Surviving Phalaris

True Stories

2012-01-10T10:39:00.000-07:00

The modern age is marked with an insistence that, for a story to be true, it must be faithful to one thing only: the immutable past. I'm convinced that a great many of our truest and most important stories never really happened at all.

Christopher Hitchens is Dead

2011-12-16T15:27:00.002-07:00

"...Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with." - Christopher Hitchens

The problem, if there is one, is not that we came to believe in God, but that we came to believe in something. All of the mighty works of men, good or bad, have a single feature in common: at bottom, they are works of certainty. It is only by accident that the truly doubtful bring to pass any great thing.

Goodbye, Mr. Hitchens, most religious of godless men! You may have doubted, but you doubted with certainty.

Let Them be Played by Machines

2011-08-17T17:10:00.007-06:00

I'm in a violin shop on the third floor of an old building in downtown St. Paul. There's an art studio down the hallway and a big ballroom adjacent to that where people come to learn Aikido. Downstairs are some law offices and an antique shop where I bought an old #5 jack plane for only twelve dollars.

Something like chaos is happening around me. There's a thunderstorm rumbling above the cavernous ceiling of the room where I'm learning to make a violin. A student is standing apart from the workbench and he's playing on one of the recently completed instruments. The instrument and the music are both masterpieces; the musician--an aspiring violin maker who has been thrown out of every pub on 7th street--once studied at Juiliard, and he plays more beautifully than anyone I have ever heard. It's difficult for me to focus on what I'm doing.

There is a school of violin making in my home town, as well as numerous violin makers, but I've traveled a thousand miles to learn the trade in Minnesota. Although he doesn't realize it, my teacher reminds me why: "The violins they make are so clean," he tells me, "and boring as shit."

This is coming from a man who attended a funeral almost every week for fifteen years during a time when he cared for AIDS patients who had been thrown away by their families and friends. Now he's making a violin from the floor of a house that burned to the ground, and you can still smell the smoke in the wood. He's also teaching me and a few others the art that he has continues to perfect after 45 years of practice.

I'm making a copy of the 1742 Guarnerius Del Gesu violin that was once owned by Ferdinand David and later by Jascha Heifetz. The original is in a museum in San Francisco when it isn't on loan to the Concert Master there. I've been told that it's priceless.

Although I've already made a couple of violins over the past several years, I'm discovering once again that it isn't easy to do, and there is a lot of controversy about the proper way to do it. Can I use sandpaper? The old maker's didn't have it. What about the band saw or the purfling router? We used modern rubber bands and dowels to clamp the ribs onto the mold; sometimes we use whatever is convenient. We aren't purists in this shop.

Other makers are equally concerned about particular aesthetic results. Some think that each instrument ought to be factory-perfect. Their scroll work is flawless and perfectly symmetrical; there are no tool marks to be found anywhere. The corner purflings all end in elegant bee-stings and the back always arches in a precise curtate cycloid. The coloration of these instruments are even and deliberate, rubbed to a lustrous finish. It's as if "Violin" were some abstract Platonic Form that perhaps Stradivari once achieved in concrete, and all proper violins must now approach this perfection or be deemed inferior. This, however, is not the school of thought pursued at the shop where I am learning.

"You must always stay within the parameters of the instrument," my teacher tells me. He is looking at a tear-out on my scroll work. My pencil line from the template has been compromised, and I wonder if the piece will need to be repaired before I can continue, or if it is already ruined. "But," he continues after some thought, "Del Gesu did whatever the hell he wanted." I re-draw the lines on my scroll to avoid the mistake; the parameters have changed. Sometimes that is the best way to fix a problem.

I think of the different kinds of work I have done, outside of the workshop. It is all artifice, to be sure; but is it all art? On the most artistic end of the spectrum are those projects that have no rules at all. What is art anyway? I have painted, I have drawn; some of it has been good but most of it bad. Why? Maybe that's hard to answer.

On the opposite, utilitarian side of the spectrum, you just don't fool around. Not ever. I once worked at the bank, and we had Sarbanes Oxley to deal with. Nobody ever examined my work and said, "I like it." No, either it worked according to exact specifications or I changed it until it did. There was only one "right."

Violins exist somewhere between pure art and pure utility. Where I learn to make them, they tend slightly to the artistic side. There are exact parameters that cannot be changed, it is true; but we avoid "factory-perfect" like the plague.

It occurs to me, as I write this, that our lives are things we make. Where do lives fit on the spectrum from art to utility? Some lives are chaotic and full of surprises, others are predictable in their attempts to approach some popular interpretation of a Jesus or a Buddha. Just like with violin making, there are schools of thought about the right way to live a life.

I got into violin making because I wanted to play a violin, but I couldn't bring myself to buy something made by a machine, even a human one. Machines achieve perfection so cheaply and predictably. Thorsten Veblen once claimed that probably these cheap and perfect things are just as good as their expensive counterparts, labored over by imperfect people. I have no doubt that Veblen was thinking only of utility when he wrote that. How boring! We can't help putting who we are into what we make. Will my instruments be clean and boring? Or can I see beauty and potential in a nail-hole-riddled plank of a barn, or in a piece of a burned-down house, or in the mark of a tool? Does it make a difference to anything? I'd like to think that it does.

I am learning a different meaning of perfection. My copy of the 1742 David Heifetz Del Gesu won't be exact, but I'm certain that it will be a sort of perfect. I'll give it to my wife, who also wants to learn to play, and we can take lessons together. As for the factory-perfect fiddles made back home--let them be played by machines.

The Man from the Machine

2011-07-23T16:05:00.002-06:00

I came across this quote on the Distributist Review, and I thought it was particularly relevant to the topic of my blog:

"Once you separate the man from the machine the man is useless, whereas the true craftsman can make things almost out of nothing. We want a population of people who can make things out of next to nothing, rather than a population of people who need an elaborate mechanical structure before they can start doing anything at all." - K.L. Kenrick

Freedom

2011-07-16T16:00:00.001-06:00

Freedom must be secured by men with guns. Can you imagine a bumper sticker that says, "Have You Hugged A Diplomat Today?" Where is the popular appeal in that? Besides, nobody counts the body-bags left vacant because of kind--or at least persuasive--words. We are not interested in people who remain free because they put their weapons away. We do not wish to buy our freedom too cheaply.

Recent Events

2011-07-12T21:00:00.008-06:00

Jack Kevorkian died, without any help and in spite of his low-calorie diet.

I was reminded of this news as I sat in traffic school, a place where one may see and hear a number of shocking things. As a matter of fact, it was in traffic school where I learned the news of a girl who was thrown from her boyfriend's motorcycle during a somewhat recent traffic accident. The responding officers, as the story goes, had to call for a medical helicopter on account of the girl's traumatic and life-threatening injuries. As the paramedics lifted her onto the stretcher, it was noted that the girl's head had assumed the tactile properties of a water balloon.

Now, it turns out that the girl survived the accident. Lucky, isn't it? A happy ending. Yes, but we also learned that she is now obliged to perform most of her bodily functions through a series of tubes. This is because she has no use of her arms or legs, you see. As the traffic school officer so nicely put it, "she's done." Somehow that got me thinking of Dr. Kevorkian and his brand of medicine.

There is more news to report. Casey Anthony, a woman accused of murdering her young daughter, has been acquitted. I have no opinion on the matter, since I did not follow the case in the least. However, I note two things:

First, On account of the proceedings being rendered a national spectacle through the miracle of modern media, Ms. Anthony surely stood trial for all accused child killers in the court of public opinion, which generally has condemned her as guilty (if I am any judge of public sentiment).

Second, I note that some specialist commentators seem to accept that the actual verdict satisfies the rule of law.

I say this is interesting because it illustrates something about the rule of law. Now, "the rule of law" means just this: Everyone is treated equally under the law. The law is supposed to be applied exactly the same way to all, regardless of circumstances or any particular itch that the public may feel. Clearly this is not the same thing as justice, which means that we get exactly what we deserve. Of course, we try to employ the right amount of casuistry when crafting our laws, so that they can be equitable laws, but in the end everybody has to abide by what the law says even if it isn't fair. This is the rule of law, which is to say that the law may be satisfied without justice being done.

Since the rule of law is a manifestly venerated principle in some quarters of our political spectrum, this is something worth thinking about.

Is there any happy news to be told? Yes, there is.

North Korea's best researchers have determined that people who live in North Korea are among the happiest to be found anywhere. Now that this has been established as scientific fact, or at least as government truth in that part of the world, maybe it will become substantially true for the people who live there. Let us hope the best for them.

And are we happy in America? Alas, no. The North Koreans have also discovered that we are, in fact, the least happy of all people on the earth.

I protest this finding. They only say this because they watch our news, and perhaps attend our traffic schools. I contend that, in the United States, we already take our collective happiness for granted and have stopped inquiring after it. It is only if you doubt how happy you are that you must produce a study on it.

That, of course, is the cue for someone to cite a dozen studies that Americans have done about our own happiness (wouldn't it be ironic if someone pointed me to a certain cranky blog with the dubious title of "Surviving Phalaris?"). Nevertheless, I defy anyone to prove that we Americans are not, generally speaking, a happy people in spite of our multitude of complaints. Or perhaps even because of them. I confess that I believe we could be much happier, otherwise I wouldn't write many of the things that I do. We think we are pretty happy, however, and so we must be.

Anyway, we've had our own season of truth-telling, as we always do, during the weeks leading up to our Independence Day. This year's patriotic fare included some haranguing over the Civil War, characterized as always by a particular consternation over the fact that chattel slavery once existed in America.

Yes, this year marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the American Civil War. I meant to write about that in April, actually; I even read Bruce Catton to mark the occasion.

In any case, one of our political factions is freshly miffed by certain progressive interpretations of early American policies on slavery. Walter E. Williams wrote up a nice editorial that is simply brimming over with truth, while The Heritage Foundation's Dr. Spalding informed us, in his Independence Day essay, of a certain prominent slave owner's indignation at King George III for allowing the the barbarism of slavery to exist in the colonies. Another Facebook commentator exulted that an old political party--one with a name strikingly similar to that of the modern party to which he claims allegiance--ended slavery in America.

I reminded that particular commentator that we ended slavery in America in the same way that Dr. Kevorkian ended the lives of his terminal patients.

It's awfully important if things come into this world or if they leave it. Do you think it matters how or why? I think of the girl with the water-balloon head, dying on the pavement. Her life is saved for a little while, but for what? I think of another girl that died in a way that even Jack Kevorkian would have never endorsed, and will there be justice for her? I think of a dying institution murdered by a Civil War, but what else died with it?

No doubt you will answer those questions, if you care to do so, with truths. Maybe they will be the same kind of poetic truths, like the truth of happiness, that are true only because someone believes in them. Truth rarely stops disagreements, though; not the kind of disagreements that happen when competing truths collide.

One of our New Atheists recently explained to me that these poetic things we choose to put our faith in are all lies, and we should not base our lives on lies. Nonsense, I told him; whenever a materialist says anything is good or bad, he is telling a lie. Whenever he glimpses meaning in some precious fact, he only fools himself. If not the stories we tell ourselves, what else have we got to keep us going? Just look at the North Koreans.

Ideals

2011-03-28T13:58:00.001-06:00

It is the hallmark of a totalitarian never to abandon his ideals. But we do not elect gods or kings for our leaders, though the price of their office is a godly vision.

Faction

2011-03-28T10:48:00.002-06:00

Faction allows for no redemption; it cares nothing even for its own principles, only that its enemies are hypocrites. The greatest threat to faction is that old adversaries should become friends, and thus we see an increased disdain for outsiders whenever their opinions begin to look agreeable.

Why Jason F. Wright could be wrong about public schools

2011-03-16T15:27:00.008-06:00

In an article entitled, "Why you could be wrong about public schools," Jason F. Wright concludes that, while there is much useful discussion from all sides of the issue of public schooling in America, he cannot respect "people forming coast-to-coast opinions about public schools and throwing teachers into a single, deep and dysfunctional pool."

Mr. Wright's apologia centers on the many exceptional and successful teachers that exist in the public school system, some of which he extols in his article. I know the kind of public school teacher that Mr. Wright is talking about.

I had a fifth-grade teacher who brought her compassion and humanity to work and wore it on her sleeve. I remember an occasion when Mrs. Ellis read to us a story about a girl who had an eating disorder. We all felt bad as Mrs. Ellis begin to cry at the part of the story where the girl dies. At first, I felt ashamed that a grownup would cry at school, but it made me stop what I was doing and think about it.

I was in her class on the day that the space shuttle Challenger blew up. While other teachers quickly turned off their TVs, Mrs. Ellis rushed in to turn ours on. She thought it might be important for children to learn that tragedy is real, and that disaster can claim even our moments of greatest triumph. We all grew up a little bit that day.

There are only three assignments that I remember from the fifth grade: A book report, a paper on one of the fifty states, and a picture and paragraph about what I thought I might be doing in the year 2010. I don't remember what I envisioned for my future self as a fifth-grader, but in 2010, I attended Mrs. Ellis' funeral. One of her daughters stood up and told us about the last days of her mother's life. She said that her mother had been happy and was not afraid of death because, in a life filled with others, she had forgotten about herself.

How to love a book, how to feel compassion, how to fool a dental hygienist, how to face death and not be afraid; these are the lessons of a dedicated teacher who has the power to reach beyond days spent sitting in a public school classroom. I had teachers who were active agents against all of John Taylor Gatto's public school pathologies, and I was made better for being in their classrooms.

Jason F. Wright is wrong, though. He supposes that all that matters is that there is hope and goodness in public schools--and the possibility for positive change. He is prepared for the unflattering studies, graphs, frightening anecdotes, and videos of teachers-gone-wild, because he knows that he is grateful for the hours of labor given by honest and loyal teachers to whom he entrusts his own children.

What has not occurred to Mr. Wright is that maybe it does not matter very much whether or not our public school teachers are decent, dedicated and caring people. Maybe what really matters is that, when children are away at school, they are not at home. When children are not at home, there is not a family.

The family is not simply a legal bond, or a useful way to delegate social responsibilities, or a method of fulfilling personal needs, or a convenience for raising children to replace parents in the workplace, or a system to grow the economy. If the first purpose of the family is an economic one, then it is only according to the oikonomia of the Greeks who understood that the word they created for us has nothing at all to do with anything outside of the home.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Horace Mann, the great champion of public schools, acknowledged the imminent destruction of the American family during a time when industrialization removed fathers from the home. Why do you think we even have compulsory government schools today? They were to be the remedy for the failure of self-sufficient private families upon which all other institutions, including the educational institution, had once been built.

I belong to a religion that believes in the so-called traditional family. We believe in a mother and a father who make solemn vows to each other and who produce children; together we think they ought to comprise the fundamental unit of society. That is our claim. Today we say that families are under attack, and we fear a coming revolution of secularism that will destroy this traditional family.

Eric Hoffer claimed that change actually precedes revolution, and not the other way around. This idea once seemed strange and wrong to me, but now I understand.

Do we wish to defend our families? First we must have them. We fight a verbal war for the family and leave empty homes behind us every day in order to go about our radically individual lives. The only thing we risk losing now is the make-believe facade of a tradition long forsaken by those who leave home for jobs and send their sons and daughters away to school. In the long history of families, this is a new and significant development.

The first step in the battle for the family must be a return to the home, and I am afraid that all attempts of subcultural movements to bring families together, in brief and faint echoes of long-lost participatory unity, will fail to save it.

We must make a new culture of family where the same high expectations and possibilities achieved by my fifth-grade teacher are removed from the non-family, government institution of public schooling and returned to mothers and fathers in the home. While I am grateful for teachers who taught me more than curricula, I still wonder how life would be different for me had I learned those same lessons in humanity from my own parents. If we still think parents are responsible for this sort of teaching, we must stop fooling ourselves that they can accomplish it in a culture where homes have become little more than dormitories. Or do we truly believe that what really matters can still be taught in the off-hours by parents worn out by the demands of everything outside of the home?

Unfortunately, public schools, as they exist today, will not survive the sort of changes that might save the family as a coherent and fundamental unit of society. A lot of things may not survive the changes I think we need, and I doubt that we even have the courage to attempt them in earnest.

Although I have not thrown any teachers into a single dysfunctional pool, I believe I have presented what Jason F. Wright would consider a coast-to-coast opinion of public schools, built from my questioning the fundamental premises of a mode of schooling that has little to do with home or family, and I am sorry that he cannot respect it.

Subsidiarity and First Things

2010-11-05T11:50:00.019-06:00

Subsidiarity is a principle of sanity. It says something about where things should be done.

You are sitting behind the steering wheel of a car, for instance, and it is your responsibility to drive. The back-seat passenger, in spite of whatever anxious inclination he may feel at the moment, is not the driver. He should not be driving from the back seat. You can take this principle--that there is an appropriate context for action--and apply it to economics, or to politics, or to business, or to religion. That is subsidiarity in a nutshell.

Subsidiarity stops nonsense in its tracks. Yesterday I came across a bit of propaganda comparing terrorism with health care reform (or the lack thereof). The advertisement was presented in the following way: At the top of the poster there is depicted an enormous pile of little skulls--a veritable field of death--representing all of the people, we are told, who died because they did not have health insurance. Down at the bottom is one little skull apart from the others, and that one tiny bit of death represents all of the people killed by the terrorists.

This reveals a great mystery. The demise of Homo erectus, for example, is now perfectly understood. No insurance! It is a miracle that our species has survived. My upper-paleolithic ancestors of the Aurignacian culture surely knew the life preserving secrets of the primitive HMO. Along with cave paintings, we can now confidently count health-plan technology among the tools of the ancients. If people die because they don't have health insurance, then it is only logical to infer that the cavemen who survived to pass on their genes must have had it.

This is stupidity, of course. People don't die because they lack health insurance. They die because of great age, injury, violence, or illness. People are not made older, injured, murdered, or sickened by lack of insurance. Thus, if we want to make claims that are at least reasonable and sane, we must admit that death comes about through nature, ignorance, or misfortune. With this knowledge, we can then plan appropriately to improve our chances at life by addressing, as directly as possible, the root causes of the problem we wish to avoid. Then we can focus on a much smaller secondary problem: how to get out of a scrape. That is what subsidiarity helps us accomplish.

It isn't so simple, though. I struggle for the glory of heaven while the Buddhist seeks the tranquility of personal annihilation. Lord Rosebery might want to be filled with "spiritual tremors," but Chesterton prefers to be filled with jam.1 What point is there talking about the proper roles of drivers and passengers, if there is nowhere to go and no car to drive? We don't agree about what we want, or even about what is possible or needed.

Even supposing we have got an idea of what we want, as soon as we look closely at it, it becomes elusive--especially when we say it must be done at the right level and not just at the lowest possible one. We say we want education, but we aren't quite sure what that means. Subsidiarity can point us in a number of directions based on our view of things, and what if our view is not really what we want and we don't even know it? What if we have second or third-order ignorance? What if we are begging for the wrong gifts? This brings me to a comment I made recently in another forum, from which I extracted my aphorism #10, and which I have edited and now include here:

I notice that we talk about teaching as if teaching were a first thing. Without the possibility of learning, there is no teaching.

But there is no objective quality that one can label "learning." This, however, does not discourage us from attempting to quantify every possible aspect of teaching. What is the proper style of education? Where does the responsibility of education belong? We are adamant that our children will be taught, but cannot seem to make them learn.

Not only should subsidiarity put things where they belong, but it should also allow them to remain in the right perspective.

Should I worry if I can’t teach my children Calculus, Latin, or any other subject? I wish to bestow the best gifts on them, but what if I can’t? Is there someone who must? Is that what subsidiarity demands?

Richard Feynman learned how to calculate at the age of 13 and was rather bothered when he discovered that his own father couldn’t quite make heads or tails of it. Feynman knew he needed to learn, so he did. No one had to teach him, but he learned anyway.

Certainly a liberal education is a very beneficial thing. But it is, nevertheless terribly fortunate, for instance, that David Farragut wasn’t given a liberal education. Imagine the national tragedy that might have ensued had the boy been properly schooled. National tragedies happen every day in classrooms where some (probably most) children simply don't belong.

My daughter loves rock and roll. She once asked me for an electric guitar. I said, “Do you really want a guitar? Then make it yourself!” That ought to discourage any foolish aspirations. I have no idea how to make an electric guitar. Guess what? It seems my daughter does, or at least is willing to make the attempt. I tried to give her good advice on how to do part of it. After ruining things according to my specifications, she redid it on her own. It worked out brilliantly without my interference. And what if I, who had the power and the right to grant a wish, had given her what she asked for instead?

It seems that gifts, when trivially bestowed, offend great desires. Subsidiarity, if it is to be right, must not demand the acceptance of gifts.

Subsidiarity has to be a very passive thing. There is a potential for right action at many levels, it is true; but right action awakens only under the current of human will and when there is a possibility for channeling it. Because a thing can be done, even at an appropriate level, does not mean that it must be done or that a way must be found.

Without the desire to receive, it is an injustice to give. Without the desire to learn, it is a tragedy to teach (and a waste of precious time). Without the need to use or to enjoy, there is no directive for making. Without the possibility of ever being, why set about realizing a proper policy for becoming?

It is, perhaps, a small thing to ask if something is done in the proper way or at the proper level. The greater question is whether the thing must be done at all. That too is a part of subsidiarity.

1. Works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton from MobileReference, version 10.1, Kindle location 112,426-59.

Aphorism #10

2010-11-03T15:34:00.003-06:00

Gifts, when trivially bestowed, offend great desires.

Time to Vote

2010-10-31T00:09:00.004-06:00

It's time for me to make up my mind again and, as usual, I have a dozen shades of vanilla to choose from. Do I choose the obnoxious, in-your-face vanilla, or do I prefer the more subtle, sophisticated vanilla? Can I even tell the difference? I am assured by the advertisements that the differences are clear. This candidate is so sweet, the others so bitter! Or, so they all claim.

The interesting thing is the vehemence of our politics. This is interesting when you think about who is typically vehement.

For instance, I understand that identical twins are sometimes terribly desperate. Even siblings who are close to each other in age are great rivals. This disruptive tendency in children seems less when the age difference is greater.

Women frequently despise other women while men engage each other in heated competition. Often if you put the man and the woman together, though, there emerges a blissful peace! That is to say, there is peace right up until these two different people discover their relative equality. In the moment that each individual's otherness fades from the partner's view, war erupts.

At the national level, we find that most wars happen between nations that share something in common, such as a border or natural resources.

There is greater strife between religious sects that claim the same god than there is between those religions whose gods and beliefs radically diverge.

If anything, political campaigns grow uglier even as they become more alike. The polarization of the American public isn't so much about our differences as it is our equality. We cherish our equality, yet it tears us apart. The limbo-world of equality is a terrible thing; we're always looking for a way out.

I don't see spectacular differences in the political platforms of the various candidates vying for votes in my precinct. For one thing, they all seem to agree on what the issues are. Certainly they all agree that politics is about "the issues."

All of the candidates on my ballot hold the identical view that education, for instance, has something to do with economics, and that health is something dispensed from a health care provider. If their particular ideas about these things aren't exactly alike, at least they agree about what the problem is.

Where I live, all of the candidates agree that immigration is a problem and that we should do something about it. They all believe in the rule of law. They all venerate the Constitution. They all believe, quite regardless of party affiliation, in the "sanctity of life" and in the traditional nature of marriage. They all agree that government should be limited.

None of this abundant and essential agreement has made for kinder, gentler politics. Isn't consensus supposed to result in peace and harmony? Not if we are interested in personal ownership of orthodoxy and right belief. It is almost more important for similar people to tell scandalous stories about each other than it is to speak for themselves. When men, who were evidently created equal, begin to tell their own stories, there arises a terrifying possibility that all of the stories will be the same. After all, what does equal mean if not the same? Why choose between same things?

My test for political preference has become the humanist test. In other words, do people really matter to politics, or is some other ideal elevated above flesh and blood? Is government for people, or are people for government? Do we first have to discover and worship some sublime ideal--some fundamental law--before we can be of suitable service to our neighbors? What is the nature of the civic relationship between citizens and government? Is it an abstract relationship, defined primarily by money, or is it a concrete relationship, defined by the giving of ones' self through service?

Sadly, I find very little of the humanist principle in the local political landscape. Almost everyone has some other, loftier cause that must first be served in order for humanity to ultimately profit. It is said that we have to return to the right principle, which is honor, or justice, or the rule of law, or the Constitution, or the free market. We've lost faith in ourselves--in mere people--to do anything for each other. The word on the street is that, if you want things done and if you want to see change, then you have to get the right person in office. That way, money changes hands, contractors are hired, and the world is made well again.

We've always wanted someone else to save us. When the Hebrews couldn't worship their golden calf, they began to worship their laws instead. The laws would save them!

