UWTWCHCGN Part 2: Facts And Allegiances

     Over the years, many have criticized the Church for promulgating a fantasy: specifically, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. The logic, such as it is, runs approximately thus:

• The Church says Jesus of Nazareth returned to life after being crucified.
• But dead people can’t return to life.
• Therefore the Church is trading in fantasy.

     What stands out about the above is the logical fallacy usually called affirming the consequent. The deployment here is moderately subtle, but the fallacy remains. It’s often found in political arguments as well:

• The National Rifle Association claims that firearms in private hands save lives.
• But guns kill people.
• Therefore the NRA is lying (and probably wants to see people die).

     These arguments are comparable in that they fail to mention any relevant facts. The fact most relevant to the first one is the existence of many corroborations of Christ’s return to life. The fact most relevant to the second one was recently provided by the Center for Disease Control: a study, suppressed until recently, that indicates that more than two million defensive uses of a privately owned firearm occur in a typical year. Those facts seriously weaken the arguments above, though they cannot be conclusively refuted.

     When the evidence points in a direction contrary to one’s beliefs, it seems to me that the rational thing to do would be to open one’s mind to the possibility (at least) that one might be wrong. That doesn’t seem impossible in either of the cases above. That having been said, quite a lot of people, when confronted with the relevant facts, react with fury. They attack the “messenger” rather than allowing that he might merely be informing them. The result is often a hardening of the attitudes and a widening of the divide between them.

     We have here a puzzler of some significance. We know from direct observation that Americans don’t enjoy hard words, anger, or confrontation. Yet there appears to be more of it withe every passing day. Moreover, none of it, in any objective sense, is unavoidable. So why?

     Why, indeed.

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     Among our human needs are some of which we remain continually conscious, some which only come to mind on occasion, and some we so greatly dislike to think about that we don’t even admit them to ourselves. Two exceptionally powerful ones belong to that third set. They’re so powerful that they account for most of what we of the First World do.

     Abraham Maslow included one of them in his hierarchy of needs:

1. Physiological needs.
2. Safety needs.
3. Love and belonging.
4. Self-esteem.
5. Self-actualization.

     It seems incontestable to me that the Level 3 need (Belonging) couples directly to both Level 2 (Safety) and Level 4 (Self-esteem). No one can be quite as secure alone as he would be in a group that values him. Similarly, no one can feel that his life is worth much entirely in isolation from others; to live simply for the sake of living is essentially sterile. But this is a side issue that deserves its own discussion.

     The need to belong is most powerful in him who feels insecure and uncertain of himself. A group that accepts him voluntarily provides him with evidence that he matters. Few of us can retain a positive outlook without that reinforcement for our value.

     Historically, the great “belongings” have been provided by churches and nations. There are important similarities between the two:

• Each promulgates a set of mandatory convictions.
• Each demands a degree of allegiance.
• Each requires that the allegiance be demonstrated by adherence to an ethic.

     Other, weaker and more transient “belongings” are available – family; friends; trade associations; clubs for various interests and pastimes – but religious affiliation and patriotism have historically held the top spots.

     It follows that the absence of religious belief and patriotic bonding leave a void that takes a lot of filling.

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     Two men in the mental health field have produced important books about the second of the great, unspoken needs. The first, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, was extraordinarily popular for decades. The second, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, has largely been neglected these past few decades. Both point at the seldom-discussed human need for a life that means something.

     It is especially noteworthy that Peck and Frankl hit upon the same insight:

Frankl: The salvation of man is through love and in love.
Peck: Ultimately, love is everything.

     But what is meant by love in these statements? A superficial reading of Frankl would suggest that it means love of other people, or perhaps of one special person. He makes a declaration of terms in an abstract but memorable passage:

     Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

     Peck is more explicit though still somewhat abstract:

     Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

     The concentration of both writers on spiritual self-extension has been missed by many who claim to be their followers. It becomes particularly piercing in light of the contemporary trends toward secularization, and toward separating sex from love.

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     I’m aware that the foregoing is more indirect even than my usual examinations. As always, I maintain that there’s a method to my madness. I want you, my Gentle Readers, to contemplate the spiritual dimensions of love, belonging, and the need for a meaningful life before I proceed to any conclusions. In particular, I hope to get you to reflect on the commonalities between love of God and love of country. These highly potent sources of belonging and meaning are what bottom-tier allegiants to any of today’s trendy Causes have elected to forgo. Many have also forfeited family love by doing so, as innumerable painful Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners have demonstrated. But with that I veer too close to the ideas in part 3 of this series, and therefore I must withdraw.

