Unusual Developments

     As a rule, one shouldn’t expect anything much from cold-callers and cold-emailers. They’re playing a numbers game, like the Frenchman on the corner who propositions every woman who walks by. Certainly, most will walk away – a few will beat him with a bumbershoot – but the percentage that smile and agree to go with him are all that he can properly service. So they keep cold-calling and mass-emailing, in hope of making a living out of the one percent or so that agree to work with them. This is most certainly the case for self-styled promoters of the fiction of indie novelists.

     But now and then, one proves to be hungry enough to be willing to invest a little time and effort in landing the sale. I encountered one recently. I actually got her to read one of my novels from cover to cover. Despite the speculative nature of such an expense, I’m toying with the idea of engaging her. (Psst! Don’t tell the C.S.O.)

     But that’s prefatory. Granted, it’s made me contemplate loosening the purse strings, but it’s still just a foreword to what’s really on my mind.

---

     Fairly recently, a new contributor joined the stable over at PJ Media: Jamie K. Wilson, the head honcho at Conservatarian Press. Miss Wilson is quite serious about her mission:

     Stories matter. They shape cultures, preserve traditions, and pass truth from one generation to the next.
     At Conservatarian Press, we’re here for one simple reason: to publish the kind of stories the mainstream industry is leaving behind — the ones chosen on merit, not on checkboxes.
     I’ve loved stories since I was a child, curled up with Tolkien, Carroll, Lewis, MacDonald, and Shakespeare. Yes, I treasure Jane Austen too, but let’s be honest: most of the Western literary canon was written by men now dismissed as “out of fashion.” Their works still inspire, still endure — and so should today’s writers, no matter who they are.
     That’s why we promise one thing: we will never choose a story based on sex, ethnicity, orientation, or any other label. We publish good stories, period. In fact, the list of what’s considered “unpublishable” by the mainstream seems to grow every day — which only makes our mission more urgent, and more joyful.

     Upon perusing the offerings at Conservatarian Press, I found several of high quality, including Marina Fontaine’s excellent novella Chasing Freedom. So it’s a publisher indie writers of a conservative or libertarian bent might want to consider. But what’s really impressed me about Miss Wilson is the depth of her insight into what’s wrong with contemporary fiction generally. This essay is particularly impressive:

     After the Second World War, evil had a face. The swastika left no doubt. The men who stormed Normandy were good; the men who filled the camps of the Axis were not. Kamikaze pilots slaughtered thousands of brave young men on ships in the Pacific. Stories reflected that certainty of a clear good and evil: High Noon, The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke. Courage meant something because sin was real.
     Then came the postmodernists.
     Deconstructionism swept universities and publishing houses. Theorists denied that stories carried truth at all. The hero became a construct of power; every righteous act was secretly oppressive. Virtue could exist only with irony. Writers who once sought truth began dismantling it.
     And ideas never stay on paper. In those years, the literary avant-garde of New York and the television studios of Los Angeles were the same world. Harlan Ellison, Rod Serling, Ray Bradbury, Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal: all men who wrote for The Atlantic one week and CBS the next. Their post-moral philosophy, nurtured in the best universities and writing programs, moved straight onto the screen. The cowboy and the sheriff became relics of an oppressive age.

     Please read it all.

---

     I’m not going to recapitulate the whole of Miss Wilson’s excellent essay. Instead I’d like to ask two questions: one that historians have traditionally asked, and one that virtually no one but atavistic recluses obsessed with understanding human nature and human societies ever raise:

1. Why did X happen?
2. Why did it happen when and where it did?

     The second question is the more important of the two.

     The intellectual-moral disease Miss Wilson fingers in the snippet I cut from her essay has always existed. What caused it to rise to dominate the cultural life of the United States? What were the necessary preconditions? What provided the propulsion it required? Why didn’t the healthy part of American society, which has always been larger and stronger than the sick part, react against it as it should have done?

     It was a highly unusual development, one that no historian of prewar America has successfully grappled with.

     I have a couple of ideas, but they’re as yet unbacked by adequate study. I’ll be looking into the matter, while I contemplate spending my stepdaughters’ inheritance on the services of a promotion-and-marketing expert. But I’ll set the key idea down here for my Gentle Readers to ponder:

     Just after World War II arrived the technologies that produced mass media capable of blanketing the entire nation.
     In keeping with Gramscian “long march through the institutions” theory, the destroyers of American culture made seizing control of those media their highest priority.
     They particularly targeted fiction, both in print and electronic dissemination.

