For The Feast Of St. Francis of Assisi

     [Today, October 4, 2026, is the 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. October 4 is the feast day on which the Church honors the great “mendicant saint” of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Saint Francis brought not only a great ardor to Christian evangelism, but a wholly new style: one that had more in common with the ministry of Jesus than the immensely rich and powerful medieval Church could countenance. Yet few of the Church’s saints have inspired greater devotion.

     What follows first appeared at Liberty’s Torch on July 12, 2015. -- FWP]

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     Though it has been called apocryphal, Saint Francis of Assisi is reputed to have said:

     “At all times, preach the Gospel. When necessary, use words.”

     The notion of evangelism without verbal preachment comes as a surprise to many. To some it’s a disagreeable surprise. If every Christian is charged with some portion of the Great Commission, surely we’re expected to tell others what Jesus said. At least, that’s how the usual reasoning runs. After all, how can we pass along the Word of God if we’re not to use words?

     That’s not totally incorrect. However, it runs into a common problem – and by “common” I mean “near to universal.” For Christians differ from non-Christians only in our profession of faith and the commitment it implies. In other regards we are much like our non-Christian brethren. The most important of these is our fallibility.

     Fallible means capable of error. That’s been the case with every man who’s ever lived. (“Man” is inclusive of both sexes, ladies, so don’t give yourselves any airs.) Note the similarity to the word fallen, more commonly used in theological talk. To have fallen is to have erred, whether willfully, through ignorance, or by accident.

     We are all fallen. Only two exceptions exist, one of whom was born Immaculate and the other of whom was the Son of God. As for the rest of us, few go any significant interval without falling, whether to little or great effect. Jesus reminded us of this rather pointedly:

     Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull the mote out of thine eye, and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then thou shalt see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye. [Matthew 7:1-5]

     He could not have told us more clearly to look first to the health of our own souls. Inasmuch as no one this side of the veil of Time is ever absolutely sinless and perfectly resistant to temptation, His instruction pretty much precludes judging others. That makes verbal preachment something of a problem.

     However, being a good example is possible to all of us.

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     Saint Francis of Assisi was known for his embrace of poverty and utter simplicity. His evangelism was largely by example. An illustrative story about his style of evangelism concerns a brother in a monastic order where Francis had taken lodging. One day the young monk begged Francis for permission to accompany him on a day’s preaching. The saint assented, and they went forth from the monastery at daybreak.

     First they came upon a group of men laboring in the field. Francis said “Let us work beside them,” which they did, in silence, for several hours before passing onward.

     Next they came upon a village where they found a group deep in prayer. Francis said “Let us pray with them,” which they did, in silence, for another hour before passing onward.

     Late in the day they entered a village where a wedding celebration was in progress. Francis said “Let us rejoice with them,” which they did. At last dusk was upon them and it was time to return to the monastery.

     When they had returned to the monastery, the young monk said to Francis, “Brother, was it not your intention to preach today? Yet we spoke not a word of preachment from departure to return.” Francis smiled. “Brother,” he replied, “this day we have done nothing but preach, from dawn till dusk.”

     Those are the very definition of “words to live by.”

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     The great enemy of verbal preachment is, of course, hypocrisy. He who dwells in darkness can never draw others into the light with words. They will observe his behavior, note the contradiction to his words, and pass on unchanged.

     However, success breeds emulation. The Christian ethos -- faith in God and the rightness of His Commandments; hope of an afterlife of eternal bliss; respectful, appropriate charity toward others whom God places in one’s path – is the one most conducive to success in life. He who commits to that ethos and lives it sincerely will draw emulators and students as surely as the sunflower turns its face toward the Sun.

     This course does not free us from our susceptibility to temptation. Every day presents fresh opportunities to fall from grace, and rare to nonexistent is the man who resists without fail. But this is the reason humility is so vital to a Christian. The first, all-important step in accepting the divinity of Christ and committing oneself to the Christian ethos is accepting one’s own fallibility. That implies an obligation to recognize and admit one’s sins, to repent of them, and to strive not to repeat them.

