"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
I recently spoke to a mid-level executive at a major corporation who had been forced to sit through mandatory “inclusivity” training. The topic was transgender rights, and the trainer proceeded to spout far-left ideology as fact, going so far as to label all who disagreed with the notion that a man can become a woman “transphobic.” I asked if anyone objected to any part of the training, and the response was immediate. “Are you crazy? No one wants to deal with HR.”
French's article elucidates ordinary, decent Americans' loss of confidence in their own values -- which eventuates, in his words, in "the slow accumulation of individually defensible but collectively unjustifiable decisions not to resist."
But how can a decision be deemed "individually defensible" yet "collectively unjustifiable?" Quite simply: Smith is principally concerned with the defense of his own interests and the protection of those he loves. His decision to "not make a fuss" might prove ideal for those purposes. However, if the majority of Smiths choose to "not make a fuss," the field has been yielded to those that are willing to "make a fuss:" the noisy, demanding minorities that gain social and legal sway through persistence and volume, in a perfect demonstration of the Public Choice effect.
Please read it all, and keep it in mind for the next time you face the choice whether or not to resist.
UPDATE: For lagniappe:
Are we allowed to laugh at that today? Excuse me, Gentle Reader; my mascara's running.
This will be an insane piece. No, it’s not insane in and of itself. Neither is it about insane persons; the persons to which it refers are all doing the sensible thing: acting according to the incentives they face. All the same, many a Gentle Reader who gets to the end of it will feel an urgent need to see his brain-care specialist. In that spirit, let’s lead off with some appropriate music:
If you’re thinking that would surely make more sense if printed out, I’m afraid I must contradict you:
Outside the gates of Cerdes sits the two-pronged unicorn
Who plays at relaxation time a rhinestone flugelhorn
Whilst mermaids lace carnations into wreaths for ailing whales
And Neptune dances hornpipes while Salome sheds her veils
Phallus Phil tries peddling his pewter painted pot
But Sousa Sam can only hear the screams of Peep the sot
Who only sips his creme de menthe from terra cotta cups
And exhales menthol scented breath whilst spewing verbiage up
Down technical blind alleys live the wraiths of former dreams
And Greeps who often crossed them are no longer what they seem
And even Christian Scientists can but display marble plaques
Which only retell legends whilst my eyes reach out for facts
Yeah, my eyes reach out for facts
[Keith Reid]
Keith Reid, the lyricist for legendary proto-prog band Procol Harum, had a gift – or perhaps a curse – for such hallucinogenic lyrics. The entire first Procol Harum album, one of the standouts of its genre and time, is like this. The songs tease you from just beyond the edge of comprehensibility, but your mental fingers can’t get a firm grip on them...nor did Reid and singer / composer / pianist Gary Brooker intend that you should.
No doubt every Gentle Reader has at one time or another heard the old phrase “You’re not crazy; it’s the rest of the world.” That phrase was once meant sarcastically, as a reproof to one who, viewing the behavior of others, finds it bizarre and rejects all sensible explanations for it. But of course, in our multivariate world, there are other possibilities:
You're Sane Rest Of The World is Sane
You're Sane Rest of the World is Crazy
You're Crazy Rest Of The World is Sane
You're Crazy Rest of the World is Crazy
Gotta love those Cartesian products, eh what?
Of course, people's interpretations of "sane" and "crazy" do diverge a bit. Mine are quite simple: if your responses to incentives and stimuli get you what you want more often than not, you're relatively sane; if not, you're relatively crazy. This should not be taken to exclude the possibility that you're sane or crazy on some limited number of subjects. For example, my Vietnamese-American sweetie Duyen is out of her BLEEP!ing mind about shoes, while her husband Matt has this obsession about toothpaste...but I digress.
Incentives and stimuli don't quite govern all. They operate on us amid a matrix of values, some of which we internalize, others of which might be regarded as "background" incentives. Values are our principal determinants of what we want, and so are critical to the sane / crazy evaluations we make of others, and others make of us.
Upon which note, let's pass to the consideration of a few other folks.
People stockpile an item out of worries that it will soon become difficult or impossible to get. But why cheese?
