Once in a while, a politician will say something so stupid, so wrongheaded, so completely at odds with observable reality that it offers an opportunity to demonstrate to the inattentive exactly what horrors governments are capable of:
An amended version of a bill that would extend new protections to California's homeless population cleared the Assembly Judiciary Committee on Tuesday morning.Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, framed Assembly Bill 5 as an attempt to create a statewide baseline of homeless civil rights, citing a proliferation of municipal ordinances cracking down on behavior like lying or sleeping on the sidewalk as examples of the "criminalization of poor people."
"Today numerous laws infringe on poor peoples' ability to exist in public space, to acquire housing, employment and basic services and to equal protection under the laws," Ammiano said at a Tuesday morning hearing.
Ammiano's legislation faced a backlash from critics who said the bill would sanction behavior like urinating in public while exposing businesses to new litigation, undercutting the will of voters who had passed local ordinances and handcuffing city-level efforts to deal with homelessness. The California Chamber of Commerce included AB 5 on its annual list of "job killers" because it imposes "costly and unreasonable mandates on employers."
[Thank you, Jerry of Common Sense and Wonder, for this citation.]
So the assemblyman is concerned about "poor peoples' ability to exist in public space," is he? Well, well, well.
It's fascinating that Ammiano doesn't grasp the implications of his statement. Does he not realize that "public space" includes things like beaches, roads, and the lobbies of government buildings? Does he not grasp that a "right" to establish a static presence in such a place constitutes a privatization of that space -- a homesteading? If he were compelled to confront those realities, do you think he'd understand the problem, or would he accuse you of being "heartless" and "bigoted?"
Isabel Paterson dissected this most ably:
Theoretically, public property belongs to everybody equally, indivisibly, and simultaneously, which is absurd. If this assumption were applied, the result would be that any person presenting himself to use the property could be asked: "Are you everybody?" and he would be bound to reply: "No"; while he could not assert any claim to use any particular division of the property. The actual use of public property by the public is therefore limited to approximately two dimensional conditions, in which cubic measure, or solids, need not be taken into account, so that a man is regarded as a point in a line which is divisible into an infinite number of points; and with any number of lines intersecting without interference, on a plane surface. Thus it is practicable—whether or not it is necessary or advisable—to make roads public property, because the use of a road is to traverse it. Though the user does in fact occupy a given space at a given moment, the duration is negligible, so that there is no need to take time and space into account except by negation, a prohibition: the passenger is not allowed to remain as of right indefinitely on any one spot in the road. The same rule applies to parks and public buildings. The arrangement is sufficiently practicable in those conditions to admit the fiction of "public ownership."
Robert Ringer, in Restoring The America Dream, provides an example of what comes from dismissing this aspect of "public property:"
What would stop a gang of people from getting up early each morning and staking out fifty yards of the most desirable [public] beachfront in a given area? After all, since they would own every square inch of the beach in common with everyone else, it would be their right to do so. Is this what the original communist theoreticians had in mind -- a chaotic society that would operate on a first-come-first-served basis?But wait a minute. Why should the gang have to arise early each morning to lay claim to the preferred area of the beach? Does communism provide for a time limit on the use of commonly owned property? Why not just have a couple of gang members guard the property at night? Technically they would merely be exercising their right to use "common property;" it's just that their use, in this particular case, would be continuous.
To carry this line of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, why not just live on that particular area of beach on a permanent basis? And that would be the precise point at which "the people" would be engaged in something called private ownership of property.
"Public property" is inseparable from this implication. If we embrace the fiction of "public property" -- really, State-owned property to which private persons are granted conditional access -- the conditions under which it can be maintained viably come right along with it.
Assemblyman Ammiano fails to grasp these facts. Yet they are inescapable; attempting to legislate around them is like King Knut's attempt to sweep back the tide.
I once wrote a jeremiad against allowing really smart people to hold public office. It appears I'll have to write one against electing really stupid ones, too. California being what it is, I doubt it will make a difference in the Golden State.
Remember Finnish Stalinist Pentti Linkola, cited in the previous part of this series? Remember this statement:
A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her.
There are several fallacies in those thirty-seven words, but the core premise is what matters most:
This is the premise of paternalism. The paternalist seeks to use the force of the State to compel certain behaviors and prohibit others, under the presumption that he knows better for you than you would. In his view, the need to make you behave properly gives him a license to coerce you. Those who disagree, he dismisses as stupid or evil; those who would defy him become lawbreakers.
There are many different flavors of paternalism, of course. On the Left, the paternalist might be animated by “compassion for the poor,” or by “the environment,” or by any of a number of other pseudo-moralistic abstractions. On the Right, the paternalist might be driven by Puritanical religious convictions, or by a distaste for certain pleasures, or some by notion of “social utility.” Whatever his overt rationale, the premise beneath it all is a constant.
Just as attempts to engineer the American economy into certain directions always fails, so also does the paternalist’s attempts to compel us to want other than we want, do other than we would voluntarily do...to be other than we naturally are.
If you destroy a free market, you create a black market. – Winston Churchill
In the overwhelming majority of cases, the behavior the paternalist wants to promote or curb involves persons acting together in some fashion.
Consider the case of illegal drugs. No other subject in political discourse involves such firmness of position or such high emotion. Enormous effort and expense has gone into the attempt to prevent the production, sale, and use of such drugs. All such attempts have failed, because black markets are inherently beyond anyone’s control. The permeation of America’s prisons by the most powerful, most dangerous illegal drugs testifies eloquently to the State’s inability to do anything effective about them. Indeed, our borders are porous in large part because of the immense profits to be made in smuggling drugs into the United States.
Consider the case of prostitution. We hear relatively little about this vice today, which has proved to be as far beyond control by the force of law as illegal drug use. When a man wishes to purchase sexual services and a woman wishes to sell them, they will find one another – and their transaction won’t appear on either one’s ledger. Nothing could illustrate the complete surrender of law to prostitution than the Eliot Spitzer / Ashley Dupree case of recent memory.
Finally for this segment of the tirade, consider gambling. It’s not that long since the only legal gambling in the United States took place in Las Vegas. Yet today, state governments routinely run lotteries, including the sort that was once called “playing the numbers,” reap considerable profits from them, and license as many casinos as there are persons willing to claim Amerind ancestry. In this case, the State decided that since it couldn’t suppress illegal gambling, it might as well get onto the gravy train. The gravy has proved rich indeed, fattening state treasuries beyond expectation owing to most persons’ inability to read the backs of lottery tickets or unwillingness to do basic arithmetic.
The above three cases are more the scourge of Right-leaning paternalists rather than Left-leaning ones; the paternalist of the Left is usually more interested in thrusting his hand into your pocket. But a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch can easily provide himself with sufficient cases of the Left’s we-know-better-what’s-good-for-you postures.
If we must have a tyrant, a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point may be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely more because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. – C. S. Lewis
The paternalist dynamic opposes the determination of the paternalist to make you behave to the determination of his target to do as he pleases even so. Both persons tend to be implacable; neither is willing to concede defeat beyond a temporary setback. Their opposition often germinates into genuine anger, the sort that could express itself in violence...and sometimes does.
The paternalist’s besetting fault is his conviction of indisputable righteousness. It might be said that he cannot do other than he does; his need to maintain that conviction trumps all other considerations. One of the deadest of dead giveaways is that, when one suggests to a frustrated paternalist that his policy might be inherently impossible of application – that to revert to freedom would be preferable to the carnage his laws have evoked – his usual response is “we can’t do that.” Not “won’t,” mind you; “can’t.” To admit to error would be to sacrifice his belief in his moral and intellectual superiority, upon which his entire self-concept is founded. Besides, his addiction to “the approval of his own conscience” will not permit it.
So he sticks stubbornly to his laws, ratchets up the force behind them year after year, and as his failures mount to the skies repeatedly cries to heaven for an explanation: “Why can’t they see how much smarter I am than they are?”