     Saint Francis of Assisi knew temptation:

     Let us not imagine that saints are free from the vicissitudes common to human life, which includes moments of happiness and frustration, dangerous temptations and courageous stands. It was no different with Saint Francis, portrayed as «the always happy brother», courteous, who lived a mystical union with all creatures, whom he considered his brothers and sisters. But at the same time, he was a person of great passions and profound rage when he saw his ideals betrayed by his brothers. His foremost biographer, Friar Tommaso da Celano, described with cruel realism that Francis suffered temptations of violent lust, that he knew how to symbolically sublimate.

     There is, however, a fact that pious Franciscan historiography hides, but that is well documented by historical critique, and that is known as the great temptation. The last five years of Francis’ life (he died in 1226) were marked by deep anguish, almost desperation, and the grave illnesses that afflicted him, such as malaria and blindness. The problem was objective: his ideal of life was to live in extreme poverty and radical simplicity, divested of all power, and sustained only by the Gospel read to him without the interpretation that often shroud its revolutionary meaning.

     As it happened, in a few years his lifestyle captivated thousands of followers, more than five thousand. How to shelter them? How to feed them? Many were priests and theologians, such as Saint Anthony. His movement had neither structure nor legality. It was purely a dream taken seriously. Francis understood himself as a novellus pazzus, a new madman that God wanted for the very wealthy Church, led by Pope Innocence III, the most powerful of all popes throughout history.

     Beginning in the Summer of 1220, he wrote several versions of a rule that were all rejected by the gatherings of the fraternity. They were too utopic. Frustrated and feeling useless, he decided to renounce leadership of the movement. Filled with anguish and without knowing what else to do, he found refuge in the woods for two years, visited only by his intimate friend friar Leo. He waited for a divine illumination that would not come. Meanwhile, a rule was drafted that was marked by the influence of the Roman Curia and the Pope, turning the movement into a religious order: the Order of Friars Minor, with defined structure and purposes. Francis, with pain, humbly accepted it. But he clearly stated that he would no longer discuss it, but would continue giving examples of the primitive dream. Law triumphed over life, power confined charisma. But the spirit of Francis remained: the spirit of poverty, of simplicity, of universal brotherhood that inspires us to this day. Francis died amidst great personal frustration, but without losing his happiness. He died singing Provencal songs of love and the psalms.

     No, it’s not commanded of us to live in Assisian poverty. Few indeed are capable of such a life, or called to it. But whatever course we choose, if we are humble and sincere, we must be prepared to admit those occasions when we fail to uphold its strictures and norms, and to repent of them. Nothing else can make our example, as guided by the Christian ethos, attractive to others.

     May God bless and keep you all.

Denominations And Denunciations

All the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants.
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

     [Tom Lehrer, National Brotherhood Week]

     There’s an infinite amount to say about this, and a never-ending torrent of tempestuous rhetoric and recrimination to go with it. Those are the reasons I try to stay away from it. But every now and then the topic broaches my Rant Threshold.

     It’s been said, by me among others, that the greatest fanaticisms arise over unverifiable, unfalsifiable propositions. A lot of blood has been spilled over religious differences. It’s hardly necessary for a minor-league commentator to deplore it. But even in relatively civil and peaceful times, the matter should be watched.

     We haven’t had a major religious war in these United States, at least as far as I’m aware. There have been some ugly occasions – the “Mormon Wars” and the “Bloody Monday” riots of the 19th Century, for example — but they passed into history without much persistent effect. Contemporary verbal conflicts among members of Christian denominations are of greater long-term significance.

     There’s a lot of mudslinging among Christian denominations. It’s more ironic than I can capture in a net of words. Christ demanded very little of His followers, as I’ve written here many times. The heart of His message was love of God and benevolence toward those around you: the two Great Commandments enunciated in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22. While I’m a Catholic for what I consider good reasons, I hold that anyone, regardless of denominational affiliation, who does his best to live by the Great Commandments, and to repent of his sins against them, will be happy with his next life.

     So why all the foofaurauw?