     For stories matter critically! They express and reinforce our values, particularly our moral and ethical values, by the most powerful of methods: by embedding them in the motivational structures of believable characters the reader can admire or detest. That’s why one novel from Ayn Rand has advanced the love of freedom and enduring values more effectively than all the works of all the theorists taken together.

     And as I haven’t said for a while now: More anon.

Our Friends, The Record-Keepers

     I just stumbled over this gem:

People who don’t write down their history get discovered by people who do. https://t.co/1gyjF7Z1E0

— Kitler (@Kitler512) October 15, 2025

     As I’m fascinated by moral theory, including the theory of natural rights, it got me going immediately: Is the practice of recording events in an enduring form a prerequisite for the emergence and acceptance of property rights?

     Think about it for a moment.

---

     Two old sayings come to mind:

• “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
• “If you don’t write it down, it never happened.”

     Those are not unquestionable truths that express aspects of objective reality. They’re summaries of why and how people remember, think, and act. Just as the concept of identity depends upon continuity over an interval of time, the concept of property cannot be fathomed without duration. The origin of property in land, or “real property” as the lawyers say, was tenancy rather than any legal procedure or fiction. “That’s Smith’s land. His father and grandfather lived there.” Consider in that light the old term for a tract of land with a recognized owner: a freehold.

     But tenancy, to be recognized as such, requires memory. Human memories shift and fade. The keeping of records – the less perishable, the better – obviates the need for people to remember the details of a particular person’s tenancy over a particular tract. Whether they’re kept in cuneiform or in cursive, such records establish the tenancy required confirm Smith’s ownership of “Smith’s land.”

     Contrast that with property in things other than land: “movable property.” You have no deed to your clothing, your tools, or any of the other items you regard as yours. They pass far more easily from your ownership to that of another, whether with or without your assent – and if they do, there’s no record by which you can claim that they’re rightfully yours, barring supporting evidence that must be introduced in a court fight. That makes your ownership less “real” than that of the land you own.

     (There is an exception, of course: the motor vehicle, for which the State now demands that you acquire a deed from the State. But let’s defer that subject to another screed.)

     So record-keeping is the indispensable support to property claims, and to the concept of property itself.

---

     A humorous anecdote about our seventh president bears upon property concepts in an illuminating way:

     In 1813, in a fight with Thomas Hart Benton and his brother Jesse, Jackson received a bullet which remained in his left arm for years. When in 1832 he finally had a surgeon remove the bullet, someone suggested giving it back to Benton, now a Senator from Missouri and a warm supporter of Jackson. Benton declined the offer, however, pointing out that twenty years' possession made the bullet Jackson's property. Told that it was only nineteen years, Benton said, "Oh, well, in consideration of the extra care he has taken of it-keeping it constantly about his person, and so on-I'll waive the odd year."
     Benton used to tell people: "General Jackson was a very great man. I shot him, sir." "Yes," he liked to say, "I had a fight with Jackson. A fellow was hardly in the fashion who didn't."

     [Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes]

     That was “adverse possession law” as it applied to movable property in the Nineteenth Century. Twenty years’ adverse possession of an object was held to transfer the property rights over that object to the adverse possessor. But even that long a duration had to be supported by testimony: usually the testimony of the previous owner.

---

     When European colonists arrived in the New World, they brought the concept of property with them. The Amerinds lacked any such concept. Thus, when the settlers started staking out tracts for themselves and farming them, nearby Amerind tribes didn’t automatically accept that those tracts were “owned.” They felt free to forage the farmed tracts of the Europeans, for in their minds land could never be owned by an individual. At most it was a tribal possession, and not all Amerind tribes accepted that. That was the source of many of the early grievances between the two peoples.

     The establishment of land registries and officials to supervise and maintain them was the settlers’ response... but once again, the Amerinds failed to accept land claims. “Writing? Paper? What is this magic with which you seek to confound us?” Not until European supremacy in war over the Amerind tribes had been conclusively demonstrated did the survivors bend the knee to the new concept.

     So it appears that until writing and record-keeping – the basis of history – should emerge, the seemingly natural concept of property will be slow to gain acceptance... indeed, if it’s accepted at all.

Alternatives Demanded

     It’s terrifying how many people refuse to confront the implications of their premises.