Can you imagine Pentti Linkola making that plaint? I can.
Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you. – Confucius.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. – Jesus of Nazareth
If there’s an overarching theme to these “of laws and men” pieces, it’s the power of human presumption. We all want to think well of ourselves, granted; our problems arise, in large part, from some persons’ need to believe themselves smarter and / or better and / or more moral than the rest of us.
Let’s be candid: all human characteristics, including all the virtues and all the vices, are non-uniformly distributed across the reach of Man. Some people really are smarter than the rest of us. Some possess more self-restraint, or courage, or perseverance. And some are more moral, at least by their own standards. But the leap from any such recognition, objectively sound or not, to “therefore I possess the right to coerce these others for their own good” is a classic non sequitur. In making that leap, the person so doing forfeits any and all claim to the respect of others, for he has done something he cannot justify by any citation of precedent or exertion of logic.
He has set his will against the Natural Law.
It is in the nature of men to resent being coerced.
They will reorganize their affairs so as to avert it.
They will seek ways to profit, including from coercions.
As often as not, those profits come at the coercer’s expense.
Neither the coercions nor the responses will conduce to social harmony.
Verbum sat sapienti.
Considering the two recent posts by my colleagues here at Liberty's Torch, I must hasten to add my own humble view that from a practical standpoint the "terrorists" have succeeded in achieving their main objectives to wit: a de facto diminution of the traditional rights acknowledged by the constitution of the United States as delineated in the Fourth, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. This, when considered in light of recent attempts to ignore the black letter provision of the Second Amendment leads me to conclude that for the most part the Constitution of our formerly freedom loving nation is more or less a dead letter only to be observed according to the federal courts lacking a "compelling governmental interest".
I would also note that public statements issued by the "terrorist" operatives invariably attribute their motives to the foreign policies of the government in Washington interfering in the internal affairs of various and sundry Muslim nations. None of these statements refers to, as former president G.W. Bush averred: "their resentment of our freedoms". Be that as it may, can a philosophy/"religion" fixated on a seventh century mentality have any expectation of a victory over western science and technology? Of course all bets are off if the West self destructs by following the path of corrupt collectivist financial, economic and political leadership so much in evidence of late.
Stated differently: the West will only lose this struggle if it abandons the strategy which has resulted in its dominance.
video by Mat Bracken via WRSA ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
[The following essay first appeared at the old Palace Of Reason on November 16, 2002. I've edited it slightly for reuse today. Given current attempts by variousidiotscommentators to obscure the role of Islam in the Tsarnaev brothers' terrorist acts, it seems peculiarly relevant. I'll continue the "Of Laws And Men" series later in the week. -- FWP]
1. Statements Of Policy
A recent interview of the Grand Mufti of Egypt, conducted by veteran reporter and commentator Kenneth Timmerman and published originally in Insight magazine, reinforces the irreconcilability of Western concepts of rights and freedom with Islamic absolutism, and possibly with Islam of any sort. The most salient parts of that interview were excerpted at the online news site World Net Daily, to which I refer the reader with a passion for horrifying details.
In essence, the Grand Mufti defended Palestinian homicide bombing as legitimate resistance against Israeli oppressions. He also characterized the United States as an oppressor nation and such persons as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "terrorists," because they had spoken critically of Islam. He repeatedly refused to engage the morality of Palestinian targeting of civilians, asserting toward the end that:
Life is sacred in Islam. But we are facing the Israeli state, which is militarily based. Israeli citizens are like warriors. They have their weapons with them at all times. So who are civilians, Palestinians or Israelis?
This is an excellent specimen of a non-falsifiable argument -- a specious argument that no evidence nor logic could overcome. All states are militarily based. They are instruments for the wielding of force: to protect their citizens from foreign attack and from domestic predators. If merely being a citizen of a nation-state makes one a warrior, then there cannot be any civilians.
It is a regular characteristic of dishonest persons to attempt to confuse their opponents by twisting the terms of debate. We've seen enough of this from Islamic clerics not to be surprised by it any more. This kind of dishonest sophistry in defense of the worst men in the world, men who murder children in their beds, is nothing less than aiding and abetting political murder. It casts a huge pall of doubt over the sincerity of those who claim, against the contrary tide of blood-drenched evidence, that "Islam is a religion of peace."
But I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard before, am I?
The American attempt to combat Islamic terrorism without engaging its ideological underpinnings greatly resembles a scene from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:
[James Taggart] "What I mean is, there are practical problems to solve, which...For instance, what was that matter of our last allocation of new rail vanishing from the storehouse in Pittsburgh?"[Dagny Taggart] "Cuffy Meigs stole it and sold it."
"Can you prove that" he snapped defensively.
"Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?"
"Then don't talk about it, don't be theoretical, we've got to deal with facts! We've got to deal with facts as they are today...I mean, we've got to devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which --"
She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs's existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game.
No one has ever dealt as well with archetypes as Ayn Rand.
2. Striking The Root.
One can destroy an ordinary threat by ordinary means. One opposes the armed enemy with more or better arms. One opposes the ideological opponent with a better ideology. These are not difficult things to do, at least in concept.
An enemy who combines a totalitarian ideology with a program of aggression is a true challenge. And all totalitarianisms are aggressive.
Consider the major totalitarian adventures in recent history. Not one was content with any delimited sphere of command. All insistently reached out for more territory, more subjects, more scope for the dictators' whims. All impoverished their people to build huge militaries, and all acted against "deviation" with the harshest means at their disposal, including torture, murder, hostage-taking, and coerced alteration of dissidents' personalities -- brainwashing.
In all measurable respects, they were identical.
This identity of result, this absolute convergence on an aggressive hostility toward anything that surrounded them, flows directly from their common premise: that one may, for whatever reason, use force against others to compel them to submit to one's will. That central filament of thought overcomes any and every impulse toward acceptance of divergent opinions or customs. Even to suggest that one might tolerate differences is to brand oneself an enemy of the regime.
The premise of rightful use of unlimited power couples the holder inextricably to force and its instruments. Force, as we know, cannot build; it can only destroy. A system of thought married to the wielding of unlimited force inevitably loses any constructive features and becomes a threat to whatever it approaches.
Systems of thought that limit the use of force to deterring and defending against enemies are viable as long as the limits are respected. They leave room for the differences of opinion, custom and taste within which market exchange and diversity of belief can flourish. Thus, a country such as the United States can possess a huge military, equal in capability to all the other militaries of the world combined, yet possess substantial internal freedom and economic dynamism. Compare this to Sandinista Nicaragua, whose totalitarian government destroyed all economic enterprise and all traffic in ideas, especially international traffic, even though its armed forces were never as much as one percent of America's.
The root is the totalitarian premise: unlimited use of force. One may shatter the enemy's army in the field, or overthrow its state and put its leaders to death, but if the root premise remains, the enemy will rise again, and will need to be put down again.
This is why military victories are not always sufficient to produce an enduring peace.
3. Facets Of Totalitarianism
The totalitarian will rationalize any deed, however atrocious, in pursuit of his objectives. The precise nature of those objectives doesn't matter at all.
Moreover, the totalitarian will strive to cast his opponents in the harshest possible light, branding him an enemy of all humanity if he can. The precise nature of the enemy is irrelevant. Hitler and Stalin were willing to demonize one another, despite the interchangeability of their regimes. The Soviet Union was willing to brand the United States and its NATO allies as the worst threats to peace on the planet, even though all the evidence was in the opposite direction.
This is both a tactical necessity and a feature of totalitarian ideology. Totalitarian ideologies cannot be completely successful unless they own, not merely the bodies, but the minds of their subjects. Such complete dominance of a people's thought is not possible unless all competing systems and alternative ideologies are anathematized, such that even the willingness to entertain them is a mark of the Beast.
The underlying need to be served is the preservation of absolute moral certainty.