     Some of it derives from the desire to feel superior to others. Some might descend from a memory of having been abused by members of another sect. But regardless of the specifics, it indicates a shortfall of humility. It violates the second Great Commandment. And it is unworthy of a follower of Christ.

     It’s bewildering to think that it should be necessary to say those things. It troubles me that I feel such a need to say them. But the evidence of steadily rising inter-denominational hostility is too plain to ignore.

     My fellow Christians: Is it too much to ask that you do as your Savior would have you do? You can argue over points of doctrine and Scripture without becoming disagreeable, can’t you? Would it pain you that greatly to allow that you could be wrong?

     Any subject can be belabored unduly, and this one is no exception, so I’ll close here:

     Remember the words of the Redeemer.
     Live by the Great Commandments.
     Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
     And do have a nice day.

     May God bless and keep you all.

A Comparison I’d Like To See

     Alice Smith’s comparison that stimulated yesterday’s piece was a clever one. It illuminated a particularly absurd fallacy, which made it useful for an old crank who needed something to write about. But equally important comparisons are being made, silently and invisibly, all the time. It’s worth bringing a couple of them out into the light and torturing them until they talk.

     As it happens, I’ve been trying to lose weight these past few months. The diet gurus will tell you that the great enemy of any weight-loss attempt is hunger. The dieter must be ready to cope with it, for a sudden surge of it can derail his intentions. Ironically, that requires that he keep his house full of foods of all kinds.

     The comparison the dieter must never make is between eating something and eating nothing. When hunger strikes with full force, not eating is nearly impossible. Insisting on it transforms his effort from a campaign of self-improvement to an exercise in self-denial. Most of us are not capable of denying ourselves for a long stretch of time. So the comparison must be among edible alternatives: the pickle versus the cream pie.

     Now, that’s a fairly clear and straightforward sort of problem. In that regard it contrasts sharply with the next one, which arises biennially and bedevils well-meaning American voters at each occurrence: Which of these useless lying parasites should I prefer to his opponent?

     A lot has been thought and said about this problem. Nearly all of it has been misguided. For there are comparisons to be made that They Who Pour The Very Best Butter over the gears and cams of our society don’t want us even to think about, much less contemplate seriously.

     The comparison of real interest, of course, is this one:

Is either of these clowns preferable
To no one at all?

     Politicians and those who gain from their machinations are terrified of that comparison. It threatens their whole game. So they palm the card and pray that no one will notice that we’re playing with a deck of fifty-one.

     After a long enough period, the political class becomes blind to the possibility that We the Sorely Tried might dispense with them. They forget that there are alternatives of any kind. This is the way it’s done, this is the way it’s always been done, this is the way it must be done… The progression is so smooth as to be unconscious.

     In 2015, an alternative arose with compelling force. It blindsided the political elite so completely that they had no idea how to defend against it. And so, in the quadrennial elections of 2016, we got a real choice for the first time in many decades. The hubris of those who derided the candidacy of Donald Trump was made plain in endless video clips. No one has asked them since then whether they might have been a bit presumptuous.

     Many in the Right are disappointed with the Trump presidencies. It’s understandable, though most of the reasons lie outside the Administration. And the political Establishment is trying its best to capitalize on that disappointment. Establishmentarians are hoping for a return to their preferred state of undisturbed kleptocracy. If they play their hand well enough, they might just get it, and woe betide these United States thereafter.

     But that only raises the comparison I’d like to see Americans making in large numbers: the one that asks How about None of the Above is Acceptable?

     I don’t know of any electoral district, however small, that has None of the Above on its ballots for any office. But isn’t that the most important of all options? The one that asks “Can you do without this office and the powers it exercises for a couple of years?”

     The very idea terrifies the political professional, from the power-hungry bloviators on their stumps all the way down to the street-level campaigners who go door-to-door trawling for votes. Politics is their life, their love, and their living. They could never do without it. Therefore it becomes imperative that they persuade us that we cannot do without them.