It turns out, America has been stockpiling cheese and butter and has amassed more golden treats than any time in past thirty years. Why? Europeans, trade, and because cheese is delicious.
Exports from the European Union have climbed so far this year and last — even after the bloc’s once-largest customer, Russia, banned trade in retaliation for sanctions over its incursion in Ukraine. A glut of milk, plunging prices and a weakening euro mean the EU has been able to grab customers in Asia and the Middle East, while U.S. sales have fallen.
European dairy products are so cheap right now that the U.S. itself has become the new No. 1 customer for some products — imports of EU butter doubled last year and rose 17 percent for cheese, according to the European Commission. All that excess supply is building up in U.S. refrigerators, especially as American dairy production heads to a record this year.
USDA statistics show cheese inventories at the end of March were the highest for the date since 1984, the year Prince’s “Purple Rain” was released. More than half of the supply is American cheese, while Swiss accounts for about 2 percent, and the rest the government classifies as “other.”
So it turns out that Americans aren't really "stockpiling" cheese. We're not worried about a "cheese crisis;" we're just buying and enjoying more of it than before. Accordingly, retailers are keeping larger inventories of it. That's a fairly predictable consequence when a pleasure decreases in price.
But European cheeses are "cheap" only relative to American-made cheeses. The EU's trade regulations have brought this about: that "glut of milk" exists because those regulations over-encouraged the production thereof, mostly in France. The EU's supranational government altered the market incentives that had previously prevailed. Americans who love cheese are merely capitalizing on the EU's bad judgment. Why, though, would persons whose livelihood depends upon profits from the sale of cheese persist in this course when it must surely be bringing them near to bankruptcy? And why would they tolerate the EU's insertion of its nose into their business in the first place?
Think that over while I finish my morning chunk of Cheddar.
If you want to buy soap at the Walgreens on Market Street in San Francisco, you’ll need to find a store employee to unlock the display case for you.
Fifty dollar earbuds and $100 bottles of Claritin simply sit on the shelves where customers can pick them up and go. But baby formula, shampoo, and soap are all protected by locked display cases.
It’s well known that pharmacies need to protect their stores of cold medicine, which methamphetamine cooks can use to make illicit drugs. But why soap? Is a $6 bottle of Dove body wash really worth the squeeze?
This excellent article goes into considerable detail about why thieves steal what they steal...but for me, the punch in the gut came with this observation about "fences:"
Residential fence: Thieves will sell stolen goods to a fence who buys and sells stolen goods out of his or her residence
Excuse me? There are fences who sell stolen goods out of their homes? Doesn't that lead directly to arrest and incarceration? The police aren't fools. They notice patterns in the movement of stolen goods, and they can be relied upon to act on them...but sometimes it's in pursuit of "a cut."
Given that the police are quite often willing to look the other way if they can have "a piece of the action," the incentives here are fairly straightforward. Yet this mode of fencing, and the related traffic in common, inexpensive household goods, is a relatively new phenomenon. What has brought it into being?
Eh Wah had been on the road for 12 hours when he saw the flashing lights in his rearview mirror.
The 40-year-old Texas man, a refugee from Myanmar who became a US citizen more than a decade ago, was heading home to Dallas to check on his family.
He was on a break from touring the country for months as a volunteer manager for the Klo & Kweh Music Team, a Christian rock ensemble from Myanmar. The group was touring the US to raise funds for a Christian college in Myanmar and an orphanage in Thailand.
Eh Wah managed the band's finances, holding on to the cash proceeds it raised from ticket and merchandise sales at concerts. By the time he was stopped in Oklahoma, the band had held concerts in 19 cities across the United States, raising money via tickets that sold for US$10 to US$20 each.
The sheriff's deputies in Muskogee County, Oklahoma, pulled Eh Wah over for a broken tail light about 6.30pm on Feb 27. The deputies started asking questions – a lot of them. And at some point, they brought out a drug-sniffing dog.
That's when they found the cash, according to the deputy's affidavit.
Eh Wah was carrying $53,000 in proceeds from his fundraising tour. You can probably guess what happened next:
The officers ended up taking all of the money – all US$53,249 of it. "Possession of drug proceeds," the property receipt reads.
But they let Eh Wah go. They didn't charge him with a crime that night, instead sending him back on the road about 12.30am, with the broken tail light.
