The Crumbling Cornerstone

I’m old. Old people typically associate with other old people. In consequence, over time we can lose touch with developments among younger people. It takes effort to resist the process of temporal separation. (It helps not to move to Florida.)

However, young and old both have the benefits of the Internet. Numerous sites exist almost explicitly to reflect the trends in opinions and behavior among members of particular demographics. If we have the inclination, we can apprise ourselves of changes among our non-contemporaries fairly easily. Of course, as in all such sentences, the most important word in the previous one is if.

One of the trends that fascinates me is the trend, among young and middle-aged Americans, away from interaction with members of the opposite sex.

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I wrote the following in a novel:

    Stromberg panned the lecture hall, gathering the eyes of the throng to him. "In the year 2061, for every thousand live births in the United States, there were nearly six hundred abortions."
    The class erupted. Shouts of outrage and cries of dismay rang from one end of the hall to the other. Shocked faces stared at one another as if what they'd just heard could not possibly be true.
    Teresza stood with her mouth agape, straining to disbelieve the sociologist's words. She glanced down at Armand. His face was as pale as her own. He shook his head minutely. She slumped back into her seat and leaned hard against him.
    Stromberg stood with his hands clasped behind him, waiting for the din to subside.
    "Before you ask," he said into the restored quiet, "they weren't medically necessary. They were a form of contraception." A murmur rose and fell quickly. "The structure of that society was far distant from ours. Extended families and clans such as we admire were very few. Even intact nuclear families had become exceptional. Many children never knew their fathers. Many couples consciously averted the possibility of conception their whole lives long. A great many women regarded childbearing and child rearing, not as a fulfillment and an honor to be cherished, but as costs, nuisances, and impediments to commercial achievement, or artistic expression, or social access.
    "My Bakunin colleague would say that the typical family was limiting its total economic exposure by having very few children or none, since the expense of child-rearing in a heavily regulated State exceeds any other expense by a considerable margin. Parents wanted their children to 'have it all,' as the saying went, but with such a large State burden, which not only reduced the family's effective earnings but dramatically increased the price of every good for sale, most couples couldn't square that desire with a family of Hope's typical size.
    "I see things differently. Families are the fundamental building blocks of a stable society. Extended families -- clans -- are the best conceivable environment for the rearing of children, the perpetuation of a commercial forte, and the germination of new families and their ventures. A clan like yours, Miss Albermayer, conserves a brilliant genetic line and a priceless medical specialty at the same time. A clan like yours, Mr. Morelon, makes possible a benign agricultural empire and produces natural leaders one after another while connecting Hope to its most distant origins. And all healthy families, which cherish life and bind their members to one another in unembarrassed love, can find far more to occupy and amuse them than they need."
    Teresza's mind lit with memories of the way the Morelons had enfolded her and made her one of them. No day could have been long enough for all they had to say and do and share with one another.
    "When Earth's regard for families and their most fundamental function deteriorated, her people ceased to enjoy the sorts of ties that had held them together throughout the history of Man. Without families, and especially without children, they groped for other things to fill their time, whether to give them a sense of purpose, or to distract them from the waning of their lives. Some invested themselves in industry or commerce, but without the sense of the family line to be built up and made prominent, those things failed to satisfy. Others immersed themselves in games, toys, fripperies, and increasingly bizarre forms of entertainment, which palled on them even faster. Still others made a fetish out of sex; there was a substantial sex industry on Earth, though it tended to operate in the shadows and was seldom openly discussed. They needed emotion and substance, but all they could contrive was sensation and novelty, and they pumped an ever greater share of their effort and wealth into seeking them. That's my thesis, for what it's worth."

Which Art In Hope is, of course, a science fiction novel. Yet what Professor Arne Stromberg says to his Social Patterns One class in the above snippet is merely an extrapolation from current trends. Indeed, if you were to compare American attitudes toward reproduction, abortion, and family in 1960 to those of today, you would find essentially the same trends, moving in the same direction and accelerating at the same rate.

This is a multicausal phenomenon. Its genesis partakes of forces from politics, law, jurisprudence, economics, medicine, entertainment, sociology, and other sources. The overall trend is toward the elimination of the family, which Professor Stromberg accurately called the indispensable building block of a stable and prosperous society. Some of the causal components are beyond an individual’s power to compensate for...but not all of them.

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I spend the occasional half-hour reading entries in the forum of Men Going Their Own Way, a website where men disgusted with women’s attitudes and behavior gather to swap horror stories and advice. The site provides a chilling look at the effects current trends are having on relations between the sexes.

I’ll save you a few mouse clicks by summarizing the picture: Quite a lot of men are coming to resent women categorically and avoid all interactions with them. They have their individual reasons. Some of them are sound beyond all dispute.

Psychologist Dr. Helen Smith once cited a comment made at her blog, by a man who had retreated from involvement with women because of his personal experiences:

I met a woman that I was sure was my soul mate. I was deeply in love and so, I thought, was she. All this changed when I lost my high paying job through downsizing. To my credit, I went to work immediately and had two jobs, but still only made about 80% of my old income. My wife gave me a year and then began sleeping with a man who hadn’t lost his job in my bed while I was at work. She left with him, taking almost all of my savings and anything else she could carry. Her explanation was that she was “an expensive bitch” and she was unhappy because I worked so much. The adultery doesn’t seem to matter to the court and she got essentially everything. Besides the financial losses, I was so devastated by the betrayal that I could barely function for months. She treated me like garbage and I never worked harder at any endeavor in my life.

Another comment from Dr. Helen’s blog depicts the cumulative effect such stories are having on other marriageable men:

I’m a single, never married guy. Professional, good job, etc. Have been dating a great lady for almost a year. I thought I was ready to ask her to marry me (she has been hinting for months that she wants to marry). Problem is, at least 7 out of 10 guys I talk to tell me that it is one of the worst mistakes that they ever made. Some tell me not to marry American women, that they are all feminist at heart. One married guy told me that I could get the same effect by selling my house, giving all my money away and having someone castrate me. This is really starting to un-nerve me and the more I learn about the legal bias against men, I’m beginning to back off of marriage. I love my girlfriend, but all of these guys say their girlfriends changed once they married and begin to dominate and control. I am starting to think marriage in America can not be saved.

You can argue:

• That the above are exceptional cases;
• That men have “done a lot to deserve it;”
• That women’s hostility toward men isn’t all that general;
• That people still do form families despite the “war between the sexes;”

...and some of that would be indisputable. But the larger point is this: The trend is toward an ever wider gulf between the sexes, owing to suspicion of one another’s motives and wariness about one another’s intentions.

If families are the indispensable foundation for social stability and prosperity, what future does a society have in which the sexes are growing ever more wary and suspicious of one another?

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As I said a few days ago, fear, like pain, can be useful. It can steer us away from unnecessary risks and make us think carefully about the potential consequences of our intended courses. But what’s useful, even essential to an individual in a specific place in space, time, and circumstance can be deadly to his society.