     Tolkien captured the mindset:

     ‘[Sauron] supposes that we were all going to Minas Tirith; for that is what he would himself have done in our place. And according to his wisdom it would have been a heavy stroke against his power. Indeed he is in great fear, not knowing what mighty one may suddenly appear, wielding the Ring, and assailing him with war, seeking to cast him down and take his place. That we should wish to cast him down and have no one in his place is not a thought that occurs to his mind.’

     Perhaps we who understand and love freedom can reorient the national conversation to include that unspeakable comparison. Suggest it to others dismayed by the status quo, instead of merely denouncing the latest elected thief or hawking the dubious virtues of some aspiring power-seeker. Both are likely to betray us. It would only be the umpteenth time.

Clever Comparisons Dept.

     I’ve just encountered this, from Alice Smith:

Calling capitalism the cause of poverty is like calling physics the cause of gravity.

— Alice Smith (@TheAliceSmith) October 1, 2026

     Alice, as she’ll readily inform you, is a direct descendant from Adam Smith. Her comparison is exceptionally clever, but – as is frequently the case with clever things said by intelligent people – many people will fail to get it on their first reading. But its value is greater than just its stimulus to comprehension.

     As I’m in one of those phases at the moment, have a little (more) Heinlein:

     Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded-here and there, now and then-are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
     This is known as "bad luck."

     [Once again, from Time Enough For Love.]

     The human condition is something everyone thinks he understands. Nearly everyone is wrong. While I dislike most of his assertions, Thomas Hobbes got this one right:

     The life of man in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [From Leviathan]

     Subsistence-level existence, a.k.a. “poverty,” is what predominates in the savage “state of nature” that precedes the development of key ideas:

• Private property;
• Free, uncoerced exchange;
• The “social contract.”

     Now, some of us have accepted those ideas and participate in societies that honor them. Call us the West, or the First World, for convenience. Is the understanding of them uniform among us? Not quite. But it prevails sufficiently in America and Europe to have supported economic development of a high order.

     For a long time, there have been people who hate those ideas. They have their reasons, highest of all the acquisition of power and wealth at our expense. So they seek to defame them. One of their gurus, a certain Karl Marx, did so by coining a term that he hoped would displace the understanding of economic freedom.

     The term is capitalism.

     Marx’s effort was spectacularly successful. The use of capitalism as a shorthand for economic freedom became widespread swiftly after his book Capital was published. No doubt he was pleased, for the term capitalist acquired unpleasant connotations along with it. “Social crusaders” slandered and vilified “capitalists” for having produced poverty: a condition that predated them by eons. I’m sure you’ve seen some of the caricatures.

     Economic freedom was the human advance that made the gradual elimination of poverty possible. Its mechanisms – specialization and the division of labor; the development of money; the codification of property rights; the emergence of banking, investment systems, and the concept of group ownership of an enterprise – brought steadily increasing prosperity to millions of people. Yet most of them lacked any understanding of the dynamics that made economic freedom work. That made them easy to deceive.

     The treatment of capitalism and capitalist as pejoratives was instrumental in pulling off one of the greatest frauds in written history: the representation that the “capitalist,” the creator of wealth where none had previously existed, was the reason that some people are poor. As an illustration of the power of words, this one has few equals.

     It’s still going on today, of course. You can probably hear it near you. But let’s return to Alice Smith’s clever analogy:

     Calling capitalism the cause of poverty is like calling physics the cause [of] gravity.

     It takes a wee bit of thought, though not much, to see what that means. Physics, the study of the patterns that run through the natural world, didn’t create or modify the natural world. It merely seeks to understand natural phenomena, and to propose “laws” that would assist others in understanding them. No one with three functioning brain cells would claim that before physics and physicists, there was no force that attracted one mass to another – what we term gravity.

     But those hostile to freedom have cleverly exploited envy, ignorance, and the desire of good men for social improvement to make it seem that some have little because some – the most enterprising and productive members of our species – have much. And they’ve done it largely through the manipulation of our language, especially Marx’s key coinage capitalism.

     Need I say more?