     I have a lot of respect for my Gentle Readers. They’re a bright bunch, and as well-meaning as anyone alive. So please take what follows as an illustration rather than a condemnation. Quite some time ago, one Gentle Reader was disturbed by something I’d written about racial matters and what must be done to improve them. I’d prescribed the separation of the black race from the White, on the grounds that it’s the sole guaranteed remedy for the plague of black violence against us. His reply was essentially that we mustn’t do that, that there must be another way.

     A reaction against the suggestion that the races should be resegregated is understandable. White Americans have been heavily propagandized about the evils of segregation. We’ve been steeped in the official lore to the point that it’s next to impossible to set it aside. Even in the face of the black crime plague – and the statistics are absolutely unequivocal on this point – the typical White American is reflexively appalled by the notion that segregation is the answer. There must be another way!

     But what’s the implication? That no matter the consequences of not resegregating, we must endure them and continue to search for an alternative approach? The Civil Rights Era is now six decades behind us. Over the years since then, we’ve poured time and treasure into attempts to raise black Americans nearer to White standards. What has resulted?

     All the problems attendant upon the mingling of the races have grown worse. Black violence against Whites has never been worse. Black crimes against property have swelled monstrously. Black disruptions of the peace have become so common that they’re no longer newsworthy. Black illegitimacies have mushroomed; today more than 70% of all black infants are born to single mothers. Other black pathologies have exploded as well.

     At what point does it become licit to say “We’ve tried long enough and hard enough; let’s go with what we know would work.” For there may not be another way. Sixty years of efforts, more than a trillion dollars of public expenditure, and ceaseless, relentless programming of young Whites’ assumptions and suppositions now lie behind us. A veritable river of blood and broken lives are all we have to show.

     But the many continue to trumpet the premise that “There must be another way.” By implication, we must reject what we know would work ab initio. Regardless of the costs and consequences, we must keep trying other approaches, from here to eternity.

---

     More recently, I crossed swords with a crusader: a woman violently opposed to the practice of the circumcision of male infants. Now, I have no opinion on the matter. I don’t claim special knowledge of the costs or benefits of the practice. I know what I’ve been told, but I don’t know how much of that is supposition as opposed to hard facts. So I start from there: I need to know more before I take a position on it.

     This woman, whom I’ll call Jane, presented the following argument:

     God created every mammal with a prepuce, and I doubt he wants you to mutilate your child to please him.

     WHOA! God created all of us with unpierced ears, too. He created us with hair growing from our faces and our groins. He created us with teeth that decay and organs that sometimes fail us. If Jane’s premise is that we must not modify what God gave us, what of all those other things? Hey, what about boob and butt lifts?

     Given Jane’s premise, I can’t find a limiting principle. Can you?

     Needless to say, Jane reacted badly to my observations. Most people are annoyed by having the implications of their premises illuminated. But then, most people don’t really think. They speak far more, at any rate.

---

     If I had a wish for my legacy, it would be that more people would think more. In particular, that more people would exercise care in their selection of premises, especially those premises from which they argue for changes in other people’s choices and actions. Surely there’s no more appropriate time for clear and cautious thinking and speaking.

     Nobody likes to lose an argument. Yet it happens. Quoth C. S. Lewis yet again:

     “I suppose there are two views about everything,” said Mark.
     “Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.”

     Proposing Deus vult as your premise is seldom the right place to start.

     Have a nice day.

Sad Patterns

     Among the things that are saddest about being what I am is my inability to turn certain mental functions on and off. Sometimes that makes me wonder if I’m authentically human, or more like a device that has various settings. Think of a rotary switch with several detents – “Slow,” “Medium,” “Fast,” “Self-Destruct” – one of which is selected by an unseen operator.

     One of those settings is surely “Maximum Gullibility.”

---

     Among the fundamental operations of the intellect, pattern recognition is vital. He who can’t detect patterns and make use of them in his reasoning is a stunted creature. He has difficulty in learning; he’s almost impossible to teach. But imagine that he – let’s call him Fran, purely for convenience in reference – can recognize patterns, but only when his rotary switch is set to “Pattern Recognition ON.” Only then do the patterns in human behavior become visible to him.