Bad enough, right? In 2015, "civil asset forfeitures" of this sort accounted for more property taken from its rightful owners than all the burglaries reported that year. But the story's not over. Here's the climax:
At The Washington Post, Christopher Ingraham told the story of how a routine traffic stop turned into the police seizing tens of thousands of dollars from the manager of a Christian band.
What makes this story unique is not the facts of the case, unfortunately, but that it went viral....
"Muskogee has no excuse for this gross miscarriage of justice," said [Institute for Justice attorney Dan] Alban. "Based on next to no evidence, what started as an ordinary traffic stop turned into a nightmare....This is a clear-cut case of abuse of power."
What is unique about Eh Wah's case, which is worth a full read, is how widely his story was shared. Hours after thousands of people shared the article, the Muskogee County District Attorney dropped the charges against Eh Wah.
Does any Gentle Reader believe that the Muskogee County police would ever have returned the $53,000 had public scrutiny and the consequent outcry not revealed them for the thieves they are? Before you answer, reflect on the article I cited just above this one. Think hard.
In all three cases above, government interventions into the business of private parties gave rise to incentives that bent the behavior of ordinary people -- yes, for the purposes of this article let's deem the Muskogee County police "ordinary" -- away from previous patterns:
Americans previously ate less cheese, less frequently than they do today.
Thieves once concentrated almost exclusively on high-value items.
Time was, the police wouldn't think they could get away with robbing an Eh Wah.
It's a demonstration of the power of incentives...but it demonstrates something else as well:
Time was, Frenchmen were too proud to enlist a government in securing them a protected market for their cheese;
Time was, Americans were too proud to knowingly purchase stolen goods, let alone stolen laundry soap.
Time was, American police regarded themselves as servants of justice, not as legally empowered thieves.
The values that previously inhibited behavior of the sort chronicled above have been attenuated into insignificance. The mechanisms that have weakened those values are several; any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch will be familiar with them. The loss thereof is rapidly reducing the entire First World to a mass of whining, conniving brats, all clamoring gimme...and taking whatever they can pry loose from its proper owners.
When I wrote this piece, even I didn't think we were this close to the edge of the abyss. Suffice it to say that I see things differently now...and not more cheerfully.
Know whom you can trust.
Keep a close watch on your loved ones.
And for the love of God, keep your powder dry.
Mentsch tracht und Gott lach (Man plans and God laughs) -- Yiddish proverb
Man, being, in Loren Lomasky's phrase, a project pursuer who conceives of goals and formulates plans by which to attain them, is ever conscious of the passage of time. Time is the least tractable of all the elements of a plan, for we cannot control the rate at which it passes. Many plans depend completely upon the achievement of specific steps at specific times; should one or more of those steps "miss its deadline," or perhaps be taken out of order, the plan will fail...perhaps disastrously.
Analogizing against human planning gives rise to fatally incorrect interpretations of God's Plan. Indeed, the eternal contest over free will versus predestination founders on that rock. As I wrote in Shadow Of A Sword:
“What makes it [the concept of a Divine Plan] hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”
It's Man who aims, plans, chooses, and acts; God's Plan is of an entirely different order: an order it would be the ultimate arrogance for any mortal to claim to comprehend. Hopefully He laughs at it, but He might not.
Here in America, the young tend to do less planning than their elders. Young adults have maximum flexibility of direction and action. They're less committed to any particular course than those of us who've been some decades on the adventure of life. Because ours is a rich society, they also tend to have less worry about making mistakes; our resources, and the often tested but seldom lacking love of parents for their children, cushions them against many a wrong turning.
Older Americans plan incessantly. This is particularly the case for those of us peering ahead to retirement. The necessity itself can make one very nervous, for even a well-heeled oldster has no way to control most of the conditions that would bear upon his plan: the ever-changing state of his health, the value of the dollar, the state of the economy, the needs of those he loves, the rapacity of the State, and other aspects of existence beyond enumeration. None of these can be guaranteed to be or remain favorable; some are guaranteed to deteriorate despite any and all efforts to preserve them.