     A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy. – Sir George Savile

Filters Old And New

     One of the perennial questions about the differences in economic and military status among the nations of the world is Why is the United States so far ahead of everyone else? Asking frequently evokes a lot of contention about “American exceptionalism.” While Americans are exceptional in certain ways, it constitutes a partial answer at best.

     If we exclude the U.S. and look exclusively at all the other countries, there remain differences to be considered. Europe and Japan are considerably better off economically than the rest of the world. Russia is “getting there,” as is South America. Asia and Africa bring up the rear. Yet the differences among them are less dramatic than the difference between America and the “second-place finishers” of Europe.

     The influence most frequently invoked is that of the oceans. For a long time, to elect to migrate to the U.S. from anywhere else was difficult and hazardous. That’s no longer the case, though it is still expensive. In that regard, migration constituted a filter that favored the more courageous and enterprising. But surely, with nearly a century of reasonably convenient air and sea travel behind us, you’d think that filter would have weakened.

     Maybe not. While America is generous toward newcomers, uprooting oneself to find a new home among strangers is never an easy decision. There remain matters of law, language, and customs, economic requirements, and a willingness to adapt to be faced. So the filter still operates, albeit at reduced strength.

     As usual, the late Robert A. Heinlein had an opinion to express:

     "It's the bell curve again," I said to Ishtar. "If – as Lazarus thinks, and statistics back him up – every migration comes primarily from the right-hand end of the normal-incidence curve of human ability, then this acts as a sorting device whereby the new planet will show a bell curve with a much higher intelligence norm than the population it came from...and the old planet will average almost imperceptibly stupider."
     "Imperceptible except for one thing!" Lazarus objected.
     "That tiny fraction that hardly shows statistically is the brain. I recall a country that lost a key war by chasing out a mere half dozen geniuses. Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion – in the long run these are the only people who count and they are the very ones who migrate when it is physically possible to do so."

     [From Time Enough For Love.]

     If Heinlein was correct, and there’s evidence to suggest that he was, then the reduction of migration difficulties from impossible to risky “chops the head off” an old society. The older a society grows, the more rigid it becomes. There’s less room in which to innovate, to take risks, and to introduce alternatives to existing ways. That incentivizes the pinnacle of its population to pull stakes… but then, the question of where to go arises. Other variations among the nations rise to the top of the list.

     I could produce a long disquisition on this subject, but really, it reduces to a single question: Where will what I want to do be least hampered?

     That question is rarely voiced aloud, yet the answer appears to be the decisive factor in the would-be migrant’s choice of destinations.

     The realization brings many implications. American society is now 250 years old, and has been growing more rigid all the while. Yet it remains less restrictive, in nearly every way, than the societies that provide most of our (legal) immigrants. Those other societies have rigidified even further than the U.S. Innovators in Europe face great legal and social obstacles. Our own disincentives to creativity and entrepreneurship remain considerably weaker.

     There’s information there for policy makers throughout the First World. It will be ignored, of course; they who deem themselves fit to rule the rest of us have priorities other than how to keep their nations healthy and growing. Yet it underscores the potential of space travel to unsettle the whole world.

     Elon Musk’s SpaceX has given us hope that Mankind may yet be able to spread beyond its ancestral home. There’s no question that many problems remain to be solved. The difficulties involved in migrating off-Earth will be stiff for decades to come. But the possibility beckons.

     We who will remain behind will miss those who will rise to the occasion.

On Not Forgetting

     “For it is the doom of men that they forget.” – Nicol Williamson as Merlin, in Excalibur

     Indeed it is. Worse, we have a tendency to flush that which we should most remember, especially if the event being flushed was unpleasant in occurrence and memory.

     This damp and dreary morning, I’m seized by foreboding. Something impends… something to which we should have relevant memories. But those memories are likely to have been suppressed, or shuffled off the back of our memory warehouses, for they were of ugly sentiments expressed at an ugly time.

     Do you remember this article?

