Schismata Part 3: The Cracks

     I’ve received a couple of questions about the neologism in the titles of these pieces. The resemblance to stigmata is deliberate. The wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ during his Passion and Crucifixion were preliminaries to His death on the Cross. The last of the stigmata, the spear wound to His side, was inflicted to guarantee that He was dead before His body could be taken down.

     My concept of schismata parallels the stigmata in that regard. The cracks in our philosophical and cultural unity being inflicted by the Left’s vanguard are preliminaries to a deathblow. They’re intended to soften us up for the kill. And they’ve been doing a bang-up job… or they were.

* * *

     As reality itself is a unity, all true wisdom is a unity as well. For wisdom is something other than material knowledge about “how things work.” True wisdom is the acceptance of reality in all its facets. The truly wise man “concedes the Tao,” as C. S. Lewis might have said. He doesn’t attempt to deny any part of it, for he knows its unity.

     Philosophy, “love of wisdom” etymologically, is a unity as well. Most peoples with a common culture share a philosophical outlook that’s seldom articulated. One aspect of that outlook is made visible in what they hail as beautiful. The architectural wonders of Europe, especially its cathedrals, testify to the esthetics of the culture that produced them. That esthetic cannot be separated from the rest of its enveloping outlook without destroying both.

     As I noted previously, that is where the Left chose to attack. No other part of the Western outlook was as vulnerable. Esthetics was uniquely sensitive because of the notion of relativism.

     In retrospect, we ought to have known better. To place the cathedrals and symphonies of Christian Enlightenment culture on a balance scale with the mud huts and grunted chants of self-mutilating savages was insane from the first. But the premise that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” rather than an aspect of reality itself, made it possible.

     The rejection of esthetic absolutes provided the ingress the destroyers needed.

* * *

     Once esthetic relativism had swept over Western culture, other aspects of the Western philosophical outlook became vulnerable. The key target was objectivity itself. Undermining the conviction that reality is real was the goal of the anti-Western forces. That could not be done by direct attack. It had to be through the promotion of non-Western outlooks, concepts of beauty, and “ways of knowing.”

     That trend began in Europe before the World Wars, but it accelerated sharply in the Sixties. That was when relativism as a philosophical primary took firm root. Millions of credulous young Westerners seized upon it. Their elders did little or nothing to correct them.

     Nonsense was promulgated as truth. Bizarre notions about reality as a plastic that individuals could reshape as they please were touted as wisdom. Relativism, already established in the arts, made it possible to introduce absurdities as acceptable alternatives to the real… and to get them accepted by millions.

     I was there. I was part of it. I remember it too well.

* * *

     “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

     Once, in giving a presentation to a college class in philosophy, I asked the students whether any of them had ever been interested in magic. A few hands went up...all of which belonged to persons who were somewhat reluctant to admit it. I smiled and told them not to be overly embarrassed, for magic, if it worked, would appear to be an easier way of achieving one’s aims – some of them, at least – than the alternatives. That’s its attraction.

     But magic doesn’t work. Why, then, are there persons who call themselves witches and claim to practice magic? Why are they granted the smallest amount of respect?

     If magic worked, it would be the focus of intense study and experimentation. Researchers would flock to the field, hoping to tease out the laws that govern it. Money would pour into the exploration of its limits and potential applications. None of that has happened.

     Another set of notions, similar to magic, is that of psi powers: in essence, mind over matter/energy. For a time, that was a field of investigation for some fringe researchers, but it yielded nothing and has been relegated to the mediums (not “the media”) and stage magicians. But again, there are persons who proclaim themselves to be telepaths, or clairvoyants, and make a living out of demonstrating those “powers.” Why are they accorded any respect?

     Ironically, a brilliant fiction writer, Robert Silverberg, provided a summary of the reasons:

     “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen—we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living.”

     [From The Book of Skulls]

     They – we – were looking for magic.

* * *

     But “mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness,” et cetera are not of the Tao. To compel respect for them, by whatever means, violates the precepts of rational thought. Silverberg may have known that, back in 1972 when he wrote The Book of Skulls. Indeed, a man that intelligent could hardly fail to know it. Those who sought to undermine the Western outlook – the philosophical bedrock of the Christian Enlightenment – knew it well.

     The fragmentation of that bedrock proceeded apace throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century. Magic, irrealism, and outright solipsism, propelled in part by the burgeoning drug plague, advanced as alternatives to reality itself. A critical moment arrived with the introduction and acceptance of a nonsense phrase: “our truth,” or alternately “your truth.” That became popular with the moral / ethical relativists, those determined to open a crack in the moral norms promulgated by Christianity.

     The assault on esthetic norms had made inroads for assaults on other norms. In large part that was through the personal charisma of the “new artistes.” It was also powered by the adolescent thrill of rebellion, flipping off the “straights” and “doing your own thing.” The cracks would soon be exploited by the purveyors of a deadly kind of magic: the “reality is plastic” notion that makes it possible to believe in impossibilities.

     More anon.

Schismata Part 2: The Unity

     A long time ago, I wrote:

     In the kitchen, Louis took a small saucepan from the cabinet beneath the cooktop, filled it half-full with hot water, and set it on a burner. From a drawer he produced a large bulb-type thermometer, attached it to a pair of wooden grips, and passed the combination to her.
     “This is going to be a little different. I’m going to make a prediction, and then we’ll see if it comes true.” He gestured at the saucepan. “I’m going to light the stove and heat the water in the pot. You put the thermometer in and watch the reading, but don’t let the bulb touch the pan! I predict that no matter how high we turn the flame, and no matter how long we let it heat, the temperature of the water will never rise past two hundred twelve degrees. Okay?”
     “Okay.” She dipped the bulb into the pot. The reading rose to a hundred fifteen degrees. He lit the burner, turned the flame up high, and they watched.
     When giant bubbles began to rise through the water, the thermometer read two hundred twelve. She kept it as steady as she could, never allowing the bulb to touch the metal of the pan. The water level dropped and the kitchen filled with steam, but the reading stayed at two hundred twelve until Louis quenched the burner ten minutes later.
     “We’ve boiled away too much to keep going safely. So? What does that mean to you?”
     She shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it supposed to mean something?”
     “Well, maybe not. But what does it mean to you that my prediction came true?”
     “You knew it would be that way.”
     “And what does that mean?”
     She started to speak and stopped herself. She knew his style. There was a pattern in the sequence of apparently unrelated things he had shown her that day. He was waiting for her to see it. The Nag lent a hand.
     Limits. He’s shown you three limits. Three things that wishing can’t do anything about.
     “Water’s just that way, right? It always stops at two-twelve. You can’t force it any higher.”
     He nodded as the huge grin returned to his face. “That’s right. Not at sea level, anyway. That’s one of the unvarying properties of water.” He took the saucepan to the sink and emptied it. There was a hiss and a new cloud of steam as the water ran over the cold porcelain.
     “Scientists study the properties of things all the time.” He set the pan down in the sink and turned back to her. “They look for patterns in the way things behave, and then they test their understanding by making predictions. When their predictions work, they gain confidence that they’re on to something. When their predictions fail, they junk their theories and start over. Mostly by little steps, sometimes by big ones, always building on the learning of those that came before them, this is how scientists come to know the world.”
     He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms against his chest. There was something in his demeanor she hadn’t seen before, a kind of all-pervading delight that transformed him and made it impossible to look away from him.
     “Scientists always look for the widest, most comprehensive patterns they can find, and then they try to explain them. And they’ve noticed that, the wider and deeper they go, the simpler the explanations seem to get.
     “The great discoveries of the past three centuries have all pointed toward the existence of an enormous central fact, a single law for the whole world and everything in it. All the little patterns we see in things, like legs only being so fast, or arms only being so strong, or water never rising past two-twelve Fahrenheit, are just special cases of that central law, like the differently shaped shadows a statue will cast depending on how you turn it in the sun. Does that suggest anything to you, Chris?”
     It took her a moment to register the question. She began to think. He waited in silence.
     A million million details. A single truth giving rise to them all. Human reason sifting the details for the patterns that hid in them. Human knowledge of the patterns accumulating over the centuries, gradually reconstructing the statue from its innumerable shadows.
     “The more you know, the simpler it all gets,” she whispered. “The parts might be confusing, but it’s made to be understood whole.” The thrill of discovery was coursing through her like an electric current. “Louis, it couldn’t have happened that way by chance, could it?”
     He folded his hands and looked down at them.
     “Some people think it could have, Chris.”
     “Do you?”
     “No.”
     “And that’s religion?”
     He nodded.