What Matters: A Midweek Rumination

     I seldom ask myself whether what I write, whether here or in fiction, “matters.” I do it by choice; it matters sufficiently to me. But I have my moments. One of them arrived yesterday, in the middle of other diverse and troubling cogitations.

     I suppose everyone wants to “matter,” however the word is defined. At least, I’ve never met anyone who hopes that no one is aware of him nor will remember him after he’s gone from their lives. But the intensity of one’s desire to “matter” appears to be roughly proportional to the effort he invests in what he does.

     I’d venture to guess that by that measure, many persons would feel that they don’t “matter” enough. That’s fertile soil for a lot of emotional maladies.

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     “A man who believes in nothing will believe in anything” – Gilbert Keith Chesterton
     “Without God, all things are possible.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

     This brief article should get major publicity. I’m not going to excerpt it; it’s far too striking and important. Please read it all before you continue on with my drivel.

     While author Annie Holmquist notes the powerful negative correlation between religiosity and involvement in some secular “cause,” she doesn’t delve into the understratum of the thing. Yet it could hardly be plainer.

Causes lend “meaning” to their adherents.

     Alternately, an activist “matters” to the extent that his cause “matters.” The relentless promotion of a cause as an issue of inherent justice or a matter of life-and-death can make it “matter” quite a bit...at least to those who swallow the promotion.

     People are willing to do an awful lot for that which “matters,” and therefore allows them to “matter.” The word martyr carries immense significance for exactly that reason.

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     The search for personal meaning by investing oneself in a secular “cause” can result in harm to others. Often it does. After all, if the aim is to “matter,” the rights, needs, and prerogatives of others must take second place at best. This is seldom addressed by contemporary analysts of the “cause” phenomenon.

     For example, recently I’ve become moderately friendly with two “transwomen:” biological men who prefer to live and present as women. They’re not the first transwomen I’ve known; however, my previous acquaintances were severely damaged persons, incapable even of looking after themselves. It was illuminating to meet persons of that persuasion who appear well balanced and capable; I began to think that the syndrome might not always be better treated with psychotherapy than with surgery.

     Well known transwoman Blaire White has something to say about it:

     Regardless of all other considerations, these folks are being badly served by those who’ve taken up their “cause” and raised it to the pinnacle of contemporary issue-urgency. Moreover, those who dramatize the subject through fiction are doing them no favors. The villains in their stories are always political conservatives or Christians: the very groups most likely to treat them with tolerance, even if mixed with some degree of disapproval.

     This phenomenon deserves cautious but close analysis. Among other things, a transgenderism activist who smiles upon such groups as “Antifa” or “Black Bloc” because of their opposition to us naughty Righties and Christians should study what happens when such forces attain genuine political power. Few remember that Jews weren’t the only group Hitler targeted.

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     I’ve written before about the desire for meaning that appears to be universal among men:

     “Today” is made “sweet” by an injection of Meaning: something to fill the yawning void created by their abandonment of God and the hope of individual salvation. For Man is the Project Pursuer, the Engineer: he who must have a goal to advance toward and a plausible means for approaching it. His consciousness of time and his own mortality will not abide an empty, hedonistic existence. Without the hope of salvation in an afterlife, the requirements for which really are quite straightforward:

     Now a man came up to him and said, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to gain eternal life?” He said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” “Which ones?” he asked. Jesus replied, “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false witness, honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself.” [Matthew 19:16-19]

     ...Man will commit himself to some other absorbing Idea, some Cause to which he can dedicate himself. For we all desire immortality, and the variety derivable from the notion that one’s Cause will live after one’s own flesh has returned to dust is, if not wholly fulfilling, at least better than nothing.

     I’ve never been more certain of Man’s utter requirement for a transcendent religious belief system. Of course, the nature of the system “matters,” too. It must be wholesome: beneficial to those who accept it and (at the very least) harmless toward those who don’t. The benefits must include temporal ones as well as spiritual promises, which is why I cite that snippet from the Gospel According to Matthew so often. Once again, Chesterton put it best:

     The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

     Bookworm adds a few thoughts on the matter:

     Islam is not about fun or even happiness. Nor are these missing attributes limited to the reverence associated with direct worship. For example, when we’re in a house of worship we don’t make fart jokes. Instead, the whole point of Islam, at least according to the Ayatollah Khomeni, is to vacuum any possibility of joy out of life:

     Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious.