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all." Thus says Ecclesiastes. And indeed, it is so. Which, combined with the above observations, renders foolish at best, condemnable at worst, any statement to the effect that this or that stroke of fortune or misfortune, whether inflicted upon oneself or upon others, was "part of God's Plan."
Conventional answers to questions about "why we're here" notwithstanding, it is nevertheless observable that:
Each of us must attend to his own needs as a first priority;
We can accomplish a great deal of good by the judicious exercise of charity.
Point 1 proceeds directly from the nature of the human organism. A man who doesn't see to his own necessities first and foremost seldom lives very long. Moreover, the wasted are seldom in a position to help anyone. (The dead, still less often.) Survival and an adequate provision for the foreseeable future therefore come first.
Yet point 2 is equally a matter of human nature, for as individuals, we are limited, fallible, and vulnerable. No one gets very far with nothing but his own body and mind; everything else we might ever bring to bear upon the execution of a plan requires the cooperation or collaboration of others, whether direct or indirect. Vanishingly few among us can say that they've never needed anyone's help for anything -- and most of us, at some point in our lives, will have a need for help we don't deserve and cannot repay.
We plan...but we don't plan in isolation from one another. The true "lone wolf" is the rarest of all human beings; such isolates tend to wither and die. Robinson Crusoe, had he not had the well-stocked wreck of his ship to plunder for resources, would not have flourished in his solitude...and the goods of which he availed himself were not his by original acquisition.
To the extent that the Divine Plan addresses Man and his societies, perhaps that mandatory involvement with one another is at the heart of it.
Americans' charitable inclinations are among the things that mark us as the finest people on Earth. Yet in these days of steadily increasing interpersonal separations, those impulses can lead us astray rather easily. In particular, we tend to give through large, institutional charities, and we tend to give money. Both these avenues for the exercise of charity should be avoided in the great majority of cases, for they conduce to the institutionalization of an activity that's properly practiced at close range. Division of labor isn't the best approach to everything.
But because of our habit of planning, the exploitation of those institutions and the cash nexus that lubricates commerce is difficult to resist. It makes it possible to conserve time for other things while simultaneously allowing ourselves to satisfy that desire, often rising near to a compulsion, to give. And time, as I observed earlier, is the least tractable of all the components of our plans; we can neither manufacture it nor bottle it for later consumption.
Though we are project pursuers who plan as naturally as we breathe, nevertheless not everything can or should be planned. Significant realms of life, most emphatically including how we interact with those around us, should be left unplanned. That way, we enjoy and / or assist one another spontaneously, albeit rationally, properly, and judiciously. We know and help one another as individuals, a far more intimate relation than formal mechanisms and institutional intermediaries can provide.
It's one of my great regrets that only now, in my seventh decade, am I coming to terms with how far from that counsel my own life has strayed. But as I've said before, these Ruminations are mostly a way to talk to myself without attracting the attention of men in white coats with butterfly nets.
Thousands of pro-life activists donned scarves, gloves and knit hats Wednesday to brave the blowing snow and arctic temperatures on the Mall as the 41st March for Life was punctuated by an unusually blunt exchange between the Republican and Democratic Party leaders that signaled a shifting fight for female voters.
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz opened the barrage, accusing her GOP counterpart, Reince Priebus, of rallying “against women’s rights” and assailing Republicans for spending “more time fighting to restrict the rights of women to make their own health care choices.”
The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.
And:
Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health. We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom. And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children. Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams. [ Barack Hussein Obama ]
Abortion is "health care?" Really? "For whom?" I hear you ask. Certainly not for the baby whose life is about to be snuffed out. It's pretty dubious for the unwilling mother-to-be, too; a great many such live with negative consequences, physical, emotional, or both, for the rest of their lives. To a non-Democrat, the matter admits of deeper, more compassionate consideration:
With a message coordinated with the march, Mr. Priebus and his Republican charges shot back at the Democratic efforts to paint the GOP as extreme and unfriendly to women.
“I attended the March for Life to show both my personal and the Republican Party’s respect for life and to celebrate adoption,” Mr. Priebus told The Washington Times. “As a party, we believe life is a gift worth protecting, and the march is an important cause.”