     That was a young genius attempting to explain the impulse toward religious belief to another young but untutored genius. He’d found God in natural law. The uniformity and consistency of natural law seemed to him to mandate a single great Lawgiver. Other great minds have done the same, though not all of them.

     Yet Louis’s insight, entirely apart from its religious overtones, has another implication of critical import: All laws are one. All truths are one. They intertwine and support one another. Were any one of them to be pulled loose, the edifice would crumble.

     Though many would disagree, the unity is there.

     I’ve written that for an individual to accept any single fact as objectively irrefutable would compel him to accept all the rest of reality, given time. But after long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the reverse is true as well: If he could successfully deny any one objectively demonstrable fact, it would force him to deny all the rest of objective reality. He’d have to! They’re intertwined. Any one thread that’s pulled loose would unravel the whole garment.

     It may be that the enemies of the Western edifice – what I’ve called the Christian Enlightenment — are more aware of this than are most of us who strive to defend it. Their attacks have demonstrated that their tacticians have some insight. A smart tactician doesn’t pit strength against strength. He always looks for a weakness to attack.

     The weaknesses of Western civilization are those realms of thought in which we’ve entertained disputes about objective truths… including the mystifying determination of some to dismiss the concept of an objective reality entirely.

* * *

     I led off yesterday’s piece by rhapsodizing, a bit wistfully, about the Apollo 11 mission. In what probably struck many Gentle Readers as the all-time champion of jagged segues, I leaped thence into a tirade about the Left’s attack on the arts.

     By now, you know that what I do, I do deliberately.

     Though I know that there are people who claim that the moon landing was faked – that men have never crossed that divide – only they take themselves seriously. They’re in a special category of naysayers, along with the flat-Earthers and Man Will Never Fly Society. But the naysayer, a.k.a. the skeptic, is an important creature. Provided that he is honest, he assists the rest of us in answering questions about natural laws. The honesty part is not optional: he must be willing to concede when he’s been proved wrong by objective means.

     The nature of objectivity is a tender point in the Western psyche. It’s unprovable, because proof is inapplicable to things that cannot be categorized. Objectivity isn’t a concept; it’s reality itself. To deny objectivity is to deny that the world we perceive is anything but a figment of our imaginations.

* * *

     I feel no need to go into the solipsist or social-constructionist fallacies today. Suffice it to say that these are the end states of the denial of objectivity. They who strive to destroy the Christian Enlightenment don’t want to go that far. They want something like this:

     ’There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ’Repeat it, if you please.’
     ”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
     ”Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ’Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
     Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ’yes’ or ’no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
     O’Brien smiled faintly. ’You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ’Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
     ’No.’
     ’Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
     ’In records. It is written down.’
     ’In records. And- ?’
     ’In the mind. In human memories.
     ’In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
     ’But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ’It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
     O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
     ’On the contrary,’ he said, ’you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’

     With themselves as “The Party,” of course.

     If all of reality is truly a unity, then successfully attacking it at one weak point offers the best chance of destroying the acceptance of reality itself – that is, reality as objective, ontologically prior to perception, statement, theory, and opinion. The weakest point was in esthetics, the special province of the human activities called the arts. Accordingly, that was where the destroyers struck.

     “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” ran the old saw. Nothing that blatantly false has ever received as much deference. Beauty – esthetic Quality, as Pirsig would say – inheres in the object itself. We perceive it, call it beautiful, and think that in doing so we’ve rendered a personal judgment, but in point of fact we are merely recognizing a fact – something prior to our perceptions; something that simply is. The artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras accepted that without bothering to debate it. Their works exemplify their acceptance.

     As usual, C. S. Lewis had something to say about it:

     She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else—perhaps—she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea—a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation—it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity—that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others.

     If yesterday’s piece didn’t make sense to you at first reading, perhaps it will today.

* * *

     I try not to go on at great length here. This is one of my longer pieces, yet it’s composed principally of citations of other works. In the next segment I’ll attempt to solidify the connections between the attacks noted here and the pillars of our intellectual realm.

     Have a nice day.

Schismata Part 1

     Depending on what time zone you were in at the time, either today or tomorrow, in the Year of Our Lord 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the surface of the Moon. For many, that moment was the high-water mark of Western Civilization. In the person of an American astronaut, Mankind had escaped its womb and begun its journey to the stars.

     But the matter was far from settled. “Those who have not joy” (C. S. Lewis) immediately began to denigrate or cast doubt on the achievement. Some were blatant, others subtle. A number strove to recast the Apollo landing as somehow tainted by slavery, “imperialism,” or whatever else they could conjure up. A few tried to reduce its significance by stressing that the Moon is “conveniently close,” which makes getting there “no big deal.” Others pointed to the competitive, quasi-combative aspect of the “Space Race.” Had it not been for the Soviets’ early lead in space travel, they claimed, America would never have cared about a Moon landing. And so on, ad nauseam.

     We ought to have paid more attention to the denigrators and naysayers. They were the point of an invisible spear aimed at America’s heart. There was significant pressure behind that spear. It had already made an inroad into our national psyche. It penetrated ever more deeply as the years rolled past.

* * *

     The Sixties, for all the hype that’s been lavished on them, were the beginning of America’s decline. Those who sought to destroy us knew that you don’t start at the top. To bring down a society, you locate its foundation and work to undermine it. The foundation stones of the extraordinary achievement that Robert A. Heinlein called “the Renaissance Civilization” were all but invisible to the great majority of Americans. In consequence, we failed to recognize their attackers or grasp the aim of their efforts.

     Rather than follow my usual practice, I’ll cut to the chase:

The foundation of the United States of America
Was made from Christian ethics and political freedom.

     Those aren’t things that would yield to the first blows of the chisel. They are – or were – too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to be quickly shattered. So deeply, in fact, that the average American of the first decades after World War II never thought about them. They were omnipresent, like air. More, we had inherited them from prior generations. It was easy to believe that that’s just how things are and always will be.

     We never thought about why we believed that. That made it easy for the underminers to chip away undisturbed.

