William Jess Higgs (always known as Jess) does not appear on anybody’s list of great men. Good thing, too, given the truth of Lord Acton’s declaration that “great men are almost always bad men.” (A statement whose truth, by the way, hinges on the assumption that Acton’s reference to “great men” pertains to men who occupy positions of great governmental power. Who can dispute that William Shakespeare or J. S. Bach was a great man?) Jess never cast a shadow in the halls of power, nor did he wish to do so. When I was growing up and got old enough to think I knew something about politics and to express opinions about politicians, he used to infuriate me by simply saying, “They’re all crooks.” I’d think, What does he know about it? Fifty years later, I am inclined to think that he knew practically everything he needed to know about politicians.

Born in the backwoods of Muskogee County, Oklahoma, unable to attend school after a brief attendance at grade school, thrust at a tender age into the position of the family farm’s chief worker by the death of his father and later by the death of his stepfather, Jess lived in the world of work. And he was very good at working: when I was growing up, I never knew him to miss a day of work. I always supposed that he was happiest when he was at work. He was reputed to be an excellent farmer, among many other things.

The range of things he knew how to do — to grow, to build, to repair — never ceased to amaze me. I used to look over his shoulder as he worked on an automobile or tractor engine and marvel that whenever he needed a wrench, he simply reached into the tool box and took out the one that fit every time. (To this day, I try one, discover it’s too big; try another; discover it’s too small; and pray for an eventual convergence on the right one.) Even after I had earned my Ph.D., he used to look at me with a gleam in his eye and say, “The trouble with you is that you don’t know nothin’.” And I knew he was right.

I didn’t need any commandment to honor my father and mother. It never occurred to me to do otherwise, in view of the examples they set. My father belonged to a generation in which a father generally did not play the role of pal to his kids. Although I never doubted that he loved me, he occupied a different, somewhat elevated stratum. So, as I matured, I automatically came to respect him, at the same time that I loved him. I appreciated that his own understanding of his chief duty in life was to support his family, which he invariably did, even during the Great Depression, when finding work was a difficult task. He was not the kind of man to go on the dole. Indeed, I doubt that he ever gave any thought to that possibility, even when people all around him were eagerly accepting some sort of relief.

Although he had a wonderful, practical-joking sense of humor and loved to tell cock-and-bull stories at the dinner table, waiting for my mom to finally catch on that he was pulling her leg, Jess was a taciturn man. Yet hardly a standoffish man. Everybody loved him, especially the children. He obviously preferred the kids to the grownups, if given a choice. Everyone who worked for him, when he became a foreman and then the assistant superintendent on the big ranch in the San Joaquin Valley of California where I grew up between 1954 and 1961, was extremely loyal to him and spoke highly of him: “Jess” they’d say, “is a good man to work for.” He expected every man to do what he was hired to do, but he posed no threat to jerk anyone around just because he was in a position to do so. Although he had been reared in a racially bigoted environment and some of his idioms would not pass muster with today’s guardians of political correctness, he treated everyone the same, regardless of race.

It’s natural for a man to compare himself to his father. I’ve done so a million times, and not once did I measure up. After he died, so many people came to his funeral that the chapel overflowed, and some had to stand outside the doors during the service. I remember thinking, “When I die, I’ll be lucky if a dozen people show up.” To say that he had a greater, more fundamental effect than anyone else in making me the kind of man I became would be an understatement. I don’t know for sure that they aren’t making men like him anymore, but if they are, I’m not encountering them. Maybe the years that followed closely after 1909 produced a different kind of men, or maybe there was something in the water he drew from the family well on that backwoods farm in Muskogee County.

Born in 1915 to educated parents living in an all-black town in Oklahoma, Franklin lived in “dignified, abject poverty.” Only his prudential virtues -- determination, thrift, discipline, attention to detail -- and his natural brilliance enabled him to overcome the racial hostility that was endemic in the South but that also touched him when he attended Harvard.

