs.
But suppose, contrary to fact, that my having more did not benefit others. Why should that affect the justice of my having more? If I work harder, longer, and smarter than you, and practice the old-fashioned virtues that liberals mock even when they themselves owe their success to them, then it is a good bet that I will end up with more than you. Unless I engage in force or fraud I am entitled to what I earn or what I inherit or what falls out of the sky into my lap. Take my intelligence and my good genes. Do I deserve them? No, but I have a right to them. I have a right to them and right to what I acquire by their use.
I grant that a certain amount of luck is ingredient in every success. But I have a right to my good luck even though I don't deserve it. Of course, liberals often 'see' luck where there is no luck at all but hard work and the exercise of conservative virtues. Hence the conservative saying, "The harder I work the luckier I become." The point is that what the liberal misconstrues as luck is really not luck at all but effort. Should we help life's unlucky? I should think so. But not if the helping is really a harming, a making of the recipients of charity weaker and more dependent.
Liberals consider it legitimate for the state to use its coercive powers to promote material equality by taking from the highly productive and giving to the unproductive and less productive. This cannot work in the long run. The well-off will resist being ripped off by government functionaries who line their own pockets and feather their nests with perquisites purchased at taxpayer expense. Many will expatriate. Government, it is clear, is too often a hustle like any hustle rigged by those who benefit from it for their own benefit. Government needn't be a hustle, but too often it is, which is why vigilance on the part of the citizenry is necessary to keep it in check.
The value of liberty trumps that of material equality. This is a key difference between conservative and libertarian on the one side and leftist on the other. Naturally I believe in formal equality, equality of treatment, treating like cases in a like manner, not discriminating on the basis of irrelevant criteria such as race, sex, or creed.
Of course, it depends on the creed. If you are a radical Muslim out to impose sharia and subvert our way of life, and act upon your beliefs, then you ought to be deported, or jailed, or executed, depending on the nature of your actions. You should never have been let in in the first place. After all, toleration, though a good thing, has limits, and if you do not see that it has limits then you are hopelessly foolish. In a word, you are a liberal.
For more on toleration and its limits see my aptly titled Toleration category.
Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality
'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.
Impersonality in the minimalist style typically takes the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.
The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.
One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.
"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"
The Melting Pot
The famous pot can work but only if the ingredients placed in it are meltable and blendable. A wise immigration policy cannot be all-inclusive. That used to be understood.
Institutional Corruption and the Death of Cardinal Law
Without institutions, where would we be? But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.
Bernard Law died yesterday in Rome at the age of 86, a pariah who was granted a kind of protective custody in a Roman basilica by the Vatican.
Law, who distinguished himself as a civil rights activist while serving in Mississippi and Missouri, came to act as the chief facilitator of the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Boston archdiocese and sent shock waves across the nation and around the world. (here)
You should be skeptical of all institutions. Like the houses out here, they either have termites or will get them.
But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror. Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.
Is Sin a Fact? A Passage from Chesterton Examined
A correspondent asked me my opinion of the following passage from G. K. Chesterton:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin — a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt. Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved. Some followers of the Reverend R. J. Campbell, in their almost too fastidious spirituality, admit divine sinlessness, which they cannot see even in their dreams. But they essentially deny human sin, which they can see in the street. The strongest saints and the strongest sceptics alike took positive evil as the starting-point of their argument.
What Chesterton is saying is that sin is a fact, an indisputable fact, whether or not there is any cure for it. Not only is sin a fact, original sin is a fact, an observable fact one can "see in the street." Chesterton also appears to be equating sin with positive moral evil.
Is moral evil the same as sin? If yes, then the factuality of moral evil entails the factuality of sin. But it seems to me that moral evil is not the same as sin. It is no doubt true – analytically true as we say in the trade — that sins are morally evil; but the converse is by no means self-evident. It is by no means self-evident that every moral evil is a sin. Let me explain.