I have a few female friends. They’re all within a few years of my own age. They, too, are horrified by the trends of which I speak, especially the mushrooming disinclination of younger Americans to marry, form stable families, and have children. They tend to see the primary cause of the gender gulf as the predatory attitude of young American men toward sexual access – to quote a villain in a recent, brilliant novel, the by-no-means-rare conviction among young men that “a woman is a life support system for a pussy.” But in this context there’s surely more than enough odium to go around.

There is no obvious solution. As I said above, what’s merely contextual survival behavior for an individual can be deadly to his society. But it’s worth contemplating whether the trends of which I write here are likely to doom America to extinction. National extinction already appears unavoidable in Japan, Russia, and the nations of Europe, though not necessarily for the same reasons. As P. D. James would tell you, it’s not a pleasant prospect for the last of us to have to face.

Addicts

By now everyone in the world knows about ISIS’s immolation of captured Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath Al-Kaseasbeh. Most persons will also know that ISIS killed Lt. Kaseasbeh on January 3, and thus had been negotiating with the Jordanian government in the quintessence of bad faith. As of this morning, world reaction is essentially “on the record,” with nothing more to be added.

Supposedly, all the recognized governments of the Islamic Middle East are denouncing the atrocity, but inasmuch as Muslims will say anything at all that they think will serve the cause of world Islam, I’m inclined to discount their “outrage” as mere posturing for geostrategic reasons.

Here at home, we have Barack Hussein Obama stridently pontificating about the need for “greater vigilance,” however that might apply to confronting and defeating an enemy openly at war with us but which he won’t even name. Actions? A plan of campaign? Please! This is Obama we’re talking about.

But the most significant response to the atrocity has come from the governments of Europe.

“What response was that?” you say. Exactly what you’re thinking, Gentle Reader: None at all.

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A few months ago, I wrote about the unwisdom of our post-World-War-II military guarantees to other nations:

NATO, the military consequence of the North Atlantic Treaty, became a growing burden on American power and finances. At its peak, in combination with our security commitments to Japan, Taiwan, and several other states, it employed roughly a third of American combat power and consumed approximately half of all American military expenditures. We told ourselves those deployments were the indispensable bulwark against Communist expansion, the sole force capable of deterring aggression from the Soviet Union and Red China. And we were quite correct to think so.

Yet it was inevitable that those deployments would have a cumulative consequence for the priorities and behavior of the governments whose nations they shielded. Trusting that America would provide, they systematically underfunded and undermanned their own military establishments. The funds Europe would otherwise have put to military preparations went to expanding its welfare states: creating a culture of idlers and persons who disdained any responsibility for their own defense. Perhaps worst of all, the dynamic nourished political forces that blamed all international tensions on American militarism. In their view, the one and only enemy was the one whose sons stood ready to defend them.

The dynamic has produced a continent lousy with state-supported layabouts, and cultures to which things military are anathema. It no longer matters that they would refuse to defend their own nations, for they lack all power to do so. As for conflicts in other lands, they're inherently someone else's problem -- and probably America's fault.

Over the decades since the North Atlantic Treaty was ratified, the states of Europe have become addicted to American military protection. The desirability of creating and maintaining armed forces sufficient unto their own nations’ defense never enters the thoughts of the political masters of the Old World. It would mean transferring far too much money away from their welfare states and toward warlike things. It would elicit strident protests from their millions of layabouts and deafening outcries from the anti-military sectors of their electorates. But worst of all, it would deprive Europe’s political class of the ability to blame any and every ugly international incident on “American militarism.”

Europe’s silence toward the evils of world Islam, coupled to its reflexive blame-the-Americans response when confronted with Islam-powered tensions, has protected its access to Middle Eastern oil. That supply has become critical now that Vladimir Putin has demonstrated his willingness to use his control of the bulk of the continent’s natural gas supply for political leverage. Alongside that, the large Muslim sub-population of Europe is kept in a state the elite regard as tolerable, though Europeans whose cars and shops Muslims burn might disagree.

Europe’s addictions go beyond American guns, tanks, planes, and soldiers.

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Any number of self-help gurus preach the beauty of “living in the present.” Inasmuch as there’s nowhere else one can live, it would seem a foregone conclusion that one should make oneself comfortable there. But like all maxims, “live in the present” comes with a limiting principle that must not be overlooked.

The great Mark Steyn has written about Europe’s descent into self-extinction. Europeans’ low birth rates aren’t biologically determined. a la mode de P. D. James. They stem from a disinclination to reproduce. It arises from a present-moment attitude driven beyond rationality by the continent’s political devolution.

When “live for the present” becomes so imperative that one utterly forsakes all thought of the future, so also does it eschew all thought of:

• Redressing injustice;
• Protecting the oppressed and defending the beleaguered;
• Making provisions for future generations to enjoy what one has;
• Making future generations at all.

The implications for national policy are obvious:

• Passivity in the face of even the most atrocious crimes;
• Acquiescence to the formation of exclaves within one’s borders;
• Indifference to proper budgeting and to conditions that incentivize or disincentivize business and commerce;
• Utter disregard of conditions that discourage reproduction;
• A fierce and unrelenting grip upon whatever external sources of sustenance and protection exist at the moment.

Europe’s flaccidity in the face of the ongoing Islamic colonization of the continent is part and parcel of these attitudes and responses. The Old World has lost interest in the future. Its peoples regard their present moment as too comfortable to compromise with concerns for an era they will not see. Their political classes are aware of the upheaval that would result from any attempt to chivvy the continent back toward military self-sufficiency, economic dynamism, and cultural confidence. Though they never say so explicitly, they have ceded their continent’s future to the Muslim invader.

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Today, Barack Hussein Obama, who favors European social-fascist policies for the United States, sits in the Oval Office. His presence there ought to have disturbed Europeans’ slumbers, for Obama is the least inclined president since Warren Harding toward the active opposition of evil – especially the Islamic evil now swelling worldwide.

Europe can no longer rely upon the military protection it has come to expect from America.
America’s Obama-induced economic stall has deprived Europe of both goods and export markets.
European indifference to its own culture and to American culture have left it culturally vacuous.
How, then, could it oppose, much less defeat, a culturally confident invader determined upon conquest?

Europe’s addiction to its seemingly comfortable present has occasioned an even stronger addiction to military, economic, and cultural supports upon which it can no longer rely. Any European awake to the realities of geopolitics and the dynamics of cultural morphology should be shuddering at the implications...but how many such Europeans are there? Indeed, how many such Americans are there?

Verbum sat sapienti.

Assorted

1. “Global warming” / “Climate change.”

Deb Heine has a nice compendium on the “global warming” fraud and associated scandals. It’s worth your time to read it all. However, for me the most striking bit comes early on:

I got into a debate with some well-meaning but totally misled friends of friends on Facebook over the Keystone XL Pipeline, which they were totally sure would destroy the environment and contribute to global warming if it’s allowed. For these young twenty-somethings, opposing the Keystone Pipeline is about “common sense.”

It’s shocking and dismaying how many millennials have been fooled by the Soviet-style propaganda of the warmist left. How do they not see that the science has become corrupted and politicized? Real science is not proven by “consensus.” Real science doesn’t lie and manipulate data. Real science welcomes debate. It doesn’t try to silence the (growing numbers of) detractors. And with real science – predictions occasionally come true.

How is this not obvious?