As it happens, the March was well attended despite the snow, the bitter cold, and the disapproval of the Left:
Last year's March was estimated at 500,000 attendees. I haven't yet located an estimate of yesterday's attendance, but it seems certain to have reached six figures, at least.
Did tens of thousands of Americans, many of them young women, brave extreme weather to demonstrate "against women's rights?" Are they really opposed to "health care?" Or is something else in progress that the Democrats and their handmaidens in the Main Stream Media would prefer not to discuss?
The Marxist obsession with death is striking. There is a blood lust to it. When they describe it, it is always as some form of ultimate good. Whether in the form of euthanasia, or abortion, or Obamacare death panels, they are always getting rid of those that don't fit into their humanistic, Godless society.
It is social planning that ultimately puts the figurative gun to the head of millions of citizens. We have all seen the pictures of the holocaust. The Jews were "wrecking" the ability of Germany to economically recover from World War I. The political opponents of Stalin were "wrecking" the benefits of communism by failing to produce enough for the people. Obamacare will eventually find that old people "selfishly" requiring too many services and not contributing to the treasury will be "wrecking" the health care system. Marxism always comes with an enemy, even when those enemies are as inoffensive as unborn children, the mentally handicapped or the elderly.
The underlying sense of it all is that being human is subjective with bureaucrats making the distinction. The most important aspect of Marxism is the bureaucracy for this very reason. There are accounts of the average Russian believing that if "Stalin knew what was going on, he would be furious and put a stop to it." Stalin depended on the bureaucracy to protect his narcissistic image. Sound familiar?
There is no conceptual or ethical space between what Davis refers to as "Marxists" and those aligned with the American Left. To a leftist, all subjects, including the most private and intimate, are political: "The personal is political" is their slogan, after all. That includes mammalian taxonomy: a human life is what they say it is.
Bone marrow stem cell transplants save the lives of thousands each year and have been performed for more than four decades. The medical therapies developed from stem cell research (SCR) have produced successful results far beyond our expectations.
With all this scientific success and with more than 15,000 patients benefiting from SCR each year, why are some people apoplectic? The answer is both simple and perplexing. The scientific breakthroughs and the medical therapies have all come from adult stem cells and none as yet have come from embryonic stem cells. Rather than welcoming the results and pursuing support for what works, there are paradoxically increasing demands for the recognition and funding of embryonic SCR.
A dangerous combination of political and social ideology is determined to make embryonic SCR succeed. The problem is an apparent obsession with destroying human life to provide medical therapies. Looking from the outside, one might imagine that embryonic SCR supporters are advocating a pagan ritual of human sacrifice to treat disease?
[...snip...]
As Lynde Langdon reported in "Miracle cells" (World, February 5, 2005):
The National Institutes of Health has shunned her grant applications three times. In one grant review, a fellow scientist commented that her stem cells come from tissue inside umbilical cords, not days-old embryos. ‘We already have a good source of stem cells,’ the grant reviewer wrote, ‘Why do we need another?'
Ms. Langdon further writes:
The NIH . . . has funded only 30 projects involving stem cells from umbilical cords. In contrast, it has funded 634 projects involving embryonic stem cells.
As I wrote at Eternity Road nine years ago:
The "why" of it is simple enough. It's an item on a checklist:
Abortion without restrictions.
Assisted suicide.
Involuntary euthanasia of those deemed untreatable or having "no quality of life."
Compulsory surrender of the organs of the deceased for transplantation.
Creation of embryos for research and therapeutic purposes.
Government-enforced "triage" to conserve medical and financial resources.
Compulsory acceptance of specified therapies.
Procreation licenses.
Government eugenics programs:
At first, as subsidies to couples with favored genetic characteristics;
Later, as compulsory donations of gametes for use in government-supervised breeding programs.
Conscription for military purposes.
Conscription for non-military purposes.
The overarching theme of all these measures, about half of which are already in place in various Western countries, is that human life has no intrinsic value and bears no intrinsic rights. By corollary, the individual's life does not belong to him, but to the State. The deliberate creation of human embryos in government-funded research centers, despite the revulsion it evokes from more than half the population of this country, is directly in line with this campaign. It's apparently the number-one goal of the pro-death forces at this time, despite lack of any indication of scientific or medical utility.