But it seems that God Himself grew weary of their oblations and their devotion to holy ideals. What a strange new thing, this god who does not care so much for cultic worship. Instead He says, "Learn to do right, seek justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow."

We still don't believe it; not where I live. Our most pious politicians can hardly countenance those poor wretches who are most in need of charity. An invasion is what they are. Get the filth out of here! Give the lawbreakers what they deserve. We're surrounded by them; deviants, the licentious, baby killers, illegals. Who will put an end to it? Hide them from us--cast them out! The rule of law! The Constitution! These politicians, who draw close to God with their lips, are modern-day Pharisees.

I even read a statement from one party claiming that foreign aid in the form of private charity is a great evil. I'm well acquainted with the arguments against government charity, but this was news to me. Apparently even the Catholic Relief Services and the Peace Corps are sowers of famine and destruction. I had a sudden vision of apoplectic old Gudge, who, "if you mention poverty to him, he roars at you in a thick, hoarse voice something that is conjectured to be, 'Do 'em good!'"

"It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity," continues Chesterton, "which means charity to the deserving poor, but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice."

I like that quote, but I'll be called a socialist for bringing it up. I'm sour because I'm a sorry socialist who can't find the right Marxist candidate this year. I'm just bitter because of all the successful people. I want to steal their property from them and redistribute all of it in order to create even more of that maddening equality.

Nonsense. I'm just looking for something different. I want to see someone, just once, suggest that maybe the cure for education isn't more funding. Maybe learning has a more glorious purpose than to make us fit to compete with the Chinese. I want to hear a confession from a politician about how health care and disease care are two different things, and that we don't need much money, or any experts, to take care of our health. I'd like to see someone suggest, if we really believe that families are important, that we should actually live as if they were. Perhaps then all of the other arguments surrounding the purpose of families and marriages would just go away.

I want to see a politician acknowledge that economy starts at home and not on Wall Street. Maybe then we wouldn't harbor anger about government bailouts of the bankers who duped us--because we couldn't be duped in the first place. I want to see someone put the humane treatment and merciful consideration of the millions of illegal immigrants as #1 instead of #4 on his list of guiding principles for immigration policy (if he even acknowledges that illegals are human beings in the first place).

Finally, I want to hear someone tell me that, if something is wrong in the world, I don't have to wait until election day to fix it.

I'd vote for that person.

What Is True, What Is Good

2010-10-07T17:09:00.005-06:00

There is a nascent secular mass-movement brimming with men (and women) of words: the self-styled intellectuals. Eric Hoffer identified the conspicuous presence of such individuals as "The Temper of Our Time." Their business is a business of debunking, as is usual with all nascent mass-movements. The purpose of debunking is to disrupt the status quo, at which point there enters a towering need for new things.

What is it that these people debunk? It is a way of knowing. We are told that there is one proper way of knowing, which is called reason. This is not a new idea, merely a new movement for an old idea.

To know is to find truth, and we are taught to believe that to know the truth is to know the good. Evidence brings forth reason, which brings forth truth, which is the Good.

This last connection is never satisfactorily explained. I suppose this is because it is never explained at all. How is the truth the same as the good? This is supposed to be self-evident--an axiom of the movement--yet it is perfectly unclear. Man has known for hundreds of years, at least, that the true and the good are different things. We have come to think that the true we know, but the good we feel.

But there it is: Should we discover true laws of economics, the laws become holy. No one shall meddle. If we see a natural cause for a defect in the body, the defect itself becomes a sacred thing. If we gain the ability to create some new wonder, it must be done. If we achieve technology, it will save us. Progress is the sign of a god who is dead, or better yet, who is man.

Herein lies the abundant irony of the modern secular mass-movement, an irony that sets it apart from all other movements since the dawn of history. This new thing is apparently driven by activists who feel justified in their claims of the good simply by virtue of their method of discovering the true. They would like to legislate truth, mistaking it for goodness. This is a primitive mode of thinking; the very sort, in fact, which they seek to debunk!

It has not occurred to these intellectuals, when they speak of the Good, that they have cast aside their reason and have wholly entered the realm of those whom they despise.

Perhaps this is why they lack success. They have nothing new to offer besides a new religion.

I can't seem to find the right words to tell them this. After all, it is not easy to get through to the religiously minded with an appeal to reason.

Aphorism #9

2010-10-07T07:32:00.005-06:00

Culture is not something defended or justified. It is something lived. Perhaps it is accurate to say that one cannot protect what one does not have.

Aphorism #8

2010-10-07T07:27:00.000-06:00

A belief in men behind curtains produces religious people as surely as a belief in God. A man behind a curtain is any whose ideas are sufficiently remote, inscrutable, or difficult for the believer to grasp himself.

The World Has Changed Us

2010-09-15T21:06:00.158-06:00

My wife has been reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. She recently shared an interesting passage that is worth some thought:

Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but--even though hideous--remain great.

As I thought about it, the idea reminded me of another idea that Eric Hoffer penned in The True Believer:

It is as if garlanded youths and ivied maidens were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse...

How is it that certain things can have so much rightness and beauty in them, and then they turn out so terrible and wrong in the end?

I have often thought that there is a difference between a beautiful platitude and a true one. There is an aphorism for you. It could also be that I sometimes mistake beauty for something else; maybe these ideas aren’t beautiful, only sophisticated. Or maybe the beauty is real and it reveals its source to be less wrong than I first imagined, and therefore I ought to consider that my own position might be the wrong one. Or perhaps some wisdom is only wise in a certain context; possibly it is always beautiful, but only correct as a second thing and not as a First Thing. Alas, we always think of beautiful things as First Things.

That last idea, which hearkens back to Victor Hugo, is most difficult for me to articulate properly, but also most intriguing. There is a tendency--I think I share it with everyone--to say that if one idea is correct, then its opposing idea is not. Or maybe it is a related idea, but there is only room in us for one “right” idea. Yet, all of these ideas are so eloquently expressed and apparently useful, and all so utterly debunked and dangerous at the same time. How now shall I believe?

This is always the joy and pain of philosophy; and you never arrive at the bottom of anything. But, you must make up your mind. For living well, at least, you have to make up your mind about something. For thinking well, perhaps it is best to remain undecided--ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth! That is what the apostle Paul tells us. The ever-learning maintain an open mind; there is no final answer for them.

The philosopher quickly comes to the realization that there must be an eternal and infinite progression of causes. As soon as he discovers some fundamental principle, as soon as its qualities and attributes have been committed to writing, he begins to wonder: whence came this principle? That was the ancient pursuit of truth.

Those seekers were like the Flatlanders1, as it were; trying to discover from within their two-dimensional geometric space (where they existed as paintings on a canvas) who it is that painted the painter. Where did it all begin? And it rarely occurred to anyone that the creator, who resides in an external and incomprehensible three-dimensional world, wasn’t painted at all!

Thus, on the periphery of our philosophy, there grew this notion of the unmade and the unknowable; some root cause that had to reside outside and beyond all other causes. This is where the intersection of philosophy and theology occurs, which I have attempted to explain through analogy.

Philosophy was anciently a pursuit of truth. It was about ontology, or what it meant “to be.” What is real and true? What is the good?

Then, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, that pursuit changed focus. We started to ask instead, “How do we know?” The First Thing, which had been the Truth itself, became not truth, but Knowing. Knowing was a beautiful new thing that required a lot of attention, and so philosophy got another discipline called epistemology. When that happened, all those who merely sought for truth, or claimed to have it, often became despised for being too primitive.

The theological field of Radical Orthodoxy, which has made up some of my reading lately, finds the crux of this change somewhere around the writings of John Duns Scotus, a theologian who posited an idea that the Creator must exist in the same way that His creation exists.2 God created the universe, and then He stepped back to become a certain kind of co-equal with creation, which had become itself self-existent and sufficient. God and universe existed substantially in the same way. Radical Orthodoxy tells us that this principle came to be known as “the univocity of being.” 3

Then there was the friar Ockham (for whom the famous “Occam’s razor” is named), who came from the same scholastic tradition as Duns Scotus; and he helped to popularize the ideas of nominalism and conceptualism. We understand from those teachings that abstract things are merely ideas (or concepts) in the mind. They exist only subjectively--within the contemplating subject--and have no being in themselves at all. In other words, they are not objectively and absolutely true or real. So, those scholastic monks were likely around at the birth of epistemology as we know it.

The end-result of this new kind of thinking was a tremendous decline in the value of things in themselves, or the loss (though not complete) of intrinsic values. Eventually there came to be an egalitarianism where everything began to appear more or less equal to everything else, and this set the stage for secularism, nihilism, and atheism.

A thing that can exist in itself, univocal with the existence of God, no longer needs a god to keep it going, nor perhaps to even get it started--there could be a simpler explanation, as Dr. Hawking has recently explained, using Occam’s razor to defeat Ockham’s faith.4 Furthermore, if the thing is merely known through its subjective representations, there need not be any universal purpose, either. You can no longer make value-claims about something, other than as personal opinion and not as matter of fact.

Due to this change in what the First Things were, people who had once enjoyed a great deal of substantial personal value within their cultures found themselves suddenly rather bourgeois--a tragedy for them! On the other hand, so were the least valuable and most despised members of society (traditionally slaves and women) raised up to a middling status. This was a great boon to that group of people, and a victory for justice.

The fault of hierarchical and ontological societies, it would appear, then, is the tendency toward social strata that run the gamut from Brahman to pariah, or even slave. That injustice began to be reversed when epistemology entered the stage, and so it looked a lot like progress was being made.

Also, this new idea of epistemology, in which all objects are simply named representations within the observing subject, made possible our advanced money economy5 which now easily extracts the subjective values of things into a transformative substance, typically greenish and papery when we can get it!

We can now apply scarcity laws to such values, including humanity itself; and we begin to play with them according to the rules of economics. People became free to specialize and to pursue their individual interests without worrying about other details, such as one’s duty and one’s commitments to others. Those things used to consume the lives of others in more primitive societies. So, freedom has increased along that continuum as well--by leaving us potentially free of our entanglements with other people.6

This epistemic equivocation allowed all disciplines to stand on their own, just as creation stands apart from its creator. We will no longer mingle church with state, work with pleasure, mercy with justice, or ethics with economy. We separate those things by institutionalizing them, a fact that will become important near the end of this essay.

At the personal level, where we once lived one life, now we live a thousand. We have a work life, an intellectual life, a spiritual life, a love life, a family life, a social life, a financial life, a political life, and so forth. As with our institutions, we have most freedom in each of our separate lives the less those other lives intrude on them. Hence, we now have the man who appears outwardly loving and family oriented, who is honestly pious in church, who is generous to his wife and children, and who defrauds his business partners by day and does violence to his marriage vows by night. Each of his independent and co-equal lives are seeking for their maximum free expression, competing with each other to see which is fittest; which will finally define the man. The same goes for our institutions, wherever they contend with each other.

American society has become fundamentally individualistic, and at the same time (and seemingly paradoxically), very leveled and monochromatic due to the tendency of egalitarianism to make different things the same--and interchangeable--in actual fact. Culture has become all one big thing, and it almost appears that postmodernism will take us full-circle back to the primitive unity of being.

Fully differentiated individuals are right now competing with each other on an ideally level and egalitarian battlefield. In the coming age, the victors of today’s power struggles will once again bring forth the truth. The interesting thing, it would appear, is that the new truth won’t look at all like the old truth.

This is the fascinating and subtle tyranny of egalitarian and epistemic philosophy:7 because Darwin predicted that the self-interested would not be content merely to coexist, cooperation became a very complex and perplexing phenomenon (I understand that biologists are still arguing about kin selection, altruism, and self-sacrifice). In the egalitarian arena of free individuals--whether they are people or entire movements--a victor must arise to subject or destroy all others.

So this leveled milieu is really all about survival, and in order to survive we understand implicitly that others will not. It turns out, in this new manifestation, that the final truth is somehow genetically embedded in the beings that are most fit. That is a sort of analogy, of course. What I mean is that all others will be subsumed or eliminated until the fractured and distinct role of individual is once again part of the glorious whole. One will not need to make up one’s mind in those days.

Society, then, seems to mimic the eternal round of causes that philosophers investigate.8 We go from one extreme to its opposite, then back again. We seem to be at a tipping point right now, as we were nearly a century ago, at the dawning of a new truth when all dissenting voices will be silenced in the same manner as they came into being: in the name of justice.

Richard Weaver was one who debunked this new direction in 1948 with his book, Ideas Have Consequences. He traced the progression of modern nihilism all the way back to the rise of nominalism in medieval times. Nominalism, where things are exactly the same as their names and nothing more, was among a handful of ideas that brought all of our modern meaninglessness upon us!

It seems that Radical Orthodoxy rejects nominalism too, contending that we can’t divorce one truth from another, that it is only the fully formed and comprehended god that can be effectively debunked, disbelieved, and thrown out of creation;9 and that therefore the univocity of being always moves us in the direction of individuality, secularism, nihilism, and atheism.

Strangely, I first heard about Ideas Have Consequences from Rick Koerber, a businessman known locally as the Free Capitalist (he is said to be a pious man, a member of my Church, undoubtedly sincere, and also under federal indictment on numerous counts of fraud). The title of Weaver’s book has passed into a pithy saying, it would seem, since Brother Koerber is very fond of it. But he is also a staunch disciple of Ayn Rand, who once said a very beautiful and true thing: that man is an heroic being who has his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life. This doctrine has become the First Thing for Brother Koerber and for others of his persuasion, whereas for Adam Smith--whom Mr. Koerber claims to be among the top 25 individuals most influential to his philosophy--it was certainly only in second place.

In spite of all its beauty, truth, and usefulness, we have seen the very same philosophy carried to its logical conclusion during the mid-twentieth century when it left us at the gates of hell. This all happened along the Darwinian lines I explained above, and I will not delve into it here.

Adam Smith wrote during a time when men were individually shaped by their relationships with others and where the modern money economy had not yet fully formed. For Smith, it was fellow-feeling10 that gave men their humanity, and when they sought for themselves, it was still within a hierarchy where they exercised their individual talents in relation to familiar others--a form of subsidiarity, if you like. Thus, the “invisible hand” could be a benevolent thing, because self-striving was also a deliberate form of group-striving. The heroism of the individual enriched the lives of others out of necessity. In addition to this tendency, one could simply not do with too much of some kinds of property. Some things simply went to waste when possessed in excess.11 This is because objects still retained substantial intrinsic value and were not transformed so easily into money. Certainly nobody thought of their own abode as an investment in those days; it was a place to live! So, the very nature of things in the more primitive economy contributed to the benevolence of the invisible hand itself, merely by reducing the repertoire of greed.

In a similar vein, the contemporary theologian, Simon Oliver, observed that an individual once found a role, place, and identity and was then free to become a particular person within a social context. This “personhood” was understood more as a gift (perhaps a culmination of social heritage, which might resonate in Jewish thought) rather than an achievement to be willed.12 This is an absurd notion in 2010, where you are only likely to become what is in your best interest (something dictated by the markets)! But it was once thought that one could only truly achieve this individuality in a unique place within society: within one’s church, community, or family; a spot that no one else filled.

In contrast, the modern and wholly differentiated individual can only be superficial and shallow, because all others are equally differentiated with similar means and opportunities, and also because the individual cannot completely commit himself in specific ways to other people without losing his boundless freedom. There is a danger, it is thought, of becoming greater or less than one deserves to be. Anything that we become must be earned through the application of will and power, and never through gifts.

Rick Koerber is one who represents an entire species of thought in which the non-duty-bound, liberated individual inhabits the position of central importance, above the importance of the group (group primacy is labeled a Marxist doctrine), and it is this philosophy that has largely shaped American reality since the industrial revolution brought financial capitalism along with it, in spite of the fact that its modern libertarian proponents tend to eulogize the American Founding Fathers and to attribute this laissez-faire philosophy to those men.

Because people are now totally differentiated from each other, and do not retain obligations to one another that cannot be completely overcome through exchange, it is now the market that shapes who we will become. If we were to bend the market according to our own desires, that would run contrary to the theory. Thus, if the market demands violins, we become violin makers. If the market demands computer programmers, we become computer programmers. Human activity and purpose are sparked at the intersection of demand and profit, only as secondary phenomena.

There is no living in growing crops, as Father McNabb was once surprised to learn. You apparently couldn’t “get token” (as he puts it) for growing wheat in those days; nor could people any longer conceive of consuming the products of their own industry. That takes too much imagination--therefore, we are foolish to pursue such interests where there is so little chance to get token. This is what Father McNabb means when he says that we are “delivered over to the token.”13

It is in this spirit that we begin to serve our secular institutions, which are beautiful truths in themselves. Our useful institutions are now First Things. What a strange result of egalitarian individualism, to become our slaves’ slave! If the primitive ontological and hierarchical society tended toward slavery, so too does the advanced epistemic and egalitarian society of leveled self-seeking individuals. It leads toward a new form of slavery and toward nihilism.14

The purpose of politics, where I live, is to improve education. That is what our politicians say is important to give our means to. The purpose of education is to serve economy. Education is good for jobs, I am told. In other places, the purpose of politics is to protect national security, which is designed to increase military power, which is in turn designed to protect “American interests” wherever they may be. Those interests are predominantly economic ones. Other political motives seek to protect various industry and business interests. Even where politics appears to be focused on something allegedly altruistic, it is only through moving around “token” from one group to another in order to theoretically level the playing field even more (some are uncomfortable with the monopolistic tendencies of Darwinian economics).

The purpose of economy is to get “more token”, of course, which is the means to free us from everything disagreeable, and that is the purpose of life which constitutes the happiness of the differentiated individual, and therefore is central to his moral pursuits. There is no doubt that much ease and convenience has come to us through this commitment to the institution of economy. Yet, some of us remain unsatisfied. Our souls are not filled.

For people like Rick Koerber, even Jesus was fundamentally concerned with his own success above any consideration for mankind.15 As a divine being, Jesus must have clearly operated according to the immutable economic laws, which appear to be universal truths akin to the laws of physics for someone like our Brother Koerber. In fact, he has been writing an essay on the very subject, I understand. He can only imagine that “socialist” is at the other end of “individualist”. One envisions Marcion busily editing the gospel of Luke in order to make it more amenable to his own enlightened interpretations! But I read Jesus as fundamentally humanist rather than individualist.

Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. That is humanism. Jesus said that the first great law is to love God, and that the second great law is like unto it: to love our neighbor as our self. And then Jesus tells us that we show our love of God precisely by loving other people, so even the first great law refers back to people again. People matter, and “people” is plural. That is Jesus’ humanism.

I can see Jesus saying that economy is for man and that man is not for economy. Naturally, everyone agrees with that. Of course economy is for people! It gives us token and makes us wealthy and content! It proves that we are blessed and chosen! Why else would we have it? And then economy overcomes all other means; it becomes the all-in-all; we turn godly humanism on its head and the whole point is lost. Jesus throws his hands in the air and leaves us to our economy worship, just as he left the Pharisees to their Sabbath worship and sat down with publicans and sinners who would enter into heaven ahead of those who served their institutions and forgot mankind.

This is how the world changes us: It happens when we are governed by the secular institutions that are supposed to serve us, especially the economic institution (whether it is “capitalist” or “socialist,” or something else purely economic in nature), but also the institutions of government and military and so forth. When the world changes us, we have no purposes other than what the institutions make for us.

Now, In the middle of this march to nihilism, we begin to tell stories of past truths and to say that we need to “restore honor.”16 We claim that these past truths are coming under attack from the outside. It is the fault of activist judges! Licentious people with wicked agendas! People hostile to religion! We seem to understand that this is a fairly recent development. No one can see the long root of it, extending all the way back into the middle ages (and beyond), and thus we cannot discern our own complicity in the matter, as individuals overcome by a single overwhelming institution of money that is consuming all others.

I think the problem is nicely illustrated by an introduction that I recently read in the local news. It seems that a certain notable Catholic, Robert P. George, has joined the news editorial board.17 In his introductory sketch, we learn that he holds sacred truths, among them the idea that the family--which is being eroded by evil--is the fundamental unit of society and must be advocated and defended. A few scant paragraphs later, we discover that this intelligent and well-meaning man spends his “rare” family hours pursuing his own personal interests!

There you have it: a man who believes that Family ought to be a First Thing, and he is rarely at home.

I can imagine this typical scenario being played out: Dad is away serving glorious secular (or even religious) institutions that are not The Family, and (I speculate) his kids are likely at school learning how to get a good job--also away from family and neighbors--working for somebody else.

I may be wrong about Mr. George, but that is the apparent shape of our advanced society, even among the most religiously inclined. Indeed, I am certainly not exempt from the thing I criticize. If this criticism in any way accurately describes Mr. George's shortcoming, then he is in good company (or poor company, as the case may be). And that, in the end, is the whole problem: too much company in shortcomings.

So, Robert P. George isn’t helping to build a culture of family; he is building a subculture18 with a compelling true story of family as its backdrop. The new sort of family is supposed to get by with a few hours of “quality time” each week. That is how we restore honor in 2010. This subculture exists within a greater, inescapable macro-culture of non-family individualism where any automaton can send the kids away to become well-adjusted so that it can be free to go out in the world to mechanically earn its fair share of someone else’s money in the pursuit of self-interest. The traditional arrangement of mom, dad, and children don’t matter one bit to the economy.

This good and sincere Catholic defender of families will be offended if any judge tries to point that out to him! Any attempt to square legal stories with the observable reality in which we all participate (where families are only second things to the individual) will be viewed as judicial activism. We blame activist judges when it is we who have fallen short of our ideals.

“In the world, but not of the world.” That phrase seems to have been distilled from various passages in the New Testament. It could mean a number of things, among them a suitable definition of subculture, such as what our defeated religions are building today. In this sense it must be rejected as a beautiful platitude and an untrue one. Instead, we appear to have adopted it to mean that we can still serve God and Mammon.

The truth is that these nostalgic, story-telling men need to stop building subcultures if they want to change the world. In the important sense, true culture isn’t in the world at all, it is the world. If you are only in this world, you will always lose. The world will eventually overcome you. Ideas only have lasting consequences when they are made First Things through actual praxis, not left to languish as a subculture. Sub-things are second things at best.

I am not Catholic, but I find that Father Lawrence Smith has some good advice for people who want to restore honor and who desire to return to a real culture of truth-seeking:

Where will we find the means to transform the world from the den of Mammon to the House of God? Go home!19

Until we see that, we will not change the world. Our legacy will be filled with furious rallies that accomplish little more than to leave behind them a remarkable absence of trash on public lawns. Garlanded youths and ivied maidens will not change the world with pretty speeches if they, in their deeds, remain servants to the secular institutions that have turned hideous even as they remain great. Such efforts only serve to demonstrate the ways in which the world has changed us.