No matter what one's overt posture on right and wrong, all persons, and all political schemes, must have one. The dichotomy between rights and force is unavoidable; the two are mutually defining. A passage from Eric Harry's recent novel Protect And Defend is eloquent on this subject:
"Rights are an archist concept. Rights have no meaning except when confronted with superior power. They are what is left to the people after the government has taken all it wants. Your country's Bill of Rights defines your most cherished freedoms how? By limiting the legal power of government to encroach upon them."
In this statement by a Russian anarchist theorist to an American reporter, Mr. Harry has exactly captured the nature of rights, and why they matter. From it we may easily infer why a power animated by the totalitarian premise can never concede any rights, nor allow its subjects to regard any potential instrument of opposition as possessing rightness in any degree. They must arrogate all authority over right and wrong unto themselves.
In comparison with this, all other, organizational or ideological facets of totalitarianism pale to insignificance. Why all totalitarian regimes converge on absolute oppression and aggression against their neighbors stands explained.
4. Today's Preeminent Totalitarianism.
We have entered an era in which political ideology is ceding the stage to other forms of ideology. Though he overstated the case, Francis Fukuyama's core idea in his book The End Of History And The Last Man was basically sound. Political theory has reached an end state where only two alternatives remain: liberal democracy and anarchism.
Economics, in practice, shelters under the wing of some political system. The prevailing economics of liberal democratic states is the free market, albeit adulterated by government interventions for particular purposes. There are degrees and variations, but the central features of all such economies are compatible, because they flow from a common concept of property rights and the right to exchange. Over time, we may expect still more substantial commonalities, as a result of international competition.
In the domestic economy of the United States, we see a trend toward ever greater liberalization. [FWP: Note that this was written in 2002.] Those who favor thorough government regulation are being swept back by the superior performance of self-regulating markets, where men's plans to produce and trade are subject to control only by their customers' preferences, and not by political whim or changes in the law. Inasmuch as America is the economic heart of the world, this pattern will probably be reproduced in other states which respect equality before the law and whose people want to achieve as Americans have. Thus, as with politics, economic theory has reached an end state: the free market.
Religion is the battleground of our time.
The Judeo-Christian religions, which share a common moral code and a vision of the Divine will as benevolent toward all men, have no problems with one another. There will always be some amount of sniping, of course -- you can't have a religion without asserting that you're right where others are wrong -- but internecine warfare of the sort that blotted earlier eras is unlikely.
The risks arise from the sole major religion that asserts Divine intolerance of dissent and instructs its followers to act accordingly: Islam.
Islam has all the other earmarks of a totalitarian ideology as well. The religion's clerical keepers assert unbounded authority, punish all deviations from absolute orthodoxy, and demonize any competing belief system without reference to its actual pronouncements. The "fundamentalist" clergy, in accordance with the unaltered words of the Qur'an, sanctify the use of force to spread Islam, promise rewards in the afterlife to those who die in such service, and indemnify the Muslim for acts against "infidels" that would be crimes if committed against a brother Muslim. The results have been horrifying.
Most critical is the transformation of Islam from a creed to an instrument for domination. The Grand Mufti of Egypt, in his adroit avoidance of any objective assessment of the deeds of Palestinian Muslims and his passionate denunciation of others who have "insulted" Islam, exemplifies a major consequence of a totalitarian system: Those who act according to the system cannot be wrong, while those who resist it cannot be right.
The fault lines that run through the Islamic world, and the response of the "fundamentalists" to the "liberals," further underscore Islam's totalitarian nature: they demand absolute authority and are willing to kill even dissident Muslims to get and keep it.
We may observe a great irony in the use of "fundamentalist" to describe certain Christian communities. Though they teach Biblical literalism, and emphasize traditional behavioral proscriptions to a degree that others consider harsh, they are essentially liberal toward those who disagree. The most any "fundamentalist" Christian threatens a dissident with is undesirable accommodations in the afterlife. Clearly, "fundamentalist" Christians are of a different and far more benign stripe than "fundamentalist" Muslims, whatever the Grand Mufti might think.
A Christian of any denomination recognizes a Christian of any other sort as a brother and fellow-traveler on the road to salvation. The same applies to the various subfamilies of Judaism. To a "fundamentalist" Muslim, a "moderate" Muslim, who argues for modernizing his creed and adapting to secular states, is an apostate from Islam in the process of defining a competing creed, and therefore must be destroyed.
The cloth is of a single pattern.
If it abjures violence and edits from its sacred texts the many sanctifications and exhortations that its adherents do violence in its service, Islam might survive as a religion in some altered form. However, textually absolute, doctrinally inerrant, "fundamentalist" Islam, now fully converted from a body of belief to an instrument for the acquisition of absolute power over others, cannot -- unless it is permitted to take over the world. In its identity of premises and methods with all other totalitarian ideologies, it demonstrates daily why men of good will cannot coexist with it.
"I came to Casablanca for the waters."
"The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."
"I was misinformed."[From Casablanca, of course.]
If you've never before encountered the word meliorist, "do-gooder" is as close as synonyms come, with a single exception for connotation: Whereas the do-gooder might be willing to act on his own initiative and out of his own resources, the meliorist is not. The meliorist seeks to use the force of law and the resources of the State to advance his aims.
The aims, you see, are what matter. They're his rationale for poking a gun into your ribs and reaching for your wallet. He can justify his coercions -- to himself, at least -- by referring to the moral imperatives expressed in his aims whether they be the succor of the downtrodden, the uplifting of the culture, or something perhaps not quite so palatable:
What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides....The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom....
Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent a dictator that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. The best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and where government would prevent any economical growth.
We will have to learn from the history of revolutionary movements — the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades — and forget our narcissistic selves.
A fundamental, devastating error is to set up a political system based on desire. Society and life have been organized on the basis of what an individual wants, not on what is good for him or her....
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. In this time and this part of the World we are heedlessly hanging on democracy and the parliamentary system, even though these are the most mindless and desperate experiments of mankind. In democratic countries the destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromising control of the individual citizen.
Pentti Linkola's rationale is that he "loves life." He's willing to demonstrate that for you, if you'll kindly just lay your neck on this chopping block -- preferably face-down -- and wait there a moment while he fetches his axe. Don't fret about the blood; that's just part of the price he willingly pays for his love.
Meliorists will protest endlessly about how they "only want to help people." That's why they need secret police, concentration camps, and legions of watchers to remain alert for dissent. They can't help people if you stand in their way -- and you'd be amazed how broad and inclusive a category of behavior that is.
Before we proceed, I'll telegraph a part of the conclusion:
You'll see why I can make that statement with confidence in just a moment.
The meliorist's enveloping rationale -- i.e., the notion that underpins all his more specific contentions -- is utilitarianism: "the greatest good for the greatest number." He seeks to shape State policy in a fashion that will produce such a condition, according to his lights. It sounds purely benevolent to the uncritical, but it has powerful implications that are seldom adequately explored.
Way back in March, 2005, at Eternity Road, I once wrote:
A government, being a human institution, must rest upon one of only three kinds of basis for its existence and its operation:
- Hobbesian absolutism ("Princes are gods") denies that the State, however organized, need suffer any constraint whatsoever.
- Benthamite utilitarianism argues that constraints on the State are temporal and topical, and may be set aside without qualm when they impede "the greatest good for the greatest number."
- Lockean natural-rights theory holds that the State must remain within those constraints arising from rights that individual men possess by nature -- that when it violates those constraints, then, regardless of its intentions or effects, the State has become criminal and must suffer to be judged.
Gentle Reader, you could struggle and strain for the rest of your life without elucidating a theory of legitimate government that differs in substance from all three of the above. There simply aren't any....
Utilitarianism attempts to supplant the concept of rights, which Jeremy Bentham and his followers deemed too abstract, with the concept of collective utility: "the greatest good for the greatest number." In this formulation, the actions of the State could and should be justified entirely on the basis of the results they achieve, or, alternately, how well they "work." Utilitarianism was prominent in the thinking of early American socialists such as Edward Bellamy, Herbert Croly, and Charles Sanders Peirce.