     Fran’s been gulled several times. Moreover, the pattern that was used to get into his wallet was always the same:

1. Initial encounter with Jane, a genial-seeming person;
2. Exchange of basic information (i.e., name, age, location, occupation, marital status, kids, pets);
3. The wind-up:
   1. Jane and Fran have a pleasant conversation about some shared interest;
   2. Jane compliments Fran’s intelligence, character, and personality;
   3. Conversation continues, usually with more intimate details being exchanged.
4. The pitch:
   1. Jane mentions a personal need or a charity with which she’s associated;
   2. She stresses, gently, that the need is immediate;
   3. She waits for Fran to agree to donate;
   4. She provides a website or a PayPal account to which the funds should go;
   5. What follows has several variants:
      1. Strange URLs;
      2. Weird-seeming PayPal accounts that don’t function normally;
      3. “Gift cards” are often suggested.
5. The umpire’s call: Depending on the “Pattern Recognition” setting:
   1. Fran either reaches for his wallet; (“Yerrr out!”)
   2. Or he recognizes the pattern and walks away. (“Take your base.”)

     If Fran fails to recognize the pattern, he’ll be gulled. If he does recognize it, he’ll be safe for the present. But everything depends on that “Pattern Recognition” setting. There’s no use in being a genius if that switch is in the OFF position.

     Some wind-ups are long and subtle; others are quick and crude. Some pitches are laced with honey and cinnamon; others are appallingly blunt. I remember one seemingly nice woman who tried to get $30,000 out of me. That was high enough to trigger my Self-Protection circuit.

     But the subject here is the pattern and recognizing it when it’s in progress. We think fish to be low and mindless creatures because they see the bait but not the hook. How much higher a creature is a man who doesn’t sense the pattern outlined above?

---

     The reason for this diatribe, of course, is that another professional fleecemeister tried her wiles on me just yesterday. Her wind-up was gorgeous. Her pitch was heartrending. But it didn’t quite nick the corner of the plate, and I didn’t swing. The charity’s front man made a fatal mistake: he spoke of a rather high “minimum” for donating via PayPal “because of transaction costs.” That raised a red flag. Another red flag popped up when the clown suggested that I buy an iTunes or Steam gift card instead. The third, “full count” flag popped when he gave me an alternate PayPal account name that looked very much like a personal account and requested a screenshot “to confirm the donation.” The fourth flag was when he said “Please complete the process within 30 to 60 minutes.” “Take your base, Fran.”

     For once, I didn’t miss the giveaways. However, I criticize myself for not recognizing the wind-up. She was too complimentary, too effusive about my exemplary qualities. I mean, we’d been acquainted for a day and a half; how could she have known about my chiseled good looks, my extraordinary brilliance, my sterling character, or my record-setting sexual prowess?

     Well, it’s been said that there’s no fool like an old fool. I suppose I qualify. But as I’ve written more than once, technological developments and characterological trends have destroyed the high-trust society that made America what it was at its height. Refusing to trust and suppressing the generous impulse have become mandatory for self-protection. Illustrations abound.

     Enjoy your Columbus Day.

The Mother Tongue

     [My regular Gentle Readers will already be aware that I have a burr under my saddle about good English. It’s become ever larger as the years pass, in part because of the sloppiness encouraged on the Web and by cell phones. We are approaching a point at which communication among Americans will become conditional on what schools the interlocutors attended, what books they’ve read, and whether their parents were wise enough to deny Junior a computer and a cell phone until the little bastard could purchase them for himself.
     But I have a long agenda for today, including the care and feeding of a wife who’s recuperating from major surgery, so rather than work up the spit for a wholly new and original rant, have a piece from the old Palace of Reason. It first appeared there on July 2, 2004. – FWP]

---

     There's been an interesting exchange of views recently on the subject of linguistic correctness, sparked by Connie Du Toit and continued by Aaron Haspel, among others. However, what makes it particularly interesting is not that any of these worthies has anything new to say on the matter. Rather, it's that no one who's been a party to the exchange has been willing to take one of the two most important poles of the debate.

     Well, your Curmudgeon does have his place in things.

     The "Ebonics" madness of a few years past ought to have been a warning sign, a shot across our civilization's bow. Persons with some following were advocating the creation of a separate linguistic community for blacks, on the grounds that the ghetto slang to which they'd attached the pretentious term "Ebonics" has "its own validity." Quite likely, none of these "educators" could define "validity" without several practice frames and a hint from the studio audience, but let it pass. The sensational aspect of the matter was the audacity of "educators" who argued for the "right" not to teach language disciplines to their charges. It completely occluded any discussion of why allowing black American youth to become an isolated linguistic community might be a bad idea.

     If you, gentle reader, are in any doubt about why it's a bad idea, consider the cage of limitation that encloses Hispanic immigrants who fail to learn English. Consider the contempt felt for them, by both native English-speakers and prior generations of immigrants who mastered the language. Consider the difficulties their children will have becoming English-speakers when their home environment presses Spanish upon them, rather than the tongue used by the society they hope to join, whose commercial and cultural opportunities they hope to enjoy.