Edwin A. Abbot wrote Flatland in 1884. The book describes a two-dimensional geometric world.
The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, edited by John Milbank and Simon Oliver. Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: from participation to late modernity. p . 23
Ibid. p. 22
BBC News, September 2, 2010. "Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe". http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11161493
The Philosophy of Money, Exchange as a form of life. Georg Simmel. Kindle Edition. Locations 3796-826. Also see Location 4493. "For the value of things, interpreted as their economic interaction, has its purest expression and embodiment in money." This is also described in the section entitled "Money as the autonomous manifestation of the exchange relation."
Ibid. See the section entitled: "Money is responsible for impersonal relations between people." Locations 8,373-404. In particular, this passage is relevant: "...we are remarkably independent of every specific member of this society, because his significance for us has been transferred to the one-sided objectivity of his contribution, which can be just as easily produced by any number of other people with different personalities with whom we are connected only by an interest that can be completely expressed in money terms."
The Radical Orthodoxy Reader. Radical Orthodoxy: A conversation. p.40
The Philosophy of Money, The objectivity of truth as well as of value viewed as a relation between subjective elements. Location 4297. Here Simmel says "the development of philosophy, and of individual thinking, moves from multiplicity to unity and from unity to multiplicity."
Radical Orthodoxy. p.28. For those few of us Christians who do not come from an orthodox background, and who sometimes criticize this philosophical account of the being of God, I found this discussion in Radical Orthodoxy to be very helpful in understanding this orthodox view.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith, 1759. See Part I, Chapter II: Of the pleasure of mutual Sympathy.
Ibid. Part IV, Chapter I. For instance in this passage, "The capacity of his [the proud and unfeeling landlord's] stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of." This is where Adam Smith first develops the ideas of the Invisible Hand.
The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, p.8. Simmel also points out that a "personality is almost completely destroyed under the conditions of a money economy. The delivery man, the money-lender, the worker, upon whom we are dependent, do not operate as personalities because they enter into a relationship only by virtue of a single activity..." (see the section entitled "Cultural development increases the number of persons on whom one is dependent").
Capitalism and Communism. Fr. Vincent McNabb.http://distributistreview.com/mag/2010/07/capitalism-and-communism/
I wrote to some extent about this in my essay on Leisure. See http://survivingphalaris.petermccombs.com/2009/09/leisure.html. Georg Simmel also writes of wage laborers in a money economy that, "it seems as if the wage laborer is nothing but a disguised slave." See locations 8405-35.
Jesus is a Capitalist, Rick Koerber, July 23, 2010. http://www.rickkoerber.com/2010/07/23/jesus-is-a-capitalist/615
Here I refer to Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally on August 28, 2010. There is apparently no available transcript of the event in this illiterate age, but you can get the video and something like a transcript here: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/295231-1
'Most influential Christian conservative thinker' Robert P. George joins News Board. Sarah Israelsen-Hartley, Deseret News. Sunday, Sept. 12, 2010. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700064817/Most-influential-Christian-conservative-thinker-Robert-P-George-joins-News-board.html
This idea about subculture is something I received indirectly from James Davison Hunter and his book, "To Change the World." I have not read the book, but I read a review of it by James K. A. Smith on The Other Journal at Mars Hill Graduate School. The review was entitled How (Not) to Change the World, and it is a great essay in its own right. In fact, the title for my own work was taken from one of Smith's sentences in his essay. Smith also mentioned the phrase, "ideas have consequences." One of the ideas discussed is the idea of "faithful presence," which is very relevant to my point. About it, Smith writes (reviewing Hunter): "What’s wrong with both the Christian Right and Left, Hunter rightly notes, is that they have unwittingly bought into the will-to-power that characterizes disordered political life in late modern America. As a shorthand, one can say (as Hunter sometimes does) that they have fallen prey to a Constantinian desire to run the world (or at least America). The problem is that, in the name of “reclaiming America for Christ,” their “Christ” has been assimilated to what we might call “Americanism”—or what Hunter will sometimes describe simply as “nihilism”. Faithful presence, then, is not simply playing will-to-power for Jesus such that Christianity wins the culture war. Indeed, faithful presence will often run counter to the strategies of religious politics as currently played. Instead, faithful presence is the church carrying out the creational mandate to “make culture” (Gen. 1:26-31) in a way that is faithful to God’s desires for his creation." See the complete review here: http://www.theotherjournal.com/article.php?id=1021&header=perspective
Beyond Capitalism & Socialism, LTD Publications, 2008. The Economy of Salvation. p.124

Vote Fascist for a Third Glorious Decade of Total Law Enforcement

2010-07-19T21:56:00.058-06:00

The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness; they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly. -John Taylor Gatto

When I was young, I once smashed a little oriental girl’s face into the carpet. I hurt her on purpose, because of a feeling that was inside me. She hadn’t done anything to me, but she was new and looked different and weak, and it made me feel uncomfortable. I sensed that there was some invisible line that divided us and which left her as an outsider in an alien world of wrongness. She crawled on her knees in all of the wrong places and she breathed the wrong air. She did not belong.

At the time of that event, I had been walking for less than a year. While nearly all other memories of those early days have forever faded from my mind, yet I am left with that one remembrance: I remember the feeling I felt when I did that terrible thing.

In kindergarten, my bully friends and I told another new girl that we would be her friends if she showed us her underwear. She did, and we pointed our fingers and laughed at her. That’s how friendly we were.

When the new boy with white hair came to school, I prayed in my mind, “Please don’t let him sit by me! Please don’t let him sit by me!” Of course, he came and sat right next to me. I found out that his name was Colin. I despised Colin because he had white hair and a strange name.

I don’t know why I felt that way. Certainly my parents have never taught me such things. I don’t even know how to describe it. All of the usual words--hatred, cruelty, bigotry--seem so incomplete. We don’t have language that can adequately convey the sickness of heart that I suffered from.

Then my family moved away. I lost all of my friends and anything that had been familiar to me outside of my immediate family. Having been something of a bully as a boy, I understood well enough what it could mean to be the newcomer. I couldn’t see why the boys and girls in my new neighborhood would possibly accept me. I had stupid, fat lips and I was ugly.

So, I coped with my anxiety by staying close to the familiar. At school, during recess, I would play four-square with my big sister and her friends. Then, one day--I was in the third grade--my sister turned me away from the four-square game and said that it was time for me to go and make some friends of my own.

I turned away and I began to cry. I ran and ran, hoping to find a safe place; hoping that no one would see me crying because I knew what happens to those who cry at school. Did new friends come to my aid to strengthen and comfort me? No. I was right. I was young, but I knew what could live in the human heart. They pointed and laughed as I ran. “Look at the crybaby!”

On another occasion I accidentally broke a school rule. I made a urinal in the boy’s bathroom suck the air into the pipes. I didn’t mean to do it, but it made a terrible, disruptive noise when it happened. One of the sixth grade teachers had authorized a team of official bullies of his own to seek and capture anyone who caused this noise during school hours. I was hunted down and brought before the sixth-grade class, forced to my knees--my shirt pulled up--and I was threatened and lectured in front of everybody in that class.

The teacher did this to me, with his ruler in hand, in order to teach me a lesson and to ensure future obedience to the rules. He didn’t understand or believe my pleas--that I hadn’t meant to harm anyone when I broke the law of the school. That teacher just needed me to be broken because I was a lawbreaker and I didn’t belong. Look at all of these sixth graders! They don’t do such things. You’re not one of us, little boy.

I’m still too embarrassed to publicly share other humiliations I suffered at the hands of my peers--and sometimes my teachers. Perhaps we all have such stories to withhold.

Suffice it to say that all of my former bullying was answered back upon my own head and with interest. At school I spent some of my time in worry and desperation, weeping quietly at my desk, until one of the kind boys finally made me his friend.

At the new school, my very first friend was Howie, a Korean boy; and who knows if perhaps I mistreated his little sister once upon a time. I believe there really are people who never had that inexplicable meanness in them that I once had. In fact, it isn’t that we have meanness in us at all. Only, that some of us lack kindness.

That kindness, and a great many of my own tears, healed me of the old sickness that had been in my heart. On the last report card that a young bully had brought home from kindergarten, the teacher had written to my parents the following words: “We have discussed problems this year... I wish all of Peter’s family the best in the move. I feel it will be beneficial to Peter socially.”

She was right. I still remember that old feeling of cruelty, but now I remember it also with sadness. It is too bad that I was once that kind of boy, but now I know how to be better. Luckily for me, it was only a short chapter in my life.

* * *

...and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. -Genesis 11:6

Some people study for the entire duration of their early lives, learning how to be cruel to each other. Those not born with a dearth of kindness, as I apparently was, may soon enough have the natural goodness erased from them. The culture of cruelty that does this violence to our souls, as far as I can tell, seems to consist in the following tenets which have in recent times acquired an aura of religious righteousness:

Competition instead of cooperation.
Liberal individualism with its complete dedication to negative liberty.
A sense of being chosen or of having a particular and glorious destiny apart from all others.
An acquisitive purpose that sees as its primary fulfillment the achievement of prosperity.

Let us consider these points one at a time.

First, the ideal of competition trains us to seek and exploit weakness wherever it is found. We develop a keen eye for the unfit, the unworthy, and the incompetent which must be overcome or cast aside. There are only limited resources and there is limited space, therefore not everyone will be able to succeed. The competitive assert their dominance by the force of will. Power and even violence are the principle tools of those who worship competition.

Second, the ideal of Individualism turns our interest to the sovereignty of the self. Self-interest demands a new, less restrictive form of interpersonal relationships based primarily in money and in talking to machines. The individual is increasingly differentiated and the sense of others as outsiders grows more acute.

The word “Freedom”, an important and ubiquitous buzzword, now means the complete removal of all obstacles impeding the individual will. True choice--free will or free agency, as we call it--can only be exercised where there are no personal obligations that were determined somewhere outside of the self! Thus, the ‘community’ of inter-dependent personalities fades into the background to be supplanted with a ‘collective’ group of leveled individuals competing on an egalitarian battlefield.

Duty toward the common good is viewed as inherently incompatible with personal pursuits and is considered coercive in nature and against the ideal of freedom. The care of the group is left to the inhuman and invisible hand of the free market, with the promise that, by seeking only for oneself, one really benefits the whole.

Third, the sense of election--of being a chosen and preferred people--throws the outsider into even greater relief. Perhaps there are determinate “slots” available for those wishing to enter into the collective, but all on the outside appear base, jealous, greedy, and threatening. Our status as “the chosen” must be protected and never sullied by lesser men. There will be only one (intrinsically mistrustful) people, one language, and one name shared among them.

Finally, the chosen are ever striving for heaven. In modern times they reach even higher--no longer to lift themselves up, but to pull heaven down to earth. They seek to establish Utopia (or perhaps Zion). And there is nothing that affirms success in this endeavor more than the attainment of material wealth!

The prosperity gospel also reaffirms the suspicion that there is not enough good to go around--because the only relevant question has become “the greatest good” (or perhaps it is “the greatest goods”). This commitment to acquisition and to prosperity brings with it a renewed inkling that others might be claiming what is not their due. If they are a burden on us--if they drag us down--then they are not our fellowmen. And so, it is not wickedness that we hate, but weakness. We hate weakness until weakness becomes wickedness. Zion will have well-guarded borders and tall walls, and that is precisely how there will be no poor among us.

The natural outcome of any society that puts these four principles among its “First Things,” is human cruelty. That these ideas are useful, or that they have some truth in them, I do not argue. The problem, it would appear, is a problem of replacing First Principles with things of secondary importance and in so doing, demeaning those things that should rightfully occupy the position of primacy: that is, human goodness and fellowship.

Alas, cruelty looks just as righteous in the 21st century as it did when Jan Hus was burned at the stake.

* * *

However unjust and unreasonable the attitude we assume toward others, we seem to set in motion an automatic process which works blindly to corroborate and justify that attitude. It is an awesome thing that when we expose people, however undeservedly, to hatred, they tend to become hateful... It is as if the world, of its own accord, furnishes reasons for our unreasonable attitudes. -Eric Hoffer

Not long ago I watched some footage of a small group of people who crossed into America illegally. The video I was watching had evidently been captured by one of the cameras on the American border with Mexico, and the footage depicted weary and destitute people whose need for help showed all too plainly. I’m guessing those people didn’t have money for the usual entrance fees, nor could they afford the decade-long wait to gain admittance--so they broke the law. The truth is, America doesn’t need them and our laws are intended to filter them out.

The theme and punchline for this video--which was doctored up and published as a joke--was that of “wild animals.” See, these mendicant humans were the same kind of thing as the wandering animals whose movements were also captured by the camera in earlier frames.

The commentary accompanying this production was predictably mean-spirited and derisive. It was the grown-up equivalent of jeering at the crying third-grader who, having been rejected, ran to find a safe place. Weakness and poverty, and the actions of the desperate who want to share in the security and prosperity of others, were things to be scorned. In America, we earn our good fortune.

Is it odd that the most differentiated and self-centered individuals are also the most leveled and predictable?

Last week, where I live, a group calling itself “Concerned Citizens of The United States” was reported in the news. They became noteworthy because they decided to publish the personal details of 1,300 suspected illegal immigrants. The need for “total law enforcement” that these people demonstrated (except, of course, for the laws they disagree with, such as privacy laws) required them to take vigilante action. Here is what The Concerned Citizens have to say:

Our group observes these people in our neighborhoods (In other words, they are our neighbors), driving on our streets, working in our stores, attending our schools and entering our public welfare buildings... We plan to provide your office with new lists on a continual basis and request — no insist — that your agency take immediate and forceful action to the individuals on this list and begin deportation now.

My wife brought this bit of news to my attention over lunch one day, and I was at once reminded of an episode of the old British television comedy, Red Dwarf.

In the particular episode recalled to my memory, the protagonists share a nightmare wherein they believe themselves to be living in a fascist society that offers “fabulous prizes to be won” for becoming a “Government Informant” and betraying “Family & Friends.” We used to laugh at that because it was hyperbole. People don’t behave that way anymore! Well, it turns out you can’t make this stuff up. It is not make-believe. It is reality, right here where I live.

Others who reacted to this same news saw the more obvious parallels to our own history and especially to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Still, there are quite a few who are greatly sympathetic to this home-grown terrorism that has been directed toward illegal immigrants. The director of our local “minutemen” group, which was formed apparently to invoke the immortal memory of our forefathers mostly by running rough-shod over it, went so far as to call the person involved with this despicable and criminal list a “true patriot.” This man is one who fears that the opposing political party will benefit in the elections if too many outsiders are allowed into the country. Indeed! “No one has done more to purge the ballot boxes than the Voter Colonel!”

It is too bad that we merely interpret this sorry incident as “people being uncivil.” I am happy to hear that those involved in this inhumanity will be punished according to the laws they surely broke. Desperate immigrants who enter America illegally have nothing on these guys. However, our public reaction to this cruelty against immigrants has been only to encourage more ‘civility’ in our discussions of illegal immigration. What we really need to see is that this hateful conspiracy is in fact the logical consequence of one side of the debate carried to its natural conclusion.

The faction that tends toward this unmistakable fascism begins to tell us new stories to justify its increasingly malevolent acts and speech: The illegal immigrant really is the source of our problems! The economy falters because of the illegal immigrant! Crime soars because of the illegal immigrant! Freedom wanes because of the illegal immigrant! War on drugs? We know where to point. Der ist schuld am Kriege! In telling these stories, we will also make them true, for it is often in calling our enemy hateful that he becomes hateful in truth.

In the end, a new Devil will be born and we shall be fully justified in our treatment of him. Any last glimmer of humanity is snuffed out in the ukase that the Rule of Law must abide. “The Rule of Law!” That is what we hear in these days when conspirators publish lists of illegal immigrants who must be dealt with ‘forcefully’ (especially the pregnant, we learn, whose children will become naturalized citizens!). Miep Gies and Oskar Schindler were criminals in their day. We may very well need more of their kind before all is said and done.

* * *

“The men of Sodom had no consideration for the honour of their Owner by not distributing food to the wayfarer and the stranger... They even fenced in all their trees on top above their fruit so that they should not be seized; not even by the bird of heaven.” The law of Moses forbade doing these mean things to the olives, the wheat, and other crops, but they did them... For Abraham, such meanness, as we have seen, was the last straw, and “he cursed them in the name of his God.” -Hugh Nibley

What makes us loathe the illegal immigrant is that he walks on the wrong dirt and he breathes the wrong air. We fear that he might be stealing our individuality, our identity, our language; he is robbing us of our means, coercing us to support his needs along with our own. We will no longer prosper, no longer be chosen. Perhaps the illegal immigrant takes too much and gives too little back.

The illegal immigrant is a lawbreaker, to be sure. He comes to us with open hands and the expectation of receiving something, but not with malice to offend us. We do not care anything for his intentions, however; only that we are offended and that our laws were broken. We will make an example of these wretches and they won’t cross us again.

It may very well be the case that we need a wall to protect our border, or a fence.

But the spirit in which that wall is presently being built is the same spirit that seeped into the dirt along with Hitler’s blood and sprung up again as a different wall in another time and another place. We could tear down that wall, but not its spirit. Today, some of its remains lie in a museum in Berlin where they are misplaced. Those remains belong on the American border with Mexico, and should stand in opposition to Emma Lazarus’ beautiful poetry that is now embarrassingly found on the outmoded Statue of Liberty.

There is a big problem with illegal immigration, and if anything, it is a human problem before it is a technical one. As a purely technical problem, its solutions are all cruel. When I read the language of many of those who have aught to say about immigration, I read the language of primal cruelty that was never replaced by kindness. Or else it is the distant, learned and calculated cruelty of “isms” that have become an inseparable part of our discourse in politics and economics.

Is it ironic that I was once healed of my own cruelty in part by the cruelty of others? I wonder how America will be healed, or if she will survive the healing.

Aphorism #7

2010-04-20T18:02:00.002-06:00

The qualities of the individual personality do not concern us. We do not ask if one is temperate, skilled, or thoughtful. We only ask whether one can afford to buy health, goods, or education. It is man's riches or poverty--his means or lack thereof--that make him stand out. Money makes inconsequential what it cannot buy.

Aphorism #6

2010-04-13T00:00:00.002-06:00

Argument is more than disagreement. We claim a right to argue but seem to have lost much of the power to do so. Perhaps this has to do with a shift in our values: As with many other things, the value we place on speech has become quantitative in nature. It matters little what we say, only that we say much. Most importantly, perhaps, is that we can afford to speak last. One thing is certain: we will not want for lively debate.

Summary And Concluding Arguments for "Rights Abdicated", by Peter McCombs and David W. Cooney

2010-04-11T16:48:00.012-06:00

This is the concluding article in the series on Rights Abdicated, which consists of the following previous articles:

Rights Abdicated: The 2nd Amendment and an Appeal to Logic
Rebuttal to "Rights Abdicated", by David W. Cooney
In Defense of "Rights Abdicated"
Response to "In Defense of 'Rights Abdicated'", by David W. Cooney

I am very pleased to have had thoughtful argument from David on this topic. For those of you who are interested in other work that David has written, please see his web site, Practical Distributism. David approaches a number of current social and economic topics from the standpoint of Distributism.

It seems to me that David adds more dimension to this argument than opposition. However, that is for the reader to decide. For myself, I have begun to think with more attention about the difference between rights and powers as well as the specific meaning of "a right".

In this article, I will present the summary of my arguments for "Rights Abdicated" as well as some final remarks. I will then include David's summary and his closing remarks. Although this concludes the debate, I welcome additional commentary on the subject from any side. It is often through argument that I refine my thoughts and ideas.

* * *

In my argument entitled, "Rights Abdicated: The 2nd Amendment and an Appeal to Logic", I made the following claims:

That some rights are transferable, or alienable.
That alienable rights are important in self-government.
That once a right has been vested in another party, it can no longer be exercised except through the one authorized.
That the Second Amendment describes such an alienable right as demonstrated by the logical analysis of the amendment.
That we ought to carefully consider the ways in which we allow our rights to be delegated (or abdicated) to others.

In defense of my original argument, I introduced some additional points:

That the American system makes use of the Social Contract.
That all rights to means are alienable rights.
That rights under any contract are governed by positive law.
That when contracted rights are retained by the people, it is only through an unjust act of bad faith or through provisions in the contract itself that regulate the portion of rights granted and retained based on specific contexts (casuistry).
That some rights are obligations that we will choose to give up for the sake of freedom in other things.

It is not important to my argument whether or not there are other reasons for the second amendment right to bear arms other than the reason provided by the authors of the Constitution. For a natural (or inalienable) right, any reason given for the right must be completely sound. However, since the one reason given for the right to bear arms is clearly no longer relevant to our standing relative to the federal government, modus ponens is sufficient to show beyond doubt that the right to bear arms is an alienable right to a means and not a natural inalienable right to an end. I do believe, however, that the right to bear arms is an extension of the natural right to protection.

To the extent that we delegate our means of protection to armies, mercenaries, and to police forces, our right to bear arms is proportionally reduced and regulated. As an example of this, I point to the fact that we must now obtain permits in order to conceal and carry a firearm. We are also prohibited from obtaining some kinds of specialized arms, such as nuclear or biological weapons. The economy of protection has also made other specialized weapons quite beyond the reach of private individuals. We may not act as or impersonate a police officer or a soldier because we lack the proper authority to do so. We have given that authority to others.

These regulations are all part of the social contract we have entered into when we authorized others to act on our behalf. The capability to defend ourselves against the very organizations that we authorize for our protection is greatly reduced. We must therefore have faith in them always to act in our best interest. Although we may still bear arms, the right we now enjoy is governed by positive law and has become a privilege. We believe that we have better served our inalienable right to protection by vesting others with the right to defend us.

I further reiterate the nature of the social contract. While I acknowledge criticisms of the social contract that question how (or if) it may originate and what its limits are, these questions are not important to the argument. What is important is that only alienable rights are susceptible to the social contract and that these rights are no longer exercised in the context conceived by their natural reasons.

I consider the large-scale abdication of alienable rights to be a national tragedy. Such a course leaves many individuals and communities at the mercy of a "majority" with whom they do not agree. This damages and destroys self-government wherever these rights are more properly delegated at a local level.

I do not limit my argument to the right to bear arms. For example, I claim a right to raise my own children. I teach them at home and do not send them to school. A natural right is one that does not require special permission for its use, yet I must obtain permission annually if I want to keep my family together at home. If I do not get this permission, a man with a gun is authorized to visit my house and enforce compliance. I could be forced to adhere to standards that are not my own or risk losing my kids.

The truth is, I no longer have a right to my own children, but a regulated privilege. This is because the right to children is an obligation that we, as a majority, ceased to desire in favor of ever increasing options in the area of ease and prosperity. In order to gain the freedom of careers and of financial gain, the State has been granted much of the power and authority once held exclusively by parents. Those few of us who still desire to maintain our exclusive rights must struggle against a rising tide that threatens to sweep us away.

There are probably many other examples of Rights Abdicated. Some of us will refuse to acknowledge our own hand in this tragedy. Others will remain in delusion, as those who trade raw diamonds for pretty glass trinkets. Such will argue that they never lost their rights, only improved them.

It seems to me that, like Esau who sold his birthright for a "mess of pottage" and then blamed others for his loss, we prefer to resent a government perceived as oppressive rather than taking steps to make fundamental changes to our lives and to our culture in order to reclaim what we have given away.

* * *

David's summary and closing remarks are as follows:

The summary of my position in regard to our current discussion is divided into two areas. The first area is that of the Constitution in general and the Second Amendment in particular. The second area is the scope to which the application of the abdication of rights involved in a social or other contract may logically be applied.

The Constitution

The Constitution and the first ten amendments to it must be viewed according to the intent of the authors in order to understand the provisions and how they were intended to be applied. The purpose of the Constitution was to define and limit the scope of the revised federal government they were proposing to the American people. The federal government was only to have those powers explicitly and clearly given to it in the Constitution. In fact, they were so adamant about this, that they did not want to include the Bill of Rights because they feared that, if they started listing any specific rights retained by the states and the people, it would end up being interpreted exactly how it is now being interpreted; that the rights and limitations of the states and people are also defined by the Constitution.

This is how you are presenting the Second Amendment; as though the inclusion of a reason for not disarming the public means that, if the government claims to eliminate the reason, the public no longer has the right not to be disarmed. The Constitution was never intended to limit the states and people to any extent beyond those powers absolutely needed to be given to the federal government to perform the explicit and limited powers granted to it. Any and all other rights and powers that can be said to exist remain with the states and the people, so it is not only not necessary to list them, but it is unwise to even start listing them because of the false interpretation that such a list would cause.

A perfect example of this is found in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers. I don't have my copies handy, but when they debated Section 8 of Article 1, the Anti-Federalists argued that the term "general welfare" was too vague and could be taken to mean anything. The Federalists pointed out that the the Constitution itself defines exactly what is meant by general welfare in that same section. All of Section 8 is one sentence. It starts out by stating the general purpose of the powers of Congress, and then, using no division other than semi-colons, lists those specific powers which Congress is allowed to employ to fulfill those purposes. At the end of that long sentence, Congress is given the power to make laws to fulfill the limited powers of the federal government, but is explicitly limited to only those laws which are both "necessary and proper" to do so.

In regard to the power of the federal government to raise an army, taking into account the Second Amendment, the federal government is not empowered to disarm the public because doing so is not necessary to raise an army. History is clear that it is entirely possible to have an army and an armed public, therefore there is no necessity to disarm the public in order to fulfill the ability of the federal government to raise an army. If it is not necessary, the federal government has no authority to make such a law because it is specifically only given the power to pass those laws which are both necessary and proper.

The view of the Federalists, the Anti-Federalists, and of the people in general is that government in general cannot be trusted, and that a remote government (and they all viewed the federal government as a remote government) could be trusted even less. This is absolutely clear from their writings. They hoped the states and the people would jealously guard against any attempt by the federal government to increase its centralized power by binding it with the "chains" provided in the Constitution. In the end, the Federalists only agreed to include the Bill of Rights because they realized that it was the only way to get the new Constitution ratified.

The Abdication of Rights, With a Particular Consideration of the Second Amendment

I do not deny that one can abdicate or otherwise forgo rights. However, the argument you present is that abdicating rights can actually separate them from you. The authors of the Constitution, however, believed that certain rights were inalienable; therefore, even if you abdicated them in any way, they still remained with you and you remained free to exercise them at any time you felt the need. If you remain free to claim and exercise your inalienable rights, then you logically must also retain the right to access to the means necessary to do so.

In the case of claiming your right to self-defense, you have the right to secure those means necessary to succeed in claiming them. This right, like the inalienable right itself, remains with you at all times as a logical necessity. Attempts to disarm the public deprive them of the means necessary to defend themselves against armed aggressors. It is no use to say that, once you are attacked, you "regain" this right. Once you are attacked it is too late. If you are standing on the street and some thug threatens you with a gun, will he wait while you go to the gun store to buy a weapon for your own defense? Will he wait while you call the police to come and defend you on your behalf? That is nonsense.