But collective utility presupposes many things:
- Defensible concepts of "good" and "better" that can be applied to collectives;
- Accuracy in the formulation of policy to achieve what's deemed as "good" or "better,"
- Continuity of policy, once formulated, until the sought for "good" or "better" has been achieved,
- The moral defensibility of policies formulated "in good faith" even after they've failed.
All four of these suppositions are provably unsound, usually by their own internal logic.
If "good" and "better" are applicable to a collective, then by implication individual choice by any member of the collective must be irrelevant, perhaps even invalid. Yet decisions about "good" and "better" must be made somehow, whether by majority vote or by some designated planner or planners. In the first case, collective utility comes up hard against the ephemeral nature of the collective: it has no enduring identity. Its component individuals will change over time, by death, procreation, association or disassociation, which can easily lead to changes in the majority's verdicts about "good" and "better." But if the collective's decisions can change in such a fashion, with no "upper limit" on how fast they can change, under what circumstances, or in response to what developments, then how seriously can we take the concept of collective "good"?
In the second case, where designated planners decide on "good" and "better" for the collective, the utilitarians have reintroduced individual choice. The sole difference here is that some individuals are deciding on "good" and "better" for many others, rather than each man deciding for himself.
It is obvious that many a State policy formulated to bring about some well-conceived end has failed to do so. Sometimes the failure was inherent in the policy conception; sometimes it was the result of discontinuity in administration or application. What matters is that the result upon which the policy was founded was not achieved. How, then, shall we defend, morally or practically, the imposition of collective decision-making that overrode individuals' claims to rightful autonomy, when the very good they were promised in exchange for their rights has failed to materialize? Shall we make restitution to those who were deprived of their lives, liberties, or properties in service to the unachieved goal? If so, what becomes of collective utility's conceptual superiority to individual rights? If not, why should individuals agree to submit to the usurpation of their rights, however conceived, in the first place?
It becomes clear from such simple analyses that utilitarianism in theory reduces to absolutism in practice.
The meliorist will never willingly confront those implications. Indeed, to press them upon him usually results in a screaming match. His aims are all that matter, and they are not to be questioned. He only wants the best -- for everyone if possible, but at the very least for "the greatest number." Nor will he accept any of the odium for the damage his policies do. Why should he shoulder the blame when he didn't intend any of the bloodshed, destruction, or impoverishment?
Well, yes, some of them, like Pentti Linkola above, do intend it, and will say so candidly. But that's beside the point...isn't it?
I have no patience for persons who would object that to conflate the Pentti Linkolas of the world with sincere American meliorists who really, truly, do "just want to help people," I'm committing some sort of injustice. Linkola and the mildest advocate of government redistributionism are on exactly the same moral plane, and cannot be separated. Both seek to use the State's defining privilege -- its pre-indemnified use of violence and intimidation -- to achieve conditions they would prefer to those that currently obtain.
The touchstone of moral acceptability is not "wanting to help people;" it's whether one accepts the Natural Law as binding upon oneself.
More anon.
Weekends tend to be lower-traffic days here at Liberty's Torch, for which reason I try to reserve my more abstract and philosophical emissions for those periods.
Hey, guess what? It's Saturday!
Many generalizations can be made about law, legislation, jurisprudence, and associated subjects. Most of them are irrelevant and the majority of those that remain are simply wrong.
I omit natural laws from the above, of course. There are very few generalizations to be made about those, though most of them are irrelevant as well. The only demonstrably incorrect generalizations one can make about the laws of nature are that:
However, we can discuss Man's laws in an abstract, generalized fashion. Indeed, there's a great deal of insight available even from making the attempt.
In the 1932 movie Island of Lost Souls, derived from H.G. Wells's classic The Island Of Dr. Moreau, the mad doctor catechizes his beast-men with a simple three-part law code:
"What is the law?"
"Not to eat meat. That is the law. Are we not men?"
"What is the law?"
"Not to go on all fours. That is the law. Are we not men?"
"What is the law?
"Not to spill blood. That is the law. Are we not men?"
We have here:
This is the pattern for all law, however made, pronounced, or enforced, among men.
All three components in the pattern are necessary. Every attempt known to history to enforce a law code behind which stood no rationale, or a rationale in which its subjects ceased to believe, eventuated in the fall of the regime, often by a bloody revolution. Moreau's Beast-Men needed to believe that men must abstain from certain acts, just as much as they needed to believe that the Law would be enforced against those who dared to violate it.
Societies need to believe in the founding rationales of their law codes just as strongly. However, only one rationale will hold men's allegiances for very long:
In short, man-made law must conform to Natural Law. No mortal Lawgiver can remain forever beyond question without that foundation beneath his decrees; ultimately, all will fall.
The reason is not hard to find: Laws compel and constrain, and men dislike compulsion and constraint. The Natural Law is built directly into our souls; its dictates are ultimately irresistible. All man-made law will either express a dictum derived from the Natural Law, or will somehow contradict it. To maintain laws of the latter sort, the Lawgiver must articulate a rationale with which he can replace or occlude the Natural Law...but no such can long endure.
I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government]
Herbert Spencer was an ethicist above all other things. He was passionately concerned with "intrinsic right and wrong:" what the late Clarence Carson called "the moral order of the universe." Legions of detractors have attempted to destroy his Natural Law-based ethical edifice; none have succeeded, for which reason the accusations universally leveled at him are that he "lacked compassion" or was "a Social Darwinist." Those accusations are leveled at present-day spokesmen for the Natural Law, as well; no objective case can be made against them.
Some of the most foolish, ultimately self-contradicting assaults on Natural Law have been fallaciously claimed to rest on Christian ethics. Yet C. S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of modern times, defeated all such notions utterly. In his mighty essay The Abolition of Man, Lewis lays out a perfect secular argument for the Natural Law:
If by Reason we mean the process actually employed by Gaius and Titius when engaged in debunking (that is, the connecting by inference of propositions, ultimately derived from sense data, with further propositions), then the answer must be that a refusal to sacrifice oneself is no more rational than a consent to do so. And no less rational. Neither choice is rational—or irrational—at all. From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. The Innovator will not take the first alternative, for practical principles known to all men by Reason are simply the Tao which he has set out to supersede. He is more likely to give up the quest for a 'rational' core and to hunt for some other ground even more 'basic' and 'realistic'....Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite....
'All within the four seas are his brothers' (xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chün-tzu, the cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto says the Stoic. 'Do as you would be done by,' says Jesus. 'Humanity is to be preserved,' says Locke. All the practical principles behind the Innovator's case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses....If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.
I cannot overstress the power and penetration of this magnificent essay. Despite its brevity -- or perhaps because of it -- it expresses the irreducible core of all rational philosophy, and demonstrates the fallacy behind men's unending attempts to build an edifice that could replace Natural Law.
Yet what has Lewis affirmed that Herbert Spencer did not? Not a thing. What innovation in rational thought did he propose? None that I can detect. The two men said exactly the same thing, one at greater length and with more detail:
It's a lesson that, despite millennia of experience, has yet to sink in.
I've been counseled against going on for too long in any one essay, so I'll continue the elucidation of these thoughts tomorrow. But before I sign off for the day, I'd like to leave my Gentle Readers with a bit of history to ponder.
One hundred twenty-four years ago today, a child was born in a small town in Austria. His mother had syphilis, which she transmitted to him. Syphilis in its tertiary stage has some remarkable effects:
That child, in his maturity, decided that he was capable of reordering the world to his own design, starting with Europe. He marshaled a large nation capable of prodigious things to his cause: the cause of war and conquest. His enterprise took millions of lives. It took the combined might of the largest and most advanced nations of the world to put an end to the carnage his madness caused.