If we are the property of the State, then we have no rights of any kind. Property cannot have rights, for the quintessential characteristic of an item of property is its owner's right to dispose of it however he pleases. That includes the right to destroy it.
Think about it.
Despite the Main Stream Media's determination to suppress the trend, the American people are steadily trending toward the legal restriction of abortion. It would appear that the Left's attempt to conflate abortion with "health care" has run out of gas. Demographic factors might play a significant role: pro-life women out-reproduce pro-choice women by a considerable margin. Also, the country is aging, and people do become more conservative as they age. But there's also a moral awakening in progress: a slow but steady return to what the Left would call "reactionary values," including the valuation of human life as a sacred gift.
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: ... it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word....
Such extreme suspension of the right of free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs. Different opinions and 'philosophies' can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the 'marketplace of ideas' is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the 'end of ideology', the false consciousness has become the general consciousness--from the government down to its last objects. The small and powerless minorities which struggle against the false consciousness and its beneficiaries must be helped: their continued existence is more important than the preservation of abused rights and liberties which grant constitutional powers to those who oppress these minorities....
[1968 Postscript:] As against the virulent denunciations that such a policy would do away with the sacred liberalistic principle of equality for 'the other side', I maintain that there are issues where either there is no 'other side' in any more than a formalistic sense, or where 'the other side' is demonstrably 'regressive' and impedes possible improvement of the human condition.
The above was written in 1965 and 1968. Dismiss it if you please. I cannot.
The two great preparatory seasons of the liturgical year, Advent and Lent, are intended to stimulate reflection and resolution among the Christian faithful. Sadly, Advent is shrugged aside by many, owing to the huge secular demands the "holiday season" imposes on us. Scarcely are Thanksgiving and its indulgences behind us than the time has come to...shop? Buy and decorate a "Christmas tree?" Festoon the house with garlands of red, green, and gold? Inundate the Postal Service with a blizzard of Hallmark's finest? Arrange our schedules to accommodate as many of our relatives' and friends' seasonal celebrations as possible?
Gahh.
I finished the first draft of Freedom's Fury just yesterday afternoon. Sent it off to my beta reader with the last of my energy. It was a draining, emotionally wringing experience. I'll be awhile recovering from it. That's what completing an emotionally and spiritually evocative story does to me. But in this case, it did something else as well: something for which my gratitude knows no bounds.
Those of you who've read Which Art In Hope and Freedom's Scion know how I tried to weave gentle Christian themes into those tales of a wholly ungoverned world. It wasn't easy. The political and sociological motifs were so compelling to me that it was a rearguard struggle to meld them with the spiritual content I've tried to incorporate into everything I write. I'm not wholly satisfied with those efforts -- what writer is ever wholly satisfied with a completed story? -- though for the life of me I can't see how I might have done better with them.
Freedom's Fury, a tale of love, war, and the emergence of political conflicts and structures on Hope, a world populated by the descendants of Spoonerite anarchists, was an even greater challenge. As the conclusion to the Spooner Federation saga, it had to complete the evolution of the sociopolitical mechanisms developed in the earlier novels. That took quite a lot of hard thought and careful character motivation and orientation. Figures who might not have "had it in them" when they first appeared on Hope's stage had to be brought forward and animated with the most powerful of fuels. In one case, they fashioned a seemingly ordinary man into a king; in another, they burned the unfortunate vessel to a crisp.
But on every page, behind every act of the tragedy, stood the Cross and the shadows it casts upon men.
I'm not going to elaborate further on that just now. You'll see what I mean when you read the novel. God and my cover artist willing, it will be out in eBook format no later than mid-February.
It's massively unfortunate that Ayn Rand so polluted the meaning of the word sacrifice. Rand was, of course, a case-hardened secularist who held religion in contempt. She was unable to cope with the cleavage between the teachings of the great figures of the Christian tradition, highest among them Jesus Himself, and the exploitation of those teachings by men who cared more for worldly authority and stature than for God's love and mercy. Thus, she declined to deal with the fundamental meaning of sacrifice as expressed in its etymology: to make holy.