     When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.
     Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
     Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information
.      The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
     We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
     Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

     I do. I wrote about it, when it was first run:

     You say that we whom the “experts” demonized, whom their allegiants did their level best to silence, scorn, condemn, and impoverish, must forgive our tormentors? You caution us against being caught in “a repetitive doom loop” -- ? You say it’s time to “move on” -- ?

No, It Isn’t.

     This protracted, unbelievably un-American episode has been the best possible lesson in why we must deny political authority to “experts.” As a (retired) expert myself, I maintain that giving a man the power to boss you around because he’s “right” is the worst decision a nation could possibly make. And we must not forgive those who did so.

     But let’s not omit this, for without it the formula would be fatally unbalanced: We mustn’t forgive ourselves either. We gave in when we should have resisted with all our might. We accepted dictatorial impositions and abridgements of our God-given rights when we should have mustered our rage and employed the corpses of our would-be tyrants to decorate lampposts from coast to coast. We acted like pusillanimous cretins rather than the heirs of Patrick Henry, who’s undoubtedly spinning in his grave fast enough to power all of Virginia over this embarrassment.

     The survivors of the Holocaust made a mantra out of the saying “Never again.” The great majority of us wouldn’t even speak our minds for fear of ostracism, demonization, and unemployment. And over what? A disease that’s proved less dangerous than ordinary influenza! A disease that has hardly any effect on the populations most oppressed and disadvantaged by the lockdowns – our minor children!

     No. Do not forgive. To forgive would be to accept that our oppressors’ hypothetical “good intentions” should exonerate them for their totalitarian conduct. To forgive would be to “understand” cowardice instead of reproving it as it deserves.

     To forgive would be to forget. The two are never separated by much.

     [From the “V2.0” site]

     Mistakes made from ignorance of important facts can and should be forgiven. Even the most strident of denunciations can, with effort, be forgiven him who was ignorant of his grounds… at least, if he wasn’t deliberately, willfully ignorant. We give credit for good intentions, and much of the time it’s what we ought to do. But when the good intentions are fictitious – defensive shields wielded to play on our sympathies – it’s vitally important that we neither forgive nor forget.

     I’ve said and written this so many times that it pains me to have to repeat it yet again. Yet I must, for it is the critical cleavage between Left and Right for some years now. The Right must not credit the Left with good intentions. Their intent has been made plain:

They hate us.
They seek our destruction
And the destruction of what we love.

     If anything of enduring value came out of the COVID-19 debacle, it was that the Left’s hatred of us was made so open and indisputable that it can no longer be denied.

* * *

     No, we must not hate them back. I’ve lost all hope that the contemporary Left can be made to see the error of their ways. I accept that they must be shatteringly defeated, such that their madness cannot rise again for generations. But we must not hate them.

     It is one of the weaknesses of our species that we all seek to triumph, to excel: to see ourselves, however briefly, as superior to others. It hardly matters that all human excellence is transient; we want it anyway. We want that moment in the sun, to stand on a pedestal for others to gaze up at and admire. Unfortunately, as those others look up at him, he looks down at them. It tends to make him forget his own fallibility.

     We are as fallible as they. We must not make their error in reciprocity for their mistreatment of us. It’s not in hope of “educating them,” or “bringing them to their better natures.” We can’t assume they have “better natures.” It’s for the sake of our own souls and those of our progeny.

     We can’t “save” them. We can only save ourselves. But to that end, we are forbidden to hate.

* * *

     Now, about that foreboding. Midterm elections are coming up. Control of both Houses of Congress is in jeopardy. We can resent the nonperformance of the Republican caucuses as much as we please. I certainly do.

     But there is this as well: The alternative is worse. Yes, we hoped for too much from that gaggle of time-servers on Capitol Hill. Yes, they could have used their majorities much better than they did. And yes, a number of them were willful nonperformers, whether out of dedication to the status quo or out of resentment of President Trump. But the alternative remains worse.

     The Democrats have made their intentions plain, this time around. We can’t sincerely tell ourselves that “they don’t really mean it.” They do. Given the slightest trace of federal power, they will act on those plainly stated intentions. America will begin a slide into socialism that might well prove termina.