Adolf Hitler took his own life rather than face justice. Perhaps at that point he was completely incapable of recognizing justice, or any other aspect of objective reality. He accomplished great, unprecedented horrors, the world rose against him, and he fell -- but not before inspiring a large and capable nation to rally to his madness and fight for his cause: the cause of Man's will elevated above the Natural Law.
His imitator to the East, who remained an admirer to the last despite the war between them, would transmit his hubris to several generations of inheritors before it collapsed.
More anon.
In Russia live Russians. Any minority, from anywhere, if it wants to live in Russia, to work and eat in Russia, should speak Russian, and should respect the Russian laws. If they prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the state law. Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell 'discrimination'. We had better learn from the suicides of America, England, Holland and France, if we are to survive as a nation. Russian customs and traditions are not compatible with the lack of culture or the primitive ways of most minorities. When this honourable legislative body [the Russian parliament] thinks of creating new laws, it should have in mind the national interest first, observing that the minorities are not Russians.[1]Or, more to the point, would that white Americans had the common sense to demand such leaders.
Now, however, any leader willing to express such sentiments would be cut off by the RNC, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians and the white population, the ultimate tragedy, would for the most part shrink from such courageous, prescient individuals like vampires from the dawn, oblivious of the presently inevitable day when whites become a minority in their own country that it heralds.
Notes
[1] Quoted in "Russia Allegedly to Resist ‘Minority’ Pressures ." By Chris Brandt, IQ & PC, 4/15/13.
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings and the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, one of the things we can see most clearly is just how irritated the Left becomes when real-world events cross-cut The Narrative.
Before the above events, the Obama regime and its media handmaidens strove to make The Narrative all about Sandy Hook and gun control. The significance of that decision reaches back to the last stage of the 2012 presidential campaign, when Obama decided that gun control would become one of the signature issues for his second term. But for a leftist in high federal office, it's not enough that he, personally, has adopted a particular issue as his precious pet. The rest of the country must be bombarded with his preferred message, the newspapers filled with it and the airwaves saturated with it, such that no matter which way a private citizen might turn, that one subject will be staring him in the face. The tactic has a Biblical feel: just keep knocking, and eventually the guy inside will give you what you want, if only so you'll go away and he can go back to sleep.
In this regard, Obama and his fellow travelers had two problems even before reality intruded on them:
Needless to say, they didn't let that stop them. Senators Dianne Feinstein (D, CA), Joe Manchin (D, WV), and others continually harped on the 20 juvenile victims of Lanza's murder spree, associating their bills with Sandy Hook as if they would indeed have thwarted the insane young man. Obama cited several statistics -- all of them entirely false-to-fact -- about how "the American people" want stricter gun control, and were being denied their desires because of "NRA lies." The falsity of such claims didn't slow them at all.
Then came April 15 and the Boston Marathon bombings.
A couple of pols made half-hearted attempts to associate the bombings with a need for stricter gun control, but these were soon shuffled shamefacedly offstage. It was obvious that there was no connection; it was just as obvious that the gun-controllers were angered by the sudden demotion of their pet cause to "inside the paper." Obama's tirade in reaction to the defeat of his lieutenants' bills in the Senate said more about him personally than about anything else. It certainly didn't reflect on Americans' attachment to the right to keep and bear arms.
Another fatuous attempt to scavenge some political hay from the bombings was evident in the repeated statements by both politicians and media figures that, given the date, they might have been the work of "anti-government extremists" or "right-wing tax protesters." There was no substantiation for such claims, but just as when Michael Bloomberg attempted to associate the failed Times Square bombing with opposition to ObamaCare, they were determined not to let that stop them.
The West, Texas disaster has certainly reduced the Left's thunder, though it's done so by implication: though the tragedy has claimed an unknown number of lives and injured at least 150 persons, Obama and his minions have had virtually nothing to say about it. Small wonder there: it's completely outside The Narrative. It deflects the public's attention from the Left's preferred subjects. Worse, it offers no handle by which to use it for political purposes. But in this we see a continuation of the Obamunist pattern: The Won will only involve himself in those developments where he foresees personal or political gain.
As usual, the more one looks, the more ironies one sees. The defeat of all the gun control proposals has dealt a strong blow to Obama's political muscle. His party is beginning to sidle away from him, somewhat more obviously and quickly than is the usual case with a second-term president in the period before the mid-term elections. The Democrat senators who have associated themselves with any of the gun control bills have taken similar blows; the worst of them have gone to the loudest complainers. The Republican senators who favored any of the bills must now look to their flanks; the probability has increased that they'll need to defend themselves against primary challengers when they stand for re-election.
Beyond all that, we have Nancy Pelosi's insistence that "we'll be back," and what it means for the Democrats' prospects in the House of Representatives in 2014. Were Obama's claims about popular support for more gun control factual, Pelosi's defiance of the defeats might be harmless or better. But since the American public appears moderately staunch in upholding the right to keep and bear arms free of further state or federal intrusion, Pelosi's insistence that the issue will be revisited could cost the Democrats further seats in the lower chamber.
As always, we shall see. But in one respect, we have already seen: When real-world events deflect Americans' attention from The Narrative, the Left loses political clout -- and to the extent that defeat makes their high-profile spokesmen act out, they lose credibility and respect, as well.
Normally, I resist writing about what everyone else is writing about. I prefer to be off the major axes of public interest, so that my columns will at least be memorable for that. But now and then, there's no help for it: there's a single topic of importance, and all attention must flow to it.
Of course, the exact nature of that topic is often invisible to the thundering herd.
There can no longer be any doubt that the bombings in Boston on Monday were the work of terrorists. There's little doubt, given the methods and the bomb components, that the terrorists were Islamic jihadis, perhaps al-Qaeda affiliates. Given those things, the work of our time is the elimination of jihadism -- I refuse to call it "Islamic extremism," inasmuch as violent jihad is integral to Islam -- from our shores and, if possible, from the larger world.
But what coloration have the talking heads been straining to apply to this atrocity? That it might have been the work of "right-wing extremists." Why, given that April 15 is the statutory deadline for filing a federal income tax return, perhaps it was a group of TEA Partiers! After all, didn't the Tea Party of 1773 take place in Boston?
Why would anyone make such a foolish suggestion? Quite simply, in defense of The Narrative.
The Narrative -- the enveloping backdrop of assumptions about conditions, causes, and motivations being promoted by the government and its media handmaidens -- has several components. The parts that matter here are:
A large component of The Narrative since 2009 has been the Obamunist declaration that "the War on Terror is over." This contention carries with it the implication that the expenditures and efforts devoted to combating terrorism can now be "saved:" i.e., deflected to other federal priorities, such as fattening the wallets of Obama's cronies. Ironically, even if the premise were correct, the consequent would not follow. A "war" is a delimited action in which governments strive to impose their wills upon one another by force. The terrorist threat is only loosely (if at all) connected to any government, nor has war been declared on any such. But Obama and his lieutenants begrudge the use of federal resources merely to keep Americans safe in their homeland; they don't believe we deserve such a sense of security. The Narrative must prevail.
Another rush to defend The Narrative arises from the Sandy Hook atrocity, in which emotionally disturbed Adam Lanza took 27 lives before taking his own. Mind you, Lanza didn't purchase the guns he used to kill all those innocents; he stole them from his mother, whom he then killed. Neither did he use an "assault weapon," the fanciful left-liberal term for a rifle with certain cosmetic embellishments; the only "assault weapon" found at the scene was locked in the trunk of his car. But the Left must defend the notion that the way to safety is citizen disarmament and "Gun-Free Zones." Therefore, these things must be effaced, so that nonsensical, irrelevant, and utterly unConstitutional anti-firearms legislation will have a chance of passing Congress.
Other components of The Narrative have been brought under harsh scrutiny in recent months. One notable case has been the trial of horror-abortionist Kermit Gosnell. I've striven to remind others that back in the Sixties, when the legalization of abortion was first discussed, conservative opponents predicted that legal abortion would lead to infanticide. The response from abortion defenders has usually been to claim that Gosnellian atrocities were commonplace before abortion was legalized. A weak response, to be sure, but when the Narrative requires defense, even the slenderest slivers will be rushed to the barricades. What's that you say? Senator Barack Hussein Obama actually voted in favor of allowing what Gosnell did? Twice? Shut up, you racist!