     No wonder that the Islamic clerics and their mobs routinely deliver death to people who dare to dance or sing in a sharia-controlled world.

     Contrast this Islamic world view with Dennis Prager’s take on happiness. When his radio show played in my area, I frequently heard him say that, because God gave us the capacity to be happy, we have a moral obligation to be so. He also wrote that true faith should in itself inspire happiness:

     I once asked a deeply religious man if he considered himself a truly pious person. He responded that while he aspired to be one, he felt that he fell short in two areas. One of those areas, he said, was his not being a happy enough person to be considered truly pious.

     His point was that unhappy religious people reflect poorly on their religion and on their Creator. He was right; in fact, unhappy religious people pose a real challenge to faith. If their faith is so impressive, why aren’t these devoted adherents happy? There are only two possible reasons: either they are not practicing their faith correctly, or they are practicing their faith correctly and the religion itself is not conducive to happiness. (Prager, Dennis, Happiness is a Serious Problem, paperback edition, p. 4.)

     “Thou shalt be happy” might not be one of the tenets of the Decalogue, but all the evidence of Creation, particularly that which inheres in Man’s nature, points to the necessity. Happy people don’t involve themselves in ridiculous Causes. They don’t need them for confirmation that they “matter.” They already know that.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Cause People

     [I’ve received numerous requests to repost this old chestnut, which first appeared at the Palace Of Reason on June 29, 2003 -- FWP]

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     Cause People can be very difficult. Trying. Often hazardous to your health. But they're getting a progressively larger fraction of the media's attention, so it's well to be up on their characteristics and migration patterns.

     If you're blessedly unacquainted with this subspecies of homo sapiens terrestrialis, and would like to explore, uh, what you've been missing, here's the official Palace Of Reason Cause People Anthropological Summary And Spotter's Field Guide. Have fun.

     1. Habitat

     Cause People are mostly found along the coasts, in the large population centers. They wear uniform-like clothing, talk in typeset phrases, and evaluate everything according to how it relates to their favored Cause. Certain institutions cater exclusively to Cause People, though the nature of those institutions has changed over time. Once it was coffee shops; today it appears to be specialty bookstores. If you locate one of these watering holes, you can reap a large number of sightings in a very short time.

     2. General Characteristics And Life Cycle

     At the center of the adult Cause Person's biocycle is, of course, the Cause. The Cause need not be any particular idea or belief. All that matters is that it have first priority in the mind of the Cause Person, to the near-total exclusion of all other considerations.

     Political affiliation provides several Causes. Special interests and fixations on various kinds of perceived threats provide many others. The typical Cause Person selects from a wide assortment of Causes early in his adulthood, attaches himself to it, and afterward nurses from it as the source of all right and justice.

     After forming the attachment, the Cause Person acquires his characteristic mode of expression. Affiliation with a Cause is normally expressed with a limited vocabulary. Therefore, the elements of that vocabulary will appear in the Cause Person's speech with very high frequency. Take note! Continual repetition of a small group of words or phrases can be a tip-off that you've spotted a variety of Cause Person of which you weren't previously aware. It's well to carry a pocket notebook for such occasions as these.

     3. Mating Patterns

     Cause People tend to be endogamous. There have been cases of out-breeding, but these are rare. Particularly attractive female Cause People can engender great consternation among males not of their sect, for which reason the temptation to "fraternize" must be stoutly resisted.

     Though endogamous, Cause People do not "breed true." Possibly because of the difficulty of inculcating their specialized vocabulary in the young, their offspring usually come to regard Mom and Dad as nuts. However, this opinion is normally repressed until Junior has his own car.

     4. Tips For The Field Observer.

     If you decide to "go for the gold" -- investigate a gathering of Cause People at close range -- you must adopt the appropriate camouflage. As you might expect, this will include your dress, your accessories, and your verbal behavior. Some quick tips:

• Do not approach "world peace" Cause People while carrying a badge or a gun, or wearing a Nuke The Moon T-shirt.
• Do not approach "drug legalization" Cause People in a suit, or while carrying a briefcase or a martini.
• Do not approach "pro abortion" Cause People while wearing a crucifix.
• Do not approach "slavery reparations" Cause People while wearing white skin.
• Do not approach "Bush Is Hitler" or "free Palestine" Cause People at all.