* * *

     It was the Sixties in which the attacks on our foundation became generally visible. Conspicuous socialist and communist movements began to proliferate in “centers of higher education.” Those things are inherently opposed to both freedom and Christianity. Their purveyors were clever; they aimed first at cultural targets: the arts. They strove to displace the esthetics that ruled music, painting, sculpture, dance, fiction, and entertainment. For they understood, as many of us did not, that those things reinforce a people’s sense of themselves and their achievements.

     Ironically, those who railed against the new, anti-Christian esthetics were beaten back with a weapon that baffled them: artistic freedom. That was presented to us with the implication that the nouvel artiste has an affirmative right to stand alongside traditional practitioners. It occurred to very few that freedom includes the freedom to condemn.

     Collectivist nostrums would soon infiltrate the educational system. Clouds began to form around basic concepts such as rights and justice. The arts had lifted the tent flap and made it possible. Eastern European intellectuals had embraced the Gramscian prescription and brought it to receptive American “scholars” who were looking for something “new.”

     First in the arts, then in “soft” studies such as psychology, sociology, and economics, American universities became battlegrounds between the Left and the Right.

* * *

     This is really an introductory piece. I can’t finish it in one Sunday; there’s too much ground to cover. (Besides, I have laundry to do, a cat room to clean, and meatballs to make.) I wanted to introduce the idea and ideas of the Sixties, “the Summer of Love,” as the appropriate starting point for examining the attack on America’s conceptual foundation.

     It’s time for the gloss that’s been smeared over that decade to be wiped away, in the interests of clearsighted understanding of our plight and its roots.

Indicting The Ism

     I had no idea that Vlad is still blogging. Here’s the Sunday punch from his comments on the recent Netflix production about Stalin’s Holodomor, Mr. Jones:

     The Ukrainian genocide, you would think from the film, was not the fault of communism. No of course not. It was the fault of a hedonistic, corrupt, megalomaniac, sex fiend, white-male, American who worked for the New York Times and perhaps Stalin who was not doing things right. ‘Imperfect’ let’s say.

     What they do not tell you, is that it is Communism that did this Genocide.

     That Stalin was a good communist in the way that Mohammad was a good Muslim and Dr. Mengele was a good Nazi. They were all excellent representations of the ideology they believed in and acted on.

     Contemporary socialists and communists will froth at the mouth upon reading or hearing such statements. They’re determined to protect their favored ism against logical or moral assaults. The mere suggestion that socialism requires a Stalin – that it elevates a Stalin to power as surely as the Sun will rise in the east this morning – is enough to provoke them to violence. So they bellow “That wasn’t real socialism!” or “Socialism works, it was the fault of the men in power!” Absolutely anything rather than admit that their ism brings about the same consequences each and every time it’s tried.

     All that having been said, there is a problem with trying to indict a system of belief in isolation from the conduct of the men who will govern it. For there is no scheme of government that eliminates the requirement for men – fallible men, men with individual drives, interests, and agendas – to impose and administer it upon the rest of us.

     Indeed, that’s the Joker in the deck of government itself.

---

     I know, I know: the above sounds like a brief for anarchism. And in truth, I was once inclined to look favorably, even longingly upon anarchism. Governmental terrors and predations constitute a pretty good argument that the whole idea of government – i.e., that some men should wield power over others – is inherently faulty. Quoth Allan Sherman:

     Every government is a geejy bird.
     The geejy bird is a strange creature; it flies only once in its lifetime, but that flight is a spectacle to behold. The geejy bird appears suddenly, standing on a limb, young, elegant, proud, and respectable. Surveying the horizon, it spreads its majestic wings and swoops upward in a wide graceful curve, with magnificent wing flappings, and loud glory whoops. When it reaches maximum altitude, it begins its elegant descent, an ever narrowing spiral. It makes smaller and smaller circles in the sky until, suddenly and mysteriously, it vanishes through its own asshole.
     No one knows where geejy birds go—probably back where they came from. Unfortunately, when they go, they take us along. We are all subjects of one geejy bird or another; we are born and live and die during one of these mad flights. To be born early in the flight is, at least, exciting; the air sparkles with hopes and dreams, and there are worthwhile things to be done. To board the flight in the soaring stage is next best; there is a fresh wind and a feel of strong wings and a dizzying view of the world.
     But what about those of us who are born near the end of the flight? We can’t jump off; the fall would be fatal. In vain we scream, “Turn around, great geejy bird! Turn back in thy flight!” Too late. There is nothing to do but make the best of it. We snap to attention, salute, and begin to sing our stirring anthem. “God Bless Our Geejy Bird!” Together we bravely enter the turd tunnel to oblivion.
     Even the friendliest geejy birds share certain boorish instincts with the disgusting ones. The species is fundamentally predatory. Thus, over a 200-year period the American geejy bird slowly gobbled up all the power it could eat, until it began to look suspiciously like the Louis XIV geejy bird.
     Sometimes I get so mad at government, I could almost become an anarchist—but not quite. In my opinion, anarchy is nothing more than the embryo of government—an inadvertent way to hatch another geejy bird, and there are enough geejy birds already.

     Yes. Despite my quondam flirtation with anarchism, it’s as flawed as any other scheme of social organization. Its instability gives birth to governments, and as Allan Sherman has said, there are enough governments already.

     But my larger point is about the isms promulgated by theorists of all sorts. None of them can be rendered immune to the dynamic of power. Friedrich Hayek’s analysis of this phenomenon in The Road to Serfdom remains unrefuted – probably irrefutable on this side of the Second Coming.

     John Gall, in his neglected book Systemantics, made a powerful case that systems of all sorts operate in failure mode most of the time. But why would men avid for power want to preside over a failing system? The key to harmonizing this insight with Hayek’s is the realization that the standards of the rulers are not those of the ruled.

     By the standards of the ruler, the system might be working fabulously. After all, it gives him what he wants: power, pelf, prestige, and perquisites. That those things are taken from others by force needn’t trouble him, as long as he remains in power. As for what would come next, he prefers to leave future problems to future solvers and solutions.

     By the standards of the ruled, the system has defaulted on its promises to him. Perhaps it promised him freedom. Yet laws and regulations strangle him even in his most private affairs. Perhaps it promised him economic security. Yet the State’s consumption of his earnings bites more deeply with every passing year, to say nothing of the instability of his income in a regime where the very meanings of the words in which the laws are written can be reversed by men in black robes. Or perhaps it promised him safety. Yet the police are limp in the face of ever-increasing, ever-escalating street crime, and the nation’s borders are colander-porous.

     No matter what ism supposedly animates those in the corridors of power, over time the system will be perverted toward the satisfaction of the private interests of the rulers, and be damned to what they may have promised the ruled. Yes, Gentle Reader: constitutionalism as well. The sole difference among them is how long it will take for tyrants to rise to the levers of power.

---

     God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all and always well-informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had thirteen States independent for eleven years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each State. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon, and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. – Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to William Smith, shortly after Shay’s Rebellion in New England.

     The ism is inseparable from the men who preside over it – and men cannot be trusted with power. But when an ism is founded on the use of power to fetter and dispossess some to slake the grievances of others, it starts life perverse and evil. That automatically refutes every collectivism ever proposed: fascism, socialism, communism, every variety of theocracy, and every other scheme put forth by some utopian theorist who’s had a vision in his cave. They are evil ab initio.