The right to self defense necessarily includes the right to prepare for that defense ahead of time. Because self-defense is an inalienable right, the corresponding right to arm oneself is also inalienable. Not only that, but the fact that the purpose of this right is self-defense, you have the right to secure whatever weapons you feel you may need to defend yourself. It is useless, in a practical sense, to defend yourself with a sword if your aggressor is armed with a gun.

This can easily be seen in how the Second Amendment was viewed prior to the very recent arguments that the government somehow now possesses the right to disarm the public. The government had as standing army long before these arguments were being made. Likewise, communities had established law enforcement long before these arguments were being made. Was the establishment of these viewed as the elimination of the right for the general public to arm themselves with whatever weapons were available? No. In the mid 19th century, you could not only order all manner of hand-held guns, but even cannon, through the Sears & Roebuck Catalog. They would ship them directly to your house.

The right to do this was assumed, therefore the social contracts establishing the police and armies did not constitute an abdication of the right to arm yourself, because they were never intended to defend everyone, everywhere, and at all times. Those social contracts were made with the understanding that there will remain times when the established law enforcement won't be available for any number of legitimate reasons, and, therefore, the people would need to be able to act in order to defend themselves, or even others when the need arose. In order to do this, they must be allowed to arm themselves in preparation for it. The government was not assumed to posses the right to restrict, or even track through registration, the exercise of this right. In fact the opposite is clearly the case. The government is assumed NOT to posses such rights because restrictions would be a violation of the inalienable right of the people and tracking is not authorized by the constitutions that limit the powers of government.

Aphorism #5

2010-04-11T00:00:00.004-06:00

Self-government has very little to do with majority rule.

Aphorism #4

2010-04-10T00:00:00.005-06:00

Humor sometimes lends sophistication to a weak character. We are infinitely amused by those who have nothing important to say.

Response to "In Defense of 'Rights Abdicated'", by David W. Cooney

2010-04-09T08:37:00.003-06:00

It seems to me that our disagreement is on the nature and extent of the social contract. I agree that contracts impose limitations on both parties, but only within the intended limits of the contract itself. In my opinion, your conclusions, especially in regard to the Second Amendment, are only possible by going far beyond those intended limits.

“Under the social contract, the author of any action does indeed relinquish his personal claim to the act in lieu of the delegate. When we say that our government is obligated in some way to perform a duty, the only way we can rightfully reclaim that obligation is by unauthorizing the government's claim. The people and the government cannot both act in the same capacity at the same time. That is the social contract which is fundamental to the existence of government.”

I agree with this completely, however you must keep in mind the intent of the contract itself. According to what you are saying, if I hire you as my personal bodyguard, to protect me from harm at all times, I necessarily give up all right to protect myself. That simply does not follow. For you are only hired to assist me in the area of protection, just as the government and local law enforcement is hired to assist us in securing our right to protection.

You say that the one hired and the one hiring cannot act in the same capacity at the same time. That is only true according to circumstance. If I hire you to negotiate a contract on my behalf, it is true that I cannot directly negotiate the same contract at the same time. (However, even in that case, you are not necessarily empowered to make offers I do not personally authorize, for you are hired to represent my interests; nor are you necessarily authorized to sign the contract and bind me to it without my final review and approval for ratification is a separate act from negotiation.) On the other hand, if I hire you as a bodyguard and someone starts shooting at me, there is no aspect of our contract that suggests we cannot both draw guns to shoot back.

“I consider the right to protection to be an inalienable right. However, this is not the same right as the right to bear arms, which would only provide a means of protection. There are other ways to secure protection besides bearing arms personally.”

True, but it does not follow that, because I choose, at this time, not to bear arms personally, I have contracted with another to bear arms on my behalf in certain circumstances, I completely waive my right to do so in all other cases. As I stated above, the restriction against acting in the same manner at the same time is not universal. It is a conditional obligation even in social contract theory.

“I know that you won't be able to fulfill the obligation under the contract and therefore I retain the right for myself also. This equates to delegation made in bad faith.”

“It is a fact that David's rebuttal is in complete agreement on this point since it specifically uses the language of bad faith”

This is a gross misinterpretation of what I said. The government, federal and state, are authorized to take up arms as a means of securing our right to personal protection against other governments. The police are authorized to take up arms as a means of enforcing the laws and apprehending criminals. These are the limits to the authorization and therefore the limits to the social contracts themselves. Therefore, those who argue that the Second Amendment does not constitute an abdication of our personal right to bear arms do not make the social contract one of bad faith. Indeed, all contracts are based on the assumption of good faith when entering the contract, but also include, at least by implication, protection against any party acting in bad faith once the contract has been established.

Therefore, as long as the government is not a tyranny, it maintains the right to act on our behalf. As long as the police enforce the law and apprehend criminals, they maintain the right to act on our behalf. However, what protection do we have if the government or the police fail to act? Have we, by entering this contract made ourselves completely helpless without them? That is nonsense. The only way to secure the protection against bad faith actions in the case of arms is by retaining the personal right to bear arms. This is completely consistent with the social contract.

Your argument is based on taking the social contract far beyond its intention. You twist my statements about the limitations of the police to make them sound as though I am claiming that, because the police cannot protect everyone, everywhere, and at all times, this constitutes bad faith, because of which we can once again reclaim our personal right to bear arms. That is incorrect. The specific things I listed, and which you quote, are precisely the original limitations of the social contract we have established with the police when we empowered them. Therefore, the social contract itself never constituted grounds to deprive ourselves of the personal right to bear arms. For the police are only hired to assist us in our right to personal protection and typically fulfill this obligation very well. However, the implied limits of the social contract (the fact that they cannot protect everyone, everywhere, and at all times), along with the only means to enforce our rights in those cases where some police office may actually act in bad faith, not only imply that we maintain the personal right to bear arms, but actually necessitate the retention of that right even if we do not personally choose to exercise it.

“In other words, there arise ways in which we may not bear arms and we must also procure special government permission in order to conceal and carry them. With regards to our rights, we become casuists, subdividing rights and applying them to specific cases.”

This is completely wrong. Authorizing the government to act on our behalf in defense of the country and authorizing the police to act on our behalf in defense against crime does not logically result in our needing special permission to own, carry, or even to conceal arms. For the very limits of the authorization does not grant the government complete control over the use of arms; that would be beyond the intent of the social contract and a violation of it. The fact that this argument fails to appear before the 20^th century, or maybe the late 19^th, even though governments and local law enforcement have existed for millenia, shows the complete absurdity of the argument. Historically, the only people government armies and local law enforcement were ever authorized to disarm were slaves. Free citizens, for that matter, even the partially free serfs of the early Mediæval period were allowed to own, carry, and conceal arms on their person.

“By my argument I do not deny that there can be other reasons for the right to bear arms and in fact I made this very point: The power to bear arms may still not be infringed even if the antecedent is false..”

“If the second amendment is a definition, then it is a biconditional proposition and it is absolutely true beyond question that there exist no other reasons to suppose we have a right to keep and bear arms other than to secure the State against the tyranny of federalism.”

“Instead, we continue to grant federal power for a professional specialized military force against which the State cannot be secured by militia. The right to bear arms is clearly abdicated for this reason. What we retain is a regulated privilege to bear arms.”

The latter statement only holds true if it can be proven that the former statement is true. However, no such proof exists. Just because the US Constitution makes no mention of other reasons for the right does not mean it is making an absolute definition. The most we could conclude on the matter is that the authors of the Constitution considered the reason given as sufficient to satisfy the concerns of the Anti-Federalists and therefore, no mention of other potential reasons was necessary. Therefore, it would follow that the Constitution is neutral regarding other potential reasons for the right.

“Freedom is sometimes found in the transfer of obligations. If, rather than a personal obligation for the security of the State, or for the education of children, or the maintenance of health, or the production of goods etc., we elect to pay (probably a tax or a wage) for someone else to do the job for us, then we can be theoretically "freed" from the obligation. One meaning of freedom is not having obligations to distract us from the other pursuits we feel are necessary to our happiness.

How curious is it that we often give up rights in order to become free and that freedom has come to signify dependence on others rather than independence?”

Again, hiring someone to help fulfill a right does not signify an abdication of the right, or obligation that goes with it. If I have an obligation to educate my children and cannot do so myself, I have the right to hire someone to do what I must, but cannot. That is merely an exercise of my rights in regard to the obligation, but it does not remove that right or obligation from me. Therefore, I do not transfer to the other the right to decide what constitutes a good education and completely abdicate my right to all say in the matter. The obligation to educate my children remains with me along with the obligation of evaluating how well the person hired is performing his side of the bargain. If I find him lacking (acting in bad faith after the contract was entered), not only do I have the right to either take on the burden of educating my children myself (home schooling) or finding another educator for the task, I have the obligation to do so. When the law removes those rights from me, I have ceased to be a free person.

In Defense of "Rights Abdicated"

2010-04-08T10:14:00.008-06:00

In his partial rebuttal to "Rights Abdicated", David Cooney presented the following arguments with respect to my demonstration of the abdication of rights based on a logical analysis of the second amendment:

That there may exist other reasons besides the reason cited in the second amendment for the right to bear arms, therefore this right is maintained even if the reason given by the founding fathers is falsified. David's argument claims that "Rights Abdicated" denies there can be any other reasons. It is further claimed that the argument does not consider the full context of the wording of the second amendment.
That Hobbes' contract theory fails utterly and that rights are in fact simultaneously delegated and retained. Support for this is taken from the fact that, in the case of military or police, a delegation of the right to bear arms cannot successfully fulfill needs in all cases, leaving individuals with the right to bear arms in those cases where the military or police fail to provide protection. Although people have authorized military and police, they still have the right to individual protection.

First, I want to point out that my claim about the abdication of rights is not limited to the second amendment. The second amendment simply provides a good way of demonstrating the idea because it is written in argument form and may therefore be subjected to logical analysis.

Secondly, I want to reiterate that formal logical analysis is not subject to "intuitive" notions of logic. It may be the case that I have mistranslated the conditional or misunderstood a nuance of the formal system and thus arrived at my conclusion in error, however the conclusion itself is quite beyond opinion if the conditional is interpreted correctly. Appeals to anecdotes that outwardly appear unjust or unfair under the required conclusion nevertheless do not change the truth value of the proposition. Nor do historical vagaries change the truth value of a proposition; they merely serve to illustrate the erroneous ways that men are inclined to adopt.

Finally, I wish to note that parts of David's rebuttal are presented as if they are in conflict with what I have written when in fact they are in perfect agreement with my argument. In this regard, the rebuttal actually provides good examples of precisely what I am not claiming in my argument on the abdication of rights.

Social Contract

The first argument I wish to address is the second argument stating that Thomas Hobbes' claim that rights cannot be simultaneously delegated and retained is somehow warped or illogical. Taken as a whole, Hobbes' philosophy may be 'warped', but it is not without reason. The founders of the American republic did not construct a wholly new philosophy in plain view of the burning wreckage of Hobbes' system. Rather, the social contract is fundamental to the Western style of government. It is not a wrong or abandoned idea; on the contrary, the social contract is a First Principle of liberal government and an axiom of our founders' political philosophy.(1) To discredit it is to cast our theory of government into the fire.

Under the social contract, the author of any action does indeed relinquish his personal claim to the act in lieu of the delegate. When we say that our government is obligated in some way to perform a duty, the only way we can rightfully reclaim that obligation is by unauthorizing the government's claim. The people and the government cannot both act in the same capacity at the same time. That is the social contract which is fundamental to the existence of government.

The social contract works because not all of our rights are inalienable. An inalienable right is one that a person cannot physically give up to some other entity. For example, how can one transfer one's life to another? According to John Locke's philosophy, property is created by the act of labor and therefore can't be changed into the property of another since labor is a defining attribute of property (e.g. it is still "Rembrandt's painting" or "Stradivari's violin" in spite of who "possesses" the property). According to Adam Smith, one cannot consciously work toward a goal of unhappiness or against one's own interests. According Hobbes, one could not willingly submit to imprisonment or torture. All of these ideas influenced the founding fathers.

I consider the right to protection to be an inalienable right. However, this is not the same right as the right to bear arms, which would only provide a means of protection. There are other ways to secure protection besides bearing arms personally. If a person has a right to something, but not the means to secure the right, it is not necessarily the fault of the social contract or of some other externally imposed injustice.

We can authorize another to protect us, to feed us, to raise our children, to keep us healthy, to build us shelter, to make us clothes, and to fulfill many of our personal obligations. We may contract with another to perform many things that we would otherwise have the right (if not the power) to do for ourselves. Part of this important freedom of transferring the alienable rights to means forms the basis of associations and of community, and as I have mentioned already, of liberal government.

Bad Faith

In order to refute my argument, the rebuttal would need to address footnote #12 in which I claim that delegation itself implies that a right delegated is an atomic entity and that whenever the right is delegated and simultaneously retained, this can only be an act of "no confidence" against the delegate; a type of injustice or contradiction. A falsehood.

The no-confidence rule essentially states that, although I authorize you to act in my name, I know that you won't be able to fulfill the obligation under the contract and therefore I retain the right for myself also. This equates to delegation made in bad faith.

It is a fact that David's rebuttal is in complete agreement on this point since it specifically uses the language of bad faith:

...no one with any use of reason can argue that the police are meant to be everywhere at all times.

...they typically arrive after the fact.

...they are responding to crime, not preventing it.

..the police cannot always be there to provide it.

In other words, we have authorized an organization to act in our name that can't provide us with the protection we claim a right to. Hence, it comes as no surprise that police officers and military personnel might hold the opinion that civilians ought to protect themselves whenever possible. We claim the right to protection, but no longer have faith in the power to secure it when we delegate it to other people.

In such a state of bad faith, those who suspect that the delegation of powers will not fulfill the contractual obligation of protection might take up arms for their own protection. This would not be entirely unjust if the delegate were actually in breach of contract, although the proper course of action is to remedy the situation by first retracting or reducing the authorized powers through modification of the social contract. This is the rule of law.

A more likely scenario for the so-called "retention" of rights is that--realizing, a priori, the weakness and limitations of those whom we authorize to act in our behalf--we only transfer a portion of the powers authorized by our right to the third party, retaining only reduced powers that become justly regulated.

In other words, there arise ways in which we may not bear arms and we must also procure special government permission in order to conceal and carry them. With regards to our rights, we become casuists, subdividing rights and applying them to specific cases. When this happens, it is not an infringement of the rights when we must refrain from acting as police or soldiers, but rather a voluntary abdication of rights under the social contract. This is the regulation of rights.

In a separate vein of thought, it matters less to the subject that they have a right to something if they do not have the effective power to satisfy the right. Also, if the power of a right can only be achieved through a delegation of that right to a corporate entity, then it is still nonsense to say that the author retains the power that he otherwise would not have in the first place. Here I am making a distinction between rights and powers.

The material point of all this is that the individual and the government may not justly act simultaneously in the same capacity. Therefore, rights must be delegated and not retained under the rule of law. Rights also become subject to regulation when sub-divided and delegated. This is not contrary to the American theory, but essential to it.

Sound Logic

The first argument in the rebuttal states that my logical analysis is deficient. In fact, if we look closely at the argument, we see that the rebuttal actually agrees with what I originally claimed, therefore it cannot succeed to show deficiency. By my argument I do not deny that there can be other reasons for the right to bear arms and in fact I made this very point:

The power to bear arms may still not be infringed even if the antecedent is false...

I am quite aware of the logical outcomes of an implication, which is the form that I presumed that the second amendment naturally takes. If the second amendment really is a simple implication, then we must suppose that there could possibly be any number of other reasons for the right to bear arms.

What I did claim is that an implication, where the antecedent is shown to be false, is unsound by reason of modus ponens. In other words, I am saying exactly what the rebuttal claims I am not: that the right, if it remains, remains only because of some other unexplained reason and not by virtue of the nature of the right as explained by the founding fathers. Therefore, the second amendment is unsound not by opinion but by the laws of logic--a fact sufficient to demonstrate that this right to bear arms itself is susceptible to social contract because the natural reason (protection from tyranny) is superseded by some other arrangement that precludes us from enjoying the right according to the original intent. The rebuttal did not address modus ponens.

My logical analysis may be deficient in another way. It has been pointed out to me that the second amendment is most likely a definition and not an implication. I am persuaded by this assertion because legal documents do not typically deal in implications, only in the definite. Therefore, the fact that the founding fathers chose to qualify the conditions of the right to bear arms requires us to presume that the right (which is a natural right that requires a reason) remains intact if and only if the antecedent remains true.

If the second amendment is a definition, then it is a biconditional proposition and it is absolutely true beyond question that there exist no other reasons to suppose we have a right to keep and bear arms other than to secure the State against the tyranny of federalism. If we aren't maintaining our arms to that end, then we hold them against our own right or only under regulation. This result is guaranteed by the laws of logic in spite of whatever personal feelings we may hold. It is very significant that the founding fathers qualified the right to bear arms by bringing into view the natural basis for the right itself.

This biconditional interpretation is very plausible. The Bill of Rights is clear in stating that there are other rights not enumerated. It states no such thing about reasons.

Some Rights Are Obligations

The notion that all of our unclaimed rights are inalienable is incorrect. The Bill of Rights does not require us to take up our rights, nor does it prohibit us from assigning them to another entity under the social contract. The logical analysis of the second amendment is a clear proof of this: We are not required to retain the right to bear arms because we are not maintaining well-regulated militias in order to protect State interests from federal power. Instead, we continue to grant federal power for a professional specialized military force against which the State cannot be secured by militia. The right to bear arms is clearly abdicated for this reason. What we retain is a regulated privilege to bear arms.

Some rights, such as the right to bear arms in order to preserve the security of the State, demand individual and community attention. The militia was once understood to be a civic duty, or an obligation.

Freedom is sometimes found in the transfer of obligations. If, rather than a personal obligation for the security of the State, or for the education of children, or the maintenance of health, or the production of goods etc., we elect to pay (probably a tax or a wage) for someone else to do the job for us, then we can be theoretically "freed" from the obligation. One meaning of freedom is not having obligations to distract us from the other pursuits we feel are necessary to our happiness.

How curious is it that we often give up rights in order to become free and that freedom has come to signify dependence on others rather than independence? I alluded to this more than once in my original argument.

Ever since the mid-nineteenth century in America, the pursuit of happiness apparently coincides with the pursuit of financial gain, of power and influence, and of material goods. In order to get gain and have "the greatest good", we must not hold too many personal obligations that would disturb us from the singular pursuit of more than we need. This is a monumental tragedy indeed, but I maintain that my original argument is basically sound and that the basis of this tragedy is not to be found in the unjust infringement of rights by a corrupted government, but in the freedom held by a corrupted and forgetful people. Liberal democracy ensures, as George Bernard Shaw once observed, that we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

1. It has been suggested that the central principle of liberal self-government--the social contract--is incompatible with Catholic social teaching (see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Criticisms_of_natural_rights ). The social contract presumes a somewhat different genesis of rights than does Christian and specifically Catholic teaching. Because of this, social contract theory would allow a people to pursue interests that are contrary to Christian principles, which I believe is adequately demonstrated in the state of American democracy today. I know that David Cooney is quite sympathetic to the ideals of Catholic social teaching, as am I. While I admit that social contract facilitates the pursuit of greed and excess, I also believe that it can be equally useful toward the ends of Christian democracy. I believe that we have used the social contract to drift ever further from the original intent of the founding fathers. This perspective may help to clarify my purpose in writing the original essay on "Rights Abdicated".

Aphorism #3

2010-04-07T07:58:00.003-06:00

Nuclear weapons are like lies. It is risky to continue maintaining them but disastrous to stop. Not only does the committed liar live in a perpetual state of anxiety, but he is often indignant when dishonesty is revealed in others.

Rebuttal to "Rights Abdicated", by David W. Cooney

2010-04-06T21:20:00.004-06:00

If any of these conjunctive predicates is false, then the antecedent is necessarily false also; if the antecedent is false, then the argument—though still valid—is no longer a sound argument. The power to bear arms may still not be infringed even if the antecedent is false, however, it will no longer be the case that this is due to the nature of the right to bear arms.

The problem with this argument is that, while you admit that there are rights not enumerated in the Constitution, you seem to deny that there can be any reasons for the specific right of the Second Amendment other than the one that is listed. This is false. Simply stating one particular reason does not mean that there are no others that could be used to maintain the right. Therefore, even if all of the given conjunctive predicates are false, you cannot reach the conclusion you have attempted.

Your argument fails to take the full context of the wording, as it was understood by its authors, into consideration. The specific mention of “a free State” was included to address the claims of the Anti-Federalists that the new Constitution would allow the federal government of the Republic to become a tyrannical authority over the otherwise sovereign governments of the States in the federation. Therefore, the federal government was, and still is, prohibited from establishing a standing army. I realize that this notion is pretty much a joke these days, but it was a very serious issue when these words were written.

According to the political philosophy that I briefly explained at the beginning of this essay, in such a condition as this, it is not a matter of opinion that the right of the people is voluntarily given to the government and no longer retained. In the specific case where a well-regulated militia is superseded be the delegation of coercive power to a professional organization, if the people still enjoy a right to bear arms, it is only in the form of a privilege.

For reasons that Thomas Hobbes explained, it is not possible to posit the simultaneous delegation and retention of rights without doing mortal harm to the very idea of government.

This is where Hobbes' argument fails utterly. In Hobbes' warped view that liberty consists of freedom from bondage, the argument seems to imply that granting the government a standing army means that individual liberty is guaranteed. History shows this to be absolutely false. Granting a government the right to have a standing army does not mean that the government has been granted the sole right to redress all injustices for which necessitate the use of arms. Otherwise, the establishment of a federal army would also eliminate the right for a local police force. After all, if granting the federal government an army in our name removes from us the right to take up our own arms, then it must follow that it removes the right of the local municipality to take up arms as well.

Yet, this is plainly not the case. By granting the federal government a permanent army (which we have not yet done in this country, even if that is the practical reality), we have only granted the government the authority to use the army according to the proper function of the government, namely defense of the country. Since there are many realities of life that may require the use of arms but don't constitute an armed threat to the country as a whole, the right of the individual to keep and bear arms is logically retained.

Indeed, it cannot even be used as an argument against the continued right for each State to maintain its own militia. The purpose of the Second Amendment was to protect each State from the potential tyranny of the federal government. Therefore, each State, in order to remain free, retains the right to maintain its own militia for that purpose. This is clear from the debates that took place at the Constitutional Convention as well as in the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers.

However, even the permanent establishment of State militias would not imply the abdication of the individual right to arms for the same reason that the establishment of the federal army doesn't. The purpose of the militia is only to defend the State which brings us to the establishment of police forces. What is their purpose? To enforce the law and capture criminals. However, no one with any use of reason can argue that the police are meant to be everywhere at all times. The reality is, as most police will readily admit, is that they typically arrive after the fact. Most of the time, they are responding to crime, not preventing it. Most police officers in the United States are ardent supporters of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

The woman who, after working late, has to cross a dark parking lot to her car still has the right to protection, and the police cannot always be there to provide it. Therefore, she logically has the right to arm herself against the very real threat of attack; likewise the shopkeeper who is confronted by robbers; the person sitting at home when strangers break in; and the law-abiding woman in the diner who was forced to watch while her parents and several others were shot in front of her while her gun was locked in the trunk of her car.

Additionally, it is not only the state that has the right to protect itself from the potential of tyranny by the federal government. The individual also has this right in regard to both the federal and the state governments.

In conclusion, the statement of a specific purpose for protecting a particular right does not mean that there can be no other purposes for that right, nor does it mean that the right is dependent on those purposes rather than an imperative right held by individuals according to the Natural Law. The granting of any right to a government does not constitute the abdication, even voluntarily, of that right for the individual, for the individual must naturally retain the right to protect himself against the government's abuse of that granted right.

Aphorism #2

2010-04-06T11:11:00.003-06:00

A people whose understanding is shaped by feelings rather than by definitions is a people that exists beyond the possibility of persuasion by argument or reason. Such people must be manipulated or coerced.

Aphorism #1

2010-03-25T10:11:00.002-06:00

Organized religious and political groups are useful things. They give a name and a shape to all of the diseases of character that are naturally present to some degree in everyone. This provides a great service to the non-affiliated who can, with deceptive reason, point their self-righteous fingers at the devil they hate and pretend exemption from the ills they see.

Rights Abdicated: The 2nd Amendment and an Appeal to Logic

2010-03-23T13:21:00.025-06:00

In this essay I will explain how rights can be lost without being infringed. I will begin with a short exposition of Western political philosophy followed by the concept of rights in the American Republic. I will make a logical analysis of the second amendment to demonstrate the transience of rights by delegation.