     Your verbal behavior, including body language, must strive to match that of the Cause People around you. This is critical. Cause People in large numbers can be dangerous, to your sanity if nothing else. Upon detecting an outsider in their midst, they converge on him -- first retracting their most attractive females to a protected zone -- and strive to attach him to their Cause. Their frequency of success varies, but there have been some disturbing reports. Some years ago, an investigator from Nebraska, a typical non-Cause middle American, attended a party among "social justice" Cause People in Southern California's famous Malibu preserve. He gave himself away rather early in the affair -- his blond crew-cut might have done it -- and was promptly swarmed under by tract-bearing specimens repeating "peace," "oppression," "genocide," "historical crimes" and "equality" at a rate that swamped the installed monitors. He was recently found in a Hare Krishna compound, making beaded curtains for sale at Los Angeles International Airport.

     5. Excursion And Reattachment.

     The attachment to a Cause, though long-lasting, is not certain to be permanent. A Cause Person can detach from his Cause under the right pressures. The nature of those pressures depends on the Cause Person's particular situation. Sexual starvation and economic privation are common reasons for detachment.

     However, the yearning for a Cause can reassert itself after an interval of detachment. Therefore, marriage between Cause People and non-Cause people can provide interesting surprises to the latter party. The apostate Cause Person seldom returns to his earlier Cause; that would be too much like admitting to fallibility. But there are many Causes in the world, all of which cry for one's allegiance. The apostate Cause Person may find himself emotionally naked until he's reattached himself to one of them. A regular paycheck and frequent sex can help to attenuate the cravings, but these are not guaranteed preventatives. A word to the wise.

     6. Gratuitous Bad Pun

     Since no Curmudgeonly emission would be complete without at least one bad pun, regard the following exhortation, seen on a lapel button in Manhattan by a Palace associate.

PROTECT YOURSELF:
Accidents
Cause
People

     This slogan was printed over the silhouette of a condom. Don't say your Curmudgeon didn't warn you.

Quickies: An Important Distinction

     There are many causes out there, as many as there are persons promoting them. No two promoters are exactly alike...with the result that no two causes are exactly alike, even if they bear the same names, the same physical trappings, and appear to allege and promote the same things.

     The promoter cannot help but alter the cause he promotes. It’s inherent in the possession of personal preferences and priorities.

     The consequence of this recognition is that drawing the distinction between the promoter and the cause has become supremely important. The promoter could be an outright villain, guilty of a thousand abominations and in the process of planning and executing a thousand more; yet his cause could still be logically and morally sound. Conversely, the promoter could be an angel made flesh, a composite of all the best qualities of Thomas Jefferson, Florence Nightingale, and Albert Einstein; yet his cause could be utterly, morally vile, perhaps because it had seduced him with false assertions or a chain of pseudo-logic his intellect was inadequate to refute.

     The cause is what demands our strict attention. The identification and prosecution of villains, and the discovery and exaltation of heroes, are matters for another board of review.

     This exhortation might sound like “previous work” to an intelligent person on the Right. Yet in practice it’s ignored, if not consciously violated, many times every day. The reason is simple; it’s the same as the reason the promoter inevitably alters the cause. We all have our individual preferences and priorities, and for some of us the highest priority is to be seen among the “right” associates.

     Note how frequently the Left exploits the seducibility of entertainment celebrities, knowing that the Bellwether Effect will draw unreflective others, eager to “associate” with such glamorous figures, into their train. Note also how often we of the Right celebrate the discovery that this or that celebrity espouses conservative or libertarian views. Even those of us who know that the cause and the promoter must be kept distinct are susceptible to the power of the Bellwether Effect.

     Yet ultimately, the cause – the set of ideas promoted and the evidence and reasoning used to promote them – is all that matters. Causes almost always outlive their originators, even if they’re never adopted by any great number of people at one time.

     Please, please: If you attach yourself to a cause – a conception of rights, a campaign for some legislative outcome, or a political alignment, or anything similar – make certain you’re doing it for the cause itself as you understand it, and not to “be seen with” others whose names have been associated with it.

     Then you should make certain that you really understand and can articulate the premises and implications of your cause...because you, its promoter, will change it as surely as the Sun will rise tomorrow.

Feedback

I never have understood what it is that propels certain ideas to the forefront of my thoughts, but at least it provides me -- and hopefully you as well, Gentle Reader -- with some entertainment. (Hey, ya gotta go with the flow, y'know?) Today the theme is feedback: how it shapes trends in government, politics, and popular attitudes.