     The cure is revolution...yet as has been observed all too frequently, the typical revolution doesn’t make matters better, but worse:

     Those who have seized power, even for the noblest of motives soon persuade themselves that there are good reasons for not relinquishing it. This is particularly likely to happen if they believe themselves to represent some immensely important cause. They will feel that their opponents are ignorant and perverse; before long they will come to hate them...The important thing is to keep their power, not to use it as a means to an eventual paradise. And so what were means become ends, and the original ends are forgotten except on Sundays. – Bertrand Russell

     Feel free to argue with me. But don’t imagine that I’ll allow you to avoid defining your terms and your standards. I’m funny that way.

Serious People

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. Welcome to another Monday in the Land of the Free. If your prospects don’t exactly fill you with enthusiasm for the day, perhaps this tirade will help you along, though I shan’t promise in which direction.

     This will be a screed of parts. Yet it will display a curious, compelling unity: a cohesion around a theme of overriding importance. Its cumulative impact will widen your vision, allowing you to see more of the world, and more of its details, than your previous mundanities would support. After you have read it, you can never again be what you were beforehand.

     Of course, that last statement is true of a trip to the W.C., as well. Read your Heraclitus.

---

     In every place and time there have been persons whose most ardent desire is to regard themselves as superior to others. I have no doubt that this will be the case for as long as Mankind is permitted to exist. Indeed, the tendency is so pervasive that it touches every man who has ever lived or ever will: that terrible, irresistible need to measure oneself against others near or far.

     I can’t condemn it in its entirety. The desire to be better tomorrow than today is linked to it. It expresses itself in many forms, including the adoption of role models and the desire to equal or exceed their accomplishments. I’ve ventured in that direction myself, as I noted in this piece. It’s an ingredient of hope, a necessary counterweight to the impulses to surrender and despair.

     But there can be no ignoring its dark side. To want to be better than you were is understandable and laudable. To want to be better than Smith over there, as an explicit statement of intent, is dubious. To make beating Smith your central aim, unless it’s confined to the context of a sporting event, is deplorable. Yea verily, even if it should never eventuate in any harm to Smith whatsoever.

     One of the greatest contributions of Christian moral teaching is its emphasis on humility: not self-denigration nor self-disparagement, but the acceptance of others as children of God no less valuable than oneself. We are all limited, fallible human beings – all sinners. We owe the greater part of what we are and have to others. Sir Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientific genius our race has produced, wrote that “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” If he could say so un-ironically, how true must it be for the rest of us?

     That tendency to want to be better than the other guy is humility’s mortal enemy.

---

Kuato: What do you want, Mr. Quaid?
Douglas Quaid: The same as you; to remember.
Kuato: But why?
Douglas Quaid: To be myself again.
Kuato: You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.

[From Total Recall.]

     While ever so slightly off-target, Kuato’s assessment is far more right than not. It accounts for a phenomenon widely acknowledged but seldom discussed: the tendency of those who have been shorn of their occupations, whether by retirement or involuntary action, to dwindle and die for lack of purpose. Their lives cease to have meaning for them. Without meaning, we cannot continue on.

     Ponder that connection for a moment. Why should “meaning” proceed from “what you do” — ? Why is a living man, whole and healthy, not “enough” in some absolute sense? Is it not enough to enjoy existence, to glory in the beauties and pleasures of the world, without troubling oneself to contribute something to it of one’s own contriving?

     The only answer we have is an empirical one, founded on what we have observed: Apparently not. Moreover, we are all but unanimous in regarding the idler as a worthless creature no matter how riotous a revel his life appears to be. Whether rich or poor, we look upon him with disdain. We might even call him “unserious:” “Why doesn’t he do something with his life?”

     I feel that this is connected to another subject. I’ve written about that subject several times. But as it’s early in the morning, I suppose I should leave that possibility for exploration after a second pot of coffee.

---

     There are many skills pertinent to living an agreeable life. One that has been badly neglected in recent decades is the skill of the mandatory disaggregation. Those who lack it are made conspicuous by their denunciations of groups when individuals are their proper targets: the offense all too often called “racism” when the proper term is collectivism.

     A few examples of when a disaggregation is mandatory:

• Yes, many Jews have been socialists, and contributed to the erection of socialism in the old Soviet Union. Many Jews still believe in and advocate socialism today. That does not mean that all Jews are socialists.
• Yes, Negroes, particularly young Negro males, commit a disproportionate share of our nation’s violent crimes and crimes against property. That does not mean that all Negroes are criminals.
• Yes, many Muslims – approximately 15% of the total –advocate the violent overthrow of all systems of government and society that do not recognize Islam as the supreme law. That does not mean that all Muslims are Islamists or would willingly collaborate in the subversion of the United States.
• Yes, a substantial fraction of “the rich,” however one might choose to define that status, regard themselves as superior to those not so blessed and would gladly accept the power to rearrange every aspect of our lives. That does not mean that all “the rich” are aspiring dictators.
• Yes, a goodly number of homosexuals actively encourage the young to try homosexuality for themselves, or to identify themselves as homosexual. That does not mean that all homosexuals are evangelists for their condition.
• Yes, many atheists regard theists as “stupid” for our belief in a Supreme Being who decreed the laws of this universe and of human nature. That does not mean that all atheists are supercilious and self-important.
• And yes, many Christians even today are intolerant of persons who deviate from the Christian ethos. That does not mean that all Christians are bigots.

     I believe that covers the currently most important cases.

     The recognition of the facts cited above can – in some cases, “should” – give rise to personal policies concerning the avoidance of situations in which particular demographic cohorts have concentrated. But when individuals interact, the strengths, weaknesses, and personal ethics of those individuals are what count. The source of those characteristics is unimportant. Nor is one’s assessment of Smith a valid reason to generalize about others in his cohort.

     The relevant technical term is the “Undistributed Middle.”

---

     I suppose I should round this off and present a summation.

     What lit my boiler this fine morning was a piece from another writer, who shall go unnamed, in which appeared the assertion – paraphrased, to defeat search engines – that “the libertarians I know don’t care about morality....If they’re against [specified obscenity] they should condemn it and help us put an end to it.” I’ve been seeing a lot of such slander in recent months, and I’ve had enough of it. Hence this essay.

     It is possible that the statement quoted above is correct, but take careful note of the phrasing: “The libertarians I know.” If the writer is inclined to generalize from his / her / its own sample space, that writer is doing an injustice. Here is the proof:

I am a libertarian.
I care deeply about the morality of our nation.
Therefore, not all libertarians are unconcerned about the morality of our nation.

     Similarly, with application to a slander evoked by a different sociocultural phenomenon:

I am a libertarian.
I have absolutely no interest in “recreational drugs.”
Therefore, not all libertarians “just want to get high.”

     [As we mathematical types like to say, quod erat demonstrandum.]

     This could hardly be clearer. Indeed, I am reasonably certain that what propels the opposite, false conclusion is the desire for devils to blame for what the writer deplores. That desire can be strong enough to warp anyone’s thinking, especially one deeply anguished over a social or cultural malady.

     But anguish is not a justification for slander, especially slander of a philosophical-political conception championed by persons who – very much like myself – just want to be left alone in the enjoyment of what is rightfully ours. Especially as John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman are our beloved brothers. If the writer whose sentiments I paraphrased would condemn them, he / she / it is a contemptible fool – especially as it can be demonstrated that the massive overexpansion of the public sphere, in consequence of which so many institutions are owned and operated by a government and an even greater number of others are closely “regulated” by governments, is closely correlated with most social maladies.