In conclusion, I will show that in order to gain more material substance and convenience, the people will delegate their natural rights to a higher entity and therefore lose them.

Western and American Styles of Government

I recently compiled a partial list of notes and favorite passages from my various readings. As I worked on this project, I came across several interesting passages from my reading of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is fundamental to Western political philosophy—his social contract theory was taken up by John Locke and by every other Western political philosopher since then.

Hobbes wrote that, in his natural brutish condition, "every man has a Right to every thing; even to one anothers body. And therefore, as long as this naturall Right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man[.]"(1) Hobbes claims that peace, the first fundamental law of nature, is only possible when "a man be willing, when others are so too... to lay down his right to all things[.]"(2)

From this voluntary abdication of rights arises the possibility of government, which is an entity authorized by the people to act in the name of the group (Hobbes thought that the ideal sovereign would be embodied in a single individual, such as a king). Any rights delegated to the government are no longer held by the people(3), unless specifically granted back to the people (in the form of privileges) by the government.

There are—according to Hobbes—certain rights that people are physically incapable of giving up of their own volition. These are inalienable rights and, for Hobbes, they are limited to life and liberty (in this context, liberty refers to freedom from bondage).(4)

The following aspects of Hobbes' philosophy will seem familiar to most Americans:

1) Rights originate in people and are natural
2) People authorize government, therefore government also originates in the people
3) Some rights can't be given up or delegated to the government except in the state of war

What distinguishes the American theory of government from that proposed by Thomas Hobbes? Hobbes' idea of Rights is based on materialism—what is physically possible(5)—and also in his view of humanity as essentially predatory and competitive(6)—perennially engaged in the pursuit of personal gain.

In contrast to this view, the American founding fathers had a more refined belief both in a general type of humanity that is basically good and of natural Rights that are fundamentally teleological. In simpler terms, the basic American view of humanity was that people are generally intelligent and can reason about cause and effect, ends and means, actions and consequences.

In the American system, the natural rights of people are considerably more constrained by affordances, effects, ends, and consequences. In the words of John Locke, "though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence[.]"(7) Conversely, to gain more license, a people must risk becoming less free. This is why John Adams claimed that the American theory of government was suitable only for what he termed a "moral and religious" people; the type of people Hobbes believed in truly would not be capable of the burden and responsibility of self-governance according to the laws of nature.

Under the American Theory, People Retain Rights

Because of the differences between the Hobbesian and American views of the nature of humanity and the nature of rights, a very different result is effected also in the nature of government. Where Hobbes requires his depraved people who live in a dangerous world to grant all(8) of their inalienable rights to the sovereign for the sake of peace, the founding fathers had their "moral and religious" people retaining all of their natural rights except for those specifically granted to the government.

Some members of an early American faction, known as the Anti-Federalists, were worried that many people might mistake the new federal government with the European Leviathan of Thomas' Hobbes political theory. Many individuals would still believe that the government is authorized by the people to assume all rights except for those specifically enumerated as remaining with the people in the reduced form of privileges.

This fear that the Anti-Federalists had is one of the main reasons for the existence in the American Theory of a "Bill of Rights" comprising the first ten amendments to the United States constitution. This document does enumerate several of the most evident of the natural rights retained by the people. Most important among the Bill of Rights amendments, however, are the ninth and tenth amendments which together clarify that there are many additional rights that are not spelled out and that nevertheless these rights are retained by the states or by the people by default. The language further implies that some or all of these rights belong to the same class of rights that are delegated to the federal government, that is, "alienable" rights. In order to govern themselves, Americans would need a "right to regulate rights" at a local level or even to delegate certain additional rights to the federal government through the amendment process.

Because of this flexibility, the United States Constitution has built into itself the capacity to form a Hobbesian-style government in which all rights are regulated—excepting those cases in which there may be questions about what precisely constitute "inalienable" rights beyond life and liberty.(9)

The Second Amendment is an Argument

The Second Amendment reads as follows:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The Second Amendment is the only amendment in the Bill of Rights that is written ex modus ponendo ponens. This means that the amendment takes a certain argument form in which the antecedent must be true in order for the consequent imperative(10) to be guaranteed true also. All other amendments are simple imperatives.

As I stated earlier, natural rights are not arbitrary "licenses." There must first be a reason for the right, and that reason must exist naturally. The reason for the Second Amendment imperative, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," is found in the antecedent: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State."

In general, the second amendment is a zeroth-order conditional proposition. If we examine the antecedent closely, we see that it consists of first-order predicates: There must exist some militia which is a well-regulated militia; there must exist a state which is a Free State; there must exist some function(11) of necessity which combines the the State and the militia in order to establish security.

If any of these conjunctive predicates is false, then the antecedent is necessarily false also; if the antecedent is false, then the argument—though still valid—is no longer a sound argument. The power to bear arms may still not be infringed even if the antecedent is false, however, it will no longer be the case that this is due to the nature of the right to bear arms.

Rights Are Abdicated, Not Infringed

The second amendment contains a number of implications. The principal implication was addressed above; another implication has to do with the purpose, constitution, and regulation of a militia.

There is a possibility that there is no well-regulated militia within the state.

It could be that the State is not a Free State.

Or maybe it isn't true that a militia is necessary to the security of a state; perhaps some other arrangement will equally suffice.

It is this last possibility that is most important to the discussion of the abdication of rights. Sometimes liberty is a burden and responsibility. In other instances, when liberty is transferred from the individual to the group, action can become more effective and efficient. In the face of increasing external threats, this transfer of rights may become a necessity for survival.

In the case of security, a people may elect to form an entity that is authorized to provide security in the place of their voluntary individual contributions. They may establish a professional police organization or hire a mercenary force or provide for a regular standing army that is never disbanded.

According to the political philosophy that I briefly explained at the beginning of this essay, in such a condition as this, it is not a matter of opinion that the right of the people is voluntarily given to the government and no longer retained. In the specific case where a well-regulated militia is superseded be the delegation of coercive power to a professional organization, if the people still enjoy a right to bear arms, it is only in the form of a privilege.

For reasons that Thomas Hobbes explained(12), it is not possible to posit the simultaneous delegation and retention of rights without doing mortal harm to the very idea of government.

Conclusion

Those who advocate the delegation of rights to efficient economic, military, medical, corporate, or educational organizations and also demand the continuation of these same rights at an individual level, are in error.

It is logically impossible both to promote a strong military and also claim Second Amendment rights, but the strong professional military is certainly more powerful than the well-regulated militia.

It is impossible to demand universal "health" care and also demand the right to be treated according to one's own individual preferences, but the universal health care system will be more efficient at treating more people in a way that is statistically predictable.

It is impossible to establish a system of universal schooling and still allow each pupil to pursue his or her own personal interests and methods of self-education, but the universal schooling system will guarantee that more people are qualified for employment in a mass-production capitalist economy.

It is impossible to create a mature and regulated money-based economy and yet expect also to have people who are self-sufficient and who own productive property, but the regulated money economy may provide a greater wealth to a greater number.

The whole point of a State in the Hobbesian model is not merely to subsist, but to use all of the rights at its disposal in precisely the way in which individual people may not use them: to establish itself as the dominant world power. This is only possible when people magnify their rights by giving them up through the mechanism of delegation. If a nation's ambition is to compete (the strongest military, the best health care, the smartest engineers, the biggest economy), then the people must relinquish their rights in order to remain in the race.

1. Hobbes, Thomas.(1651) Leviathan. Kindle Edition, developed electronically by MobileReference. Locations 1346-48

2. Ibid, locations 1352-54

3. Ibid, locations 1498, 1817-19, 2332-34 (for example)

4. Ibid, locations 1628-31

5. Ibid, location 178

6. Ibid, locations 1302-7

7. Locke, John.(1689) 2nd Treatise on Government, chapter 2.6. Kindle edition, from MobileReference. Locations 2629-30

8. Hobbes, location 1498

9. Hobbes, locations 1377-78

10. A proper imperative is not a logical sentence. The imperatives found in the Bill of Rights are legal imperatives and are therefore bivalent logical sentences. When a legal document states that a right "shall not be infringed," this is a very serious statement. Some might say that, regardless of whether or not people have such a right under nature, or whether or not the argument supporting the right is sound or even valid, if the legal imperative exists (typically identified by the word "shall"), then it will always evaluate as "True." In other words, the Second Amendment can (and presently does) represent an unsound argument, but the right to keep and bear arms remains an imperative. The implication is only that the Bill of Rights is weakened and made unsound. This is an unfortunate side-effect of enumerating retained rights: "you can have your cake and eat it too." The reality is that the second amendment has become a legal fiction since nature in fact abhors a contradiction.

11. Using the formal QL language, I had some question as to whether or not the security function could or should be written as a second-order predicate function. I refrained from including any formal language in this essay for fear of being too obtuse and thus hindering the argument. There are few who are familiar with formal languages. The main point of the logical exercise is to demonstrate that the argument is not subject to agreement or disagreement. Bivalent language is either true or false.

12. Delegation implies that a power is an atomic entity. If I delegate all rights to my work to a corporation under the "Work for Hire" rule, then it would be a conflict of interest for me also to retain my right and continue to use my work for my own personal gain in direct competition with the corporation. The master who delegates a power to his servant and then retains the power unto himself acts in bad faith and undermines the power of the servant.

Science Does Not Demand Belief

2009-12-10T11:46:00.006-07:00

... but Scientism does.

Scientism is what Chris Mooney (author of Unscientific America) advocates. He thinks that scientists and their supporters "must work to influence public opinion, and anticipate and thwart the skeptics." Ironically, this isn't what science demands--it is what True Believers demand. Under this system, scientists assume the roles vacated by discredited religionists under a new modern secular mass movement, replacing old ideas with a new metaphysics of value which is always completely unscientific (by definition) in order to craft a worldview that is a viable context for meaningful and moral human action. This is ostensibly done with "science" as its foundation and framework, which is of course nonsense.

Science doesn't say anything about value. It can quantify physical and empirical properties of things, but it can't give direction on what those properties should mean to humanity, philosophy, politics, religion, or economy. We have to infer those connections from another value context which is intuitive to humans but never scientific. There are no scientific tests for human rights, for acquaintance, for aesthetics, for morality, for being, or for value. It is impossible to prove that these things exist in an empirical domain; they rely ultimately upon subjective conviction.

People don't operate under the rules of science which level all measurable things in a sort of objective equality. Humans naturally stratify things into value groups, and that is what has ultimately brought about "ClimateGate." It isn't good enough merely to do science for the sake of finding things out; it has to mean something. It has to be important. When it comes to praxis, there is also a moral dimension because application always involves human action. None of those are scientific phenomena, but they begin to lead scientists in different circles more familiar to those who seek religion. We soon find that there are scientists who see data where there are none to be seen; scientists who desperately need to advocate a cause. In the end, Scientism gets in the way of science. It's just another religion.

None of us possess all of the objective facts. We don't do primary research of a generalized nature (few of us do any at all); we increasingly specialize. This requires a great deal of faith in other specialists who claim to have the first-hand knowledge that we lack. In this regard, we are something like those who once waited for Moses to come down from the mountain. While the true prophet of religion is measured on a scale that weighs the purity of his causes, the true scientist is identified by his lack of any cause at all. True scientists are the ones who don't evangelize--they don't have a reason to influence public opinion or to thwart skeptics. When scientists forsake science to become activists, like Chris Mooney thinks they should, that is when things like "ClimateGate" happen.

Leisure

2009-09-07T10:14:00.000-06:00

In 1858, in the midst of turmoil incident to the American Abolitionist Movement, James Henry Hammond addressed the 35th United States congress with a speech that would later become known as the Mudsill Theory. In his speech, Senator Hammond claimed that all societies are built upon a class of people "requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill." Such a class was a necessary prerequisite of "progress, civilization, and refinement." Hammond said that a race of people "eminently qualified" for this role in society had been found for the south: "We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves."

At this point in Hammond's speech, things get interesting. Slavery, said Hammond, could be done away with in word only -- "the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that."In support of his assertion, Senator Hammond pointed to the only class of people worse off than slaves: those who relied, for their subsistence, on a wage paid out of someone else's pocket. Hirelings are "essentially slaves," said Hammond; only, without the perks. Hammond claimed that his slaves were well compensated, "there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either." In Senator Hammond's view, it was far better to be a slave than an employee.

In 1859 an Illinois Senator, Abraham Lincoln, refuted the mud-sill argument. Interestingly, this refutation did not include support of a working class of hired labor over a class of chattel slaves. Instead, Lincoln claimed that Free states didn't have a mud-sill class at all; almost everyone was self-employed! And those who weren't, Lincoln claimed, were just working their way up to it. The hireling was a transitory phase leading to self-sufficiency. According to Abraham Lincoln, America didn't need slaves of either stripe.

Six years and 360,000 dead Union soldiers later, the name "slavery" had been abolished from America, but not the thing. The institution had merely been transformed, and in July of 1894, in an unconscious vindication of James Hammond, Federal troops killed numerous laborers in the Pullman dispute. The strike was broken on August 3, and six days afterward the 53rd Congress bestowed national recognition to "Labor Day" (at the emergency request of President Cleveland) in a futile attempt to quell the anger. Grover Cleveland learned the hard way that it's often poor policy for a government to murder its own citizens.

Woodrow Wilson re-enshrined the Mudsill Theory with his "class of necessity" before America entered into World War I. Over a decade later, in the desperation of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "The American Dream." It is true that sometimes we don't find words for things until we lose them and wonder what it is that we lost. Abraham Lincoln was wrong.

At the turn of the 20th century, economist Thorstein Veblen tackled the mud-sill theory from the other end, publishing in 1899 his Theory of the Leisure Class. The book was not an exposition on the nature and practice of leisure, but rather an investigation of Darwinian-style institutional economics; of what happens when leisure meets money and power.

Veblen said that, as a society matures, some of the people will find that they can escape the need for full-time subsistence labor. This is done through the means of exploit and predation upon a class of industrious and unrefined (i.e. "those of a low order of intellect"). In Veblen's own words, industry "is effort that goes to create a new thing, with a new purpose given it by the fashioning hand of its maker," while exploit "is the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to other ends by another agent."

The leisure class coincides with "a transition from a peaceful to a consistently warlike habit of life." Leisure must be preserved by predation and by inflicting injury on others (ostensibly to protect the economy or preserve the way of live). "the ancient tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is to be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men."

The rich and powerful wear leisure as a badge to distinguish them from the lower classes, thus in the distinction of class, "the performance of labor has been accepted as a conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes itself, by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically base."

Veblen said that time had to be consumed in ways that are not productive "as evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness." From this idea arises the now-famous term, Conspicuous Consumption. There must be visible evidence of worthiness for one's exalted position in society, which demands excess and waste in the highest degree. From this perspective, the first institution of ownership "has begun with the ownership of persons..." Human resources, if you will. Ironically, this feeling of ownership does not extend to family ties; "the reputable maintenance of a child is very considerable and acts as a powerful deterrent."

Conspicuous consumption turned superfluous things into commodities and then into necessities of life. Things that had been done without in the past would become indispensable to the present. Even religion was a thing to be consumed, without the actual need to follow a particular precept or to mind inconvenient "commandments." Religious devotion was a putative thing; meant to be worn on the sleeves and displayed as a public adornment.

To the leisure class, utility and beauty become a function of cost. You get what you pay for. Under the law of conspicuous consumption, "admission to the [leisure] class is gained by... aptitudes for acquisition rather than serviceability."

In modern times, Veblen said, the "lines of demarcation" between the classes would become "vague and transient." In such a condition, the "norm of reputability imposed by the upper class extends its coercive influence ... down through the social structure." Each class would accept as its ideal of right living the form practiced by the next higher stratum. The dignity of the poor would not allow them to cast aside some "last trinket or... pretense of pecuniary decency" (better to starve); the middle class (a well-compensated class of people among whom there was "no starvation, no begging, no want of employment," to use James Hammond's verbiage) would fill its spare time with petty consumption, recreation, and ease.

Education for the leisure class gains as its "dominant aim... the preparation of the youth... for the consumption of goods, material and immaterial[.]" As for teachers, "administrative ability and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than they once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching." The idea of work would become limited to only those activities likely to produce pecuniary gain while the standard of living would reach and even exceed the earning capacity of the class. Regardless of the situation, the tendency would be to live beyond one's means.

There is, however, a certain dissatisfaction with belonging to a leisure class. It is that nobody wants to feel useless or unproductive. Veblen said that people have an internal instinct for workmanship. How can there be a reconciliation between the ideal of conspicuous waste and the human need to produce?

It would be done through the "make-believe of purposeful employment." The leisure class would invent for itself "duties of a ceremonious nature." There would be much coming and going and a great deal of talk; they would become talkers and take their place among the most busy of all people. This new kind of "work" would leave little time to reflect on the "economic value of their traffic." A whole new type of false production was imagined: man invented the MBA. Leisure would be filled to the brim with management.

**********

Leisure, when corrupted by money and power, is no better than idleness and extravagance. But it has not always been the case for leisure to be viewed exclusively as an indicator of class distinction or economic success. It's true that leisure is more precious than gold. Leisure is the mother of philosophy and an essential vehicle for the development of character.

David McCulough said that, to the American Founders, the pursuit of happiness "didn't mean long vacations or material possessions or ease. As much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit. It meant education and the love of learning, the liberty to think for oneself."

In twenty-two volumes of British National Biographies detailing the lives of noteworthy individuals, there are nearly a thousand instances of leisure. In not a single case, that I could find, did leisure coincide with idleness. These notable people, almost without exception, filled their leisure with literacy and a passionate pursuit of self improvement.

"I must study politics and war," wrote John Adams, "that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

Is it fair to view John Adams' vision as a litmus test for the success of the American experiment? In America, do we have time for leisure? If so, how do we spend it? Is ours a culture of economic and conspicuous consumption that relies on the toil of lesser classes, or is it a culture of refinement, education, and self improvement where Americans are self sufficient?

Gatto, Farragut, and the Nature of Machines

2009-07-28T17:07:00.034-06:00

I just finished reading John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction. It took me four days to do it, compared to the months it took me, slogging through the epic Underground History of American Education. Part of that is because Weapons is a shorter read, and maybe a little bit easier too. Another part of it is that I'm quite a bit more literate now than I was then.

In 2003, I lost the best job I had yet been in. In a panic, I sold our little house and eventually sought low-paying employment programming financial software at a multinational mega-corporation while I pursued what I thought would be a beneficial education at the University of Utah. This was during the tech bust that followed the dot-com boom of 1999 and 2000. We rented a small apartment that kept the family close — when we were together — and I spent my time between work, school, and my small replica of the Armed Virginia Sloop (which I finished building in less than two years, in spite of my insane schedule).

The only really interesting thing I learned at school that year was how to make a blind continuous contour drawing. My math teacher was so useless that I started skipping class regularly, teaching myself at the kitchen table instead. To my knowledge, I'm the only one who achieved a perfect score in the class of about 200 students. I got a 4.0 GPA for the term; other than that, I don't remember anything about my schooling (well, there was once when I almost got crushed by a train while trying to find a shortcut across campus in the dark. But the risk shaved about five minutes off my walk and I was able to get home early that evening). Today, I'm a college dropout.

It was also in those days that I began to feel a vague uneasiness about the upbringing of my two kids.

I began to realize that I hadn't been sufficiently programmed to fit the image of "father" that I had been taught about in church. It was the dormitory model that I pursued instead. My three-year-old wanted bedtime stories and playtime with dad, but I wanted to do my own things after a crazy day at work and school. It occasionally bothered me that I spent so little time with him. I don't even remember what my daughter was interested in as a fourth-grader at Midvale Elementary school. All I remember was that sometimes I had to pick her up from school, that once I went to a parent teacher conference, and that there was mold growing in her bedroom closet.

I wondered who my daughter was, or who she was becoming. Even had I wanted to be an engaged dad, the short windows of actual human interaction enforced by lives lived away from home made the prospect of my daughter turning into a decent adult seem like a twisted sort of lottery. I counted on other people not to mess her up. It wasn't a good feeling.

In 2003, the best education I got happened during the frequent train rides between work, home, and school. It was the only leisure time I had, other than occasional after-dinner spurts of work on the model sloop (also quality education) when there was no homework to worry about.

Some friends of mine, Aaron and Diana, were homeschooling their kids. Sometimes they talked about it with us, and one way or another, I ended up with a loaned copy of Oliver DeMille's "Thomas Jefferson Education" which I read on the train. I must have been inspired by something in that book because soon enough I was consuming every classic I could get my hands on. I read Defoe, Verne, Goldstein, Richard Feynman, Roger Lancelyn Green, David McCullough, among many other classics related to my own profession. Once, on a visit to Aaron's house, he pulled out a copy of Gatto's "Underground History" and began quoting passages from its pages. It was mostly boring stuff; I couldn't understand it. I wasn't interested in education or in schooling at all, only in forgetting about it. What in the world is pedagogy, and why would I ever care to know about that?

But the schooling problem still nagged: I was walking on that line between trusting my kids to the invisible hand of the public school lottery (Look, I turned out OK! I work for a successful fortune 500, spending most of my conscious hours in a 4x4 cloth-covered cubicle worthy of Dilbert!) and the unknown world of homeschooling that I once perceived as the exclusive realm of crazed conspiracy theorists and deranged, maladjusted cranks. I decided that if my homeschooling friends thought Gatto had something important to say about school then I would read it and then make my decision.

The Underground History was not an easy read, but in the pursuit of it, something happened that I hadn't experienced since I learned to speak fluent Portuguese in the early '90s. As a result of that effort (accomplished largely on the streets of Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) my mind was expanded to new thoughts, never to shrink again. As I struggled through Gatto's prose (often with multiple re-readings, with the aid of a dictionary, and with Wikipedia), I felt and understood ideas in a way that I had never experienced before. It was real education like I never knew, and I could hardly explain the sense of it even if I possessed Gatto's own considerable talent for exposition. I realized for the first time what it felt like to come face-to-face with greatness, and that was a life-changing moment.

Gatto spurs and prods. He is a revolutionary, a trouble-maker, a dissenter, a rule breaker. He is the kind of man who can give a calm lecture at an upscale school (by invitation) right here in America, armed with nothing but independently verifiable facts, and be forced from the podium by the police before he is allowed to finish his speech. That's how dangerous his ideas about society and freedom are, even in America. His writing can be angry, shrill, agonizing; but it is all true. Mostly true; true in the important, overarching sense.

Gatto is a conspiracy theorist worth listening to, because he bothered to do the research needed to sketch legitimate pictures of actual reality. He knows how to connect dots or at least how to ask the important questions, like Neil Postman, Eric Hoffer, Aldous Huxley, and all of the other great Noticers the world has ever seen.

How do I know? Because the allegations Gatto levels against schools (himself a decorated veteran of the New York public school system, an English teacher of some 30 years experience) are so serious, so monumental, and so intricately detailed that I had to look into it for myself. It seems I suddenly lost my disinterest in schooling and education.

So I read Hobbes, I read Adam Smith, John Locke, Hugh Nibley; I'm on track to finish everything Eric Hoffer ever wrote. I was introduced to Niel Postman; I discovered the Catholic Distributists quite on accident (McNabb, Belloc, and Chesterton among others), and I've even read a great deal from the Pope (Benedict XVI). As a non-Catholic, I'm quite impressed, really. I have my fingers in Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, and Newton; some of them still waiting for more anxious scrutiny.

Gatto cracked open a whole new world of yesterday, today, and tomorrow; showed me that I am allowed to make my own connections between people and places and ideas and things that happen in this world. I don't have to wait for the textbook assignment. Now my appetite for this kind of learning is insatiable. This is the love of education that prepares a man for freedom, the kind that Thomas Jefferson knew was the only hope for America.

All of my reading and personal observations have, up until now, proven to me that Mr. Gatto is overwhelmingly correct in his mighty harangue against public schools, and against most kinds of schooling in general.

I also find that I can criticize Gatto on some of the particulars.

For instance, David Farragut didn't exactly sail a captured British ship to Boston at the age of 12, Like Gatto claims in Weapons. He even has some of the story a bit out of order in The Underground History. I checked the facts myself.

It is true that David Farragut was only 12 years old when he was given command of the HMS Barclay as prize master — an occasion in which Farragut had to overcome the rage of a much older British captain whom he subordinated (Gatto recounts this bit, if I recall). On that particular cruise, Farragut had already completed the second year of his service in the Navy.

Now, the Barclay wasn't a warship, it was a whaler captured by the US privateer, Essex (itself, a fifth-rate frigate useful mostly for prize taking). Farragut sailed the Barclay from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Valparaíso, on the coast of Chile, where he rejoined the crew aboard Essex as midshipman. He didn't sail to Boston, but it was a great feat nevertheless.