     NASA astronauts have a saying: Communication Is Life. Indeed. Among other things, it's often the only way to persuade others not to kill you. What is generally not conceded by the excessively tolerant is that it's also the road to social acceptance, respect, and often to riches.

     Do you think your Curmudgeon overstates the case? His own fortunes are founded entirely on his communications skills. Yes, much of that was communication with computer systems, but the principle is the same. In fact, the starkness of that milieu helps to reveal the most important principles beneath the contention.

     But let's not jump to the climax of the argument quite so fast. It's worth developing a few important lines of thought, and the consequences of ignoring them -- all of which are historically well confirmed.

* * *

     If you've ever been exposed to Middle English, you already know what the temporal drift in the language has done to our ability to comprehend our forebears. Scholars put whole careers into decoding the argot of that time. Without their annotations, the texts left by famous medieval authors would be indecipherable by a layman.

     That drift occurred because of the difficulty of promulgating a language standard. The first printed books were still centuries away. Dictionaries were unknown. The class structure of pre-Industrial Revolution England guaranteed that the educated noble would speak an entirely different language from the commoner. Regional and occupational jargonization played a part as well.

     Though the sciences and technologies made slow progress during those centuries, there is still much to be learned from them, which makes it a tragedy that so few of us are capable of reading their documents. If we move forward to the Tudor era, the barriers thin somewhat, largely because of the rise of national and international trade, in which many English estates took some part. But only when industrialization made England into a massive importer of raw materials and a unique source of finished goods to be sold as widely as she could did the standardization of the English language become an urgent matter. The movable-type printing press made it possible. Among the first books to be widely produced and distributed were grammars and proto-dictionaries.

     It was about then that the persistent practices of inter-estate raids and violent sectional feuds ceased to trouble England as well. The muting of language differences seems to have played a part in the emergence of peace, though its importance is obviously open to dispute. There can be no dispute that general education received an enormous boost from the progress of linguistic regularization, and that the living standards of English commoners benefited greatly by it as well.

* * *

     The history of the ancient world features many mentions of the importance of the traveling trader as a source of news. What is seldom pondered is the prerequisite for that function: the ability to make oneself understood, which is of course also required by trade. In those days, he who traveled long distances to trade needed to be a polyglot, capable of speaking at least a minimum amount of several languages and handling the customs of several peoples as well. That, along with the requirements for integrity, competence, endurance, and self-reliance naturally limited the number of persons who could follow that star. Those few became very widely known, highly esteemed, and -- in a time of grinding, universal poverty -- very, very rich.

     Also significant from that time was the practice of using linguistic barriers to further campaigns of conquest and to secure enslavement. Armies were more willing to slay and enslave when their victims could not make themselves understood, which was a large part of the reason for the long journeys of barbarian armies such as the Vikings, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns. Captured slaves and concubines were routinely put under the guardianship of men who could not understand them -- often, men who could only make themselves understood to their masters, and not by the larger surrounding population.

* * *

     Your Curmudgeon hopes it is understood by now that language differences are destructive barriers among men. Indeed, the effect is so powerful that, were he capable of waving a magic wand and eliminating all languages but one from human intercourse, now and forever, your Curmudgeon would not hesitate for an instant, even if it meant the permanent loss of all material written in any other tongue.

     But what would that mean? What is a language, that we might recognize this one as different from the one spoken over there?

     Quite simply, a language consists of three sets of rules:

• A lexicon or vocabulary, which maps "atomic" symbols -- words -- onto extrinsic meanings through widely accepted definitions;
• A set of rules of combination, more commonly called a syntax, by which symbols from the lexicon can be combined to form more complex descriptions, queries, and ideas;
• An accretion of lexical compounds, usually called idioms, which map to meanings that are not obvious from the standard definitions of the "atomic" symbols in the compound.

     Divergence from any of these sets of rules impedes contemporary comprehensibility, unless and until the divergence becomes widely accepted. The comprehensibility of material from earlier times will be affected if the lexical elements they used cease to have meaning to a reader of our time, if the syntactical import of their constructions is lost, or if their idioms cannot be translated.

     Of course, if that earlier material has at most a marginal cultural value, "we" can "afford" to lose it. But "we" must not assume that "we" will always be on the receiving end of the wire, or that "they" will always have little of import to say. What of the future, when persons not yet born strain to make sense of our philosophical, scientific, cultural, political, and personal legacies?