     That makes it critically important not to forget:

• FDR came to power on a small government / hard money platform.
• Lyndon Johnson promised to continue the policies of the Kennedy Administration.
• Bill Clinton was hailed as a “centrist,” then put domestic policy into his wife’s hands.
• Barack Hussein Obama was touted as a healer and unifier.
• And of course, Joe Biden was supposedly a moderate.

     Finally, have a few words from the dean of science fiction, the late Robert A. Heinlein:

     If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.
     If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.

     [From Time Enough For Love]

     And don’t forget.

The Dynamic View

     A great many misconceptions of what’s possible and what’s inevitable arise from a static view of the conditions before us. Some have become quasi-immortal… ironically, because though incorrect, they support some doom-shouter’s favored Cause. If it becomes possible to laugh at them later on, that doesn’t undo whatever damage they may have caused in the meantime.

     Consider the famous case of Thomas Malthus. Here we have a highly intelligent man who thought long and hard about the subjects he addressed. Yet his view of Mankind and its environment was static, which gave rise to his Essay on the Principle of Population. Had he foreseen some of the developments that were breasting the technological and sociological horizon even as he wrote, he might have avoided his most famous error.

     Mind you, if we postulate Malthus’s static view of conditions, he was correct. What he failed to foresee was the alteration of attitudes toward childbearing due to the Industrial Revolution. (It would be unfair to gig him for not foreseeing the Green Revolution that made agriculture many times as productive as it was in his day.) Once children went from an economic asset to a luxury expense – an expense that was greatly amplified by urbanization – population growth tailed off sharply.

     Malthus heavily influenced the eco-warriors of the Twentieth Century. Theirs, too, was a static view of human existence. They uniformly saw the human resource and technological bases as fixed. Indeed, some of them opposed expansion of those bases. Have a particularly significant statement from Amory Lovins:

     If you ask me, it'd be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. We ought to be looking for energy sources that are adequate for our needs, but that won't give us the excesses of concentrated energy with which we could do mischief to the earth or to each other. [Amory Lovins, Playboy interview, Nov/Dec 1977]

     In the above, Lovins expresses a very dark opinion of Mankind generally… and, of course, his own superior wisdom and morality: he would never misuse such a resource, but you just can’t trust those benighted humans. But it’s all justified, you see, by that fixed resource base. “We’re using up our planet! Once it’s ruined, there will be no more! If only you could see it as I have!”

     Barry Commoner captured that pessimism in his four laws of ecology:

• Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
• Everything must go somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no "away" to which things can be thrown.
• Nature knows best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, "likely to be detrimental to that system"
• There is no such thing as a free lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.

     All four of those statements are dubious in the practical sense, yet they constitute the Gospel of the Static System. Indeed, start from an enclosed system – say, a man trapped in his own home, unable to leave or open a window – and they become applicable. His best chance of survival is to use what resources are available to him in a miserly fashion. He must hope that he can survive until someone outside his enclosure manages to free him. Of course, if there is no such person… but that’s the question, isn’t it?

     The view of Earth and its resources as the absolute limits of Mankind’s expansion is very much like that of the man trapped in his house. But that view treats the rest of the Solar System as inaccessible. At the present time, that’s true: we can’t access the resources of the Solar System conveniently, much less put them to use. But need it be so for much longer?

     Some awfully smart people are trying to make it not so. There’s a significant chance that they’ll succeed before I die.

     Physical expansion has long been the sovereign remedy to resource depletion. It’s also the usual curative for restlessness, impatience with local constraints, and irritation from one’s neighbors. But it requires that we forge ahead scientifically and technologically. That means rejecting the radical ecologists’ prescription of stasis, under which the future is foreshortened to what Earth alone can supply, and adopting the dynamic view of existence.

     Of course, that would be a thumb in the eyes of Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy Rifkin, Amory Lovins, and their fellow-thinkers. It would reduce the Gospel of Stasis to a historical curiosity. A lot of intellectually and morally superior people’s egos would be bruised as their pet Cause diminishes… but what was that saying about eggs and omelets, again?