     Serious people think seriously. They admit to their own fallibility. They learn how to recognize patterns of pseudo-reasoning that lead to false and dangerous conclusions. They resist premature generalizations and they perform mandatory disaggregations. They strive to remain aware that all sample spaces are partial, and may not accurately represent the larger whole.

     And they restrain themselves when writing for a general audience: some members of which, were they not slandered as contemptible enemies, might well become valuable allies.

     Have a nice day.

Quickies: Trends In Collectivism

     Collectivism – broadly speaking, the doctrine that the group is prior and superior to the individual – is the root of all political evil. However, its form can change over time, according to the strategic vision of the collectivists. Ace of Spades notes this in a swift but massively illuminating comment:

     Bernie Sanders is the conventional class-warfare socialist while Elizabeth Warren is the new breed of identity-politics socialist. Elizabeth Warren has run on little except identity politics.

     Hell, she owes her entire career to identity politics, pretending to be a Native American, but only when searching for a job or angling for a promotion.

     So, in response to Sanders' dismissal of her as yet another rich bored leftwing woman with a White Savior complex, Elizabeth Warren did the only thing Elizabeth Warren knows how to do -- she played the Identity Politics Victim card.

     Sanders’s collectivism follows the Marxian model of economic class warfare. Warren’s collectivism is about “oppressed” and “marginalized” groups. In both cases, these...persons seek to get susceptible voters to see their interests as indistinguishable from those of a group – and to have “rights” associated with that group, rather than with any individual member. That way, anyone who is superficially a member of one such group, but who differs with the collectivist’s assertion of its interests, can be denounced as a traitor to his class, his race, his sex, his orientation, his ethnic heritage, or his delusion.

     And there are millions who are seduced by it.

Sexism, Or Sex?

     'Zeb...I think I understand you at last. You are...an atheist. Aren't you?'
     Zeb looked at me bleakly. 'Don't call me an atheist,' he said slowly, 'unless you are really looking for trouble.'
     'Then you aren't one?' I felt a wave of relief, although I still didn't understand him.
     'No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions...for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone-not the Lodge Master nor the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.'
     'But you do believe in God?'
     'I told you so, didn't I? Not that you had any business asking me.'
     'Then you must believe in other things?'
     'Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak...patient with the stupid...generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do.'
     I let out my breath. 'I'm satisfied, Zeb.'
     Instead of looking pleased he answered, 'That's mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry-I shouldn't be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me-accidentally, I'm sure-into discussing matters that I never intended to discuss.'

     [Robert A. Heinlein, “If This Goes On”, in Revolt In 2100]

     No doubt most of my Gentle Readers are puzzling over that citation, especially how it relates to the equally quirky title of this piece, and what could possibly follow the two of them. That’s quite all right; in fact, it’s what I was hoping for.

     Today’s broadside is about unnecessary concepts.

     There are a lot of folks who regard God – specifically, a Supreme Being responsible for Creation and its laws – as an unnecessary concept. They aren’t as numerous as are we who consider Him indispensable, of course, but still, there’s an ample supply. A goodly number of atheists manage to live decent, honorable lives without ever “needing” God to do so. Evangelistic atheists often cite this as “proof” that He doesn’t exist. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, but it does lend substance to their contention that God is “unnecessary”...at least, for them.

     Many Americans now consider religious beliefs a battlefield to be avoided in general conversation. But even more of us are coming to loathe any mention of certain other concepts:

• Racism;
• Sexism;
• Homophobia;
• Xenophobia;
• “Trans”-phobia;

     ...and so on. The subjectivity of these things is enough to drive a man to drink, and not from the top shelf. They’ve ruined many human relationships and have made our national discourse far more painful than it’s ever been before.

     So I’ve decided to do away with them.

---

     Unnecessary concepts attached to imputations about human attitudes are the principal pollutants of civil discourse today. I listed the worst of them above. There are surely others that currently command less attention, but the five in the list above will do for a start.

     I contend that those “isms” and “phobias” are phantasms: chimeric notions that have never existed, do not exist today, and will never exist at any future time. They have no reality except when employed as rhetorical bludgeons by evil-minded demagogues. We in the Right must immediately take that as our working premise, and alter both our rhetoric and our conduct to match.

     Compare and contrast the following two isms: sexism and Marxism. What do you see when you put them side by side?

• Sexism denotes an attitude by one sex toward the other; or maybe an attitude by each sex toward itself; or maybe an attitude by each sex toward the other.
• Marxism is an economic conception that demands that the means of production, as generally understood, should belong to those who labor in them.
• The sexist is inclined to treat persons of the opposite sex differently from his own, or maybe to treat his own sex as superior or inferior, or maybe both or neither.
• The Marxist votes for nationalizations and redistributive measures.
• There is no standard by which to determine whether an individual is a sexist.
• Marxists can be easily distinguished from non-Marxists by their political conduct.

     A concept that cannot predict is an unnecessary concept. An allegation of sexism cannot predict sufficiently well in any venue to be useful for anything. Therefore, sexism is an unnecessary concept. Quod erat demonstrandum.

     While there are two biological sexes, and statistical differences between them that are essentially inarguable, the concept of sexism cannot be relied upon for anything. I maintain that the same is true for racism, homophobia, et cetera.

     From that position, many good things might flow.

---

     I’m looking forward to an exchange such as the following:

     Woman: Sexist!
     FWP: (snorts) Do you deny that you’re female?
     Woman: Huh? Well, of course not! But—
     FWP: (imperiously) Are you displeased that I recognize you as female?
     Woman: No, but—
     FWP: Stop right there. You admit to being female, and I recognize you as such. That’s all that’s going on here, so take your mentalist act and skedaddle along. I have nothing more to say to you.

     Many have orated about the Left’s attempt to claim the “moral high ground” with its accusations that conservatives are racists, sexists, et cetera. The point of the exchange above is to suggest that there’s a higher “high ground” that conservatives can claim: that of objective reality itself. The key is to refuse to allow any pretense of validity to the unnecessary concepts of racism, sexism, and so forth, and to insist solely upon what’s real and observable.

     The virtue of this approach is that it treats each individual as an individual. It refuses to see any group or its claims as relevant to relations between individuals. If practiced consistently by enough Americans, it could sweep the Left’s moral pretenses into the ashcan of forgotten rhetoric.

     It would require awareness of context and interlocutor, and more than a little determination. It would demand an absolute refusal to discuss groups or attitudes toward them. It might occasion a few bellows. But it would badly upset the Left’s applecart, because its entire strategy relies upon group affiliation and the “isms,” “phobias,” and other phantasms associated with them.

---

     Note that what I’ve called “unnecessary concepts” are collectivist concepts. Collectivism is the denial of individual autonomy: the denial of the individual’s rights and responsibilities as a moral agent. It subsumes him into a group that supposedly possesses those things. Strangely, that group is never around to change the oil or take out the garbage when those chores impend.

     Group identification has been promoted as a route toward effectiveness for the weak: “In union there is strength.” But we know, from many decades of experience, that “in union” there is political power, and that power and its benefits will find their way into the hands of the least ethical and most ruthless pursuers. “The little guy” gets only crumbs and promises, if he gets anything at all.