Why such passion for The Narrative? Quite simply, because we convey knowledge of causal relations to one another principally in the form of stories. The Narrative attempts to wrap left-liberal policy positions in stories with happy endings. When the endings prove to be not so happy after all, the associated story will be questioned and possibly dismissed. Can't have that, especially when America's first black president has stated so plainly that the War on Terror is over, gun-control legislation is being debated on the floor of the Senate, and ever more Americans are coming to understand the horrors unleashed by legalized abortion.
A long time ago, I wrote:
A number of brilliant analysts of argument and persuasion have set down the requirements of honest exchange: the supremacy of facts, avoidance of personalities, willingness to admit that one might be wrong about propositions for which the evidence is inconclusive, and so forth. Arthur Herzog, in The B.S. Factor, mentions another: sufficient decency to disdain victory through force of rhetoric.Argument differs from rhetoric in many ways, but one above all others: the goal of argument is not to defeat one's opponent, but to increase one's understanding. Rhetoric is a sheaf of techniques for prevailing at verbal combat, regardless of the rightness of one's position. Demosthenes, the classical icon of rhetoric, was said to be capable of taking either side in any controversy and prevailing through sheer rhetorical skill....
In these United States, free and open communication is the rule. (We shall omit consideration of the universities and the Old Media for the purposes of this screed.) There's essentially no prospect for a regime of censorship that would suit the purposes of the Left. Its thrusts at imposing the shackle of "political correctness" on Americans' speech by the cultivation of unearned guilt have all rebounded catastrophically against it. What remains to it is the pollution of the intellectual waters, such that we recoil from them in disgust and futility.
Sadly, unless the defender of freedom is intellectually well armed and possesses a robust sense of humor, the tactic works more often than not.
The sense of humor is a shield against the sense of outrage Alger alludes to in his piece above. Outrage in a discussion format only feels energizing. In fact, it's wearying. It also tempts one to unsuitable responses. If an honest debater feels outrage stealing over him, he must invoke his sense of humor at once, both as protection and as the beginning of the only effective available retort: the leap to the meta-argument.
The "meta-argument" is to the argument itself as the rules of a game are to the play of a particular game. It "summons the referee" to bear witness to a dirty trick. If one can show that the opponent is violating the rules and hoping not to be called on it, the gain can be immense. Given the pattern Alger cites, imagine a reaction like this:
[Hearty chuckle] What Phil is doing here, friends, is stating a group of rumors and outright lies as if they were unchallenged facts. He has to assert them quickly and move on to other subjects, to keep them from being challenged and destroyed. An honest arguer wouldn't do that. But Phil's not interested in argument; he's trying to prevent argument and spread propaganda in its place. Phil, as our listeners don't have any patience for that, we don't have any time for you. [Click]
If you detect the sort of behavior described above, the meta-argument is your best recourse. Granted that it won't work on a case-hardened liberal. Granted that honesty demands that you admit that you, too, could be wrong. But if you're playing by the rules of honest argumentation, the mere fact that you've caught your opponent in a violation of those rules is a heavy stroke in your favor.
The Narrative, being a tissue of lies, can be countered factually. Indeed, the leftist's primary aim is to spread lies. If you can demonstrate to your audience that he's attempting to win their assent by dishonest means, you can protect third parties from his wiles.
The problem of Main Stream Media defense of The Narrative is much stiffer. People will tend to accept what's repeated at them sufficiently often, especially if it comes from a source deemed authoritative. Ironically, the media are treated as authoritative for no other reason than that they are the media. You, on the other hand, are a mere peon, subject to being dismissed no matter how eloquent or well supplied with facts you might be. After all, if you're so smart, why aren't you on television?
Quite a three-pipe problem, Watson.
If there's an effective counterstroke to The Narrative, it probably lies in the promotion of a competing narrative founded on actual events: true stories to counteract lies.
True stories possess an inherent advantage over deceitful ones: an attentive listener will grasp the causal relations for himself. He won't need them pointed out to him. A man is far more likely to believe his own inferences than those presented to him ready-made, and far more likely to defend them energetically when challenged.
The time has come for massive efforts in this direction. Indeed, it came long ago. We have firm evidence that we're under attack by the adherents of a vicious theocratic-totalitarian ideology. Despite that, and despite the complete lack of Constitutional or utilitarian justification for infringements on our rights to keep and bear arms, rapacious governments determined to extinguish the vestiges of freedom and eager to use fear in that effort are straining to disarm us. Meanwhile, soulless creatures are killing fully born, viable babies because, after all, what's the difference between a partially-born infant, head still within the birth canal, and a wholly born one? The proponents' principal tool is The Narrative.
It's time to knock it flat and crush it into dust.
There have now been three "uncontrolled" explosions. The most recent was near the front of the JFK Memorial Library.
Ball bearings have been found near the explosion sites.
According to scattered reports, the Boston police already have a suspect in custody: A Saudi national, estimated to be about 20 years old, who was seen running away from the bombing area before the explosions occurred.
Terrorism. At least two fatalities. Many injuries, including the complete loss of limbs.
Is anyone still unconvinced that we cannot share a planet with these savages?
Oh, by the way, a CNN commentator has suggested that "right wing extremists" might have been behind the bombings.
Words fail me.
It's getting to be time to be unreasonable.
For example, Americans have long agreed that governments must have some degree of coercive taxing power if they're to function. We've long agreed that certain persons must not be allowed to have weapons, and that there are certain weapons no one outside our professional military should be allowed to have. And we've long agreed that governments must be conceded the power to ensure against certain hazards to public health, safety, and reliably trustworthy commerce. We were told that a "reasonable man" couldn't possibly object -- that such powers, placed in the hands of "reasonable men," would never be abused, and that if they were, the corrective action would be swift and definite. And indeed, it all seemed quite reasonable at the time.
In each of the above cases, and many others beyond my power to enumerate, we were had by our own "reasonableness."
Writers on law and jurisprudence often refer to the "reasonable man" standard, a shorthand way of referring to what "everybody" would agree is "necessary and proper." The "reasonable man" standard doesn't make actual reference to reason -- i.e., the accumulation of facts over time and the application of deductive and inductive logic to them. It merely decorates the "everybody knows" pseudo-standard with the term "reasonable" in the hope of discouraging dissent.
No doubt you've encountered the term "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," which is supposed to apply in criminal trials. A thinking person would want to ponder that standard for a while. What, after all, constitutes "reasonable doubt?" Doubt of the defendant's guilt arises when there are one or more alternative explanations for the case put forward by the prosecution. But when does an alternative explanation for the commission of a crime cease to qualify as "reasonable?"
If counsel for the defense introduces evidence that other persons, known to have harbored a deep animus against the victim, were observed in the immediate area of the murder at the time of its commission, while the circumstantial evidence against the defendant remains inconclusive, a juror might find that he can reasonably doubt that the defendant was the murderer. On the other hand, if the circumstantial evidence is broad and trustworthy, while counsel for the defense contends that the victim was death-wished by a malevolent gel from Pluto that happened to be visiting Weehauken at the time, a juror -- even a science fiction aficionado -- should demand somewhat more substantiation, perhaps reportage of the gel's recent audience with the Pope. But between those two poles are positions where even "reasonable men" may disagree -- reasonably.
The "reasonable man" standard has proved acceptable for criminal justice, largely because juries seldom include persons willing to believe without evidence, or in contradiction to the patterns of behavior that characterize men's lives. But it goes horribly wrong when used as a prop for legislation.