Once again, I must remind my Gentle Readers that the Latin roots of “obvious” mean “overlooked.” What’s not quite so obvious is why Deb’s observations are overlooked.

Young Americans have been steeped in leftist propaganda much of their lives. Quite a lot of it originated from “authority figures” they were told to respect – and who were capable of taking vengeance on anyone who dared to argue with them. Add to that the celebrity-worship that’s so common among the young, and the ubiquity of the culture that promotes it. The habits one can develop from a dozen or two years of that are very hard to break.

Our successor generations include a devastating number:

• Who are ruled by their emotions;
• Who’ve never learned critical thinking skills;
• Who don’t know how to tell facts from opinions;
• Who place their trust in the opinions of entertainers;
• Who believe it’s acceptable to shout down one’s opponents;
• And who dismiss clear thinking and accountability in favor of presumed good intentions.

They must be made conscious of what’s been done to them. To allow them to continue on in blithe, unreasoning ignorance could spell doom for these United States.

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2. An Offense.

I like Senator Rand Paul. I think there are better choices for the Republicans’ 2016 presidential nomination, but I like him all the same. But it’s become clear that the GOP Establishment media don’t like him at all:

When asked by radio host Laura Ingraham Monday about his views on vaccination, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said that while he is not “anti-vaccine” at all, he does think they should be voluntary, later going on to say that vaccines can cause “mental disorders.”...

“I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines,” he said on CNBC. “I’m not arguing vaccines are a bad idea — I think they’re a good thing. But I think the parent[s] should have some input — the state doesn’t own your children; parents own the children and it is an issue of freedom.”

Look closely and carefully at the assertion in the first cited paragraph. Then look closely and carefully at what Senator Paul said. Can you spot the difference? More, would you be able to explain the difference to others?

This sort of slander of a conservative politician rapidly gaining national prominence has become all too common from GOP Establishment mouthpieces. They’ve become so prone to such tactics that there’s little to choose between them and the Main Stream Media, at least on matters of opinion-editorial probity.

If you disapprove of calumny-by-implication, take a moment to express yourself to the Washington Times.

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3. Oh No, Not Another One.

Do we really need another liberal Republican to toss his hat into the presidential ring?

Former New York Gov. George Pataki said Monday that he is “seriously” considering getting into the crowded Republican race for president in 2016, and for good measure took a swipe at Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Mr. Pataki, a three-time governor, said he has the executive experience that would be a welcome change in the White House....

“Her philosophy is way to the left of me and way to the left of the American people. And it’s not what we need more of,” Mr. Pataki said of Mrs. Warren.

“I also don’t think that someone who has never had a day’s experience running something can be expected to run the government of this country particularly well,” he added.

Northeastern Republicans are not particularly conservative. Indeed, in many respects they can’t be distinguished from Democrats. Governor Pataki, though he was preferable to Mario Cuomo (and his son), is not a conservative by any interpretation of the word. Fortunately, he has little chance of gaining the Republican nomination in 2016. Indeed, he has barely more chance than I do – and only because “if nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”

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4. The Legacy Of Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand, born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia on February 2, 1905, retains a powerful influence over conservative and libertarian political thought. She deserves most of her reputation, given that her books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have persuaded so many away from left-liberal premises and toward a belief in individualism, freedom and the objective nature of reality.

Concerning Rand’s decision to flee the Soviet Union for America, David Boaz writes:

Like Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, Rand demonstrates the importance of immigration not just to America but to American libertarianism. Mises had fled his native Austria right before the Nazis confiscated his library, Rand fled the Communists who came to power in her native Russia. When a heckler asked her at a public speech, "Why should we care what a foreigner thinks?", she replied with her usual fire, "I chose to be an American. What did you ever do, except for having been born?"

An important observation, doubt it not – and a reminder that one’s place of birth does not predetermine one’s character, ideas, or achievements.

Yet Rand, through the cult of personality she inspired, also did harm. In particular, she ignored an important aspect of rationality that permitted her and her followers to make several egregious errors:

Every concept has a domain of applicability.
Outside that domain, it is irrelevant or worse.

Randians’ irrational hostility toward religion, their fatuous notions about “national rights,” and their inability to grasp that individual freedom cannot imply a “right” to kill an unborn child, all stem from the overextension of Rand’s conceptions of individualism and rights. Let’s hope these missteps will someday be erased from Randian thought, before they can fatally cripple an otherwise glittering legacy of courageous thought.

The Ostrich Has Landed

Ronald Reagan famously said, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”   I must admit that when it came to ostriches, I was like a liberal.  Why ostriches?  Based on discussions over the last several days with more than a few people, it left me thinking of that old anecdote about the ostrich sticking his head in the sand.  In other words, intentional ignorance was their approach to information.  They’ve deliberately decided that “no news is good news” -- choosing to not be knowledgeable.  Willfully choosing to remain ignorant, in my opinion, is just plain un-American.   In fact, our Founding Fathers believed if enough Americans were ignorant, there wouldn’t be an America at all.  The ostrich-like approach of many of our fellow citizens is downright dispiriting.

It is my duty as the Colonel of Truth to present facts, in this instance, about ostriches.  Using National Geographic as our source, I’m pleased to report that, “the flightless ostrich is the world's largest bird. Although they cannot fly, they can sprint up to 43 miles an hour.  Their powerful, long legs can cover up to 16 feet in a single stride.”  But what’s relevant now is that ostriches do not actually bury their heads in the sand.  The misconception originates with one of the bird's defensive behaviors – you see, “at the approach of trouble, ostriches will lie low, pressing their long necks to the ground in an attempt to become less visible. Because their plumage blends well with sandy soil, from a distance, it gives the appearance that they have buried their heads in the sand.”

Maybe the ostrich should become our new national bird.  One only needed to watch an episode of Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” segment polling Americans on current events and what should be common knowledge to recognize the unbridled and unashamed ignorance on full display.  There is a term kids use nowadays to describe the humiliation one senses observing the segment – “secondhand embarrassment.”  Their fifteen minutes of fame is frittered away becoming an infamous fool – frankly, it’s pretty painful to watch.  

So why do I care? Thomas Jefferson said that liberty and ignorance cannot coexist.  In 1816, Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."   One has to wonder why we would think that two hundred years after Jefferson’s utterance that we’d suddenly become immune from the ignobility of ignorance.  Benjamin Franklin warned us that if we exchanged liberty for security, we’d soon have neither.  How much more foolish, then, to voluntarily surrender liberty to stupidity? 

Winston Churchill was clearly prophetic when he proclaimed, “If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.”  In a nationwide survey several years ago, more teenagers knew the names of the Three Stooges than knew the three branches of government.  The correlation of age, knowledge, and party affiliation that Churchill points out was proven again last year in an Annenberg study titled, “From ISIS to Unemployment: What Do Americans Know?”   It proved that ignorance isn’t just bliss; it’s also an indicator of party affiliation.  Their conclusion, “Republicans tend to do somewhat better than Democrats overall.”  Some specifics; “Republicans are 16 points more likely than Democrats to answer the Common Core question correctly (58% vs. 42%). And 57% of Republicans identify the oil industry as a primary driver of growth in North Dakota, compared with 42% of Democrats.”  Concerning the present Prime Minister for Israel, the Republicans were nine percent more likely to know (46% to 37%).