* * *

     None of this argues for a language that never adds new words or idioms, and never lets idioms whose referents have ceased to matter lapse into unemployment. But it does press for the conservation of the basis of our language: its vocabulary, its syntactic rules, and the body of idioms whose meaning has been widely accepted. Only if those strictures are maintained will men be guaranteed to be comprehensible to other men.

     This stance is called prescriptivism. We who hold to it are often derided as grammarians consumed by the fear of unemployment.

     Prescriptivism comes in degrees, like so many other convictions. "Loose" prescription seeks to conserve only the thousand words that are indispensable to common speech, omitting nearly all descriptive words, all purely cultural markers, and all idioms without a commercial demand behind them. It sanctifies the dozen syntactic rules that allow the formation of simple statements and queries, usually leaving out complex conditionals, subjunctives, and advanced usages such as ablative absolutes, gerunds, and the pluperfect and future perfect tenses. Loose prescription gives rise to vertical divisions in a language: "low," "middle," and "high" dialects. Over time, these will become close to mutually incomprehensible. The speakers of these dialects will often be stratified by wealth and political privilege as well.

     "Middle" prescription adds to the conserved set of rules. To the base thousand words, it adds a range of "discretionary" adjectives and adverbs, common cultural words, and "less important" idioms. To the dozen innermost rules, it adds some conditionals missing from the "loose" protectorate, and perhaps some subjunctives and advanced usages, though far from a complete set. "Soon I shall have set this behind me" might not be conserved, but "Some day, this will be behind me" probably would be. Here, too, a vertical division will develop between formal and common speech. They will remain comprehensible to one another, but it will be common for persons to judge one another's social status according to their linguistic command, and harder for a person of low status to rise than might otherwise be the case.

     "Strict" prescription allows virtually no changes to existing vocabulary or syntactic rules. New vocabulary will be added to answer the emergence of new referents in the relevant semantic domain, but a word already defined is deemed sacrosanct. Syntactic rules about even the most complex usages are maintained as well. To be added to the expressive set, idioms must pass stringent requirements for cultural relevance and harmony with the language's other rules. Obviously, except for occupational specialty jargons, this approach to language will guarantee the maximum degree of common comprehension and the minimum trouble in decoding texts by writers distant in time.

     Even under strict prescription, there will be a colloquial dialect and a "high" or formal one. But speakers of the formal tongue will have no difficulty speaking to those conversant only with the colloquial one, which is not guaranteed under middle prescription and against the odds under loose prescription. Commerce will be served to the highest possible degree, and though there will still be language "snobs," there will be no impenetrable linguistic barriers against economic, cultural, or political advancement.

     Strict rules make linguistic attainment easier than loose ones.

* * *

     The earliest aim of American classroom education was the promulgation of a regular language. Indeed, there was a time when "grammar" schools taught little else, under a prescriptive regime so strict as to be incredible to Americans of today. The underlying assumption was that the ability to speak and write fluidly, comprehensibly, and with flair was the key to all of society's doors. The unprecedented economic and cultural mobility of Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was strong confirmation of this thesis.

     Your Curmudgeon holds that the emergence of the permanent underclass -- persons born into poverty, who spend their whole lives mired in it, and bequeath the same to their progeny -- argues to the same effect.

     One cannot teach or learn an "undisciplined discipline" -- that is, a body of knowledge that has no enforced rules. This is as true of language as it is of mathematics. Language skills are so fundamental to the acquisition of any other sort of knowledge that the impossibility of creating well educated men who are not linguistically well equipped comes near to tautology. Put another way, by not insisting that our children acquire a rigorous command of English, and then stick to it, we virtually condemn them to mediocrity or worse in every other dimension.

* * *

     With all the racism-shouting going on today, your Curmudgeon is simultaneously amused and appalled that black and Hispanic "leaders" are so willing to accept operational illiteracy among young American blacks and Hispanics. Of course, the paradox is purely cosmetic: a "constituency" made helpless by lack of language skills is far more biddable than one which can integrate with the larger, more prosperous American culture. But for those of us not warped by a venal desire for power over others, the matter remains grave.

     Abraham Lincoln reminded us that "a house divided cannot stand." He was referring to the division between the free and the slave states, but the observation applies just as well to the division between literate and illiterate Americans, especially if the ranks of the illiterates continue to swell. As Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wrote in The Bell Curve, if that division were to be deepened and widened, it would force our society into the have / have-not pattern of Latin America, whose well-to-do live in hilltop garrisons guarded by men with guns to keep the impoverished masses below from approaching.