It's one thing to point to egregious abuses and misuses of power; God knows, we've endured enough of them. It's quite another matter to establish -- beyond a reasonable doubt? -- that the "reasonable man" standard is the key to the lot of them. I'm not sure an airtight case can be made. However, someone has to attempt it, and I'm at Liberty's Torch to tackle exactly this sort of tough nut.
Marshall Fritz, founder and guiding light of the Advocates for Self-Government, attempted to cast light on one of our core fallacies with a presentation titled "Does Wrong Become Right if the Majority Approve?" That presentation focused on the moral barrier between theft and "legitimate" government seizure of private property (e.g., taxation). In one iteration of his talk, he asked specifically, "If N persons saying that it's right aren't enough, but N+1 would make it so, what's the value of N?" Needless to say, no one in the audience could solve the equation.
It's an undeniably brilliant approach to the question, to which the only possible rejoinder is a deflection to "reasonable man" criteria: "Everybody knows governments have to have the power to tax!" That what "everybody knows" has so often been proved false seldom persuades an adherent to the "reasonable man" standard.
With that, we turn to one of the topics concomitant with such conundrums: the misuse of words to promote a fallacious position.
Just as "reasonable" has been used to camouflage "everybody knows," the critical term "rights" has been redefined to include "needs," "desires," and worst of all, "permissions."
Contemporary political cant includes many pernicious uses of "rights:"
...and still more. Yet none of the above are rights. The first assertion in the above list is no less absurd than the last. They've been shoved under the rhetorical cover available from the term "right" because it serves the agenda of the political Left.
The demonstration requires a firm insistence upon a strict definition of "rights." Such a definition must distinguish rights clearly from permissions, needs, and desires; if there is no distinction, there's no need for the highly charged, heavily laden term.
In this connection, a statement from the great Herbert Spencer is most apposite:
I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [From The Proper Sphere of Government]
A right must be intrinsic to the moral order of the universe. It must conform to the innate moral understanding with which we are all equipped. In other words, a right cannot be a wrong. There must be a clear, unbreached demarcation between them.
The tale of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's great exemplar of faith and perseverance in the face of intense personal trial, is highly relevant. While he was alone on his island, Crusoe could do whatever he was capable of doing with whatever he found around him. He could not demand food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or anything else be given him as his "right;" there was no one to whom to put such claims, which made it clear that they could not be morally mandatory. Indeed, he needn't concern himself with "rights" at all, for one cannot commit a wrong against inanimate objects and subhuman creatures. Only when Friday arrives upon the scene do rights make even a tenuous appearance, for Crusoe recognizes Friday as a human kinsman -- an entity capable of apprehending the moral order, and thus a possessor of whatever rights inhere therein.
But we have been so propagandized about rights, in particular about assertive pseudo-rights that require violence or the threat thereof to effectuate, that the distinction has been effaced...even though when we view and evaluate on an individual level, that distinction becomes crystal clear. And when we attempt to transpose our individual understanding about right and wrong to the actions of government entities, we're told, as if by reflex, that there are needs to be met, that it's always been this way, that we're arguing against what "everybody knows"...in short, that we have to be "reasonable."
The time has come for clarity, for an absolute insistence upon clarity, and for the rejection of the demand from our political shepherds that we submerge ourselves in the great pullulating flock of the unthinking and petulant. The time has come when firm meanings must be attached to the words we use, most especially our terms of public discourse. The time has come when he who dares to twist language to make it serve his power-lust must be dragged down from his perch and taught clarity with bastinado cruelty. The time has come that what "everybody knows," when put forth as an argument for intrusive, anti-Constitutional changes in law or policy, be rejected with extreme prejudice.
The time has come for the demise of the notion of "reasonable men."
Yesterday's piece has evoked the usual hail of denunciations, as any Gentle Reader of Liberty's Torch could easily have predicted. But we haven't yet gotten to the fun part of this investigation, which makes me wonder if the moral relativists and multiculturalists have any outrage left. I suspect they'll need it.
The late Lawrence Auster once promulgated a generalization about "liberal societies" that neatly expresses the moral relativist / multicultural dynamic:
(Thanks to commenter dondiego at Crusader Rabbit for this link.) I know of no exceptions to this observation over the past fifty years. It should tell us clearly how to correct our sociopolitical mistakes...if, indeed, they're still correctable. However, it becomes even more significant when applied to the origin of our troubles with querulous and belligerent minorities.
The problem of the petulant and antisocial black minority arises from two sources:
The social workers of the "New Frontier" and "Great Society" years might have had only the best intentions. (I know that sounds farfetched, given the consequences of their work, but we must concede the possibility.) However, they committed a catastrophic error in telling their clients-to-be that American society owed them the benefits they were to receive. That fostered a sense of entitlement -- a word that has come to have a pernicious political meaning -- in any of their targets with a "condensation nucleus" for it. In the case of the American Negro, that condensation nucleus was ready and waiting: resentment about having been excluded from the opportunities of the larger society, accumulated over the decades since the Civil War.
White guilt over past racial exclusion was the motivating factor in such pronouncements; Negroes' resentment, long suppressed in the interest of retaining what acceptance and opportunities were open to them, was easily brought to the forefront of race relations as the era's racialist hucksters sensed their opportunity.
Ironically, the mechanisms that had worked to marginalize American Negroes in Northern cities were not rooted in racial preferences, but rather in the desire of the commercial firms of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century to "consolidate their gains." Firms with an urban base, alarmed by the rapid influx of energetic migrants, colluded with machine politicians to erect ever higher, ever stronger barriers against new competitors. The earliest migrants to the Northern port cities -- i.e., those preponderantly from Mediterranean Europe and eastward -- were able to "get in under the wire." Later migrants were less fortunate -- and those included the majority of Negro migrants from the rural South.
As psychologist Peter Breggin has observed, the migrant ghettoes of the late Nineteenth Century were places of tremendous enterprise. Their residents were busy: creating small businesses, offering their services in their various trades, and generally doing the sort of ground-state commerce characteristic of an infant capitalist economy. It took time, but those with determination and energy prospered. Their children prospered still further.
As we advance into the Twentieth Century, we see the proliferation of barriers to new businesses and trades: zoning regulations; licensure laws; restrictions on the size and construction of commercial buildings; limitations of the hours of labor and commerce; ever-rising property taxes; and so forth. Much that was utterly essential to the prosperity of the earlier wave of migrants had been barred to the later wave. A Negro migrant from the South, who'd been attracted northward by the promise of the urban dynamism that had uplifted the earlier migrants, arrived to find that he was no better off than he had been in the South...sometimes worse.
Did racial preferences play a part? Perhaps to some extent. But the prejudice among Americans of Northern and Western European stock against the waves from Southern and Eastern Europe proved incapable of thwarting their rise. It took the political machinations enumerated above to create a really strong barrier against the later arrivals from the American South.
Negroes' history of marginalization plus their readiness to believe in willed oppression synergized with social workers' statements about entitlements and the efforts of racialist hucksters to mobilize them for collective action. The brew proved lethal to race relations, particularly in the Northern cities.
Really, how long can you tell a man that he's "owed" before he stands up and demands to be paid? If "payment" to his liking is not forthcoming, he's likely to act out -- and the probability of serious acting out rises according to a number of factors:
Starting roughly in 1965, all these things were in play.
The question next to be answered is why white targets for government largesse didn't behave in such a fashion. For one thing, social workers didn't show poor whites the solicitude they extended to poor blacks. For another, economically disadvantaged whites seldom concentrated geographically to the extent urban Negroes did; more, they exhibited a greater degree of mobility than did blacks. Third, one of the worst of the social pathologies -- unwed motherhood -- was far slower to take root among lower class whites. Thus, the terrible plague of fatherless, disruptive young men afflicted Negro communities far more seriously than communities of lower class whites.
We cannot know at this remove from the seminal period what the dominant causal factors were. But that doesn't mean we can't candidly recognize that the problem correlates strongly with race.