Christ Himself introduced a measure of uncertainty into the Jews' traditional interpretation of sacrifice:
As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax booth. “Follow me,” he said to him. And he got up and followed him. As Jesus was having a meal in Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with Jesus and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this he said, “Those who are healthy don’t need a physician, but those who are sick do. Go and learn what this saying means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” [Matthew 9:9-13]
Indeed, the point was so important that He repeated it:
At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on a Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pick the grain and eat. But when the Pharisees saw this they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is against the law to do on the Sabbath.” He said to them, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry—how he entered the house of God and they ate the sacred bread, which was against the law for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests? Or have you not read in the law that the priests in the temple desecrate the Sabbath and yet are not guilty? I tell you that something greater than the temple is here. If you had known what this means: ‘I want mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.” [Matthew 12:1-8]
Holiness is the supreme expression of wholeness: of congruence with God's Will as expressed in the laws He has written for this universe. Among those laws is one we rail against at every turn, despite its obvious immutability: that all things have a price. As a somewhat less exalted figure has written:
“Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain....The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself--ultimate cost for perfect value.”
They who most highly valued freedom, during the years of our Revolution, had to risk their lives for it -- and many paid the ultimate price. They who value justice are often compelled to pay the same price. Many a mother has paid that price in an attempt, successful or not, to protect her children. And throughout the two millennia behind us, many men, including most of the Apostles, have been compelled to surrender their mortal lives for the sake of remaining true to their faith.
Let him who dares condemn those men and their sacrifices.
A human life is an organic whole. Its events are connected to one another by bonds of causation and ripples of consequence that can sometimes be difficult to see. Yet the connections are always there. We would be unable to make sense of our experiences, learn the lessons they bear for us, if it were otherwise.
Each of the protagonists of Freedom's Fury confronts a point of crisis, a fork in his life where he must either sacrifice or admit that what he values isn't as important to him as he'd claimed it to be. A superficial reading of the book will leave the reader puzzled by that description. They win, don't they? They get what they seek from their enterprises, don't they? Yes, they do. But they pay a price for each such gain. Sometimes the price isn't obvious until long after it's been "rung up."
A man's continuity of values and commitment to them, including the price they demand, is what elevates him above the common run. It's the fee for his admission to the halls of greatness. The highest and most dramatic of such figures are our greatest heroes. We see their lives as expressions of their values, despite the obvious truism that any mortal, however dedicated, will have his lapses and his intervals of doubt. In identifying them with the values they championed, we contrive to see them whole. We measure ourselves against their integrity of purpose, dimly aware that in that wholehearted commitment to something greater than oneself lies the true meaning of heroism.
In that wholeness resides the holiness of life.
I've written in the past about the "private experience" that, coupled to the desire for transcendence, will allow one to complete one's journey to faith. From time to time a Gentle Reader will write to me inquiring -- sometimes pleading, sometimes demanding -- what constitutes an experience of that sort. It's an impossible question to answer in any way but this one: When it happens to you, you'll recognize it at once.
In these latter years, I've come to believe that to open oneself to such an experience, one must live in full commitment to one's values, whatever they may be. Commitment that complete implies that when the price for upholding and advancing them is presented to the holder, he pays it willingly and without attempting to haggle. He recognizes that the price is inseparable from the value itself.
You might think that's oversimplified. Aren't there bad values, of a sort that God frowns upon? Of course. But bad values lived with full commitment tend to evoke corrective forces. Those forces charge a price that reduces the transaction to a pure loss. Afterward we are reoriented, made aware of our errors, and equipped to do better. That, too, is an aspect of the wholeness of life. With a single necessary exception, there are no saints who were not also sinners.
Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is the Sunday of Hope. We are counseled to elevate our hopes above our fears, to petition God confidently for sustenance in facing our trials, and to look forward with the optimism of persons who really, truly believe in the possibility of admission to eternal bliss in His nearness. Christmas, the commemoration of the birth of Jesus and the second highest of all the holy days, is almost upon us. The season is His and ours, for He came to free us from the chains of sin and open the gates of heaven to us.
It's not a sacrifice of shopping time, or decorating time, or time sending out greeting cards or responses to party invitations, to spend an hour reflecting on that. It's an admission that above the secular trappings of the season there are values that stand infinitely higher: values to which we can and should commit ourselves, not only for the "holiday season" but for all time to come.