Anyone who designs active systems must be aware of feedback, its uses, and its pitfalls. The exploitation of feedback is often an important part of a design: sensing it, determining the proper response, and most critically, limiting the response to prevent a runaway. Some treatments of feedback in the world of inanimate mechanisms attempt to avoid positive feedback, the sort most prone to runaway, completely, while others seek to exploit it with a limiter attached. We can find both approaches in the political realm.

Consider governmental deficit finance. We have here an example of positive feedback bounded, if at all, by the readiness, willingness, and ability of the legislature to put a stop to it. Borrowing to fund an underfunded budget results in debt, which is added to the next year's budget. This increases the government's incentive to borrow while simultaneously dampening economic growth by reducing the capital available to the private sector. The cycle will stoke itself into ever larger borrowing and spending unless and until Congress votes down any and all spending greater than conservatively projected revenues, or a popular revolt destroys the government.

Consider arms races between nations. In keeping with the military dictum that threat is about capabilities rather than intentions, for country X to increase its armaments creates an incentive for surrounding countries to increase theirs. Seldom do nations draw any distinction between offensive and defensive arms once this cycle gets under way. There are two potential limiters here -- Congressional refusal to acquiesce to further military spending, and warfare -- but there is reason to believe that in this age of nuclear weapons, the first cannot halt the progression, while the second might put a halt to much else as well.

This morning, we have a curious example of a form of negative feedback -- the sort of feedback that immediately dampens the stimulus that evokes it -- among Americans of a conservative bent. Two articles at Breitbart.Com are relevant:

• "The End Of GOProud"
• "Conservative Media Refuse To Cover New Book On Gay Movement"

These articles speak in somewhat plaintive, uncomprehending terms. Their authors appear unable to grasp why the "gay movement" is encountering public resistance after a long series of advances in popular acceptance. Yet the feedback mechanism here is one that ought to be widely understood. It's closely related to a term that became popular in the Eighties and Nineties: compassion fatigue.

The cited article speaks of compassion fatigue as an individual malady, but it has obvious application to popular attitudes and responses as well. One cannot berate the American people endlessly about some "cause" that demands "action" without evoking resistance, for as Thomas Sowell has said many times, "There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs." At some point, no matter how poignant the cause nor how eloquent its promoters, our willingness to trade other considerations for it will dwindle to zero, or perhaps go into reverse. We saw this thirty years ago, as popular resistance to the indefinite and eternal expansion of the welfare state rose to check it where it stood.

In the realm of "sexual politics," the advances of homosexuals and deviants in achieving public tolerance at first evoked a positive-feedback dynamic: as resistance to them weakened, the vanguard activists of that movement intensified their demands, pressing for ever more. Eventually they demanded privileges that ordinary heterosexual Americans would not enjoy. They got one of these -- the prohibition of employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation -- before public resistance stiffened significantly around them.

The activists reacted to being thwarted in a perverse manner. (Apologies, Gentle Reader.) They "doubled down," demanding legal recognition of same-sex marriages, mandatory acceptance by homosexuality-averse churches and allied institutions, the legal prohibition of public condemnations of sexual perversion, and lesser accommodations. But the negative feedback merely intensified. In continuing to press for more, they are merely sowing the wind. Public resistance, defied by activist judges who've undermined the institutions and rights to which Americans are accustomed, has become public resentment, which will cost homosexuals and deviants heavily in the future.

Negative feedback is the mechanism that enforces equilibrium. Things change, but they do not change without limit. ("Trees do not grow to the sky" -- Baron Philippe de Rothschild) Every instance of positive feedback eventually self-destructs unless a superior negative influence should rise to counter it in time. We should not be surprised at its dominance, for equilibrium, at least on the longest time scales, is the dominant principle of the universe.

Consider the other "causes" that have dominated American public discourse for a time: the amelioration of poverty, race relations, women's rights, environmentalism, et cetera. Each of these, after a period of positive-feedback-propelled acceleration, has run up against a limiter: a negative force that has overwhelmed the positive one and brought the "cause" to a halt. The striking thing is the uniformity of those limiters: swelling public resentment at having our rights undermined, our institutions re-engineered from outside, and our traditions corrupted.

You might think that resentment is something we should be reluctant to celebrate. But all the emotions with which God has equipped us have their proper place. The important thing is to bring matters to a halt before resentment morphs into hatred and violence.

Food for thought.