     The dissolution of group-identity politics and claims can begin only with individuals determined to see and relate only to individuals, never to the groups to which they profess allegiance. It rejects groups as obstacles to seeing the individual, in whom all rights and responsibilities really reside. Today it’s the road less traveled by. Taking it, refusing the course of groups and their claims, could make a huge difference.

The Individualist Collectivist

     Once in a great while, someone asks me a question that deserves its own article. It happened fairly recently, and I’ve been chewing over the appropriate treatment ever since.

     The question, as best I can recall it, ran thus:

     “You’ve embraced all these ugly collectivist labels: racist, sexist, Islamophobe, and so on, but you also call yourself an individualist. How does that work?”

     That question, asked with no trace of the “Hah! Gotcha!” attitude that it would carry from the lips of an adversary, brought a broad smile to my face. The recognition of the apparent contradiction involved indicated that the asker is open to the possibility of new knowledge. However, rather than answer it at once in the compressed fashion that a conversation-on-the-run would demand, I asked my interlocutor to be patient with me: “I’ll get back to you.”

     And here I am to do that very thing.

---

     In discussions over politics and related subjects, it’s supremely important never, ever to assume any shred of the responsibility for other people’s preconceptions. I made use of that notion in a different context in Polymath:

     Presently Todd said “You think I talk too much, don’t you?”
     Redmond, caught in mid-bite, gave himself a few seconds to chew and swallow. He set his slice of pizza down carefully and caught Todd’s eyes with his own.
     “I can see why you might think so, but no, not really.” The engineer’s expression grew pained. He appeared to be casting about for words. “It’s more...well, forgive me, Todd, but every now and then you say something that would be better lived than said.”
     Todd peered at Redmond in confusion. “I don’t follow you.”
     Redmond’s look of chagrin deepened. “Todd, these days there are very few people who really can do all they say they can do. That includes most of the most capable people alive today. There’s a notion going around that self-promotion is expected, even demanded of us. That it’s not enough to be good, that we have to constantly talk ourselves up so that everyone will know we’re good, and so people who already know it can’t possibly forget it. You know what comes of that when your ordinary human fallibility gets its vote in?”
     Todd bit his lip. “I can guess.”
     “I’m sure you can.” Redmond shook his head bemusedly. “So why can’t anyone else? Reticence about your abilities is a better policy no matter how confident you are about them for precisely that reason. Don’t trumpet them; simply use them. Others will notice, and they’ll notice your taciturnity as well. They’ll start to speculate about what you can do that they haven’t seen yet, always in your favor. It’ll do more for your reputation than any amount of bragging or any number of PR agents.”
     Todd mused over it in silence for a few seconds before a realization struck him. He opened his eyes wide and jabbed an index finger at Redmond. The engineer’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Hah! Gotcha!”
     “What? What do you—”
     “That gets people thinking that you can do anything, that you have no limitations at all. But everyone has limitations. So what happens when his legions of admirers discover that Louis Redmond can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound?”
     A delighted grin spread across Redmond’s face for the second time that day. “That’s the fun part, Todd. You don’t say a word. You just give them this look. You make it say ‘Where on Earth did you get such a crazy notion?’ You shake your head a little, and you walk away. And your reputation gets better still.”
     Todd’s mouth dropped open. “You’re a manipulator.”
     “Absolutely not. I just prefer to let other people reach their own conclusions.”
     “And their own illusions, too.”
     “Especially those. Why would I want to be responsible for them?”

     Preconceptions can be murder. If you assume anything about your conversational partner (or if he assumes anything about you), it had better be accurate. The terrible damage that’s been done to our language, especially the terms we use in discussing politics and the things relevant to it, has made conversations about them, even conversations with good friends begun in total innocence, into a minefield, largely because of the preconceptions associated with those terms.

     Consider the terms racist and sexist. What do they really mean? Some time ago I allowed that under the current [ab]usage, I qualify as a racist and a sexist. But note the specifics – originally set forth in this essay — and ask yourself whether you would use those terms in that fashion:

     Before we proceed, allow me to state a few things very, very plainly.

1. I am a Caucasian of Irish and Italian descent, whose parents were immigrants from those lands.
2. My loyalties are to my family and the United States of America. I would defend either or both to the death. Apart from a mortgage and a car loan, I owe nothing else to anyone.
3. What matters most to me about others is their character: their willingness to respect the rights of others and to discharge their proper responsibilities, without whining about any of it.
4. I believe that there is an American culture, and that it is infinitely superior to all the other cultures of the world, past or present. More, I believe that Americans are the finest people in the world -- that no other land produces anything remotely comparable to our general standard of decency, justice, generosity, or good humor.
5. I believe that the races, as conventionally defined, differ in various ways. The importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
6. I believe that the sexes differ in various ways. As with racial differences, the importance of those differences is topical and contextual.
7. I believe that homosexual sodomy is self-destructive, but that, at least in certain cases, sexual orientation can be changed.
8. I believe that there is such a thing as general intelligence, that it is at least partly inherited, and that it varies widely.
9. I believe that the handicapped should receive our sympathy and compassion as individuals to other individuals, but that they are not entitled to more as a matter of right.
10. I believe that laws that mandate preferred treatment for the members of any group, however defined, are both unConstitutional and destructive.
11. I hold these convictions not because anyone else holds them, but because the evidence of my senses and my own powers of reasoning have led me to them.

     According to the major taboos of our time, this makes me a racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic chauvinist abuser of the physically challenged. By copping to all this, I've violated all the major, politically correct taboos of our time: about race, gender, sexual orientation, the handicapped, and multiculturalism. Needless to say, the enforcers of those taboos would like to see me boiled in oil.

     They can dip their outrage in beaten eggs, roll it in crushed walnuts, and shove it up their asses.

     See Items #5 and #6 specifically: I believe there are statistical differences among the races and between the sexes. Actually, I don’t merely believe it; I know it. Those differences have manifested themselves in various observable patterns. The patterns are available for anyone to study and contemplate. But under current conditions, merely to note the existence of the patterns, much less to suggest that race and sex might have a causal connection to them, will get you called racist and sexist more often than not. Don’t take my word for it; ask John Derbyshire or Charles Murray.

     John Derbyshire’s treatment of the matter as it pertains to race is characteristically well considered and well phrased:

     (4) The default principle in everyday personal encounters is, that as a fellow citizen, with the same rights and obligations as yourself, any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship. In some unusual circumstances, however—e.g., paragraph (10h) below—this default principle should be overridden by considerations of personal safety.

     (5) As with any population of such a size, there is great variation among blacks in every human trait (except, obviously, the trait of identifying oneself as black). They come fat, thin, tall, short, dumb, smart, introverted, extroverted, honest, crooked, athletic, sedentary, fastidious, sloppy, amiable, and obnoxious. There are black geniuses and black morons. There are black saints and black psychopaths. In a population of forty million, you will find almost any human type. Only at the far, far extremes of certain traits are there absences. There are, for example, no black Fields Medal winners. While this is civilizationally consequential, it will not likely ever be important to you personally. Most people live and die without ever meeting (or wishing to meet) a Fields Medal winner.

     (6) As you go through life, however, you will experience an ever larger number of encounters with black Americans. Assuming your encounters are random—for example, not restricted only to black convicted murderers or to black investment bankers—the Law of Large Numbers will inevitably kick in. You will observe that the means—the averages—of many traits are very different for black and white Americans, as has been confirmed by methodical inquiries in the human sciences.