Moral evil is evil that comes into the world from a misuse of free will. As such, it could exist whether or not God exists as long as there are free agents. All that would be required for the existence of moral evil, in addition to free agents, would be moral values and/or moral laws. Sin, however, implies God by its very concept. Sin is an offense against God. A sinful act is not just a wrongful act, but an act of disobedience, a contravention of a divine command. From the Catholic Encyclopedia article on sin:
In the Old Testament sin is set forth as an act of disobedience (Genesis 2:16-17; 3:11; Isaiah 1:2-4; Jeremiah 2:32); as an insult to God (Numbers 27:14); as something detested and punished by God (Genesis 3:14-19; Genesis 4:9-16); as injurious to the sinner (Tob., xii, 10); to be expiated by penance (Ps. 1, 19). In the New Testament it is clearly taught in St. Paul that sin is a transgression of the law (Romans 2:23; 5:12-20); a servitude from which we are liberated by grace (Romans 6:16-18); a disobedience (Hebrews 2:2) punished by God (Hebrews 10:26-31). St. John describes sin as an offence to God, a disorder of the will (John 12:43), an iniquity (1 John 3:4-10).
My first conclusion, then, is that moral evil is not the same as sin. The concept of sin includes the concept of moral evil, but not conversely. This is because sin is an offence against God. If so, then it is difficult to see how sin could be a fact, as Chesterton claims. It is an interpretation of certain facts. We need an example.
One man brutally assaults another to get his wallet. He beats him to death with a baseball bat while the victim's little girl looks on in horror. The act is evil, and let's assume that the act's being evil is a fact not only in the sense that it is the case, but also in the sense that it is evidently the case, observably the case, indisputably the case. But is the act of assault sinful? Only if God exists. For only if God exists can there be an offence against God, which is what sin is. No God no sin.
But that God exists is not a fact in the sense I just defined. For even if it is the case that God exists — even if the proposition God exists is true — it is not evidently, observably, indisputably the case that God exists. Chesterton says one can "see sin in the street. " This is just false. For surely one cannot see God in the street, or in the sky, or in nature as a whole. The theist interprets what he literally sees in terms of, within the horizon of, his belief in God, and so he interprets the evil act as a sinful act. But the sinfulness of the act of assault is not a perceptible quality of it: it cannot be 'read off' the act.
My second conclusion, therefore, is that sin is not a fact in the sense defined. It is not an observable fact. This is because calling an act sinful involves an interpretation of the act in terms of an entity, God, whose existence is not a fact in the sense defined. It is interesting to note that if sin were an observable fact, then, given that the concept of sin includes the concept of God, we would be able to mount a quick argument for God from the existence of sin. That is, we could argue as follows:
There are sinful acts; If there are sinful acts, then God exists; ergo, God exists. This argument is valid in point of logical form, exemplifying as it does modus ponendo ponens, but is not probative because it begs the question in the first premise: anyone who classifies some acts as sinful in so doing presupposes the existence of God.
So, contrary to what Chesterton says above, sin is not a fact one can "see in the street." It is no more an observable fact than the createdness or divine designedness of the universe are observable facts. They may be facts, but they are not observable facts. I seem to recall Kierkegaard saying something similar to what Chesterton says above. Kierkegaard, if memory serves, says in effect that Original Sin is the one dogma that is empirically verifiable. But this is the same mistake. The most one can say is that the fact of moral evil is plausibly explained by the doctrine of Original Sin. If the doctrine is true, then we have a plausible explanation of the ubiquity and horrendous depth of moral evil; but other explanations are possible which operate without theistic assumptions.
Seven Signs of Tyranny
Very interesting on several levels. I'll leave it to you to decide whether Trump is a tyrant. But here are a couple questions you might want to think about. By implying that Trump is a tyrant, is Robert Reich inciting violence? Is he contributing to a civil 'conversation that will 'bring us together'?
A Liberal’s Notion of Self-Restraint
The Obama-Hezbollah Connection
A Jacksonian Manifesto
Victor Davis Hanson explains the Trump administration's first national security strategy.
The theme of the Trump document is American restoration. In Reaganesque fashion, the administration sees itself as similarly overturning an era of strategic stagnation, analogous to the self-doubt, self-imposed sense of decline, and thematic malaise of the Carter era. Instead, the “strategic confidence” and “principled realism” of the Trump Administration will purportedly snap America back out [of] its Obama recessional in the same manner that Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s.