The Essex was later attacked by the combined forces of a powerful British fourth-rate ship of the line and a smaller sloop of war. It was then that Farragut first experienced the horrific carnage of naval battle, another character defining moment. During the battle, Farragut — considered an officer — was charged to "do his duty" against a fellow crew mate, "a quarter gunner named Roach," who had deserted his post in awe of the advancing British forces.

Of that experience, David Farragut wrote:

"The most remarkable part of this affair was that Roach had always been a leading man in the ship, and, on the occasion previously mentioned, when the Phoebe seemed about to run into us, in the harbor of Valparaiso, and the boarders were called away, I distinctly remember this man standing in an exposed position on the cathead, with sleeves rolled up and cutlass in hand, ready to board, his countenance expressing eagerness for the fight: which goes to prove that personal courage is a very peculiar virtue. Roach was brave with a prospect of success, but a coward in adversity."

A keen observation, for a teenager. Don't you think?

Farragut would have been 13 at that event. In the end, the Essex was badly beaten and those still living who hadn't deserted were captured. The crew, including Farragut, were paroled by the British and, by stratagem, the captain escaped to rejoin them in New York to a hero's welcome. Heroics don't always include winning.

Reading David Farragut's cruise diary is like reading fiction. How can these things happen to ordinary people, much less to "children"? How can mere kids be so magnificent? Gatto may be technically inaccurate about David Farragut, but even Gatto doesn't do Farragut justice. Not by half.

The stories of David Farragut, of Thomas Edison, of George Washington, of the founder of my own Church, Joseph Smith (One of Farragut's contemporaries, getting his leg cut open at the age of seven, having refused anesthetics, possibly around the same time of year when Farragut was sailing to Chile); they all really bother me.

I once led a group of church boys. I was in the business of teaching them that they had great potential. They were choice people, perhaps the best young people in the history of the world. They had powerful true doctrines and a powerful heritage to live up to. They had the very power of God to reckon among their virtues. And yet all they wanted to do was talk about XBox and pop culture! Some of their forbears walked in theological darkness, by my estimation; yet they commanded ships, ran successful businesses, walked barefoot and fatherless across vast tracts of America, and talked to God like Moses once did. All this because they stood as men, not as boys. They had done just what Paul once suggested in the book of Corinthians and put off childish things.

In 2004, a researcher by the name of Dr. Jay Giedd reported that, in spite of the human brain being materially complete at age 12, it takes until at least age 25 before the synapses are sufficiently "pruned" for an individual to exhibit judgment advanced enough to be considered "adult."

Far from interpreting Dr. Giedd's work as a wake-up call to action against a system of learning that is so flawed it keeps us childish until at least age 25, we now use this research as an excuse for everything from jurisprudence to insurance claims. We have been absolved of all fault. Our biology has predestined us to stupidity; adolescence is a greater disease than we first suspected.

John Gatto says that if we are still treating kids as little children much beyond the age of seven, then we are doing them a huge disservice. Oddly enough, the Mormon Prophet, Joseph Smith said the same thing: when any child reaches the age of eight, let him be accountable for his own actions and a full-fledged member of the congregation (with its attendant responsibilities — no small order) if he should so desire.

At age twelve, we consider worthy male members of the laity qualified to wield the authority of God in ministering to the Church. No schooling required. That used to mean something. Smith claimed that God revealed these things to him, and I can believe it. Today we barely allow our eight-year-old to walk on his own to Cub Scouts, half a block from home. What happened? Gatto knows.

Is it any wonder there is such a mess of broken homes in our communities? I can't seem to escape stories about it on the Mormon media these days. Have you ever seen kids play together, especially young siblings? Not five minutes can pass before they've resorted to physical violence against each other. Could divorce be largely a result of adult children getting married? Do you think it's important for people to grow up? John Gatto shows us just how schools are designed to ensure that never happens — and why.

There are other nits I can pick with Weapons of Mass Instruction. The open-source learning metaphor, with its cathedral and its bazaar, and used without citation by Mr. Gatto, comes from an idea published by Eric S. Raymond, a computer programmer who was preceded ideologically by Richard Stallman (another alumnus of the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab).

What has happened to me? How is it that I begin to discover the provenance of ideas not even properly cited by the author? I would still be ignorant of Mr. Gatto's little sin to this day, except that I once read Eric Raymond's book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, on that train to and from the University of Utah in 2003. It is a treatise on something called "open source" software. There is a long-standing dispute between the Free Software ideal and the Open Source ideal. Richard Stallman still bothers the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery with his insistence on Free Software instead of Open Source. Dr. Stallman wrote the essay "The Right to Read." Gatto might be interested in it (available here). I would have never known all this, except that Oliver DeMille, who studied one of the most brilliant men in American history, told me that I could educate myself about my own profession by going straight to its classics. So I did.

Perhaps I differ from Gatto in the nature of Conspiracy that is afoot in the world. Hobbes envisioned an artificial man; Adam Smith, an invisible hand. I have worked with artificial machines for long enough, coaxing them to do what I want, to know that they are all psychopathic creatures in spite of the best intentions of their stewards. I say this in all seriousness.

Not long ago, a friend and I traded ideas over stir-fried eggplant at a local Chinese restaurant. My friend, Paul, is probably the most brilliant programmer I know. Without any college degrees, Paul is presently Chief Technology Officer at a tech firm with customers like Facebook, Harvard, and NASA. He's interested in the anarchist philosopher, Jacques Ellul; and it was Paul who introduced me to Niel Postman's work, among others.

During our lunch, Paul was telling me all about psychopathy from his latest reading (a book called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go to Work, if I remember). Paul was working on hiring some new employees and was interested in discerning emotional health, hence the incursion into the subject. It turns out that psychopaths are to emotion as the blind are to color. It is often true that psychopaths know all about emotions and that people have such things as feelings, but psychopaths experience little of these things for themselves. They become dangerous when they learn to manipulate emotions in other people by carefully programmed stimulus and response. It occurred to me that business organizations are naturally psychopathic, out of necessity.

Earlier this week, the New York Times reported on Dr. Horvitz, a researcher in machine intelligence, who is concerned that smart machines might someday look down on humanity and get out of control. In spite of this, he feels that research into machine intelligence can benefit humans and perhaps even make up for our failings. To illustrate his hopes, Dr. Horvitz demonstrated a medical machine that could detect negative emotions from a patient's spoken words and then respond with carefully programmed, simulated empathy.

The machine exhibited the disturbing trait of a psychopath: carefully measured response to an emotion that it knew about, but could not actually feel.

The most disturbing part of the article is that, "a physician told him that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. 'That's a great idea,' Dr. Horvitz said he was told."

Now, ask yourself this: Would a master painter cherish praise, even if it came from the blind? So, who craves empathy from a psychopath? The same kind of people who have been taught to believe that praise is important, even if it isn't real. To these, Dr. Horvitz's machine must seem like a miracle.

The irony of this is that we have already subjected ourselves to machinery, described best by Thomas Hobbes as "the Leviathan, that mortal god." The machinery is invisible to us because we are its pieces. Our great social machines make all of this hand-waving about robot overlords seem a little bit silly. We've been trying to automatize ourselves ever since the Industrial Revolution; is anyone surprised that actual automatons would be better at the new humanity than people?

The Leviathan — embodied in any bureaucracy (school, business, or government) — is just as psychopathic as all other artificial machinery. It matters very little how benevolent its stewards, how righteous its members. Each of them may have only the best interests of the commons at heart. They only wish to help the children, the shareholders, the underdog.

Eric Hoffer once wrote that "there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse." Such is the nature of inhuman machines, and those who worship them; whether they be machines of steel or of abstract social, economic, or political systems.

It requires very little actively malicious conspiracy to produce a system of conspirators, as cogs in a clock unwittingly conspire with each other to measure time. This is the sort of conspiracy we are dealing with (and participating in): one conspired years ago, mostly by men long dead. Philosophers, businessmen, pedagogues, clergy. They all had a hand in it, some of them ignorant of the fact, others perhaps less so.

Gatto tells us all about many of them, and how he has connected their dots together into the modern sickness of forced schooling. I recommend his work to anyone who has courage to read it.

Global Warming & My Letter to the Editor of Meridian Magazine

2009-07-01T11:44:00.005-06:00

Global warming is a topic actively debated in America today. Opinions are divided roughly along party lines.

I am a religious man, and when I read a recent article about global warming from Meridian Magazine (an independent, Latter-day Saint publication), I was skeptical. In summary, Brother Lawrence feels that Global Warming could be a subtle tactic to distract good people from believing in God. I felt inclined to respond to that, feeling that it was more inspired by faction than by God.

Due to my lengthy prose, I rarely get published; but this time the editor put my letter up in full (Why Are We Angry When Others Tell Us To Do Better?).

I was one of only two writers who did not agree with Brother Lawrence's idea. The letter is under-attributed (I always like to source my ideas), but you can see that it is influenced by some of my recent thoughts that I have posted here.

Since this letter was posted to a religious forum, my argument is not as secular as what you might expect to see on this blog. My general opinion is that religious arguments are the poorest and least persuasive (since they require something from the audience in addition to -- or aside from -- pure Reason), but when I speak to the religious, I like to speak on religious terms.

Property and the Wrong Road

2009-06-24T16:31:00.018-06:00

Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which is their own; nay, they learn to love the very soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands, not only food to eat, but an abundance of the good things for themselves and those that are dear to them. -Leo XIII

In my last essay on property, I appealed to the common-sense reasoning of G. K. Chesterton to demonstrate one fallacy of modern economy. Today's economists, laboring under the delusion that theirs is an empirical science, endlessly seek to distill prosperity from money like the old alchemists sought to turn lead into gold. We fully expect to find "the answer" somewhere between free markets and regulation, making economy an increasingly complex subject (complex like alchemy was and like chemistry is not); thus our notion of property has become more abstract than ever before. There are some — pessimists, we call them — who are starting to feel crowded out by the elephant in the room. They have a sense that the perfect economic recipe will never be found. In the end, they are resigned to "suffer under some combination of capitalism and socialism."1 What other option can there be?

It is a fact that progressive thinking tends to mistrust what used to pass for common sense. The argument goes like this: Who wants to live in the stone age, anyway? Didn't we already try all of the old answers? Didn't they fail? Following this shallow examination, progressives dismiss the brutish past and campaign (like heroin addicts zealously advocating their differing methods of needle hygiene) for the candidate most qualified to wrangle the economy. It is no surprise that we have a new kind of common sense in the Nonsense Age, and I suspect that is because we find ourselves in a different context where the old questions cease to be relevant because we have forgotten what they mean.

The truth is that it doesn't matter much which way we turn once we have already traveled far down the wrong path. That doesn't stop us from arguing about it, though; brilliant, virtuous, and impassioned arguments that congeal into opposing gospels, each with its congregation of savage and loyal adherents. Dale Ahlquist wrote of "this seemingly endless battle where the virtues on either side are doing war with each other[.]"2 It is often easier to see the Devil in the competition than in the opposition.

It is impossible for those who do not stand scratching their heads at the Fork in the Wrong Road to join in the argument between the Lost and the Misguided. Unfortunately, America hasn't seen a leader who does not advocate some direction of either Right or Left (or in between) since Thomas Jefferson faded from living memory. There are precious few who have stepped back far enough to see that we have traveled a road that goes nowhere near where we expect it still to take us.

On the Wrong Road of 21st century politics (and economics), I imagine that prosperity feels something like the synthetic "high" must feel. We enjoy prosperity immensely while it lasts, we know that it won't last forever, and we are frantically depressed when it is gone. But never mind this temporary discomfort; we also know where to go to get more "prosperity" - until it bankrupts us, or until we die of the overdose. Who is really in control of a system that "has its ups and downs?" The invisible hand pushes us along whither it will.

"For it is possible," wrote Thomas Hobbes, "long study may encrease[sic], and confirm erroneous Sentences: and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine[sic][.]"3 It is a remarkably true statement, and it must lead us to consider, when faced with financial and economic disaster, the fundamental premises upon which our system is built.

The Distributists, including G. K. Chesterton, pointed out the elephant of credo quia impossible that stands front and center on the stage of global economics. What I shall demonstrate now is the elephant of false property; the wooden nickel of free-market Capitalism, zealously guarded by men and women who label themselves "conservatives" and imagine a noble calling as stewards of the sacred treasure of their forefathers.

The polymath, Hugh Nibley, provides one of the best definitions of property that I know of:

The words property and private have the same root (prop = priv by Grimm's Law) and emphasize the same thing — that which is the most intimate and personal part of an individual. The Oxford English Dictionary specifies "privatus — peculiar to oneself ... that belongs to or is the property of a particular individual; belonging to oneself, one's own." And "proprius — own, proper, ... property, the holding of something as one's own." Both definitions fall back on Old English agen (German eigen), "expressing tenderness or affection ... in superlative, very own." Webster has "Latin privatus, apart from the state ... of or belonging to one-self, ... single , private, set apart for himself." What is privatum or proprium is therefore peculiar to one person alone (not a corporation). It is something that I could not do without, under any social or economic system, and that would have little interest for anyone else, such as my clothes, shoes, books, notes, bedding, glasses, teeth, comb, and so on. Because they are personal and indispensable to me and of no value to anyone else, they must be inalienable to me, for there is great danger if they fall into the hands of another.4

The Distributists have claimed all along that clothes and shoes are for wearing, that books and notes are for reading, and that all other things have their proper and personal use. Nibley goes further when he tells us that the moment these things become primarily for profit; when their values become money values exchangeable for abstract denominations, they no longer even qualify as property by definition. They become, in essence, something entirely different.

"The word 'property,'" says Dale Ahlquist, "has to do with what is proper. It also has to do with what is proportional."5

From this natural and rational definition of property, the Distributists claim "Father McNabbs' Law," that the areas of production and consumption ought to be, as far as possible, coterminous. In other words, things ought to be produced as close as possible to where they will be consumed, and in proportion to the need.

How surprised would today's businessman be to discover Adam Smith's own view of the excess, the "mere trinkets of frivolous utility" made possible by modern Capitalism? What of the "greatest good" of power and riches, considered to be the final result of the free-market economy?

"Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. They are immense fabrics, which it requires the labour of a life to raise, which threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which while they stand, though they may save him from some smaller inconveniencies, can protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much, and sometimes more exposed than before, to anxiety, to fear, and to sorrow; to diseases, to danger, and to death."6

John Locke once wrote that "it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than [man] could make use of." He then proceeded to explain how the introduction of money, which "has its value only from the consent of men," gives rise to the "disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth." Thus, according to Locke, property arises from the act of labor, which naturally limits "largeness of possession" to that which the laborer can produce and consume (or exchange for what he can consume).7

What this means is that the maker, or creator, naturally owns the work of his own hands. It is the inalienable right to property that Locke wrote about — a far cry from today's "work for hire," where all that we make belongs, upon creation, to the investors (who consequently derive the greatest benefit). The markets and the managers will determine how much abstract money the work of other people's hands can command. By our own American theory, such a contract is impossible to make without some fundamental violation of human right.

It is also in the original, rational definition of property where we find that the real solution to Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" lies not in redefining morality or in dissolving the natural family (ideas that have manifested themselves among progressives in interesting ways since Hardin first proposed them), but in rediscovering what the central problem really is. Instead of "the greatest good for the greatest number" (a proposition that the Communist and Capitalist will both agree is the only important question in spite of their disagreement on how to achieve it), Father Lawrence Smith wrote that "the common good is not merely a matter of what is good for all, but what is good for each."8

The natural law of property, then, is simply "the proper amount of good for each individual." This is a suitable definition to replace the wrongheaded and fallacious definition of property that now exists as a tenet of economics, and until this is done, we risk facing the reality of Hobbes' assertion of false grounds.

Property has nothing to do with things bought on credit or with things hoarded for profit or gain; and nowhere can I find that property is rightly distributed based on merit instead of need.

Another central problem of economy is that the current notion, as a system established on a global or large scale, is a contradiction also by definition. I'll write more about that in a future essay on the principle of subsidiarity.

1. Beyond Capitalism & Socialism, Aidan Mackey, et al. p. 38

2. Ibid, p.33, emphasis mine

3. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (Kindle edition, location 2940)

4. Approaching Zion, Hugh Nibley. From the Essay "Work We Must, but the Lunch is Free," p. 221.

5. Beyond Capitalism & Socialism, p.33.

6. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, section IV, chapter 1

7. 2nd Treatise on Government, John Locke, chapter 5.46-51; Kindle edition location 2974

8. Beyond Capitalism & Socialism, p. 128

My Comments to the ACM, Re: Women in Computing - Take 2

2009-03-06T14:47:00.006-07:00

I indicated in my last post that I would be writing about property in this essay. Since then, I had the opportunity to test the new CACM beta site and leave a comment on the February CACM feature article, entitled "Women in Computing - Take 2." I will defer my next essay on property until next week.

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the monthly periodical published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The ACM is arguably the most respected computing association in the world (of which I am a member).

The ACM is currently presided over by Professor Dame Wendy Hall, of the University of Southampton in the UK. Over the past few years, I have noticed a very focused effort within the ACM to promote the "equal representation" of women in the field of computing. Whether this is due to notable fact that our president is a woman, I do not know.

In any case, the article in question goes into some detail about the numerous strategies that can be employed to bring equal representation to women in the field of computing. Since my comments tend toward exposition, they typically get rejected by moderators. Also, since the idea of egalitarianism is appropriate to the topic of this blog, I am publishing my comments below. The argument I make can be applied to other areas besides computing:

I often read about how women are underrepresented in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.(STEM) I have always wondered exactly what "underrepresented" means. I now see that this is a function of population, given that "the gains listed here, while encouraging, stop short of achieving equal representation and point to the fact that much work has yet to be done."1 Ideally, there would be an equal number of men and women in the field.

Based on this same reasoning, I fear that the Amish are woefully underrepresented, as a minority, in the field of computing. Yet to achieve equity in this demographic would require a certain cultural destructiveness - an intrusion into the lives of people who don't wish to participate in the first place.

Equal participation between men an women in the field of computing is based on unexamined premises. It assumes a general equality in psychological, mental, cultural, biological, and lifestyle aspects of both men and women. It is a sort of egalitarianism that seeks to erase distinctions in order to serve an agenda.

In fact, the APA recently published a press release about a study that examined the participation of women in technical fields. The press release contains the following text:

"Even though institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers... The evidence did not show that removal of these barriers would equalize the sexes in these fields, especially given that women's career preferences and lifestyle choices tilt them towards other careers..."2

While it is important to eliminate all unfairness to women who demonstrate interest in pursuing technical careers, it may be that pushing the ideal of "equal" representation is akin to forcing computer jobs onto the Amish. What valuable attributes are being forced out in order to equalize the sexes? Such an approach is actually detrimental to the notion of diversity. Normalizing people rather detracts from the qualities that make them distinct from each other.

In mathematics, the inequality of values is what makes them diverse and gives them their unique and important features. Equations can only evaluate truthfully when the variables have the right value, regardless of how great or small.

Men and women are not the same. The numeric value "two" is not the same as the value "seven." In math, we do not hesitate to call two things that are not the same unequal. In politics and activism, however, it just isn't done. We must all be different yet equal. Thomas Hobbes once called that kind of logic "absurd."

We have a cultural confusion about what equality means when applied to people. We ought to examine the premise of equality before advocating beyond fairness.

1. Women in Computing - Take 2. By Maria Klawe, Telle Whitney, and Caroline Simard. CACM, 02/09 Vol. 52 No. 2

2. APA Press Release, March 3, 2009. http://www.apa.org/releases/women-math.html

Property in the Nonsense Age

2009-03-02T18:46:00.017-07:00

One of the more amusing aspects of the present "global economic downturn" was the early resistance to the word "recession." It turns out that things like economic recessions are actually self-fulfilling prophecies: once you say it, it becomes true. By this I do not mean that there were no problems with the economy before it received its official designation of "recession;" I only wish to emphasize the highly perceptual nature of prosperity. As far as I can tell, there has been no great material change in the world from the days of our past excess to the days of our present want.

A paragraph published by the Associated Press in late January made an impression on me:

A build-up in business inventories — which in calculating GDP adds to economic activity — masked the fourth-quarter's true weakness. When inventories are stripped out, the economy would have contracted at a 5.1 percent pace in the fourth quarter, closer to the 5.4 percent drop that economists expected. Businesses couldn't cut production fast enough in response to waning customer demand and got stuck with excess inventories, economists explained.1 (Emphasis mine)

In other words, symptoms of economic sickness include excess inventory — too many things sitting on shelves. I picture store shelves stacked with goods and no one around to buy them. This is essentially what the Associated Press is suggesting, that able-bodied people are going without, living in the midst of an untouchable surfeit.

Could it be that after years of consumerism, everyone is finally satisfied and we all went home? If that is true, why do I begin to hear reports of increasing poverty?

Perhaps no one ever wrote more appropriate words for our time than G.K. Chesterton did during the early part of the 20th century:

"No creed or dogma ever declared that there was too little food because there was too much fish. But that is the precise, practical and prosaic definition of the present situation in the modern science of economics. And the man of the Nonsense Age must bow his head and repeat his credo, the motto of his time, Credo quia impossible."2

It requires only a few moments' reflection on the mortgage crisis to realize how far this contradiction has gone. In America, we very seriously regard the condition of paying a mortgage as "ownership" of Real property. If you can qualify for a sufficiently large loan, then congratulations; you can now "own" a home!

The truth is that banks own most homes. It seems that Capitalism is also a collectivist theory, at least in practice.

How is it that "to own" now means the same thing as "not to own?" Is it so we can claim that the "American Dream" is somehow still a reality even for people who do not actually own the type of property that John Locke once considered fundamental to being free?

Today we see that homelessness is on the rise, but not for lack of houses. They increasingly sit empty. I occasionally hear news on the radio of how the present poor economy wreaks equal havoc on the general quality of nutrition, but not for lack of nutritious food!

"The Irish have sometimes been accused of unbalanced emotion or morbid sentiment. But nobody says that they merely imagined the Great Famine, in which multitudes starved because the potatoes were few and small. Only suppose an Irishman had said that they starved because the potatoes were gigantic and innumerable. I think we should not yet have heard the last of the wrong-headed absurdity of that Irishman. Yet that is an exact description of the economic condition to-day as it affects the Englishman. And, to a great extent, the American"3

Chesterton went on to discuss the hypothetical orchard farmer who grew nothing but apples. His business plan was to make a profit by selling apples to the whole world. Unfortunately, his neighbor's orchard was full of apples too, resulting in a glut of apples on the market. Apples being so worthless, the farmers couldn't make a profit to buy pears and peaches at the grocer.

What if, instead of selling apples, the farmer could reach out his hand and pluck all types of food from his own trees and from his own garden? And then eat it?

Cynics may cast into doubt whether this is entirely relevant to the present catastrophe. They will call the idea too simplistic. Things are never so simple as this, which is true enough; and finally, we do not all want to become farmers anyway. Of course, such cynics lack sufficient imagination, or perhaps do not understand that the paradox of over-production only serves to illustrate what the right premise of economy ought to be.

It really is as simple as that when we put things in their right perspective and, in any case, "we must understand things in their simplicity before we can explain or correct their complexity."4

I once invited a salesman in from the cold. The gentleman was training a neighbor of mine in the arts of entrepreneurship, and so I had previously agreed to the presentation which included an interesting discussion on how one ought to properly use other people's money to "grow wealth" for one's self. We reviewed my financial situation, including the status of my mortgage. In the shelter of my warm and cozy dining room, this salesman proceeded to show me, by infallible mathematics, the ways in which my money did not work for me. It turns out that in those days I might have used my house as a type of leverage to get even richer — which is apparently what houses are good for.

Had I taken his advice then, my family and I might very easily be homeless today. This brings us to the rotten heart of the modern notion of economy, the root of the paradox that Chesterton describes in the following way:

"When God looked on created things and saw that they were good, it meant that they were good in themselves and as they stood; but by the modern mercantile idea, God would only have looked at them and seen that they were The Goods. In other words, there would be a label tied to the tree or the hill, as to the hat of the Mad Hatter, with "This Style, 10/6." All the flowers and birds would be ticketed with their reduced prices; all the creation would be for sale or all the creatures seeking employment; with all the morning stars making sky-signs together and all the Sons of God shouting for jobs. In other words, [certain mystics, in the American business world] are incapable of imagining any good except that which comes from bartering something for something else. The idea of a man enjoying a thing in itself, for himself, is inconceivable to them. The notion of a man eating his own apples off his own apple-tree seems like a fairy-tale...

The last result of treating a tree as a shop or a store instead of as a store-room, the last effect of treating apples as goods rather than as good, has been in a desperate drive of public charity and in poor men selling apples in the street."5

Of course, it does not begin nor end with apples.