     Derbyshire, a serious student of mathematics, is scrupulous about his uses of statistics, knowing how easily they can be put toward a sinister agenda. Moreover, he writes right up front that in individual encounters, the default principle of normal courtesy and respect supersedes all statistical considerations. Treat individuals as entitled to the presumption of dignity and respect until they demonstrate otherwise, but when dealing with an aggregate, be guided by the patterns known to prevail among them! What could be more evenhanded – more respectful of the norms that must be observed in a free society that operates under a Rule of Law?

     The same logic applies to the sexes, to the followers of Islam, to self-segregating ethnic groups, and so forth -- as statistical aggregates. But to say so in public is currently an act of considerable daring.

---

     The great Walter Williams once discoursed on racism in a refreshing fashion. His take on it was that whatever one might believe about differences between the races, the sole important aspect of such a belief arises in one’s attitude toward rights. Dr. Williams proposed that the charge of “racism” should be reserved for the conviction that one race should have more or higher rights than others. He argued that only that conviction could give rise to true sociopolitical conflict. So long as every recognizably human individual is conceded the same rights as any other, dangerous conflicts can be averted.

     How refreshing! How wise. To concede that aggregates, however defined, need not be identical under all measures, but to insist that individuals, who are all equal before God, must be treated that way by the mechanisms of politics and government! That whatever we may learn about any particular aggregate, we must never deny an individual the natural human rights to his life, his liberty, or his honestly acquired property because of his skin color, his sex, his ethnicity, his creed, or his membership in any other aggregate!

     The simplicity and power of Williams’s approach are astonishing. We wouldn’t have to have quotas for black concert cellists or Jewish NBA forwards. We could let people find their ways to what they do best without interference – and without feeling guilt that there aren’t “enough” female coal miners or male midwives. But the Left, which is responsible for essentially all the brutalities inflicted upon our lexicon, refuses to allow it.

---

     Rather than let this drag on interminably, I’ll state my position plainly:

I’m an individualist when I deal with individuals;
I’m a collectivist when I discuss collectives.
I’m a believer in individual liberty and justice for all.

     If there’s a more rational way to cope with the dizzying variety of challenges to intellect, ability, courtesy, and safety contemporary American life presents us, I can’t imagine what it might be.

     Food for thought.

Groupiness And The Imperative Of Formality

     I avoid crowds. I detest large cities. I refuse to join groups. None of that will be news to the typical Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. What might surprise him is the question I recently received from a woman who was baffled by those preferences:

“Then who are you?”

     Ponder that for a moment: specifically, what it tells us about the assumptions of the asker. It’s been on my mind since 4:30 AM.

---

     Collectivism, every version of which privileges groups according to some scheme of valuation, is responsible for virtually all the evil in the First World. Yet the assignment of others into categories – groups – is an ineradicable trait. We all do it...because we must.

     About two years ago, I wrote:

     Collectivism – the doctrine that rights and responsibilities adhere not to individuals, but to groups – is a gospel of unending strife. But the ordinary man cannot be moved to take part in such strife without having something to blame on “the Other.” So Negroes must imagine Caucasians to be the source of their problems with crime and lack of economic advancement; women must conceive of men as their oppressors; “the young” must blame “the old” for their struggles at getting employment; and so forth.

Note that just as Anthony Bryan states that “white people and black people are different,” so also are men and women different. So also are the young and the old different. So also are urbanites and suburbanites different, Northerners and Southerners different, Christians and Jews different, et cetera ad nauseam infinitam. Indeed, every individual differs from every other, in innumerable ways. It’s the factual soil in which individualism is rooted: You are unique, with a unique and irreplaceable soul; therefore, only you are responsible for your destiny.

Some differences matter more than others. Some are contextual and mutable, while others are innate and permanent. Some can be accommodated and harmonized; others are immiscible, requiring separation. They exist beyond our opinions and despite our preferences; indeed, they can be critical to the survival of both individuals and nations. But as long as we cleave to the individualist premise that each of us is alone responsible for himself, we can navigate among our differences, making use of the useful ones, coping with the ones that cause difficulties, and avoiding the ones that cause friction.

The substitution of the collectivist premise permits evil minded persons to create discord. If we can be induced to see John Passerby not as an arbitrary individual with his own priorities and obligations, but as black, or female, or Jewish, we can be trained to fear him...and to hate him.

     I stand by every word of the above. It’s beyond refutation. Yet I, too, am impelled to assign people to groups, to expect them to conform to the norms of those groups, and thereafter, to be surprised when they deviate from what I expect. Everybody does it.

     But that’s not the sting in the tail. We do it for a compelling reason: It works often enough, and positively enough, to be worth doing. In somewhat more loaded words:

     So we’re not going to stop. The question of the hour is how the tendency can be detoxified...tamed...rendered less likely to bring bad consequences.

     It can be done, of course. Indeed, it’s not complex or difficult: it merely requires that we see the individual first, allow him the right to differ from any and every group, and judge him on his own merits. But quite a lot of people don’t or won’t do it. Some refuse to do it, and exhort others not to do it, for – drum roll, please – political reasons.

     They who desire strife – who see disharmony, friction, and conflict as paths toward power or profit – are inherently favorable toward the crudest sort of collectivism.

---

     The above might seem a bit off-axis from me, inasmuch as I’ve been vocal, and quite recently so, about the desirability of formalizing the relations between the races. As it happens, I feel the same way about relations between the sexes, between the generations, between the religions, between the nations, between the [insert your meta-collectivity here]. We appear to do much better, socially, when we practice a high degree of formality toward those who differ with us in recognized ways.

     The undiscussed virtue of formality is that it incorporates respect: specifically, respect for the other person’s prerogatives. The patterns it prescribes are designed for exactly that purpose.

     For example, what does it mean when an unaccompanied woman, approached by a man she doesn’t know, smiles formally and says “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced” – ? It’s shorthand for a longer, more explicit statement likely to wound feelings:

     “Excuse me, but I don’t know you, and circumstances are either conducive to fear, conducive to inconvenience, or inappropriate for us to make one another’s acquaintance. Please allow me to go my way. If at some future time we should encounter one another again and discover that we have friends in common, perhaps the outcome will be different.”

     Even the simplest of formal politenesses – “Excuse me,” “Pardon me,” “Please,” “Thank you,” “May I,” “So sorry” – promote and facilitate the maintenance of respect, especially respect between strangers.

     In circumstances of enforced crowding, where there’s nothing to be done about the throng that presses upon one, formalities are far more difficult to implement, which is among the reasons I avoid crowds. Among other things, ammunition has become far more expensive in recent years...to say nothing of the services of a good criminal-defense lawyer.

     I expect I’ll return to this.

The Game Plan

     Is what follows a realistic summary of a major part of the strategy of our political elite, or merely a conspiratorialist’s fantasy?

     “The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed....So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed....

     “Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests....

     “The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas....

     “They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home....

     “Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State....

     “Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must known their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit....

     “The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion....

     “All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits., and experiment with any man who catches their fancy....And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there....

     “In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels....

     “It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure. It’s not in their nature.”

     The above excerpt from Hans G. Schantz’s The Hidden Truth struck me so powerfully that I feel a moral obligation to pass it along. Ponder it, please.

