The Airtight Garage of Jonah Goldberg

 Every so often I wonder what it is that makes Jonah Goldberg believe he's a hero. 

He obviously does, because he belongs to that coterie of the Right. There's a big group, perhaps the biggest, that simply hate liberals. THey come by this honestly, because the liberals, in a short period of time, made them witness a shift that knocked their country out from under them: blacks and rebellious women and free love and paganism and abortions and a repudiation of an heroic war. All at once, too. It didn't matter whether  they lamented the dethroning of christianity or the loss of white man's privilege or the assault on corporate America. It didn't matter that their own values contradicted each other: they could define themselves by their common enemy, and could easily call themselves conservatives, because they wanted back what the godawful liberals had taken from them.

But that is not the sort of thing that makes a young man a hero. Even a boy with a privileged elite upbringing has all the youth of his limbic system against the impulse that says hold on, mine, don't take it away, I liked it the way it was. A hero advances; s hero  looks forward; a hero relishes the future. 

And so Jonah and his ilk all turn to Ayn Rand and her heroic vision of selfishness, laissez-faire capitalism, and the glories of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture.  Unlike other writers that glorified thte figure of the artist/genius/daimon, Rand--not deftly, because deftness is beyond her--with no more ponderousness than anything else, justifies superiority on the base of imagination and skill, and them removes the imaginatiion and skill, leaving only our old friend the will zur macht.

(Let's make a bet: How many young people became architects because of reading The Fountainhead? I'm putting two chips on zero and two on double zero.)

(but seriously, what kind of books are these, that use artists as their heroes, that does not inspire their devotees to create, to strive to dream, to perfect their craft, to push their imaginations to the limit, to be the poet/genius/writer/architect/Gregor Samsa they could someday be? What kind of book about artists gives the message that artists aren't important? That instead of reaching creative heights, it seemingly tells you to be inordinately fond of what you already are? Weird city...)

But it is a heroism. And it enables one to believe in all sorts of dangerous things, like purity and magic and it's okay to shoot them in the head because they're demons or robots. Beyond selfishness, there's a solipsism involved.  But heroism also allows you to keep your heart within you, which keeps all from being lost.

If it comes to heroes, putting Tom Joad alongside Howard Roark shows how clownish this whole thing is. Roark's great act was to blow up buildings for aesthetic reasons, while Joad keeps his family alive. From where I sit, there's no contest.

But that puts me, in Jonah's eyes, on the black side of the card: communist/socialist/mutualist. He in the White City and me in the Dark. Of course I'll believe the opposite of what he believes! Individualism bad, socialism good! Private property is theft! Workers arise and slay the bosses! Individual artistic expression should be subordinate to the State! John Galt must die!

Well, isn't it? If Jonah Goldberg is for Personal Freedom, the Free Enterprise System, and the Sanctity of Contracts, mustn't I be against them? Mustn't I, in short, be a fascist?

And so we come to Michael Moorcock. He's an exciting writer who has done an awful lot over his career, and one of those rare birds who can write as hip, cynical and postmodern as any academic darling, but then turn around and use that analysis, that consciousness of style, that depth to write crowd-pleasing stuff better than anyone else. It's also kind of stupefying to realize that someone with such a titanic presence in the world of sf/fantasy/comics could be so invisiblble outside of it. Still, one day there'll be an Elric movie.

But one of the things that Mr. Mike did, in his great sword & sorcery canvas which contains Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, Corum Jhalen Irslei and others was to set up a multicosmic opposition between the Lords of Law and the Lords of Chaos. It's the context in which heroic action can be something other than steal the jewel from the idol's forehead, jam the magic sword into the monster's underbelly, save the exquisitely prepared girl, lather, rinse, repeat. And by choosing Order and Chaos, he set up an opposition that didn't demand that one side win every time.

It's a seductive construct, and Arioch and Xiombarg are pretty nasty entities, and all sorts of unexamined assumptions make them the Bad Guys. But Mr. Moorcock, no fool, gradually intimates that the Lords  of Law may not be any nicer than the Lords of Chaos. And it's a tribute to Mr. Moorcock's skill as a writer of potboiler fantasy that it does not make things stupid and pointless but gives it a bleak wonder to it.

Which leads to the question: are we Lords of Law or of Chaos? And which is Jonah?

After we get through saying that of course Law is good! Of course Chaos is bad! Law means reliability and Chaos means car bombs in the streets!(but Law means paralysis and Chaos means change...) we can start getting serious.

Here's where it gets me: 

The Libertarian Jonah believes that the right to property is sacrosanct and redistribution of wealth is an abomination. He believes that liberals agree with Marx that property is theft and an abomination, and that if we live in Thomas More's Utopia things would be grate. Well,, what we really believe is that people have a right to most of their property--and whether they have a right to 95% of their property depends on how much property they have, how healthy the economy is, and what things thee are that need doing. Jonah: a priori; Me: ad hoc.

How much freedom versus how much security should our society provide? Jonah, if he follows the catechism, believes as much freedom and as little security as possible, and he believes that we love the nanny state and want to eliminate all prods to freedom and venture. We actually believe that it varies from person to person. I myself think that most people feel they should be vulnerable in the places they choose to be vulnerable and secure otherwise (considering the fact that we all die.) The weak, the scared, the children, the wounded--should have more security, the strong, the restless, the courageous should have less since they want less.

We're Lords of Chaos once again.

Jonah 's folk say we should be able to do whatever we want as long aas it hurts no one, and so do we. But that's trivial, and scarcely even political. It's when it does hurt someone else that it's called power. It's the reality of libertarians of the right that when property is concerned, the freedom includes power. Of course someone who owns a factory can do whatever he or she wants, even if it hurts other people. WE believe that some things should be allowed, others not. Libertarians believe that the only thing other than freedom and property that should be holy is the contract, and that a contract means a free and voluntary acceptance of all the terms of a contract, while we believe where the matter is at all complex and when power is involved, that practically no contract is made without reservations and objections. And tat a piece of paper doesn't make coercion and oppression right. What should be honored and what not--it depends.

Now it can be said that our point is based on principle, and that principle is not hurting people, and that this is the pole star by which we steer. But chaos is a principle as well. We and they both believe in adherence to law, and both we and they believe that  the people should be able to modify those laws. But the libertarian thinks that he or she can determine if a law is good just by looking at it--while we believe you can't tell that without seeing whom it hurts.

So, as it turns out, we are at opposite ends after all, Jonah Goldberg and me. The mistake that Jonah makes (ignoring the dishonest ones) is that, having staked out their ideological turf, he imagines that we, his opponents,must sit at the other side of their spectrum. As it turns out, liberals are at the opposite end from him, but the spectrum is not Randian but Moorcockian. Freedom and security, capitalism and socialism, foreign interveention and foreign isolation--looking down one gunsight we're a mess. But once you see that Tom Joad is a Lord of Chaos (with that all-important point of democracy added), it all makes sense. The difference is procedural rather than principled, then it begins to make sense.