What is the permanent solution for a broken economy? It is simply that we put first things first, to understand that "the only way to proceed through a complex situation is to start with the right first principle." 6

Houses are first valuable because they are good for living in. Apples are first valuable because they can be eaten. Books are first valuable because they can be opened and read. Clothes and shoes are first valuable because they can be worn.

A bank has no interest in houses for their own sake, only as leverage for something else. To a bank, houses and food and clothing are first valuable because they can be bought and sold.

Insisting that the real value of things is the same thing as the purely abstract monetary value represents a fundamentally flawed premise that will never produce enduring prosperity. This is the Big Lie implicit in modern economics.

In nature, ownership is determined by intrinsic value, not by price. This is the correct first principle that has been forgotten.

In the next essay, I will write a little bit about what property really is and how it is important to the state of freedom.

1. Economy shrinks at 3.8 percent pace in 4Q, by Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press, Friday, Jan. 30, 2009

2. Works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Kindle edition. From the Essay, "Reflections on a Rotten Apple" found in "The Well and the Shallows," beginning at position 111763, by G. K. Chesterton.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

Three Aspects of Liberty: Awareness

2009-01-30T19:00:00.005-07:00

In the previous two essays, I demonstrated how America regressed to a pre-Revolution state that might conceivably seem familiar to the Tories who once enjoyed the unrivaled security and prosperity of George III's empire. In those days, as in other times, intellectuals turned the wheels of revolution and advocated their brand of back-to-nature philosophy in the form of John Locke's Natural Law.

But if freedom has since lost its meaning, as I claim, why is there so little outcry among Americans who still pay lip service to the ideal of liberty? It is tempting for me to say that this is because prosperity, or "way of life," feels so much like our notion of genuine freedom that we can't make a distinction. Certainly that would be a form of ignorance indeed. But the citizens of George Washington's era also enjoyed relative prosperity, yet they rose up against their government. What made the difference?

Our word "liberty" comes from the Latin word liber. When used as an adjective, liber means "the quality of being free" or "lacking restrictions." When used as a noun, liber means "book."

In order to be Liber, a person must be aware. A man who does not examine premises, test his faith, or think his own thoughts cannot expect to become master of himself or of his destiny. Such people would be perfectly satisfied with no real responsibilities and with infantile dependency upon artificial social systems. On the other hand, free men and women are prepared for liberty through literacy and education. A true liberal education is designed to prepare its students for the hard responsibilities of freedom. To be truly free, we must become generalists: "A classical definition of a liberal education is that you know everything about something, and something about everything." 1

A friend of mine recently brought to my attention an article published by the ACM entitled The Five Orders of Ignorance.2 In this article, Phillip Armour lays out the orders of ignorance as follows:

0th Order Ignorance (0OI)— Lack of Ignorance. I have 0OI when I know something and can demonstrate my lack of ignorance in some tangible form.

1st Order Ignorance (1OI)— Lack of Knowledge. I have 1OI when I don’t know something and can readily identify that fact. 1OI is basic ignorance.

2nd Order Ignorance (2OI)— Lack of Awareness. I have 2OI when I don’t know that I don’t know something. That is to say, not only am I ignorant of something (for instance I have 1OI), I am unaware of this fact.

3rd Order Ignorance (3OI)— Lack of Process. I have 3OI when I don’t know a suitably efficient way to find out I don’t know that I don’t know something. This is lack of process, and it presents me with a major problem: If I have 3OI, I don’t know of a way to find out there are things I don’t know that I don’t know.

4th Order Ignorance (4OI)— Meta Ignorance. I have 4OI when I don’t know about the Five Orders of Ignorance.

What should become the central pursuit of a society that is interested in the principle of liberty, considering that liberty can only be secured in an atmosphere of general awareness? Who among us, in addition to heeding our life's calling, should not be engaged in the career of liberty? To be free, we must be educated.

"Ah!" Some might say, "But we already put such a tremendous emphasis on education in America! We understand this requirement for freedom!"

Do we?

Eric Hoffer wrote that "it stands to reason that the central pursuit of a society attracts and swallows individuals who by nature are meant for other careers."3 He also claimed that "the best of our literature, painting, sculpture, music, etc. has not come from our schools."4

So what is the central pursuit of our society, if it isn't liberty or even individual fulfillment? It is the quest for efficiency and innovation; to compete with foreign powers in a global marketplace. Instead of providing us with the liberal education that will prepare us as free men and women, our schools are designed to provide us with the security of good jobs -- to maintain America as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.

In short, we are a massively illiterate people. Yes, we can read the words and (arguably) follow the instructions, but as individuals we no longer own much knowledge or remember first principles. We have traded knowledge for minutia and principles for privileges.

It all comes down to leisure. When I say "leisure," I do not mean that form of largely useless entertainment that we have come to associate with leisure in modern times. In fact, the contemporary idea of leisure is partly to blame:

A great media metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that the content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense... Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different from what it is now -- generally coherent, serious and rational... under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. 5

The truth is that a rational sort of leisure is actually the solution to the problem.

For instance, Hobbes said that leisure is the Mother of Philosophy.

Eric Hoffer taught that leisure is required for a person to grow and mature; time for leisure enables one to leave the juvenile madhouse of constant activity and continual change (this comes from a man who spent many of his leisure hours reading Montaigne and Dostoevsky among many, many others).6

The Mormon religious Utopian and savant, Hugh Nibley, derided the American "work ethic" as pretentious, greedy, and distracting: "Those very popular how-to-get-rich books, which are the guides to the perplexed of the present generation, say we should keep our minds fixed at all times on just one objective; the person who lets his thoughts wander away from anything but business even for a moment does not deserve the wealth he seeks. Such is the high ethic of the youth today. And such an ethic places us not on the level of the beast but below it." 7

The British engineer, C.H. Douglas, ruminated about the 15th century laborer who was "able to maintain himself in a standard of living considerably higher, relative to his generation, than that of the present time."8 It turns out that Christopher Columbus' contemporaries somehow recorded far less time working in the fields providing for themselves than we, in our mechanized and automated age, spend in the office working for someone else.

In contemplating the eight pathologies of character that mass-schooled students consistently demonstrated during his thirty year tenure as a public School Teacher, John Taylor Gatto attributed it to either schools or television. "It's a simple matter of arithmetic, " he wrote, "Between schooling and television, all the time the children have is eaten up."9 The leisure hours of our youth are filled up with equal portions of Global Economy and entertainment.

Gatto traced the blight of modern public schooling to an infancy where fathers had been removed from their homes by a new mass-production industry, from the resulting broken families and moral vagaries that would be put right by a reinvented American State destined to become, like James I, Father of the People; and from roots in the Prussian school system originally designed to churn out professional soldiery that would reign on the battlefields of the Napoleonic wars.

If mass urbanization and industrialization constitute the first great American Tragedy, then the resulting idea of public schooling is a close second. In a system designed to produce efficient workers for a global mass-market economy, we lost the process we needed to become prepared for the unique and individual responsibilities of liberty. Those lessons require moral, character, and mental education that our schools, and now our communities, are no longer equipped to give us. We live, for the most part, with fourth order ignorance.

"Character," Helen Keller once told us, "is not developed in ease and quiet." As of January 28, 2009, and with the sum of $819 billion imaginary dollars, the United States Government (We the People), made an attempt to restore ease and quiet and to defer the development of national character for another day and for another generation. For the time being (it is widely hoped), instead of going home to our families and communities, we will return to our jobs and to our economy and to our silly schools.

Because in America, ignorance truly is bliss.

1. Donald Knuth: A Life's Work Interrupted (CACM interview with Donald Knuth by Edward Feigenbaum), Communications of the ACM, Volume 51, Number 8, p35

2. The Five Orders of Ignorance, by Phillip G. Armour, Communications of the ACM, Volume 43, Number 10, p19.

3. The Temper of Our Time, p.98

4. Ibid. p.38

5. Amusing Ourselves to Death (20th Anniversary Edition, 2006), by Neil Postman, p.16

6. The Temper of Our Time, ch. 2

7. "Work We Must, But the Lunch is Free", Approaching Zion, 1989, by Hugh Nibley, p. 236

8. Quoted in "I Fear No Peevish Master," by Anthony Cooney; Beyond Capitalism and Socialism, 2008, p.17

9. Dumbing us Down, 2nd edition, 2005, byt John Taylor Gatto. p.28

Three Aspects of Liberty: Choice

2009-01-23T16:37:00.008-07:00

Freedom is predicated on the presence of alternatives in the economic, cultural, and political fields. Even in the absence of tyranny, freedom becomes meaningless where there is abject poverty, political inertness, and cultural sameness. -- Eric Hoffer

It is beyond argument that an increase in security coincides with a decrease in possibilities. Security, by definition, is a regulator of risk. Risk is reduced by eliminating potential paths of action, and with them, unknown and potentially hazardous future consequences.

In the computer industry, security is about locking down systems. A secure network is one where ports are closed or well-policed. Well-secured companies restrict their employees' computer activities. At a bank, it is not uncommon for employees to be denied access to instant messaging, to certain internet web sites, and to configuration and software settings. The approved activities are permitted and the forbidden activities are denied through the application of electronic policies enforced by a central governing Information Technology group. The result is that security is greatly enhanced. The risk of infestation by malware is reduced or eliminated. Sensitive data are safely stored where they cannot be accessed by prying eyes. Productivity is generally improved. It could be argued that security is good for business.

Security can benefit the individual as well. If a person decides to eliminate risky behaviors such as alcohol consumption, the abuse of food or drugs, sexual licentiousness, and so forth, he may well expect to likewise avoid the adverse consequences that such behaviors can cause. Security can be had in adopting a positive work ethic and assuming responsibility, in fulfilling duties and in practicing trustworthiness.

Security is the antithesis of freedom. A well-worn quote is attributed to Ben Franklin: "Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both."

If security is such a desirable quality, why must it be at odds with liberty?

In fact, liberty itself requires a certain type of security. Garrett Hardin understood the principle, which he called Hegelian in nature.1 But our founding fathers also understood it, and this is why they reluctantly allowed the Constitution to be amended with the Bill of Rights. It was to be understood that these Rights did not come from the Constitution itself, but were intrinsic human rights that needed to be secured by a limiting of risks presented by excessive government power. So, in order to be free, a type of limiting security must be practiced.

Sometimes security comes as a reaction to fear. We fear death, pain or suffering and we desire to avoid these possibilities.

Eric Hoffer wrote that "It is in the city that man's lusts and fears have free play, and dehumanization spreads like the plague... We savor power not when we move mountains and tell rivers whither to flow but when we can turn men into objects, robots, puppets, automata, or veritable animals."2 As city-dwelling automata, our choices are largely predetermined for us.

For example, building codes are a type of urban security. We will be safe from fire and poisonous gasses because we have installed arc-faulting circuit breakers and special chemical and particle detection alarms. Specific artificial materials must be used with certain ratings and in particular quantities and configurations. This results in safer communities and sturdier buildings that can better withstand disasters.

Earlier this month, a group of Old-order Amish families entered into a lawsuit against their Upstate New York town. The town had refused to grant these families permission to build their own homes without first obtaining specific permits. 3

The Amish said that they would be willing to pay for the permits (since permits also serve as a source of revenue to the city), but were unwilling to conform to some building codes that required engineered materials or electrical wiring. Some of the construction requirements were not compatible with the unique beliefs of the Amish people.

These building codes don't just make us safer and more secure, they also intrude into the separate lives of a religious people who can no longer practice their religion without breaking the law. Liberty and freedom suffered.

Does it make sense to require building codes in dense urban residential zones? Eminently so. Does it make sense to enforce these same codes on self-sufficient rural Amish communities? This is tyranny.

Sometimes security comes as a result of political or professional jealousy, or from the fear of losing a lifestyle or material wealth.

On February 18, a committee will convene in Salt Lake City to hear the case of a group of professional medical practitioners who desire to outlaw the natural birthing process.

Although humans have successfully given birth to children for perhaps millions of years without any medical bureaucracy, this group will require every baby to be born in a room that is sterile only in its ambiance, and in the presence of professionally trained medical staff.

Upon entering the world, the first experience our children encounter will be that of steely needles and burning synthetics coursing through their veins. All of this will be for the sake of security; that no woman or child should suffer or die from a natural birth.

It all has the flavor of professional disdain for natural and alternative health options. Perhaps these professionals are losing too much business to those despicable and pretentious upstarts who know nothing of the One True Path of modern medical practice.

These builders of Utopia will take away our pain and wipe away our tears; and so they will make us empty. We will have no landmarks in our lives against which we may measure any joy, which must fade into a gray contentment and the dull yearning of the soul.

Is it possible there are hills that nature or God demands we climb alone or become forever the less for having been carried over them?

The plans of true believers for our lives may well be better than our own when judged against some abstract official standard, but to deny people their personal struggles is to render existence absurd.4

Liberty comes from within, and so must security. Security is the result of virtue practiced, not of entitlements enforced. We would do well to adhere to the principles of liberty envisioned by our Founding Fathers, in applying the tenets of security wisely and sparingly. Unfortunately, security has become the pursuit of our nation.

1. "It is the newly proposed infringements that we vigorously oppose; cries of 'rights' and 'freedom' fill the air. But what does 'freedom' mean? When men mutually agreed to pass laws against robbing, mankind became more free, not less so. Individuals locked into the logic of the commons are free only to bring on universal ruin; once they see the necessity of mutual coercion, they become free to pursue other goals. I believe it was Hegel who said, 'Freedom is the recognition of necessity.'" From "Recognition of Necessity" in The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin, 1968.

2. The Temper of Our Time, Eric Hoffer, p38

3. AP article, 1/6/2009 1:10:51 PM MST, Amish sue over upstate N.Y. town's building rules

4. The Irony of the Safety Lamp; The Lure of Utopia, from The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

Three Aspects of Liberty: Independence

2009-01-21T15:35:00.007-07:00

America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbears, and true to our founding documents. - Barack Obama

Liberty was the vision for America and the charge of our political philosophy. It was not given to us by our forbears or by the government they created, rather it was defended and advocated. Liberty is a universal intrinsic property and Right of all men that can only be taken away by injustice or by indifference.

Where there is independence, choice, and consciousness there is also liberty.

Independence is the first aspect of liberty.

Thomas Hobbes would have categorized "independence" among the same pile of nonsense words inhabited by "free will." He would probably point out that universal independence is an absurdity and cannot be demonstrated anywhere. Perhaps early theologians sensed this uncomfortable fact when they re-invented their god sans parts or passions, without substance and without being, but finally independent! I suspect that if you were to order a cheeseburger without parts or passions, you would end up with exactly the same thing as our third and fourth-century churchmen: Nothing.

Let us admit that there is little room for "pure independence" within our universe. Being itself demands a hierarchy of dependencies before creation is possible. Existence depends on matter, energy, properties, and laws. Outside of these boundaries, ontology, epistemology, and philosophy all become paradoxical, self-contradictory, and illogical.

However, if we place the idea of independence within a certain context, it becomes a very useful and natural concept. The independence upon which liberty is predicated belongs to a natural human domain. It is not infinite and absolute.

For example, Free people enjoy healthy bodies unhampered by sickness or addiction. Dead or sick people are less free to choose and to act than healthy living people. Thus, freedom itself depends in part upon health and wholeness.

A healthy body requires clean air to breathe, fresh water to drink, wholesome food to eat, and adequate exercise. A healthy body also depends on property, such as clothing and shelter. Physical property requires skill, knowledge, and tools to cultivate and create.

Infants depend upon parents to care for them; children and parents require family relationships in order to thrive. Local community and professional associations are important to secure stability and prosperity for all. To all of this, we must add a sense of spiritual fulfillment, a sense of purpose, and a sense of calling that humans need in order to be genuinely happy.

This web of dependence, far from being the enemy of liberty, is a natural and organic phenomenon. Indeed, wherever these fundamental and natural dependencies are infringed, it is liberty that suffers.

But it is possible for dependence to become artificial and complex, extending beyond or replacing the natural dependencies found wherever artifice is not imposed.

Instead of healthy food and exercise, a person may become dependent upon synthetic drugs and medical procedures.

Instead of depending on his own property for comfort and shelter, a person may come to depend on abstract money and the property of other distant and unknown people.

One may depend on virtual friends, committees, and political parties instead of parents, families, and communities.

Instead of relying on self-command, rely instead on the moral hazard of "technologically preempted" consequences. Choose results instead of actions.

Instead of personal skills, require the skills of impoverished aliens or invisible foreigners.

Unions replace local guilds, power and hierarchy replace common interest; sinecure and management replace actual productive work.

In the place of spiritual fulfillment, put insatiable consumerism and recreation.

Where there was once purpose and calling, there are now citizens ready-made by their government, not to follow their own dreams, but "to meet the demands of a new age."1

The test for independence is simple. Do individuals and local communities have all that they need to be self-sufficient? If not, then they are not Free. Where artificial, distant, and abstract dependencies have been introduced, the individual's influence and capacity for working out his own good and directing his own destiny is greatly reduced or eliminated.

Imagine if some or all of our artificial infrastructure were to disappear, including long-haul trucking, fossil fuels, synthetic drugs and contraceptives, artificial foods and materials; utilities, transportation, and so forth. If we were left thus, only to ourselves, to the care and skill of our neighbors, and to our own productive property, would we live or die? And if we live, could we thrive and progress on our own? This is what independence is all about. It exists at a national, local and individual level.

Our forbears envisioned an independent people, not a people dependent on distant strangers, complex processes, abstract systems, or bureaucracies.

Have we been faithful to this ideal?

In the next essay, some words about choice.

1. From Barack Obama's inaugural speech, January 20, 2009

Truth that is Pitiless and Pity that is Untruthful

2009-01-09T14:44:00.024-07:00

The recent political elections provided a great opportunity to look into the nature of disagreement and argument in America. Have you ever wondered what is at the root of these differences? Our tendency is to adhere to the opinions we have been given, to live our scripted lives. Those who disagree with us are mysterious at best, and dangerous or threatening at worst. Let's examine the invisible premises that divide us.

Generally speaking, there are two schools of thought in America when it comes down to the ideas of Rights and Liberty.

Actually, "school of thought" is an interesting phrase in itself. In this case, the word "school" comes from scole, the old Dutch word, not from the Greek skhole. In other words, schooling is what fish do when they gather in tight groups and follow each other around. I could also argue that the modern implementation of our other word "school," which is theoretically based on the older Greek word for a place of learning, has come to better represent what fish do than anything remotely academic. But that is a topic for another essay.

What are the two schools of political thought in America?

The first major group of people call themselves conservatives. They believe themselves to be the heirs of a true and ancient legacy, faithful stewards of God's own politics. They are marching toward a glorious and righteous Zion. These are the Religious Americans. To them, God is the author of prosperity, and riches bestowed reflect a measure of God's approval and blessing. We associate these with the political "Right."

The second group consist of the self-styled progressives, or liberals. They identify themselves as intellectuals (just as Eric Hoffer described them) and believe that they are advancing the great work begun in the Age of Reason. They are marching toward a grand and secular Utopia. These are the Licentious Americans. To them, if there is a God, He is a god of tolerance and equality. We associate these with the political "Left."

The Catholic scholar, Dale Ahlquist, wrote the aphorism, "truth that is pitiless and pity that is untruthful"1 to describe the spirit of these two groups. I think it is the best description for them that I have ever read.

Truth that is Pitiless

The religious view of liberty is that action can rightly be constrained by taboo. Divine law, revealed through Holy scripture, teaches unquestionably where Rights begin and where they end.

According to the Religious Americans, the United States Constitution grew out of the Judeo-Christian tradition that is recorded in the Holy Bible, thus America must be a Judeo-Christian nation and her Rights are the God-given Rights of the Bible. Preserving liberty is therefore synonymous with preserving religion and religious freedom.

How is this liberty to be preserved? By incorporating into religion a certain reverence for the soldier. In an ironic twist, the religious will put his faith in the arm of man, in the mighty military with its fearsome guns and bombs; the biggest ever! To the conservative, a strong military is a central plank. Righteous Coercion will be the means of conservativism; it does not itself belong to the tradition.

Perhaps these conservatives forget how General Washington's cruisers sailed under a banner that had the words "Appeal to Heaven" on it, and how the Founding Fathers desired to never have a standing army if it were possible. The mistrust of military power is a central principal of sane living, but that is a topic for another essay.

To the Religious American, proof of freedom can often be found in his bank account. He may admit that his particular view of "economy" is not exactly God's view, but that it is the closest we imperfect mortals are likely to ever get. In a logical equivalence, all property has a monetary value, thus Freedom means having plenty of money.

But this wasn't what George Washington thought, or John Adams. David McCullough tells us how appalled the British and Hessian troops must have felt after landing on colonial soil. "The Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. [...] How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was [...] incomprehensible."2 To the Founding fathers, wealth was more than riches and property more than money.

In argument, the religious' language is full of saccharine glurge, patriotic platitudes, inspirational slogans, and lordly pronouncements. He is wont to cast his pearls before the swine, appealing to authority little respected by his opponents; and so his discourse is met with scorn and derision.

Sadly for the Religious Americans, the original American Theory is more Locke than Moses, more Jefferson than Jesus. Though filled with reference to deity, the Founding Documents encode more of the philosophy of men than of God. How could freedom of religion be truly guaranteed if political philosophy was grounded in a discrete religious tradition? Whose god is not a jealous one?

While the Founding Fathers would likely agree that the Rights of man look very much like a particular set of rights that can be interpreted from holy scripture (John Adams is often quoted for his saying that the U.S. Constitution is best suited for a moral and religious people), they would argue that Providence had revealed these Rights through Nature and Reason.

Pope Benedict XVI spoke more accurately when he recently referred to an America that was formed upon ideas of "positive secularism."3 Unlike our modern secularism, which seeks to establish its own fervent beliefs as the supreme religion of the land, the positive secularism of the founding generation was theoretically friendly to all religion.

Pity that is Untruthful

This brings us to the modern secular, or licentious, view of liberty. The licentious view of liberty is summarized in the ukase that whatever I do, if it does not harm another individual, it is my Right. Individuals are free to behave as they please, so long as the behavior does not infringe on the Right of another person to do the same. Beyond a certain egalitarianism, no morality shall be legislated by anyone anywhere. This creates entire classes of minorities who must now be endorsed and welcomed by all with open arms, in spite of any differences. Tolerance now means acceptance.

Philosophically, this thinking is more Rousseau than Locke; more Robespierre than Jefferson. This has the flavor of the French Revolution, an anti-establishment, anti-corporate, anti-association, acutely individual philosophy. It embraces back-to-nature ideals: the human being, living as an animal, can do no wrong. "Wrong" (according to Rousseau and Hobbes) can only be defined once we get civilized. At the root of this system, there can be few or no intrinsic inalienable Rights at all, only as prescribed by the social contract -- perhaps a necessary evil.

Even so, Licentious Americans tend to incorporate the inalienable rights of the Founding Fathers into their worldview: Rights are an enumeration of instincts. Dignified with the language of Thomas Jefferson, this new philosophy says that the things we feel like doing are natural to us, thus we also have a Right to them.

It is a mistaken interpretation of Jefferson's Natural Law which was distilled from the likes of John Locke and Adam Smith; and, although Rousseau and Hobbes both developed coherent systems, they are not the American system.

Indeed, of the licentious, Adam Smith wrote that "a system of natural philosophy may appear very plausible, and for a long time be very generally received in the world, and yet have no foundation in nature, nor any sort of resemblance to the truth."4

Like Hobbes, the licentious are masters of definition. They are the fathers of "political correctness." The licentious re-cast all of the arguments into their own terms so that their opponents are obliged to hopelessly make a case for their own ideals using newly redefined language. The licentious are sophists.

Licentious Americans further confuse science with reason. They wrongly believe that scientific inquiry is an extension of the practice followed by the Natural Law philosophers. They forget that science merely quantifies objective experience and allows us to make concrete statements of fact (mostly reliable). Science does not give us meaning or reveal value, and it never will.

In general, the licentious make poor philosophers and poor theologians. Their application of science to ethics, politics, and religion is often arrogant and sophomoric. It substitutes psychology for philosophy. All action is deterministic and fatalistic; we are a product of our genes and are therefore absolved from blame or guilt. There is no good or evil -- code words for subversion.

Unfortunately for the licentious, American liberty precedes the social contract. It does not live or die with its definition, codified in legal documents. It comprehends more than just life. Liberty is not an enumeration of instincts. Liberty is not truth made.

Conclusion

The jealousy between the licentious system of the left and the religious system of the right fuels much of the argument in America today. What has been long forgotten is the positive secularism of the American Founding Fathers.

In the next essay, I will write about the concepts of independence, choice, and awareness that I alluded to in the previous essay.