     The wide dissemination of high skill with the English language is the key to averting this fate. No other change to our educational practices or our cultural milieu comes near to that in importance. If it takes the ruthless red-penciling of billions of essays, endless drills in vocabulary and syntax, and the occasional public knuckle-basting of a recalcitrant student, so be it. Any other course is cruelty under the name of "tolerance," a sin against our young so black as to admit of no pardoning.

     Your Curmudgeon will now await the fusillades.

And All Of Us But Players

     It isn’t often that I read anything anywhere that makes me re-examine fundamental convictions. I’m sure that’s partly because I’m old. Nevertheless, it’s disturbing to think that even in old age, a professional thinker could be so “set in his ways” that he never inspects his intellectual foundation for cracks. And after all, a professional thinker is what I am.

     Yes, I’ve just read something that shook me, and I recommend it to you:

I knew a woman in Montana whose eyes never changed when she laughed.

We didn't notice it at first.

She and her husband took us in when we first moved there. We were living in an old Air Force base that had been converted into a boys home, they worked there as counselors. We had… pic.twitter.com/sH1skSbL5Y

— The Biblical Man | 4 AM Field Notes (@SlayStupidity) October 8, 2025

     I hope you did read it all, Gentle Reader. Give it a few moments to percolate before continuing on.

---

     First, to set the mood, a fine old tune from sixty years ago:

     Many of our relationships are colored by grants of authority. If you work for a living, you probably have a manager or supervisor of some sort. Inasmuch as we haven’t yet rid ourselves of that pestilential, infinitely aggravating parasite, The State, there are authority relationships there, too – and sometimes they involve the use or threat of force. Then there are family relations: husband / wife, and parent / child. Those too have aspects of authority embedded in them.

     It’s in the nature of authority that the subordinate has incentives to please his superior. The superior is in a position to award rewards and penalties. The subordinate knows it. His conduct must take that into account. That doesn’t mean that the subordinate will always be “acting,” but questions such as “What does he want me to say / do?” are frequently in his thoughts.

     Even relationships that have no authoritarian aspects involve those questions. One’s membership in a social or commercial circle may depend upon saying / doing “the right things.” That’s the basis of the power of “political correctness.” (Don’t preen yourselves, conservatives; your social and commercial circles behave much the same way.) Losing such a membership can be as traumatic as a major setback in business; indeed, the former often entails the latter.

     I think the man who is never moved to “perform,” in the sense of that embedded tweet, is likely to be very rare. While the woman of whom the narrator speaks is an especially dramatic case, we’re all in the “What should I say / do to please him / them?” mindset under certain circumstances.

     Is that terrible? Does it illustrate some tragedy indelibly written into our natures? I can’t say. I only know that I’ve both witnessed it and lived it.

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     I’m not here to rail against “performing,” in the sense of that embedded tweet. Neither am I here to exhort anyone to be “authentic,” much less “real.” I’m just noting a pattern that arises from human relationships and our desire to manipulate others’ opinions of us.

     Most of us have a desire to be liked, at least when we’re in certain company. And most of us are in positions where someone else’s opinion of us can have a material bearing on our lot in life. So we learn what would please and displease those others. We “perform for them.” And those of us who are employees go through an annual “performance review” in which we’re told how well we “performed,” sometimes even sincerely.

     It’s the same in our noncommercial relationships, except for those damned performance reviews. We learn the preferences of those whose good opinion we seek, and if it’s possible and not too expensive, we “perform to them.” This is just as applicable to romantic and domestic relationships as to any other sort.

     This is what constitutes role-playing:

• Select the role you want to perform;
• Learn your lines;
• Deliver them, with matching expressions and intonations, at the proper moments.

     The woman in the tweet didn’t get the expressions right. That was her giveaway. Still, she learned her lines and delivered them. One might even say she “lived her role,” whichever one was “on the boards” at the moment. Was she happy? I could never say. It’s possible that she couldn’t, either. It’s just as possible that the question never occurred to her.

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     A vignette to close.

     Some months ago, I met a woman through the Net: a retired actress who’d been prominent in a “sitcom” of an earlier decade. Our conversation prospered for a while, until she did something I didn’t expect: she asked me for financial help. This, after telling me in some detail about her several businesses and how involving they were.

     No, I didn’t send her money. And yes: that was pretty much the end of the conversation. It was disappointing, as I’d come to like her quite a lot, but such is the World Wide Web in this age of ours.