James Madison, a Founding Father and our fourth President, gave us both the antidote and the prognosis of passing on the prescription for power.  Presciently Madison predicted, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.  A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both”   Madison makes clear that not only is knowledge power – it is the only sure way that the people can prevent tragedy.  Sadly, much of the mainstream media only promotes propaganda that advances their agenda.

Perhaps like the ostrich and my liberal friends, you too can find bliss by burying your head in the sand.  

After all….”What difference does it make?” 

Prosodies, Threnodies, And Maladies

Well, it’s another snowy day here on Long Island, and I find I have both the time and the inclination to write, but – apart from the depressing way the Super Bowl ended – nothing newsworthy to write about. You know what that means, don’t you, Gentle Reader?

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The indie-writers movement is a thing of great internal variety. Indeed, the one thing we have in common is that we publish our own crap. However, our offerings do display some differences, statistically at least, from the drivel that Pub World puts out. In particular, Pub World fiction puts more emphasis on style than does indie fiction. Indies tend to emphasize plot and excitement.

That cleavage probably derives, at least in part, from the reason we write: the kinds of stories that thrilled us as readers have become rare among Pub World offerings. That’s certainly part of my motive power: at one point before I decided to try my hand at fiction, I felt I’d gone a whole year without encountering a hero-protagonist I could wholeheartedly admire and root for – and I read 150 to 200 novels per year.

But just as tedious is the prevalent demotion of plot in favor of just about anything else. Were it not for murder mysteries and the Clancyesque military thriller subgenre, Pub World fiction would lack plot almost completely. It’s as if Ayn Rand’s caricature of a writer from Atlas Shrugged – the one who opined that “plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature” – had taken over the publishing industry.

Ponder the sentiments of one such denigrator of plot:

Eva Brann cares.

Brann teaches at St. John's College in Annapolis, where the curriculum is driven by the classics and professors are known as tutors.

Years ago she read one of Stephen King's books. She was greatly disappointed. "It was mere plot," she says. "Everything was geared to stimulation by way of action."

Asked if she could recall the name of the King novel, she says, "It left no impression. It left no impression whatsoever." That, she says, is a characteristic of popular fiction.

"There's a pornography of sex and a pornography of the nerves," she continues. The No-Stylists, she says, are penning the latter type of porn. "Things happen -- crude, wild, exciting things. They have no human depth. They're just occurrences."

A derisive, backhanded dismissal of one of the most gifted storytellers of our time! This Brann babe must have some chops of her own, wouldn’t you think? Yet an Amazon search turns up no fiction published under her name. Maybe she publishes under a pseudonym. At any rate, that would help her to avoid having her stories contrasted with King’s. Whatever the case, it’s plain that Miss Brann is very sad about the state of modern fiction.

I don’t write to please the Eva Branns of the world. No indie of my acquaintance does.

The point of storytelling is...well, let’s not go there, as there’s more than one answer. But the principal requirement of storytelling is to entertain the reader. Style fails to address that requirement.

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One of the happy discoveries I’ve made since embarking on this adventure is that a writer’s personal style becomes distinctive as he writes, even if his sole aim is to tell a particular story, eschewing stylistic considerations of any sort.

I didn’t set out to coin a style of my own, as if I were composing a signature by which the reader would immediately know he was consuming a genuine FWP product. I had stories to tell. I told them in as straightforward a fashion as I knew how. That’s all I know how to do. But have a gander at the following email I received shortly after I self-pubbed Which Art In Hope, Chosen One, and On Broken Wings:

I greatly enjoy your op-eds, and always look forward to new ones, but your fiction blows me away. But something puzzles me. When you write about fiction writing, which I hope you'll do more of, you always seem to be running down style as a factor in good fiction. Yet you have one of the most unique styles I've come across in all my years (don't ask how many) of reading. What gives?

I read that email in a state of bewilderment. I couldn’t get a grip on what my correspondent was talking about. I just tell the stories as my characters relate them to me. If anyone was responsible for the “style,” whatever it is, of those books, it would be their protagonists, through whose eyes the story is told. I was just the typist.

I had to come back to those books much later, to read them as if they’d been written by someone else, before I could get any sense of the thing. There is a consistent character to the prose of those novels. It screams that all three were written by the same person. That’s what’s usually meant by a writer’s style. I didn’t intend any such thing...but it happened even so.

This seems to be the pattern among the indies whose works I’ve read.

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So in one corner we have indie writers, happily churning out the sorts of tales they most love to read, while in the opposite corner are the writers beloved of Pub World, the majority of whom spin plot-deprived non-stories about antiheroes and victims of fate who spend most of their time lamenting their lots in life. Who’s ahead on points? Hard to say, as Pub World houses tend to keep sales figures confidential from everyone outside their orbit. But if Amazon is a gauge, there are more indie writers than ever before, and they’re producing books at a really impressive rate. Some of them are even good.

One of the recent critical “responses” to developments in contemporary fiction went like this:

    The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer "How should novels be?" but "Why write novels at all?"...
    The scarcer or more difficult to access an aesthetic experience is—the novel very much included—the greater its ability to set us apart from those further down the social ladder. This kind of value is, in [sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's] analysis, the only real value that "refined" tastes have.
    It’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this riposte to the aesthetics of "transcendence" must have seemed 30 years ago....
    We who curate our Twitter feeds and Facebook walls understand that at least part of what we're doing publicly, "like"-ing what we like, is trying to separate ourselves from the herd....
    Writers since at least the heyday of Gore Vidal have bemoaned their audience's defection to other forms of entertainment. But pop-Bourdieuvianism deprives them of the sense of high-canonical purity with which they've traditionally consoled themselves....
    To hell with style, then; the novelist now has to confront the larger problem of what the novel is even for—assuming it’s not just another cultural widget....
    This is where "The Marriage Plot"'s titular enjambment of literature and love—those two beleaguered institutions—is so clarifying....
    This isn’t to say that, measured in terms of cultural capital or sheer entertainment, the delights to which most contemporary "literary fiction" aims to treat us aren’t an awful lot. It's just that, if the art is to endure, they won't be quite enough.

If you’re an indie writer, as I am, the above should elicit approximately the following reaction:

“What the BLEEP! is he talking about?
Did he go off his meds?”

It should also reassure you that the “critics” no longer matter to any substantial degree.

Tell your stories and let the chips fall where they may. Trust your readers to let you know whether you’re getting the job done. Mine always do.

Polymath Now Available At Smashwords! (UPDATED)

(This post will be "sticky" until February 1, 2015. Scroll down for new material. Hey, I'm trying to sell a few books here.)

Even in his high school years, it was clear to all who knew him that Todd Iverson is special. There are no sciences, no technologies, and no arts he cannot master. There is no field of human endeavor he will leave untouched. He has the power to transform human civilization utterly, and he means to do so.

Todd does have a few little problems. For one, his mother crippled him emotionally by artificially orphaning him, abandoning him to become a nun just after his father’s death. For another, he can’t abide the idea that anyone might be better than he is—at anything. For a third, he might just be a sociopath: the most dangerous sociopath ever to be born among men.