1. Beyond Capitalism & Socialism, Part of this Complete Breakfast, by Dale Ahlquist, 2008. p.33
2. 1776, by David McCullough, published 2005. p.158
3. In-flight interview of Pope Benedecit XVI, by Father Lombardi, April 15, 2008.
4. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, "Of Licentious Systems," by Adam Smith, Barnes & Noble edition, 2004; originally published 1759. p.423.

The Non-thought of Received Ideas

2009-01-07T16:28:00.006-07:00

John Taylor Gatto once pointed out "what the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called the non-thought of received ideas."1 I've thought about this phrase considerably in the years since I first read about it. In this age of information excess, even our ideas are not our own.

It is evident that American attitudes toward politics and the principles of American Democracy are derived primarily from Television and Internet sources, mostly crafted at the hands of PR specialists or pundits who recycle the traditional party lines of major political or social groups of the day.

We wear other people's opinions like we wear fashion. While it's possible to feel strongly about such opinions, feelings do not make them ours. We must understand not only what we believe, but why. We own ideas through the process of thinking - even when those ideas originate somewhere else or coincide with the ideas of some other person.

Do we hold principles because of tradition? Because we "identify" with them? Because they resonate with us? Then we are a part of the non-thought of received ideas, simple threads in the tapestry of our culture.

Are we Free if we can't think for ourselves? Then what does it take to become Free?

The tiers of Liberty are independence, choice, and awareness. More on those later.

1. What Really Matters, by John Taylor Gatto, published in Natural Life Magazine, November/December 1994.

A Democracy of Devils

2008-12-20T16:29:00.013-07:00

I want to bring up the topic of dignity because it is at the center of my next subject, which is the principle of Liberty. How we approach the idea of dignity will affect very much how we view liberty.

When I think of dignity, I remember a dog my family once owned that apparently felt shame after being groomed and cleaned. That was the distinct impression I got when I watched this animal sulk and pout and hide.

It seems that dignity is not exclusive to human beings, but of all creatures, it appears most developed in people. Dignity is a pillar of civilized society, the consciousness of character. It is an awareness of shortcomings coupled with the capacity to remedy or, failing this, to conceal.

This sense of dignity constitutes, I think, a part of what C.S. Lewis once called the "tao of humanity." Dignity is not an objective sense, but arises from the measuring of one's self against ideals. It is in part an acknowledgment that there is little self-interest in seclusion; that the selfishness of the lonely consists of longing for the company of others. Dignity is felt because people are fundamentally more social than selfish.

Dignity is the covering of nakedness.

Dignity is the retreat of sexuality from the public square into the private closet.

Dignity is the practice of temperance.

Dignity is the respect of innocence.

Adam Smith taught that the dignified attune the expression of their passions to the sympathies of those around them.

There is also an Aristotelian aspect to dignity: a want of dignity results in licentiousness and savagery while the excess of dignity results in hypocrisy and falseness. True dignity requires frankness and candor in private, but tact and control in public.

After I read Victor Frankl, it occurred to me that the Nazis didn't need the concentration camps for an agenda of mere extermination. Frankl said that the best men didn't survive those camps, but survival went to those who lost their dignity.

The Nazis needed Auschwitz and Dachau and other camps to remind them that their enemies were simply brutes and that they deserved all of the misery that they got. Look how the Jew is miserable and depraved; look how low he sinks. He is not human. He is not even an animal. The Nazis needed to manufacture a devil worse than themselves, and that's what the concentration camps did for them. The most brutal men at the camps, said Frankl, were not the Nazis.

What is more troubling than the loss of dignity through coercion? Just this: that since the days of Auschwitz, men have begun to shed human dignity of their own free choice. Eric Hoffer had an inkling of it. He said that in our age, dominated by self-styled intellectuals, the human being would take back-seat to nature. Humanity, it now seems, should not be allowed to encroach upon the natural world. Humanity itself is unwelcome and depraved, and we should do well to be rid of it.

Thus, today it is fashionable to "come out of the closet." We now celebrate the "natural" attributes that once were considered deficiencies; we rejoice in excess and condemn innocence as ignorance. All is natural and all is equal, and life with its concrete lusts is greater than the abstract principles and vague superstition of dignity.

That's why we feel more humane keeping our worst criminals penned up in kennels, like dogs, than we do sending them to the gallows. We keep them, a weight around the neck of society, because we can't conceive of anything more important to being human than the biological life that animates our flesh.

With all of our progressive doctrine in these modern times, we've only now managed to re-discover the sixteenth century philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, or as W. G. Pogson Smith put it, that truth is not found, it is made. Not only is our pity untruthful, but it is undignified as well.

Is there more to being human than the human being? Is it really better to live an animal than to die a person?

Herman Melville said that "there is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals." This is the flavor of egalitarianism that shapes the landscape of liberty in America going into the 21st century.

No Technical Solution

2008-12-15T18:00:00.004-07:00

In his 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, Garrett Hardin made an interesting observation. He said that there is a class of human problems that have no technical solution. These are the kind of problems that we are constantly trying to solve by inventing better technology; problems like hunger, strife, poverty, disease, and so forth. They have been with the human race out of living memory and probably since before written history began.

To date, there has been no technological advance that has made humanity, as a whole, significantly "better off," whatever that means. We make advances in one area while giving up ground in another. Our artifice can give us new ways to deal with problems, but usually it also opens up entirely new possibilities for suffering at the same time. Think about nuclear power and prescription drugs as two examples.

Hardin's particular problem, the Commons, is another good example. It turns out that we can't simultaneously maximize the variables of population and luxury. In other words, it's not possible for every human being on the planet to live the "disposable" American lifestyle without completely wasting the Commons (i.e., the Earth). I think the assertion is rather unassailable.

Hardin's "non-technical" solution to the tragedy of the commons is aptly named "Mutual Coercion." He recommended the divorce of sexuality from reproduction and the elimination of the natural family as a human Right - a whole new direction for human morality. It's easier for us to enjoy luxury when there are fewer of us around. Hardin was a terrific advocate of The Brave New World; it's unfortunate that Aldous Huxley's prophecy was so dystopian. Perhaps I'll argue with Hardin's solution in a future essay.

What comes to mind, though, is this enormous $700 billion bailout for the Wall Street firms that got in trouble by owning bad debt. Our bleeding hearts desired for everyone to own a house; which is of course the American Dream. But we forgot that renting from the bank and "owning" are two very different things in the Real World, and so our charitable plan of easy debt backfired badly. It was pity that moved us, but it wasn't truthful; like most of the pity our politicians subscribe to in these strange times. A certain notion of property is at the heart of sane living, so perhaps I'll argue that point in a future essay too.

We are trying to solve a problem with $700 billion, a sum that could easily grow an astronomical number of healthy calories from common dirt. Oh, but we plan to buy bad debt from Wall Street speculators. Well, that was the original plan. Our pity said that it was all for the little guy's sake; to make sure he can keep his mortgage. Now it seems that the government wants stock instead, and also we mustn't forget the failing auto makers. So we will take our grandchildren's money (taxpayers won't suffer... yet) and apportion it to the Managers of Other People's Lives. If they go out of business, who will we work for? Freedom feels so strange in the 21st century.

We once solved another problem by drastically increasing the efficiency of our agriculture. We found that we could increase the crop yield of an acre of land to embarrassing proportions. What a fine tool in the fight against hunger! Of course, all of this excess grain goes to feed beef cattle and to make corn syrup, two products that have hardly increased the quality of life for those who still feel hungry. At least we breathed new life into the health industry which is now booming with heart patients and state-of-the-art synthetic pharmaceuticals. Dollars galore. So, you see how technology solves our problems.

Speaking of the health industry, I was a recent witness to a relatively trivial problem at my wife's family Christmas gathering. My wife's aunt accidentally split her palm open with a dull knife. My brother-in-law's wife happens to be a nurse, so she promptly began to apply some rather old-fashioned medicine: pressure and a napkin. But the talk was more technical; it seems we need technology even for simple problems. There are stitches to think about, and of course liquid bandages of the polymer sort. For the ignorant, such marvels include the polyvinylpyrrolidone variety, the methylacrylate-isobutene-monoisopropylmaleate spirit-based variety, or the isooctane solvent based types. All of these probably got their start from the rudimentary cyanoacrylates that Harry Coover invented, used to patch soldiers back together in Vietnam. Who hasn't accidentally glued a finger to something with a bit of superglue? Just keep that caustic stuff away from your eyes and you'll be fine.

My unfortunate wife showed up during the treatment and suggested that a bit of cayenne pepper might be a good idea to stop the bleeding. She's an herbalist, so she says things like that. Well, capsicum is a vasodilator and can equalize blood pressure, so taking it internally can stop light to moderate bleeding fairly quickly (I've even heard rather outlandish claims of cayenne stabilizing bullet-riddled kids, but I'm way too skeptical for that story). The old herbalists still use it topically, in the open wound itself. Of course, this advice is rather alien to the Certified Health Professional, to whom all healing has become an entirely synthetic pursuit. The professional reaction to natural cayenne as a healing agent was somewhat sharp and incredulous, finishing on a sarcastic note from the non-professional quarters (we often have a peanut gallery at those gatherings).

I remembered a time over the summer when I punctured my wrist with a sharp chisel; it's just how I use tools. My first thought on that occasion was how unhealthy I must have been. Blood is supposed to gush red, not purple. My wife wasn't around to help me, but I remembered her cayenne and I put some in my wound and applied pressure to stop the oozing. The wound itched for a day or two, then I forgot about it until the Christmas party. I was going to demonstrate my own scar with the anecdote, but I couldn't find it anymore. I guess I'm a satisfied customer.

Now think about it. If we didn't have pharmaceutical technology and people could just grow their own remedies out of the ground and care for themselves, where would all the jobs go? What would happen if money didn't change hands every time someone got sick or hurt (or if people just didn't get sick or hurt as often)? We'd go bankrupt. Think of the economy!

On a serious note... are there any "noticers" in the world today? Who is questioning the ridiculous but invisible premises of our modern ways? Look for some future essays.

History: Prince de Neufchatel vs. Endymion, War of 1812

2008-12-04T20:42:00.006-07:00

History gives us context. History provides landmarks and paints broad pictures from which we may, with discerning minds, form our opinions and shape our worldview.

I build historic model sailing ships out of bits of wood. Years ago I was at a meeting of the Great Salt Lake Ship Modeling and Research Society when Ken Harris, our President, read a letter he had received from a good friend. He said that men, real men, have art in their blood; and they release it by making things with their hands. The ship modeler shares, for a time, the decks and spars of bygone sailors, pulled from the pages of history.

So I have an affection for maritime history. One of the ships I built is the Prince de Neufchâtel, an American privateer during the war of 1812. I learned a little bit about this vessel from George Coggeshall's 1861 publication, History of the American Privateers. This book has since passed out of copyright and can be had in its entirety at Google Books, for those interested.

Here I reproduce an excerpt from the book, regarding one of the Prince's naval battles. Not only is the history recorded, but we get a glimpse into the life and character of an early nineteenth century American hero. Of particular interest to me is the excellent prose in which this story is related, quite different from the terse and sterile language that we have become accustomed to in later years.

Following this excerpt, entitled "Note to Page 241," I have provided a few photos of my model. Read on!

Note to Page 241

Since the first edition of this work appeared, I have received a more particular account of the desperate battle fought between Captain John Ordronaux, of the privateer The Prince of Neufchatel, of New-York, with five British barges belonging to the English frigate Endymion, off Nantucket, on the 11th of October, 1814; by which it will be seen that under all the circumstances, it was the hardest fought naval engagement and the most conspicuous victory achieved during the war.

It was a contest waged against a force more than three times superior numerically; advancing in separate divisions under the cover of night, and assisted by the presence of a heavy frigate, while at the same time, and as a most serious obstacle of a successful defence, Captain Ordronaux was encumbered with thirty-seven British prisoners, who were refractory and all ready for revolt.

He was therefore obliged to handcuff his prisoners, and confine them in the hold just before the action.

He had recently manned so many prizes that he had left only thirty-three men, including officers and marines at quarters, when simultaneously attacked by five British barges, manned with one hundred and eleven men, beside the before-mentioned thirty-seven prisoners confined below, who were striving to get loose from their manacles, and unite themselves to their fellow countrymen.

Fearing that the British frigate would attack the privateer with her boats, Captain Ordronaux made the following preparation for the contest, beside the usual number of muskets, pistols, boarding-pikes and sabres, belonging to his vessel: He had made a large augmentation of fire-arms taken from sundry British prizes during the cruise, so that his gun-room was literally filled with these implements of death and destruction. He accordingly took the precaution before night to have some two or three hundred muskets and pistols loaded and placed in a position to grasp at a moment's warning.

The loaded pistols were put into baskets and placed behind the bulwarks, so that when the strife should commence, it would not be necessary to reload these weapons. He had also his shot-lockers all filled with heavy shot, to throw into the enemy's boats, and stave in their bottoms, if brought to close quarters, when he could not use his carriage-guns.

Being thus prepared, the brave Captain waited with the most intense anxiety for the approach of the enemy: it was about nine o'clock, the night being dark, they heard the sound of oars at a distance, silently approaching. In the obscurity they could not see the boats of the enemy; a few shot were fired from the Neufchatel in the direction of the sound, to draw a shot from his adversary, with a view to ascertain his position, and how he meant to attack, but the ruse did not succeed.

Captain Ordronaux had no intention of running away from the fight, nor did he mean that the enemy should, when once engaged in the deadly strife, it being well understood by all on board that rather than surrender to the enemy the privateer should be blown up. Such was the condition of things at the commencement of the action.

The Neufchatel lying at anchor, was now fully prepared to receive the enemy, who approached with five barges in the following order, namely, one on each side, one on each bow, and the other under the stern. A warm action then took place with muskets, pistols, sabres and boarding-pikes. The enemy were promptly met and repulsed, and in about twenty minutes many in the boats cried out for quarters, which were granted to those amidships. The men in the two barges under the bows of the privateer, however, succeeded in gaining the forecastle, when Captain Ordronaux, with two or three of his faithful followers, discharged one of his main-deck guns, loaded with canister shot and bags of musket balls. This gun was trained upon the forecastle, which had the effect of killing and wounding great numbers of the enemy, and of driving the remainder overboard. In this discharge he unfortunately wounded several of his own men. The five barges which attacked the privateer contained at the commencement of the action one hundred and eleven men, including officers and marines. One barge was sunk with forty-three men, of whom two only were saved. Three boats drifted off from alongside, apparently with no living soul on board; one was taken possession of. She contained thirty-six men at the beginning of the action, of whom eight were killed and twenty wounded, and eight uninjured.

The Second Lieutenant of the frigate, (F. Ormond, who was not injured,) three midshipmen, two of whom were severely wounded, with one master's mate also wounded, were permitted to come on board. The remainder of the prisoners (fifteen seamen and marines) were kept astern all night in the launch — after taking out the arms, oars, etc., the commander being afraid to trust them on board, having only eight men fit for duty.

After the battle was over, it was found that six of the privateer's crew were killed, and nineteen wounded, beside Mr. Charles Hilburn, a Nantucket pilot who was stationed at the helm during the action; it is stated that he was several times wounded, and finally killed by the enemy. The British in this action acknowledge a loss of thirty-three killed, thirty-seven wounded, and thirty prisoners.

During the hottest part of the engagement the prisoners in the hold were loudly cheering their countrymen to continue the fight, and constantly striving to break loose, while Captain Ordronaux and his First Lieutenant, Mr. Millen, were obliged to watch their prisoners, and guard every point to prevent a recapture from the enemy.

The brave Captain, though wounded, could not be attended by the surgeon, for this gentleman was also wounded in the fight, and unable to assist those who were suffering; so that through this long and dreary night, Captain Ordronaux and his First Lieutenant, Mr. Millen, were obliged to keep guard at each hatchway, with pistol in hand, to prevent the prisoners from breaking loose, while his own poor fellows were lying about the deck, suffering from their wounds, with no one to attend them, or even to give them a drink of cold water.

Thus passed this awful night of painful anxiety. I will leave the reader to imagine the anxious feelings of Captain Ordronaux, and his faithful followers, during the long and sleepless night, surrounded by the dead and wounded, with mingled sounds of groans and curses of those who were wallowing about the deck, while the frigate at a distance was seen burning port fires, and sending up signal rockets for her barges to return.

He also feared that at the break of day the frigate would bear down upon them, and thus defeat all that he had gained in this eventful struggle. At last the morning dawned upon these weary, battle-stained watchers, who had passed the dreary night without once leaving their posts. The colors of the Neufchatel were still flying, though her decks were in an awful condition. Some thirty or forty men lay dead and wounded in every condition of mutilation, while the broken arms and implements of warfare scattered around told how desperate had been the struggle on that bloodstained deck; and now had arrived the most difficult part of Captain Ordronaux's duty. As has been stated, he had but eight men fit for duty after the termination of the action; all his prisoners were to be paroled and landed under the eye of a numerous enemy. He was, therefore, obliged to employ five or six of his men in a large launch, and at the same time to keep up an appearance of strength to deceive his adversaries. He was, therefore, obliged to resort to stratagem to carry out his plan.

Accordingly, he had a sail hung up abaft the main hatches, to serve as a screen, wherewith to conceal the quarter-deck. After this was done, he kept two boys there, one beating the drum, the other blowing the fife, and tramping heavily about the deck, to make the enemy believe that a large number of men were stationed there at quarters, to enforce his orders. Thus while the attention of the enemy was drawn off from his enfeebled state, sixty-seven of the prisoners were passed over the side into the launch, and transported to the shore, where they were placed in the possession of the United States Marshal.

He also landed his own wounded men, that they might be better attended to, and receive more medical assistance than could be given them on board of the privateer. And thus after having landed all his prisoners, except some five or six, who had been paroled, these being young and active he retained on board to assist his crew in weighing the anchor, and navigating his vessel to Boston.

In this adroit management, Captain Ordronaux displayed a vast deal of cool, deliberate judgment, as well as uncommon tact in disposing of his numerous prisoners, and hiding his own weakness in point of numbers.

He showed himself a great tactician, and, like General Jackson, knew how to avail himself of every advantage for enabling a small force to compete successfully with a large one.

A near relative of Captain Ordronaux has furnished the writer of these pages with the brave Captain's journal, the original parol given by the English in their own handwriting, and many other valuable papers and documents, which clearly establish the truth of this unparalleled victory.

I shall, therefore, make no apology for thus discharging my duty to the memory of a distinguished fellow-citizen, by communicating these facts in full. I think it will be conceded on all hands that Captain Ordronaux evinced as much bravery and tact in disposing of his prisoners after the battle, as in defending his vessel against the enemy during the severe conflict. There are many men who can fight bravely, but few who can manage as well as he did, to profit by and secure the fruits of a glorious victory.

On his arrival at Boston, a large number of patriotic merchants and other citizens proposed presenting the brave Captain with a sword and a vote of thanks for his gallantry, but the unaspiring modesty of the heroic Ordronaux begged, through his friends, that it should not be done.

For, so far from coveting applause, his unassuming, retiring disposition, led him to shun publicity of every kind, and often prevented him from receiving that just share of public approbation which his merit so richly deserved; so that the world knows but little of the gallant deeds of this distinguished nautical hero.

The following are photos of the starboard profile, the forecastle, the deck view, and some details.

What It's About

2008-12-03T08:45:00.004-07:00

In his introduction to Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes asks the question, "why may we not say, that all Automata ... have an artificiall(sic) life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts(sic), but so many Wheeles(sic), giving motion to the whole Body..."

In his 1967 book, The Temper of Our Time, Eric Hoffer wrote that "all through the millenia of man's existence the vying with God has been a leading motif of his strivings and efforts." The Hebrew creation mythos reveals a notion of God not only as creator, but as automator, breathing life into His creations.

The Classical legend of cruel Phalaris, and his brazen bull, becomes a metaphor for industrialized America, a place where mortal men have failed to achieve the holy grail of automation. Our machines yet lack souls of their own; thus we meld flesh and blood with iron and steam "to make the Bull of Phalaris Roar."

In the end, our machines remain machines, but our lives become artificial ones. We lie down each night with bodies well-fed and malnourished souls. There are those among us who are artists misplaced, greasing the wheels of global economy:

We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.1

As Eric Hoffer said, "Up to now in this country we are warned not to waste our time but are brought up to waste our lives."

Surviving Phalaris is about returning to sane principles by exploring the premises of modern American culture and understanding.

Here also is a repository of my half-baked thoughts on social and philosophical issues; a private soliloquy overheard by few.

1. From the mission statement of Rockefeller's General Education Board, "Occasional Letter Number One," quoted in "An Angry Look at Modern Schooling," The Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto.

My Comments to the President-Elect: Energy Policy

2008-11-21T15:52:00.001-07:00

To some, freedom means low prices. To others, Freedom means independence. With the recent economic crisis, energy costs have plummeted, particularly for oil and its byproducts. With this refreshing change, I fear we may soon forget what it felt like to be at the mercy of foreign corporations.

I think the primary focus of energy policy ought to be independence from foreign interests.

I agree that our national energy policy ought to be a policy that allows us to be good world citizens and also to better care for the commons that we all share. While expanding offshore drilling and developing protected lands may be a better choice than continued dependence on foreign powers, seeking alternative sources of energy would help us more in the long term. Now that the auto industry finds itself in arrears, it could be the perfect chance to change how we think about energy and transportation.

Ultimately, I'd like to see America's energy production owned and operated by Americans, not by government or foreign interests.

In summary:

1) Energy independence is better than low cost energy.
2) Local oil production is better than energy dependence, but alternate energy is the way to go.
3) Energy production in America should be owned and operated by Americans and energy should be produced closest to where it is used in proportion to local demands.

My Letter to the Senator

2008-11-20T15:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Senator,

I am writing in regards to the recent Senate Bill S.3688, Introduced by Senator Harry Reid. As you know, this bill is designed to provide "bailout" funds to the US automakers, or more specifically, to "automobile manufacturers and component suppliers that have [...] operated a manufacturing facility for the purposes of producing automobiles or automobile components in the United States[.]"

I am writing to tell you that I oppose using American funds to maintain any corporation, US or otherwise, if it means propping up the present status-quo. In addition, I do not consider companies that maintain significant foreign operations to be "US" corporations in any practical sense. Foreign multinationals, even if they consider themselves US corporations, should never receive American money as a matter of principle.

While I feel no compassion for corporations, I am sympathetic to those fellow Americans whose jobs are on the line because of the present crisis. In fact, the managers and pencil-pushers that have no part in the physical production of useful goods reap the highest rewards from the profits. They have now failed even in their sinecure, and are of no further use to the workers who depend on them for their living.

If taxpayer money is to go to these companies, I would like to see it happen only under the following conditions:

1) That foreign operations shall cease. Automobiles are for the convenience and necessities of actual people, not for profit. American cars should be produced where they are most efficiently consumed, that is, on American soil.

2) That the corporations shall cease to be publicly traded, and that once they have been set aright, shall be returned to the hands of those who operate the factories and produce the goods. According to our theory, those who create property also own it. It is an injustice to place ownership of these things in the hands of investors who care little about the goods produced, other than as a means for profit. Such contracts should be discouraged in America.

When healthy and skilled men and women - who live in a land of plentiful resources - find themselves at the mercy of panicked investors and greedy executives, they can not be Free. America has failed them.

We are now confronted with the unprecedented opportunity to return to sanity. We can return to the America where individuals once relied on their own ingenuity, on their local communities, and on the good graces of Providence to thrive on this abundant land. A Free people must never become dependent on "other people's money" lent at usury, nor on the Invisible Hand of a fickle Wall Street, nor on the benevolence of Leviathan.

We have traded our American Dream for the American Illusion, which is the belief that renting from the bank at interest is the same thing as owning property, and that work for hire is just as good as directly owning and profiting from the produce of our hands. Thus a core value of American Democracy has been eroded, i.e., the proper and proportional ownership of private property.

Please use this opportunity to help Americans instead of corporations.

My Violin

2008-11-18T09:51:00.001-07:00

Here are some pictures of the fiddle I recently finished making. I had a lot of help from Will Bartruff, and from my friend Chuck Thomas (he lent me the Stroebel book), and also from a local apprentice, Sam Barker.

One of the things Will pointed out to me is that the strings are supposed to lie over the saddle on the tailpiece, not under the tailpiece, as I have it in these photos. So, I have since restrung it. Sam checked my sound post and confirmed what Will also told me: it is too close to the bridge. He tried to reset it, but I have it a hair too long. Those are some of the improvements I am still making, in addition to thinning my neck a little bit more.

But it sounds great, and you can see how it has turned out. Prior to beginning this project, I had never handled a real violin in my life. Now I am learning how to play it.

I'll be working on a couple more instruments in January.

I Have No Blog

2008-10-07T09:13:00.000-06:00

If you are looking for my website, try http://petermccombs.com. I haven't posted there for a while, but you can see some of my projects.