     Just yesterday, I noticed her on X, and “said hello.” She responded, but within two sentences it became clear that she didn’t know me. The woman I’d conversed with months ago was an impostor. That impostor had apparently employed artificial-intelligence programs to play the role she’d chosen. She’d been utterly convincing, too.

     Is the second encounter any more to be trusted than the first one? Or is my more recent acquaintance just another impostor? One more unidentifiable role-player who’s assumed the same persona and is reading from the same script, or perhaps a slightly different one?

     And now, Gentle Reader, I must bid you adieu, for it’s time for me to change roles. I must doff this Curmudgeon Emeritus persona and don that of a storyteller whose tales enthrall... well, a few people, anyway. There’s an unfinished novel awaiting his / my / our attention.

     Do have a nice day. And remember: While Sybil was fiction, there are other, similar tales that aren’t. Perhaps you’re living one yourself. So be kind to your fellow players. A noted talespinner of yore, Henry James, has said that it’s all that matters. He might have been performing when he said it, but it’s good advice anyway.

Dynasties

     I just saw this graphic over at X:

     ...and it put me in mind of one of my favorite bits of wisdom from the Great Lawgiver:

     There are many human achievements, including some of the finest, which need more than a single lifetime for completion. The individual can compose a symphony or paint a canvas, build up a business or restore order in a city. He cannot build a cathedral or grow an avenue of oak trees. Still less can he gain the stature essential to statesmanship in a highly developed and complex society. There is a need for continuity of effort, spread over several generations, and for just such a continuity as governments lack. Given the party system more especially, under the democratic form of rule, policy is continually modified or reversed. A family can be biologically stable in a way that a modern legislature is not. It is to families, therefore, that we look for such stability as society may need. But how can the family function if subject to crippling taxes during every lifetime and partial confiscation with every death? How can one generation provide the springboard for the next? Without such a springboard, all must start alike, and none can excel; and where none can excel nothing excellent will result.

     [C. Northcote Parkinson, The Law, Complete. Emphases added by FWP.]

     If you’re familiar with the work of Cyril Northcote Parkinson, your acquaintance with him probably started with his First Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” It was a potent insight, gleaned from Parkinson’s scrutiny of the behavior of British bureaucracies. Yet it’s a pity that so many stop there, and never become acquainted with his later oeuvre. In total, they mark him as one of the master-intellects of the Twentieth Century. He deserves the same stature and worldwide recognition as any other more frequently praised genius. The citation above is one example – one of the most penetrating yet overlooked observations of the tragedy of the Nightmare Century.

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     I’ve written in other places that the family is the indispensable building block of the free and stable society. A society largely made up of intact, cohesive families will be highly resistant to attacks on its values and norms. That might be called the horizontal-in-time view of the family. But if we rotate the time-axis ninety degrees for a vertical-in-time view, we see something at least as important and probably much more so: the steady growth of family dynasties, each of which conserves and nurtures its family’s greatest strengths. Hearken to Hope’s foremost sociologist:

     “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.”
     “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.”

     [Arne Stromberg, holder of the Edmond Genet Chair of Sociology at Gallatin University, the foremost center of higher learning on Altus, the northern continent of Hope.]

     Proceeding from Professor Stromberg’s insight, I have come to regard the aim to create a numerous, well-tutored family dynasty as one of the most praiseworthy of all ambitions. But how does one do that? With what sort of structure does he begin?

     It’s almost childishly simple: He begins by accepting and honoring one of the free society’s greatest strengths: the division of labor. He “hires:”

• A “breadwinner:” usually himself.
• A “procreation and nurturance expert:” a wife / mother / homemaker.
• A squad of “perpetuation engineers:” their kids.

     Moreover, he refrains from insisting that any of those “specialties” take on the labors of any of the others. Each dedicates himself to the refinement of his particular specialty and practices it assiduously, deaf to outside critics.

     And over several generations, a cathedral or an avenue of oak trees just might result.

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     The above probably looks a bit facetious to my Gentle Readers. It’s not; it’s how the great ones of our society were produced. Ironically, the mighty family dynasties that produced them are seldom studied; all the attention goes to the “great man.” But he is a resultant. He didn’t spring forth fully formed from conception, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It probably took three, four, or five generations of families, each building upon the legacy of its predecessors, to produce him.

     The Founding Fathers had a better grasp of this than contemporary Americans:

     “The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

     [John Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife]

     Young readers (if I have any): Give it some thought.