If the United States is not strong, then the world order will weaken: “America first is the duty of our government and the foundation for U.S. leadership in the world. A strong America is in the vital interests of not only the American people, but also those around the world who want to partner with the United States in pursuit of shared interests, values, and aspirations.”
The document gives short shrift to the idea of a utopian global community of fellow nations seeking to follow similar progressive agendas. (The United Nations is mentioned briefly in passing just twice). Instead, there is a Manichean subtext that the beleaguered Western-inspired world is, and will always be, under assault by its antitheses. The proverbial free world cannot survive such an existential struggle if a United States—plagued by self-doubt and hollowed out economically and spiritually—proves wanting.Yet the Trump national security strategy—likely the work mostly of H. R. McMaster and his deputies Nadia Schadlow and Dina Powell—is just as antithetical to the 2002 George W. Bush vision that called for preemptive measures to stop regimes that posed threats on the horizon to the U.S. world order. And the Trump doctrine says little or nothing about nation-building or seeking to remake the world in the image of a consensual, free-market democracy like the United States, which then would spend blood and treasure in liberating the unfree and poor, and thereby lessening world tensions.
The neo-con approach failed. So did the hard-Left Obama strategy. Time to try a Jacksonian approach in the spirit of good old American pragmatism.
Jonathan Haidt on the Age of Outrage
Worth your time, but leftist bias is in evidence. The Democrats have moved much farther to the Left than the Republicans to the Right. Haidt seems quite oblivious to this. But he's young. Give him time.
The first comment, by one Christopher Conole, is on target (minor edits by BV):
Professor Haidt is very late to this "party". It all started about the time he was born, in the 1960s. Back then Herbert Marcuse was turning day into night by referring to American culture as an example of "repressive tolerance". He laid down the foundations of today's campus totalitarianism by stressing that there can be "no free speech for fascists." A facist [fascist] being defined as anyone who opposes the cultural marxists that were just beginning to assert [insert] themselves into academia as student protesters.
Those students of the '60s became in turn professors, administrators, and finally college deans and presidents. To think that having come so far via their long march through the institutions, that they would give it all up as if it were a big misunderstanding, is just terminally naive.
That's right. The centrifugal forces are in the ascendancy, and they can be expected to be operative for some time to come. And that reminds me that I need to get out to the range. The wise hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
An Allegation is All it Takes
A Democratic candidate hoping to flip a hotly contested congressional seat in Kansas has dropped out of the race after allegations that she sexually harassed a male subordinate resurfaced during her campaign.
Not only does the Left eats its own, being a female lefty won't save you.
Sunday Morning Sermon: Like a Moth to the Flame
Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept. She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.
The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless. He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic. He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers. The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.
One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being. The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man. He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway. And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?
One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life. If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic. All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest? So what good is it? Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature. Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?
SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books. I've read both twice.)
Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.
Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.
Related: Trotsky's Faith
The Last Words of Leon Trotsky
Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, with van Heijenoort standing behind Frida.
Time is Not on Europe’s Side
Another warning from William Kilpatrick. Excerpt:
The Importance of Will
Just as conversions can accelerate after a tipping point has been reached, so can emigration. But there’s also a third factor that seems to have been left out of the Pew Center’s calculations. It’s difficult to measure, but it may be the prime factor in determining which culture predominates in Europe. The crucial factor is will. If they want their culture to survive, people must be willing to defend it, and they must be willing to bring children into the world who will carry on the culture.
You can call it “will,” or “cultural confidence,” or “fighting spirit,” but whatever you call it, Europeans seem to be losing it. The problem begins in school. As Melanie Phillips noted eleven years ago in Londonistan:
The British education system simply ceased transmitting either the values or the story of the nation to successive generations, delivering instead the message that truth was an illusion and that the nation and its values were whatever anyone wanted them to be.
It's probably too late for Europe and the UK. But we still have a little time, and with Trump in the saddle, a fighting chance. Hillary, you will recall, refused even to name the threat.
Saturday Night at the Oldies Guest Post: From Gospel to Rap, Part II
By X. Malcolm. Trigger Warning! Not for snowflakes. Second in a series on the degeneration of black music. Part I here.
In part I, I summarised the elements of the rap genre as I see them, in particular how it seems to be influenced by Malcolm X’s brand of identity politics. In Part II I shall try to assess the genre. Does it succeed as art, or as political philosophy, or anything else?