It's likely that the key to the tragedy was and remains whites' willingness to encourage blacks' resentment coupled to whites' willingness to protect disruptive and violent blacks from the consequences of their behavior. Remember that in the years prior to the explosion of welfarism, there was no significant problem of Negro unrest. Granted that we can't turn back the clock; nevertheless, it is imperative that a mistake recognized not be repeated. The excuse-making for black violence and lawlessness, and the appeasement shown to black race hustlers, must cease if America is to know peace between the races. Peace rests upon a foundation of justice -- and a justice that stays its hand when the accused's skin color is a certain shade is no justice worthy of the name.
Mark Butterworth's "Punisher" post below has sent me off in a direction that invariably draws the harshest criticisms and the most effusive thanks -- both.
You'll see why after a few words from our sponsors a quick break for physiological reasons.
The most important characteristic one can nurture in discussions of social pathologies is the willingness to see clearly. That comprises two other characteristics:
The first of these is often shouted down with ugly epithets. "Racist" is, of course, the most frequent of them, and in recent decades has had the most telling effects. The second is militated by a sense for justice -- in particular, the insistence upon holding individuals responsible for their individual decisions and actions, rather than taking refuge in a trendy collective pardon such as "They can't help it" or "Society is to blame."
The Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch are surely bright enough to detect the tension between those two traits. Yet both are required for penetrating, clear-eyed analysis of the ailments of our society...or any other.
Consider one of the most important, least disputable patterns of recent years:
In company with a leftist -- or a Muslim -- to utter such a statement will routinely get you blasted (rhetorically) as an Islamophobe. The term is supposed to express massive opprobrium. It's effectively silenced a fair number of observers of the contemporary scene, though it's arguable whether those persons' convictions have been altered by being shouted down.
Yet the statement is inarguable. The record bears it out. The sole exception to the pattern of Islam-powered terrorism is the Murragh Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh -- a white American atheist. Every other terrorist incident has been the work of a young Muslim man. The correlation could not be stronger.
By adding that recognition to several other facts about the behavior of Muslims, many persons have reasoned their way to the conclusion that Muslims should not be admitted to these shores, and that efforts be made to encourage those already here to emigrate. I shan't be coy about it: I am one such person. For that chain of reasoning I've been called, in the charming idiom of a colleague, "everything but white." But my detractors have never countered the evidence nor the reasoning that led me to my conclusions.
I was willing to disaggregate the violent, jihadi Muslims from the peaceable ones, at first. It seemed the path of justice; why hold Smith accountable for Jones's crimes? But as I learned more about Islam and the behavior of significant Islamic sub-populations in non-Islamic states, I realized that disaggregation is inappropriate in this case: the peaceable members of those sub-populations function, whether willingly or under coercion, as supporters, enablers, and concealment to the jihadis. The two groups are inseparable, and must be endured or expelled together.
Equally unpleasant yet inescapable conclusions are associated with another recognizable group.
When the "New Frontier" and "Great Society" transformations of federal policy were kicked off in the Sixties, Americans saw them, quite accurately, as expressions of benevolent intent toward the less fortunate. The original maxim of "New Frontier" social programs was "A hand, not a handout;" federal assistance was intended to set the recipient on a path to self-reliance. The "Great Society" expansions of those programs were otherwise oriented; though it wasn't stated overtly until HEW Secretary Joseph Califano said so in 1968, those programs assumed that a hefty fraction of the beneficiaries would be government dependents lifelong. Califano called it "structural poverty," plainly implying that the spars of American society itself had trapped those millions of unfortunates in their dependent condition.
Patterns were already emerging among long-term government dependents:
Social analysts of that era were more willing than those of today to concede that those patterns existed. The prevalent racism-shouting of today didn't catch on till somewhat later.
In that case, disaggregation appeared morally and analytically mandatory. The dependent sub-population wasn't entirely black; moreover, illegitimacy rates among dependent white women were on the rise as well, though they were nowhere near those of black women. However, the pattern intensified over time; the dependent sub-population grew ever blacker, and pathologies other than government dependency -- i.e., crime, vandalism, drug abuse -- were proliferating rapidly in geographical concentrations of dependent Negroes.
Those of us reluctant to blame these developments on race searched frantically for an exculpation. The one seized upon most popularly was an echo of Califano: "structural racism."
The thesis was that black dependents were held back by white Americans' reluctance to give them the opportunity to advance economically. The protraction of dependency supposedly led to a condition of despair and alienation whose efflorescences included crime for gain and various modes of dissolution (e.g., drug abuse, prostitution, and careless sex). These conditions reinforced the victims' economic stasis and caused them to cluster into tight groups impenetrable by outsiders. In other words, it was whitey's fault.
It was a brilliant, powerfully compelling explanation for the most painful social malady of the day. It became a reflexive mantra among the political elite and bien-pensants. The only problem with it was that it was entirely unsupported by the facts.
At this point, I can recommend two books, both top-heavy with factual and statistical citations, to those who'd prefer to form their own conclusions:
Both men have come in for enormous volumes of condemnation, merely for daring to amass the relevant facts and reason dispassionately from them. That, unfortunately, is a feature of the politics of our time, when bloc voting is the pattern and the two parties are defined, with fair accuracy, as pro-government and anti-government. The central irony of those denunciations is that they accuse their targets of racism -- a collectivist perversion -- yet they're being made by hard-core collectivists, who regard individuals as interchangeable pawns that can be coerced into whatever patterns the State's chessmasters might decree.
But the facts are as they are. Despite law after law, regulation after regulation, program after program, all supposedly aimed at equalizing the conditions of the races to a single high standard, America's social pathologies have a distinctive color: black. Not all American Negroes are drug dealers, violent felons, unwed mothers, or such, but the overwhelming preponderance of America's drug dealers, violent felons, unwed mothers, and so forth are Negroes -- and peaceable Negroes reflexively rally around their violent and dissolute fellows to protect them from prosecution, correction, and criticism.
All it takes to evoke a hail of condemnation is to suggest publicly that race is a participating factor.
It's become a cliche to note that no one is campaigning for greater white representation in the National Basketball Association. We easily concede the higher performances of black basketball stars. That pattern seems not to trouble the racism-shouters at all. Yet the appearance of a high-performing mixed-race player in golf, a sport dominated by whites, was greeted as a millennial breakthrough. The cant at the time was that non-whites are systematically excluded from professional golf -- this despite the high performances of various players of Oriental descent. Those who dared to note the contradiction were routinely vilified into silence.
Note also: Black basketball stars are notorious for violence, sexual profligacy, and fathering children on multiple mothers. White golfers are not.
42, a movie about breakthrough black baseball player Jackie Robinson, has just made its debut. It's being hailed as some sort of cultural landmark even though there's already been a movie about Robinson, starring Robinson himself. Perhaps it's more significant than it appears on the surface; according to early reviews, it emphasizes faith, family, and the roles of various white innovators in introducing a Negro to the major leagues. Robinson himself was an entirely admirable person, according to the facts of his life as universally reported.
It was white America that stooped to offer a hand up to blacks. Without the benevolence of whites, the various Civil Rights Acts and affirmative action initiatives would not have taken place. Without massive infusions of tax dollars taken from white taxpayers, the programs intended to lift American Negroes out of poverty would not have been funded. Yet everywhere we look, complaints about race discrimination flow in one direction -- the discriminators are supposedly white and their victims are black -- despite the profusion of private and public attempts to lure more Negroes into environments where they're deemed underrepresented. Everywhere we look, black "spokesmen" demand more, more, more...from whites, of course. Everywhere we look, the preponderance of long-term government dependency, violent crime, drug abuse, and unwed motherhood in America is among Negroes. And everywhere we look, persons who dare to note those facts and their persistence over time, and to counterpoise them to the popular cant about "structural racism," are vilified as if they'd raped the president's daughters in Macy's window at high noon.
There have already been unpleasant consequences for such persistent self-delusion and censorship-by-denunciation. There will be more -- and they'll include quite a lot of "violence and language."