The powers of darkness are aware of him, and they don’t plan to let him work unmolested.

But Todd will not go his way unmentored or unprotected. The most powerful creatures on Earth have resolved to complete his upbringing and bring his strength to fullness:
Malcolm Loughlin.
Christine D’Alessandro.
And Louis Redmond.

Todd will find love and deliberately forsake it.
He will know the most terrible kinds and occasions of loss.
He will enter the world of business, first as an employee, later as an entrepreneur.
And his powers will reach their zenith just as a most improbable figure takes the White House.

For Todd Evelyn Iverson has his eyes on the skies. He has resolved that Man shall leave his species’ womb at long last. As Stephen Graham Sumner and the Constitutional movement rise to prominence, Todd prepares to set his foot upon the first rung of a ladder to the stars. It’s a ladder he is uniquely qualified to design and build.

Polymath chronicles the bursting of an Onteora County giant from his chrysalis to spread his wings over the world. It’s the fourth novel of the Realm of Essences series, the beginning of the story of an American Renaissance.

UPDATE: Polymath has become available for the Kindle as well, at Amazon!

FURTHER UPDATE: Do please remember, dear readers, how important reviews are to a book's sales fortunes!

Also remember that no matter where you purchase a book, you can always post a review of it at Amazon!

Possessions: A Sunday Rumination

It isn’t often, these days, that a militant atheist thinks to cross swords with me. Most of them know better by now. However, it does still happen on occasion, and it can result in some interesting exchanges:

MA: (sneering) So you believe in demonic possession?
FWP: (smiling brightly) Of course! How else could I explain you?

That having been said, the Church has been greatly pained by questions about demonic possession in recent years – not because the actual doctrine on the subject has changed, but because aggressive secularists of every stripe use it to heap ridicule upon Christianity. Just this morning, after the Gospel reading for the day:

Then they went to Capernaum. When the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people there were amazed by his teaching, because he taught them like one who had authority, not like the experts in the law. Just then there was a man in their synagogue with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “Leave us alone, Jesus the Nazarene! Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” But Jesus rebuked him, “Silence! Come out of him!” After throwing him into convulsions, the unclean spirit cried out with a loud voice and came out of him. They were all amazed so that they asked each other, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He even commands the unclean spirits and they obey him.” So the news about him spread quickly throughout all the region around Galilee. [The Gospel According To Mark, 1:21-28]

...our normally reliable pastor, Father Charles Papa, felt compelled to qualify whether Jesus Himself actually exorcised demons from possessed persons with all sorts of uncertainties. It should serve as a measure of how sensitive the subject has become among the Catholic clergy.

Yet here are the facts:

• The Church still teaches that demonic possession can and sometimes does occur.
• The Church maintains a special curriculum for priests who are called to become exorcists.
• There have been events, including some in the recent past, that cannot be explained by secular means, but which are consistent with Church teaching on demonic possession and its ability to warp the behavior of human beings.

Historian Brian Levack, author of the recent book The Devil Within, is frank in stating that though fraud and psychosis serve to explain many incidents claimed to be demonic possessions, neither those nor any alternates suffice to explain all such incidents in a satisfactory manner. Indeed, in some cases the “secular” explanation proffered has been without objective substantiation, as demonic possession has often been said to be. A good example of such an explanation is “mass hallucination,” a phenomenon that has never been established as real.

The great challenge for a Christian who accepts demonic possession as a possibility is to reconcile it with human free will.

---

The essence of demonic possession is the surrender, whether complete or partial, of the behavior of the possessed person to the control of the possessing demon. If Man has free will, as is absolutely necessary for our deeds to have moral weight, it would follow that a possession must be in some way acceptable to the victim when it occurs. No other premise is compatible with Christian conceptions of free will and Divine justice.

But if the victim’s surrender to the invading demon is at first voluntary, the will of the possessed cannot have been completely extinguished, for that would contradict another Christian premise: that no man is condemned irrevocably while he yet lives. Therefore, the victim can rebel against the possession: a prerequisite for a successful expulsion of the invading demon, whether by the victim’s independent efforts or with the assistance of an exorcist.

A human exorcist would be unable to expel a demon from a victim happy with his condition. Jesus, of course, is another matter entirely. His power, innate in His Divine nature, cannot be compared with that of a priest. When I wrote the relevant preparatory segments in Shadow Of A Sword, I had that in mind: the possessed had to have retained at least enough will and reason to approve of the exorcism and to cooperate with it to the extent required for success.

Why a man would surrender his body to a demon in the first place is beyond my power to explain. (I mean, I wouldn’t.) But then, neither do I have an explanation for why, having acceded to demonic possession, the victim would not later change his mind and seek release from his plight. It’s got to be pretty nasty.

---

The Gospels define Christianity. A Christian is expected to accept the Gospels as essentially accurate narrations of the life, ministry, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind. Therefore, we’re expected to accept the several accounts of Jesus’ casting-out of demons from afflicted Galileans. But your average Christian, confronted with the scorn of a militant atheist determined to heap ridicule upon the Christian faith, tends to hedge, qualify, or back away from the subject rather than defend the Gospel accounts and stand by them.

It’s perfectly understandable, if not commendable. We live in a time which claims that everything can be explained by scientific means. Helmut Schoeck has called this scientism, a term appropriate to a religion that dare not admit its religious nature. The devotees of scientism routinely deride those of us who believe in a plane other than this one, inhabited by creatures capable of influencing human will.

Yet incidents occur, even today, for which secular explanations are insufficient.

For my part, I’m grateful, both for the pseudo-scientists who scoff and for the incidents that confound them. The former remind me how faith -- both my faith and theirs -- differs from science. The latter remind me of the need to remain on guard: that temptation is perpetual and of infinite variety, that there is no moment in a man’s life in which he is proof against a deadly failure of will, and that one’s journey from such a failure to spiritual disaster might well have a willing helper or two that one cannot see.

May God bless and keep you all.

If It Looks Like A Duck Dept.

Ever since he burst onto the national scene, there have been questions about Barack Hussein Obama’s religious affiliations. The revelations about his Islamic upbringing and the various documents that listed the young Obama as a Muslim were disturbing. Neither did it help Obama’s claims of devout Christianity that the only Christian church he ever attended was that of black racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-American “pastor” Jeremiah Wright, nor that Wright himself said that he’d put special effort into making the formerly Muslim Obama “comfortable” with his change of affiliation. And of course, we have Obama’s current non-attendance at Christian services, his dismissal of traditionally celebrated Christian holy days, his demonstrated antipathy toward Israel, and his pronounced favoritism toward the Islamic states of the Middle East.

Despite all that, it was difficult for me to see Obama as a Muslim for a single reason: it would require him to accept that there’s a Being superior to him. That’s a tough dictate for someone as narcissistic as Obama to swallow:

If you want to know why the Obama administration failed so spectacularly to defend Obamacare in the Supreme Court last week, look no further than a 2008 statement President Obama gave to author Richard Wolfe: "You know, I believe my own bulls--t."...

Here is what Obama told aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008: "I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."...

When Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., told Obama that the political atmosphere in his state felt a lot like 1994, when Democrats lost the House for the first time in two generations, Obama replied, "Well the big difference between here and in '94 was you've got me." Upon hearing those words, Berry chose to retire rather than run again. Democrats lost a record 63 House seats -- including Berry's -- and control of the House....

But don't worry. Obama is the most talented politician of our time. Just ask him. In 2004, after his Democratic National Convention speech, Obama told David Mendell, "I'm LeBron, baby."

(Granted that his narcissism also undercuts his claim of Christian allegiance, but for me at least, that’s been a non-starter from the first.)

But they who make it their practice to delve into the backgrounds of the highly placed have not been idle:

For example, at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Secretary of State John Kerry made certain to avoid offending or disrespectingMuslim terrorists such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He told the attendees at the forum that the U.S. government will never rush to judgment regarding the nature of the Islamic State: “We have to keep our heads…the biggest error that we could make would be to blame Muslims collectively for crimes not committed by Muslims alone. Crimes that the overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose… Religions don’t require adherents to raze villages and blow up people, it’s individuals with a distorted and an even ignorant interpretation of religion who do that.”

According to the Examiner's anonymous source, those were not the words of Kerry, but were the dictates of Valerie Jarrett, who had been born and raised in Iran, and has always shown sympathy for the fundamentalists in the Islamic religion. While a student at Stanford University, Jarrett admitted her loyalty to Islam and continues to object to any negative statements aimed at any part of her "religion of peace."

" Farsi-speaking Valerie Jarrett, the senior advisor to Obama, his right-hand woman was born in Iran. She also has ties with terrorist William Ayers, and her father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett is a card-carrying communist party member and associate of Frank Marshall Davis, the controversial Communist Party activist who was Obama’s childhood mentor. Davis is mentioned many times in Obama’s autobiography. Obama’s senior advisor/campaign manager David Axelrod also has family roots in the Communist party. His parents were Communists," according to former Saturday Night Live comedian and actress Victoria Jackson, who now hosts a conservative talk show and researched what she calls "the real Obama White House."

(Applause to CM Blake for the link.)

Given the indisputable behavioral patterns of the federal executive branch and essentially all its conspicuous members, perhaps the acknowledged religious attachments of Obama and Jarrett don’t really matter. But doesn’t it all make a consistent, hugely compelling picture?

---

Any Gentle Reader who hasn’t yet lapsed into a diabetic coma from regularly reading my treacly-sweet effusions will already be familiar with my opinions about Islam. That we have an executive administration resolved to kowtow to this totalitarian, inherently anti-American creed should appall anyone with three functioning brain cells. That with sufficient information it might have been predictable from the first makes the matter even more disturbing. It resurrects a set of familiar “whys:”

• Why has Obama been so secretive about his college and law school records?
• Why is so little information about Obama’s pre-Senate career publicly available?
• Why has Valerie Jarrett trailed him like an imprinted duckling, wherever he’s gone?
• Why, given her obvious influence, does Jarrett have no official position in the Administration?
• Why did those who know the answers to the above questions work so diligently to suppress them?

And why did the American electorate, which already had four years of experience with the duplicity of the Obamunist cabal, return him to the White House for a second term – if, indeed, it really did?

Food for thought.

Fears Of An Old Man

Just in case you were blissfully unaware of it, you’re getting older at an unrelenting sixty seconds per minute.

I’ve already endured nearly two billion seconds of aging. Many of those seconds were materially profitable. Some were fairly pleasant. A few were both, a few were neither, and a few were downright awful. But that’s life under the veil of time. It’s not only that “no one here gets out alive;” no one gets to live a perfectly pain-and-sorrow-free existence.

As time passes, things change. (Wow! Really deep, Fran. Maybe I’ll have T-shirts made of that and sell them at Cafe Press.) The changes usually include what one fears.

Some of the changes – the ones connected to the physical deterioration nearly everyone suffers over time – are fairly easy to predict. Some are subtler than that. I and quite a few of my contemporaries are coping with fears all but unique to our time and place.

Whatever your age, there’s a good chance you’ve been coping with them too.

---

Way, way back in the red-in-tooth-and-claw days of these United States, back before we knew the blessings of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent government – the year 1900 – the average life expectancy was 48 years. That figure can easily mislead you: infant mortality was much higher then, and infant deaths substantially depress a mean such as the above. Most persons who survived their infancies lived considerably longer than that: typically, into their sixties at least. Though it’s hard to come by a figure that omits the deaths of the very young – where would we set the threshold, after all? – it’s likely that an American who survived his infancy averaged somewhere around 65 years of age at death.

In those dark and primitive times, very few persons experienced the condition we of today call retirement.

Conditions were different in many other ways, as well:

• There was no income tax.
• There were no payroll taxes.
• There was very little violent crime.
• Aggregate federal debt was only $1.27 billion.
• Most Americans worked in family-owned businesses.
• Most Americans lived within a 50-mile radius of their birthplaces.
• Only the largest cities attempted to infringe upon Second Amendment rights.
• There were no “alphabet agencies” and few laws to impede business and commerce.
• There was no licensure to speak of: e.g., a doctor was anyone who called himself a doctor.
• Localities controlled their public schools completely, with neither state nor federal interference.
• Though the populace was over 90% literate, very few persons went to high school. (Colleges and universities were regarded as suitable only for the progeny of the wealthy.)
• The overwhelming majority of goods for sale to the public were routinely priced in cents. $20.67 would buy a Troy ounce of gold, $1.00 would buy 0.90 Troy ounces of silver, and gold and silver coins were in regular circulation.

No, it wasn’t Utopia. Certainly there have been some wholly beneficial developments since then. For my own part, I like the idea of having a few years of retirement in which to do whatever I please and can afford. But I’d surely love to have some of the conditions of 1900 apply to our nation today.

Because of some of the changes since 1900, particularly with regard to medical products and services, I’ll have a few years of retirement in which to read, write, and generally enjoy life. However, because of some of the other changes since 1900, particularly with regard to politics and government, I fear that despite all my efforts, I might not be able to sustain myself – that I might become financially dependent on others.

If you’re near to my age and station in life, you probably fear that too.

---

There are three looming threats to my ability to sustain myself after I’ve retired from my salaried job:

1. Inflation;
2. The rising cost of medical products and services;
3. The threat of federal confiscation of IRAs, 401(k) accounts, and private pension funds.

I’ve hedged as well as possible against the first of those threats. However, as most of my savings are in IRAs and a 401(k) account, I haven’t hedged as well as I’d have liked. When those accounts become the pool from which I draw to pay for things, I’ll be regularly weighing tax effects against the desirability of some proposed expenditure. (And as a married man, I won’t be the one proposing the majority of the expenditures.)

Aged men require more medical support than younger ones. I already need more than I’d ever anticipated. (As a friend likes to say, if I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself. Climbed fewer Cat 5 cliffs and chased fewer Cat 10 women. But that’s all past and done.) Should the cost of those medical supports continue to rise as sharply as they have these past fifty years, I might be in trouble in my seventies and beyond.