Through Herculean efforts, he received an outstanding education, and over time he began obtaining the honors due him -- professorial appointments at schools such as the University of Chicago and Duke, the presidency of the American Historical Association, awards such as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. By his own account, his life was rich and satisfying, professionally and personally. He experienced the reward of a loving marriage of nearly sixty years, and he dedicated his book to students “from whom I have learned more than they will ever know.” He does not seem to have been an unhappy person.

But even with such deep satisfactions, Franklin never set aside the righteous anger that racism engendered in him. This is the contradiction that puzzled me: his life was good, but the memory of racism (and the racial barriers that he perceived even late in life) was unrelenting.

The pain of these barriers pervades his book from the first page: “Born in 1915, I grew up in a racial climate that was stifling to my senses and damaging to my emotional health and social well-being,” he writes. On the second page, he calls racism “a challenge to the strongest adult” but “cruelty” to children. He alludes to a famous incident; when he was 80 years old at a Washington, D.C., club to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a woman gave him her coat check and asked him to get her coat.

Given his constant consciousness of deprivations, slights, and indignities, it is not surprising that Franklin agreed to head President Clinton’s advisory panel on race. But the experience disappointed him because the nation never got the conversation on race that he had hoped to initiate.

Franklin is, of course, absolutely right about the shameful racial divide in this country in the past. And many will consider it admirable that Franklin refused to let go of this past -- why should he, or anyone, make his peace with mistreatment and prejudice?

After much thought, however, I have concluded that his refusal is better understood as a “conflict of visions.”

As readers of Thomas Sowell’s writings know, a person’s ideological and policy views tend to reflect a consistent way of looking at life -- a consistent “vision.” In his book Conflict of Visions, Sowell identified two leading visions. The unconstrained vision sees unlimited possibilities in human nature, anticipating the unfolding of better and better qualities. The constrained vision accepts human nature as flawed; rather than expecting human nature to change, this vision looks to changes in institutions (laws and customs) to spur people to act differently.

Franklin, like many liberals, seems to have had an unconstrained vision. That is, he was an idealist who kept believing that people would someday live up to the nation’s ideals. For example, if people would talk forthrightly about race, they would understand more and thus act more humanely; race might disappear as an issue.

For those who hold the constrained vision, however, such hopes are quixotic. They believe that the elimination of Jim Crow laws reduced racial barriers by changing people’s incentives, not their nature. And market forces, rather than forced persuasion, are more likely to improve racial relations in the future.

An incident from Mirror to America may indirectly corroborate Franklin’s “unconstrained vision.” In his second chapter, Franklin explains that his home town was divided into two factions -- the Baptists and the Methodists. Because his family was Methodist, the Baptist-run school board refused to let his mother take a maternity leave, telling her to resign instead; only the intervention of the white county school superintendent let her keep the job. This factionalism actually got worse -- leading to shots fired at their home -- as Franklin’s father’s independent spirit continued to offend the Baptists.

Initially, I thought that Franklin started his story as he did to make an ironic point. I thought he was going to reveal that flaws in human nature are universal, that racism is one -- one of the ugliest, yes, but still just one -- manifestation of underlying human failings. But he didn’t make that point. The anecdote seems to have simply been a way of explaining the circumstances around his birth (and his family’s eventual departure to Tulsa). His lifelong mission, after all, was to eradicate racism.

But isn’t this factionalism the same kind of petty and inhumane behavior that finds expression in racism?

Franklin’s long and productive life reveals that it is possible to overcome enormous barriers. His devotion to the highest standards of scholarship, his dedication in the face of obstacles, and his personal rapport with his students all make his life exemplary -- more exemplary, in fact, than his philosophy. Guided by the unconstrained vision, his philosophy may have distorted his view of reality and, as it does for many liberals, led to profound disappointment.

Hat tip to David Adelman

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

Justin D.’s been nagging me to blog about the Tea Parties, so here’s my two pence:

Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment.

By the same token, the party that’s in power employs alarmist rhetoric about the other side’s supposed anti-government radicalism in order to drum up support for its own policies.