In trying to assess the genre, I shall ignore the first two, namely repetitive groove sampled from the beats of Starks and Stubblefield, and the use of speech rather than song. One is simply a musical style: nuanced repetition is the stock in trade of composers such as Philip Glass, and speech song or Sprechgesang is a technique long practised in the classical tradition and a significant part of the canon. This is style, it could reasonably be argued that style is a matter of taste, and I shall not quarrel with taste.
The third and the fourth are peculiar to rap. One is an aggressive style of delivery in the language of the streets, the other is broadly anchored in the politics of Malcolm X. I say ‘broadly’, for if a position is a political ideology, then it must as such possess some form of internal consistency or coherence. The assumptions behind it do not have to be true, but they must be consistent. If we say that the agenda of black politics should be set by radical organizations that advocate armed self-defence against the police, this is a version of the just war doctrine, which sees violence as sometimes morally justified under certain circumstances, and it is perfectly consistent.
The problem with rap is the lack of such internal consistency.
Take money. Most ideologies have a view on it, e.g. love of it is the root of all evil. Now the wealth that rappers have made from their craft is legendary. The net worth of Jay Z is currently estimated at $600m, of Dr Dre at $750m. This equals long-established performers like Madonna $800m, McCartney $660m. Their wealth is ostentatious: the typical rapper’s mansion might be worth $20m, 25,000 sq ft, with 15 bathrooms, perhaps a theatre or helipad, in one case a private night club. Is that wrong? No, it is patronising to criticise members of a poor and oppressed class for escaping poverty and oppression. ‘Middle finger to you hatin’ niggas, That hate to see a nigga do his thing’.
But the rap is all boast and braggadocio. The first commercially successful rap single was full of it. ‘Hear me talkin’ ‘bout chequebook credit cards mo’ money than a sucker could ever spend.’ NWA waxed philosophical. ‘Life ain’t nothin’ but bitches and money . . . Fuck bitches, get money, Fuck niggas, get money’. To brag about wealth is hardly a position, and such ostentation is not the basis of any political philosophy, and it does not address systemic racial and socio-economic oppression. Nor is this ‘oppressed people’s music’.
Take violence. Rap lyrics, and especially so-called gangsta rap, is famous for it.
For every one of those fuckin’ police, I’d like to take a pig out here in this parkin’ lot and shoot ‘em in their mothafuckin’ face.
Cop Killer, fuck police brutality!
Cop Killer, I know your family’s grievin’ … Fuck ‘Em!
So they complain about the police, and seek redress for the injustice, but what are they doing to attract this unwelcome attention from the law in the first place? Well, only some dope-dealin’, some gang-bangin’, takin’ niggas out with a flurry of buck shots etc. Where is the consistency? Unfairness requires a presumption of innocence. Again, NWA complain about the police searching cars, ‘thinking every nigger is selling narcotas’, yet other black artists openly boast of the practice. ‘I was only 17, had the neighborhood hooked / Had ‘em stealing out they crib ‘cause my crack taste like ribs’.
They may say they document the violence of street life, yet the words celebrate it. Famously ‘Hit ‘Em Up’ by Tupac Shakur: ‘Killing ain’t fair but somebody got to do it, You’d better back the fuck up before you get smacked the fuck up .. Takin’ a life or two, that’s what the hell I do, You don’t like how I’m livin’? Well, fuck you!’ Famously, Shakur was murdered only three months after its release.
It has too often been real. In 1991, Dr. Dre attacked presenter Dee Barnes, slamming her face and body against a wall. Dre commented ‘[if] somebody fucks with me, I’m gonna fuck with them. .. Besides, it ain’t no big thing – I just threw her through a door.’ In 1993, Snoop Dogg’s bodyguard shot and killed a member of a rival gang, although he was later acquitted on grounds of self defence. After becoming annoyed by his persistent questions, producer Suge Knight dragged a journalist across the room and shoved his head over a tank of piranhas: ‘How about if my fish eat your fucking face?’ See also this rap sheet.