But the most fearsome of the threats comes straight from Washington. The facts are too stark to be ignored:

• Social Security is insolvent, while its liabilities are increasing geometrically;
• The federal debt has passed $18 trillion and shows no sign of slowing;
• Retirees have a lot of bucks in IRAs and 401(k) accounts.
• There are still some private pension funds around.

If you’re a wholly corrupt, conscienceless scumbag consumed by greed and lust for power who’d rather die under torture than admit to ever making a mistake – in other words, if you’re a federal politico – doesn’t the answer just pop out of a slot?

It begins to seem a matter not of if but of when.

---

There’s a guaranteed, 100% effective cure for what I fear. It’s called death. But though I believe in an afterlife, I’m not all that enthusiastic about embarking on it just yet. (Among other things, you’re not supposed to be confident about what God will say to you at your Particular Judgment, and I’m not. I’m no saint. Ask my wife.) Besides, I have promises to keep: books to write and so forth. I hope to satisfy Edward Teller’s dictum: to live my life so that when the time comes, I’ll feel that I’m ready to die.

Every man around my age who looks forward to a few years of untroubled retirement, regardless of his plans for those years, faces the uncertainties I face. We’re all vulnerable to the same possibilities. We’re all about equally helpless before Leviathan. And nearly all of us are frantically searching for escape hatches.

If you’re in the fortunate category of the young and strong, and are currently unconcerned about your future as an old fart, remember that sixty-seconds-per-minute bit. Be aware that when you vote, you’re exercising an influence over the future. If your vote is directed by a gimme mentality, or by envy of persons seemingly more fortunate than you, remember that what goes around comes around. Whether you realize it or not, you’ll be setting an example for those who come after you, and you’ll have your turn under their crosshairs sooner than either of us can imagine.

Fear, like pain, can be useful, but it’s no fun. A fear that you can do nothing to offset or to brace for is the worst of all. And the older you get, the more such fears you’ll feel.

Take it from one who knows.

Time Was...

...“libertarian” meant “favoring freedom above other political ends,” and nothing else.
...libertarians were as patriotic as other Americans, and were acknowledged to be so.
...libertarians deemed freedom the natural right of all men, even non-Americans.
...and thus, libertarians had no philosophical problems with a war of liberation.

Time was.

Time was, I thought well of Sheldon Richman:

The only reason [American Sniper Chris] Kyle went to Iraq was that Bush/Cheney & Co. launched a war of aggression against the Iraqi people. Wars of aggression, let's remember, are illegal under international law. Nazis were executed at Nuremberg for waging wars of aggression. With this perspective, we can ask if Kyle was a hero....

Excuse me, but I have trouble seeing an essential difference between what Kyle did in Iraq and what Adam Lanza did at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It certainly was not heroism.

Good God Almighty. If you have a strong enough stomach, you can read the rest for yourself. I shan’t excerpt more here, for fear of driving away my more sensitive Gentle Readers and inciting some of the others to acts unlawful in these United States.

Reason, at one time regarded as the “flagship” publication for American libertarians, allowed this piece to appear on its website. What appalling judgment...if, indeed, judgment was involved.

---

I’ve styled myself a libertarian (or a libertarian-conservative) for a long time. I was once a state-level official in the Libertarian Party. Yet I’ve disassociated myself from organized libertarianism, and I understand full well why the moniker is considered unattractive by many persons who agree with me on almost every political subject. Quite simply, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

It comes as a surprise to me that Sheldon Richman, a long time pillar of the Future of Freedom Foundation, should have leagued with the lunatics. He’s written a great deal over the years. What I’ve read of his oeuvre I’ve enjoyed. In the main, I’ve agreed with his arguments. I can’t recall having seen his name on anything even remotely comparable to the cited article. Perhaps I never had an accurate sense of him.

The current of libertarian thought that deplores wars and argues for the reduction of the American military has become cancerous. Its emergent absolutism comes up hard and shatters against a compelling truth:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." [John Stuart Mill]

The Iraq War may have been a mistake geostrategically. There are arguments for and against it even today. But it was not a “war of aggression against the Iraqi people,” as Richman styles it. It was a war of liberation.

We went to Iraq seeking nothing for ourselves. We spent most of a trillion dollars there and shed the blood of thousands of young Americans. When we believed a stable elected government had arisen to replace the Ba’athist regime of Saddam Hussein, we relinquished sovereignty to that government, struck our tents, and departed. Our forces brought nothing back from Iraq but corpses, wounds, and war stories.

The men and women Chris Kyle targeted and killed were weapons-bearing enemies, themselves trying to kill members of a liberating force: a force sent to Iraq to relieve its people of the yoke of one of the most brutal dictators ever to appear on this ball of rock. Comparing Kyle to psychotic killer Adam Lanza, who walked into an elementary school and slaughtered two dozen perfect innocents, is a moral crime of a magnitude I lack the words to define.

The one obscenity missing from Richman’s piece is a statement that the psychotic ex-Marine who murdered Chris Kyle served justice by doing so. Perhaps Richman’s vestigial conscience kicked in at the last moment to prevent it. Or perhaps he realized that that would be a “bridge too far” even for him.

---

I can no longer bear the “libertarian” label. The dictionary meaning of the word has been swallowed by a heap of malevolent connotations, among which an absolute and unreasoning hostility to the American military is perhaps the worst. I maintain my pro-freedom stance and the policy positions that flow from it, but I reject the label and its implications of association and agreement with such scum as Sheldon Richman. Those who retain the label must henceforth defend themselves against the implication that they agree with Richman, or argue for his odious stance. And so yet another honorable word is colonized by dishonorable men.

I have come to understand all too well why so many persons who share my views prefer to call themselves “constitutional conservatives.” Though there’s some fuzz on that peach, at least it doesn’t dishonor the very best Americans of all: those who have gone forth over and over, wisely or not, to succor the oppressed of other lands, at great risk, and frequently the ultimate price, to themselves.

“We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in.” -- Colin Powell

A Crisis Of Meaning

“The destroyer is not a truth-crisis, it is a meaning-crisis.” – Piers Anthony, Macroscope

Political persuasion specialist Michael Emerling has said that the meaning of a communication inheres in the reaction of the receiver. Unless you have a considerable grounding in epistemology and semantics, that statement can be somewhat difficult to decode. Yet it’s one of the most important statements ever made about political outreach. Recent developments in the strategies and tactics of the Left have made it essential for freedom lovers to grasp it and internalize it.

For openers, consider the following episode:

The Obama Administration, following in the footsteps of another noteworthy Democrat liar (“It depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”), has decided to defend the indefensible by arbitrarily redefining the terms of discussion. That this has been viewed – so far, at least – as merely one more outrage to add to the Obamunist ledger suggests that in political discourse words shall no longer be permitted to have enduring meanings. If this is the case, our political degeneracy has reached a terminal stage.

But pause for a moment and reflect upon:

• What Administration spokesdroid Eric Schultz said;
• The meaning drawn from it by those who have heard his words.

No one with three functioning brain cells could imagine that the Taliban, whose operational tactics are indistinguishable from those of other Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, is anything but a terrorist organization. It differs from the others only in once having had control of a nation-state. Calling it an “armed insurgency” cannot change the objective facts of its behavior; it can only provide a tissue-thin rhetorical cover for the Obama Administration’s actions toward it.