Thus events like the Tea Parties serve the interests of both parties; people with libertarian leanings get diverted into supporting one half of the bipartisan duopoly, the antistate message getting diluted by mixture with (in this case) right-wing statist crap about war and immigration and the Kulturkampf. Those turned off by this creepy right-wing stew get diverted into supporting the other half of the bipartisan duopoly, with any libertarian sentiments likewise getting diluted into (in this case) left-wing statist crap about gun control and the need to impose regulation on some imaginary laissez-faire economy. And so the whole power structure ends up being reinforced.

I saw this game under Clinton, I saw (almost) everyone switch teams under Bush, and now they’re all switching back again. And so we get Republican pundits and politicians suddenly howling about Obama’s fascism when they’ve never supported anything but fascism in their entire lives; and on the other side we get Democrats ridiculing the very sorts of concerns about oppression and civil liberties violations that they pretended to take seriously under Dubya’s reign.

Is it worth libertarians’ and/or anarchists’ while to participate in such events? Sure; because while the voices at the podium tend to be statist apparatchiks, the crowds will tend to be a mixture of statist yahoos and genuinely libertarian-leaning folks, and outreach to the latter is always worth a try – in Kierkegaard’s words, “to split up the crowd, or to talk to it, not to form a crowd, but so that one or another individual might go home from the assembly and become a single individual.” But of course the organisers of such events are on the lookout for us and always do their best to try to narrow the boundaries of discussion.

Watson spends the rest of his article rhapsodizing about the glorious possibility that the Obama administration will succeed in “changing American patterns of behavior,” not simply by improving rail transportation, but also, along the same lines, by establishing “a strong moral counterbalance to the ‘greed is good’ ethos that has ruled much of the last 28 years.” You would have trouble making up this stuff.

What are progressives thinking? If I prefer automobile transportation to taking a train, they condemn me for my greed. Their preference for taxing people and pouring the money into economically wasteful expenditures for rail facilities, however, they laud as the very heart and soul of public-spiritedness.

AMTRAK lives on subsidies; always has, always will. Americans have limited demand for passenger-train services. Nearly everyone prefers to use a personal automobile, for all sorts of good reasons, including privacy, flexibility, and convenience. None of this is news. Transportation economists have been documenting it in study after study for decades.

Yet the leftists of this country at some point — I’m not sure exactly when it happened — fell head over heels in ideological love with trains. I lived for many years in the Seattle area, where traditional religion does not rank very high with the bulk of the population, but devotion to “light rail” serves as a perfect substitute for belief in a higher power. For decades, the Seattle leftists worked to gain voter approval of their beloved light rail system. Finally they succeeded, and the people of Seattle are now getting the “benefits” of this democratic boondoggle good and hard.

Republicans dish out subsidies for perfectly understandable reasons: they wish to enrich their pals in the corporate sector at public expense. Although I do not rule out similar motives among Democrats, a substantial contingent of Democrats seems to love passenger-rail subsidies for reasons that have little or nothing to do with pork for their friends. As the article I quoted earlier suggests, they view rail-over-road as a religious matter: car = evil; train = virtuous. Reasoning with them is as futile as reasoning with any religious zealot. They simply know they are on the side of the angels.

I suspect that someone has written a book about this curious linkage of ideology and technology. If someone hasn’t written such a book, plenty of material surely awaits its interpreter. A cultural anthropologist might be best qualified for the task.

One blogger has asserted that, however obnoxious his behavior might be, it has nothing to do, as some have claimed it does, with free speech:

Miss Prejean has as much free speech as anyone else in America. She was asked for her opinion, and she gave it. Live on television. If asked again, she could say the same thing. She could sing it from the rooftops, provided she stop before 11pm, lest she cause a noise violation. No one is restricting her speech in any way.

The question of whether or not she lost the crown for her remarks isn't the same as the question of free speech. The Miss USA pageant is an enterprise, not a government body. They may choose whomever they wish. It is up to the judges to decide, on whatever arbitrary grounds they see fit to apply, who wears the Miss USA crown for a year.