A Few Words On The Status Quo

     “Status quo, you know, is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in’.” – Ronald Reagan

     For some reason, the sort of public policy pontificator we see on television or who rants in the newspapers’ op-ed sections is frequently concerned with stability, or the maintenance of the status quo in various manifestations. Such a commentator seldom faces the question “Why is it right and necessary to maintain the status quo? And why is it America’s responsibility to see to it? Be specific.”

     Now, the generic answer to such a “why” question would be that the status quo is preferable to the alternatives – at least, to the alternatives that would most probably result from disturbing it. But that, of course, raises other questions: “Preferable to whom? And why? And once more with feeling, is it really our problem?”

     That’s why specificity is so important...and why the windy types mentioned above would gladly sacrifice a finger rather than be forced to provide it.

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     Granted that there are identifiable conditions, local, regional, and global, that seem worth preserving, at least prima facie. But even the most desirable of such are desirable to specific persons, for specific reasons, and not unanimously so. For example, there are several local businesses I patronize regularly and would hate to see go bankrupt. Regionally, were all of Long Island’s throughways to be closed, there’d be some dislocations. As for global conditions, I’d be greatly vexed if the planet were to stop rotating. (I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t be the only one.) However:

1. Those businesses’ competitors might have a different opinion;
2. Islamic terrorists would count it a “win;”
3. There’s this marauding fleet of genocidal aliens from Antares that...oh, never mind.

     Moreover, the responsibility for protecting those conditions from perturbation is not uniformly distributed over the affected populations. At least, were the Earth to threaten to stop rotating, I’d have a hard time blaming some illiterate starving aborigine in Papua New Guinea for not “doing his share.”

     There is no moral or rational way to assign responsibility without assessing the distribution of the relevant authority -- and on that subject, a better known voice than mine has spoken:

     “Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.” – Robert A. Heinlein

     In the great majority of cases, the persons responsible for protecting some supposedly desirable condition – e.g., by correcting a problem that threatens it – are those who benefit from that condition, not some gaggle of outsiders. Yet this is seldom admitted by those aforementioned windy types.

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     The more you look, the more you see. -- Robert M. Pirsig

     The collectivization of responsibility – most often in order to load the responsibility onto the shoulders of a government – is the reverse of the coin of the worship of stability. The Reagan quote at the top of this piece implies that, albeit indirectly.

     “The mess we’re in.” As Tonto might have said to the Lone Ranger on many an occasion, “What do you mean we, paleface?” “We” did not create many of the conditions in the world, nor are “we” the beneficiaries thereof. Indeed, just as some well-meant American interventions have actually worsened matters, some conditions the U.S. has intervened to “stabilize” ought to have been left to topple.

     Stop! Stop! Danger, Will Robinson! Return to the previous paragraph. Read the last sentence aloud. Analyze it carefully. What implicit collectivizations can you find in what I wrote? There are four; find and unpack them all for full credit. See how easy it is to “slip one over” on your audience?

     Look at any nominally well-meant government intervention, in a matter that seemed to call for it. Ponder the collectivizing assumptions hidden in it and how they might fail under scrutiny. Here’s an example that will prove fruitful to the careful analyst: the intervention by the federal government in a coastal community’s recovery from a destructive hurricane. There’ve been several such these past sixteen years; any such will yield treasures of understanding to the determined student.

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     This is on my mind this morning because of Michael Snyder’s citation of this paper on “possible global catastrophes.” I’ll cite a single passage, the brief Foreword, which is magnificently exemplary of the syndrome discussed above:

     Nearly four years ago when the Global Challenges Foundation was established, we decided on a direction with two parallel strategies. The first is increasing the knowledge about Global Catastrophic Risks (GCRs), which with our terminology means threats that can eliminate at least 10% of the global population. This knowledge is an important prerequisite for the Foundation’s second strategy: to encourage debates and proposals as to how we can effectively and fairly reduce – and preferably eliminate – these catastrophic risks.
     This publication, the Foundation’s Annual Report for 2016, is the result of a collaboration between the Foundation and the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) and the Global Priorities Project at Oxford University in the U.K., which has now lasted for over two years. A big group of researchers at the FHI, commissioned by the Foundation, summarized where research, focused on charting some of the greatest global risks, currently stands.
     In addition to describing the risks, their effects and their likelihood of occurring, this year’s Annual Report takes one step further and try’s to show how different risks relate to one another, what can be done to combat the risks and who can and should do this. In addition to the risks involved in the Annual Report for 2016, the Foundation actively works with environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, population growth (that exacerbates several risks), and political violence which is behind many of the world’s current problems.
     Political violence comes in many forms. Various kinds of weapons of mass destruction represent potentially devastating weaponry. Further, political violence creates uncontrolled migration and we receive repeated reminders that there is also “digital violence” in the form of cyber-attacks. Together, this takes up a significant amount of space on the political agenda, thus stealing attention from other important risks. And above all, the defense against various forms of political violence requires a grotesquely large share of public resources. Each day, the world spends over SEK 40 billion on defence expenditure – money that would be needed to fight poverty and prevent catastrophic risks.
     My personal opinion is that in order to drastically minimize GCRs we must develop a model where a majority of the world’s nations, with strong support from leading nations, can make binding decisions which can be enforced in an effective and fair way. This would imply that individual nations waive their sovereignty in favor of one or more organizations that have a mandate to decide on how to mitigate GCRs.
     Would this be possible? My counter question is whether there are any alternatives? To continue relying on multilateral negotiations increases the probability that decisions and actions are insufficient and executed too late. This means that the likelihood of GCRs continues to escalate.
     I hope that this publication can deepen the understanding of GCRs and that these insights provide a fertile ground for both debates and proposals on how we can develop a better way of managing and addressing these risks.

     The above is an absolute masterpiece of implicit collectivization...and multi-level collectivization at that. Moreover, as you proceed into the document, it will become clear that several of the “risks” the authors cite are either illusory or are merely challenges to a status quo from which some benefit and others suffer.

     The publication is an irritating, remorselessly self-righteous and tendentious document written mainly by Scandinavian socialists. You might not want to read it in its entirety. I could hardly blame you. But those who steel themselves to the task will learn many things about the Left’s tactics, to say nothing of the reasons for them.

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     A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Leftists’ manipulation of language as one of their principal tactics. To save you some wear and tear on your mouse, here’s the central thesis of that essay:

     [I]f the perversion of language is directed toward rendering particular concepts immoral, it sanctifies the use of violence to suppress those who would dare to speak of them, much less act on them. And as we have seen in recent years, leftists are growing ever more ready to use violence to prevent the discussion of concepts unfriendly to their aims.

     Exactly the same could be said about the manipulation of language to imply collective responsibility for various matters. When that collectivization is aimed at the protection of some status quo, sharp questions demand to be asked:

• Who benefits and who suffers from the “problem?”
• Who has authority over the conditions described and why has he not acted?
• Are there “passive victims” who ought to have taken a hand in redressing it?
• Concerning the proposed intervention, who would profit and who would be mulcted – and why should the latter group willingly assent?

     These are questions the Left, and the great majority of those at the levers of power, would prefer not to face. Collectivization is the source of their power, prestige, and perquisites...and collectivization is the essence of any status quo.

     Yes, the title of this piece is “a few words.” For this enormous subject, the above are very few words. Think about it, especially in the light of our current political cycle.