So what Schultz said amounted to “Don’t probe us on this or we’ll take some sort of vengeance for it later.” That’s almost certainly the meaning he wanted his audience to derive from it. However, the meaning they drew from it might have included that, but surely also included: “The Obama Administration will do what it damned well pleases when it damned well pleases, without regard for the prior policies of this or any other Administration.”

Ponder the difference for a moment before continuing on.

---

Man’s rational capacity requires the use of symbols. The reason is embedded in the nature of reason itself:

• To reason is to make use of abstractions – generalizations from specific cases to general patterns – to deduce effects from causes applied to adequately specified contexts.
• One cannot conceive an abstraction without inserting symbols – each one a placeholder for a generic member of some defined class – into one’s conception.
• Thus, symbols with stable meanings are essential to the conception and employment of abstractions.

(A little deep for a Thursday morning? Blame my snowblower, which weighs twice what I do and was massively disinclined to deal with the load Mother Nature dropped on my driveway Monday night and Tuesday morning.)

This is so fundamental to human mentation that even mathematicians tend to be unaware of it until it’s been proposed to them explicitly. It’s too automatic – too integral to Man’s pursuit of knowledge about the world and the creatures in it. Compelling oneself to think about it involves deliberately inserting oneself into a “strange loop” of the sort Douglas Hofstadter wrote about in Godel, Escher, Bach. Such a loop has no exit point upon which we can rely.

By corollary, if one is forbidden to attribute stable meanings to certain symbols – for example, the words used in political discourse – one cannot make sense of the statements that employ them. A barrier rises between our minds and the truths of reality with which we must grapple.

This is immensely appealing to those who seek to evade the consequences appropriate to their actions.

---

I wrote some time ago:

In the ideological clashes of today, the attention of the greater mass of Americans is focused on secondary matters. Arguments over national defense, tax rates, social policy directions, regulatory structures, and so forth continue to rage, but with less prospect of being satisfactorily settled than ever before...because a critical pinion for all argument of any sort has been undermined near to collapse.

The pinion of which I speak is the concept of objective truth.

It's hard for most people to grasp that objective truth is a conception, rather than something self-evident. Yet furious philosophical battles have been fought over it. The negative side has never conceded defeat. They've advanced reason after reason to doubt the existence of objective reality. As each one is destroyed, they shift to another. In a sense, their proposition is its own strongest weapon, for they respond rather frequently to even the most obvious points by saying, "No, that's your truth" -- an implicit claim that it's the not the observation but the observer's willingness to accept it that really matters.

John Q. Public has heard little of this, of course; it's mostly fought in the ivory towers, and in the publications that cater to professional intellectuals. All the same, it matters to him more than he's able to appreciate.

Truth is an evaluation: a judgment that some proposition corresponds to objective reality sufficiently for men to rely upon it. The weakening of the concept of truth cuts an opening through which baldly counterfactual propositions can be thrust into serious discourse. Smith might say that proposition X is disprovable, or that it contradicts common observations of the world; Jones counters that X suits him fine, for he has dismissed the disprovers as "partisan" and prefers his own observations to those of Smith. Unless the two agree on standards for relevant evidence, pertinent reasoning, and common verification -- in other words, standards for what can be accepted as sufficiently true -- their argument over X will never end.

An interest group that has "put its back against the wall" as regards its central interest, and is unwilling to concede the battle regardless of the evidence and logic raised against its claims, will obfuscate, attack the motives of its opponents, and attempt to misdirect their attention with irrelevancies. When all of these have failed, its last-ditch defense is to attack the concept of truth. Once that has been undermined, the group can't be defeated. It can stay on the ideological battlefield indefinitely, preserving the possibility of victory through attrition or fatigue among its opponents.

As the years have flowed past, I’ve come to consider that particular essay the most important of all my emissions onto the Web. Indeed, the importance of its core thesis has risen to the point that no political statement can be assessed without evaluating whether the words it uses are being employed according to their public meanings: i.e., the meanings private persons routinely attribute to them. In other words, we must determine whether the speaker respects the truths those words are used by us common folk to express.

The effort involved in even listening to political gabble has risen proportionately to politicians’ self-defensive reinterpretations of key words and phrases. Such reinterpretations are inherently attempts to evade the facts.

If you’ve wondered why it is that no politician ever answers a yes-or-no question with a yes-or-no answer, wonder no longer. It’s utterly impossible to reinterpret “yes” and “no.” That makes them quicksand for the politician determined to retain the option to “adjust” his positions for subsequent needs.

---

Yesterday afternoon, the esteemed Glenn Reynolds wrote thus:

IN JOHN CARTER’S WORDS, I STILL LIVE: Andrew Sullivan is going to stop blogging. No, blogging isn’t dead. And InstaPundit gets more pageviews than pretty much everyone who’s calling blogging dead. But I can understand Andrew quitting. For me, the real strain isn’t the blogging, but having to pay close attention to the news all the time. The news is usually depressing, when it’s not angering, and that’s doubly true for the Obama years. But I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.

I’m pleased that our beloved InstaPundit has resolved to soldier on, but ponder for a moment why “The news is usually depressing, when it’s not angering.” There’s always been a large percentage of bad news in the news; after all, the major maxim of journalism has always been “if it bleeds, it leads.” In earlier decades, we were far more confident that bad news with political import – i.e., negative developments the response to which would appropriately come from an American government – would be confronted squarely and coped with properly. Public confidence in such a response ain’t what she used to be. (If that comes as news to you, congratulations on a really long nap.)

The reason is the increasing – today near to absolute – unwillingness of our political class to confront reality when doing so might make it look bad.

When reality slaps you across the face with a wet mackerel, the only imaginable evasion is rhetorical: “No, no! While it did look like a mackerel, it wasn’t an authentic mackerel, as these variances along the lateral fins and the belly scales should make obvious. Besides, I turned forty-five degrees in the instant of the first impact, so it didn’t get my right cheek, so I wasn’t really slapped across the face. Anyway, we’re still good friends.” Dealing with the evasions and their implications is what I find most wearying and most angering. I’d be surprised if that weren’t so for Reynolds and many other commentators who’ve been tempted to lay down their keyboards.

Politicians’ methods for evading reality increasingly employ redefinitions of common words and phrases, distortions of their meanings, and a refusal to use those terms whose meanings are so strongly established that they cannot be so treated. The marvel of political journalism in our time is that anyone still bothers to ask a politician a question, when we all know that the answer will be self-serving rather than honestly responsive. Why, indeed, should a reporter bother to report on political statements and orations, which are inevitably more deceitful than informative? The temptation must be strong to eschew such wastes of ink and pixels, and merely report on politicians’ deeds as recorded by cameras and microphones.

Our political destroyers – and by that term, I mean our entire political class, regardless of party affiliation – have embroiled us in a meaning-crisis whose consequence is a truth-crisis. They are resolved that we shall never be able to hold them to the least of their statements. (Their promises? Forget it, Jake.) If we can be battered out of our reliance on the meanings of common words and phrases, our yearning for truth, and our belief in objective reality, their paths to absolute power over us will be completely unobstructed at long last.

Food for thought.