In their defence of rap, the liberal left have naturally avoided this aspect of the genre. Theresa Martinez (‘Popular Culture as Oppositional Culture: Rap as Resistance.’ Sociological Perspectives 40: 2, 265-86) has claimed it as a form of ‘oppositional culture’ promoting ‘resistance, empowerment, and social critique’. But as Sikivu Hutchinson has complained, this passes over how gang rape, pimping and the murder of prostitutes are ‘chronicled, glorified and paid homage to’ as the spoils of street life. ‘Black female survivors suffer on the margins in a culture that still essentially deems them “unrapeable”’. Nor is there anything liberal about some rappers’ views on gay rights. Try this. ‘Won’t play basketball cause your nails ain’t dry’. ‘I ain’t into faggots,’ added 50 Cent, ‘I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are,’ although he claimed ‘I’m not prejudiced,’ and that it was OK because on the street they ‘refer to gay people as faggots, as homos. It could be disrespectful, but that’s the facts.’
This is not a position.
As for the overall success of the genre, if it attempts to be serious, it needs to be serious. But rap, in becoming the court jester of black music, has also, with considerable irony, turned into the house negro. Of course, sometimes the fool gets to tell the truth, the truth that would be trouble in the mouth of another, but that is the problem of the fool: we can only take him seriously on the assumption we do not take him seriously. ‘Truth has a genuine power to please if it manages not to give offence, but this is something the gods have granted only to fools’.
Indeed, has the history of black music been about playing the fool? In Golliwogg’s Cakewalk (1908) Debussy not only ‘appropriates’ the rhythms of the negro minstrels, but also the music of the white German nationalist Wagner. Listen out at 1:09 for the opening theme of Tristan. Perhaps Debussy is having a snigger at the pompous high-culture aesthetic of Bayreuth, yet he must contrast it with the vulgar and comical cakewalk – which itself began as black people aping the manners of the white upper class of the American Golden Age: ‘the bumbling attempts of poor blacks to mimic the manners of whites’ (link).
The later American fascination with Harlem was part of a larger fascination with black culture that Nate Sloan believes was imported from France in 1900s, with artists like Picasso painting ‘African’ art, and Debussy writing ‘minstrel’ music. The project was sincerely intended as respectful of ‘primitive’ or ‘exotic’ art, but it was a condescending form of respect. Berliner has complained about the ‘stereotypical representations of black as grands enfants – whether savage, servile or hypersexual’ which helped define the colonial and civilising ‘French self’. ‘Duke’ Ellington’s style of symphonic jazz began at the Cotton Club, open only to whites, where blacks were depicted as jungle savages or ‘darkies’ in the cotton-fields of the South. So the signature sound of probably the greatest black composer of the early twentieth century is located in a white primitivist fantasy. Sloan views this as Western ‘romantic re-imagining’ of non-Westerners as charmingly primitive and primal, but black writer Langston Hughes was more direct, speaking of the Club as ‘a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites’, and likening it to the entertainment provided at a zoo.
Is rap any better? As I have argued, it is not a coherent political philosophy, but a form of entertainment. And do not forget that about 70% of people who buy the stuff are white. Spike Lee has argued that it is just a modern version of the Victorian minstrel performer. Lee grew up aspiring to be like the educated black men he saw reading books and going to college, when young black kids ‘didn't grow up wanting to be a pimp or a stripper like they do now’. Are the personas of the pimp, the pusher and the gangsta just another kind of blackface?
As for this gem, which I began with, I find no redeeming qualities whatever. It does not even pass as entertainment, except for disturbed adolescent boys. Aristotle pointed out long ago that music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young. ‘For young persons will not, if they can help, endure anything which is not sweetened by pleasure, and music has a natural sweetness’. But this has no sweetness, nor does it seem capable of forming the character.
In summary, rap music is for the most part a form of entertainment. It has made a lot of black people wealthy, but that is precisely because it is entertainment, which needs no coherence or system or ideology, nor the kind of difficult writing or subtlety of thought that is less financially rewarding. Perversely, its ‘oppositional’ and separatist black identity politics has become absorbed into the mainstream culture of America, as another form of stereotype, and has even turned into a weird form of integration, namely the house negro as court jester. Just as Malcolm X complained there are ‘house negroes among us’, so Lee laments that ‘Minstrels are still with us today’. And that irony is still with us today, too.