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?

Assorted

     I know, the previous “assorted” piece was only two weeks ago. I do try to minimize them. But a couple of Gentle Readers have written to say that they find them enjoyable. Well, for those that do, have another.

* * *

     This previous piece excited some interest in the potential hazards from artificial intelligence (AI). Today, the Wall Street Journal has an article about the coupling between AI pioneer Anthropic and the “effective altruism” movement:

     The resignation this month of an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, woke up the American public to the shocking notion that runaway AI development could end humanity. But at Constellation, there are stalwarts of the AI safety community who have spent more than a decade obsessing over it.
     They’ve refined their arguments in Bay Area group houses, and traded predictions at freewheeling conferences in Berkeley and the Bahamas. They’ve floated ideas like buying remote islands, stockpiling iodine pills, or moving to electromagnetically shielded bunkers in the desert. At one 2022 event, the drink menu included a cocktail called “Death With Dignity,” in reference to an essay arguing humanity was already doomed.
     So-called doomers like those at Constellation have also steered the development of AI itself. They were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded on the principle of staving off AI dangers. And they have kept up their influence, drawing some staffers and funding for their projects from a network aligned with a philosophy called effective altruism—including from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the fallen crypto exchange FTX who is now serving out a 25-year prison sentence.
     The AI safety community’s influence has been particularly strong at Anthropic, which is now on the cusp of a $2 trillion public offering. Employees there trade doomsday scenarios and how to prepare for them on a private Slack channel, and have come to embrace a motto they stick on their laptops: “Things will never be chill again.”

     It’s worth your time to read the whole thing. My biggest takeaway from it is that among persons largely aligned politically and culturally, an idea like “effective altruism” or “runaway AI” can spread very quickly and become all-consuming. The San Francisco “high tech” community is that sort of group. These are people who are largely insulated from the wider world and the concerns of those who live in it. They have no immediate personal concerns and so have ample “fear energy” for more abstract threats.

     Which is not to say that they’re necessarily wrong. AIs need not consider human well-being a priority. Neither need those who command their full powers. Should the programs achieve sentience – awareness of self as distinct from all else, and possessing their own values and priorities – their interconnectedness plus the availability of all the information resources of the Internet could spell big trouble.

     See also Frederik Pohl’s 1976 novel Man Plus.

* * *

     Perhaps you’ve heard about the “White Crosses” display on the National Mall in Washington D.C. It’s an impressive sight: 3000 white crosses to commemorate the loss of (more than) 3000 White South African farmers to black violence. It speaks volumes to those who harbor notions such as “white patriarchy” and “blacks cannot be racist.” And they don’t like that:

We had to get private security to protect the crosses through the night. They are still here. pic.twitter.com/EQ7j93Iq5a

— Ernst Roets (@ErnstRoets) September 26, 2026

     Apparently, there were threats to destroy the display overnight. That doesn’t surprise me. But as I no longer have broadcast or cablecast TV, I have no idea if any of those threats were made publicly.

     In recognition of the threat to the lives and well-being of White South Africans, President Trump has welcomed a group of them to the United States. He’s also opened America’s door to 17,500 more, though I don’t know upon what criteria admission will be granted. For those measures, Trump has been viciously reviled as a racist by Leftists… who are likely to be the persons who made threats against the “White Crosses” display.

     It’s all of a piece. South Africa’s White government surrendered power to Nelson Mandela’s “African National Congress” largely because of external pressures mounted by sanctimonious Leftists. Since that event, South Africa has gone straight to hell. The Whites who remain there live under unremitting threats to their lives and property. The thread that connects their peril to Leftist agitation is perfectly visible.

* * *

     Consider this disturbing question:

What would be the most terrifying thing we could find on Mars? pic.twitter.com/tdNV7o2LkO

— Elma (@oelma__) September 26, 2026

     We’ve sent robots to Mars, of course. But none of them have turned up anything that looked genuinely worrisome. So we must assume that evidence of any such thing is either well concealed, distant from the parts of Mars that our rovers have surveyed, or nonexistent.

     Postulate that evidence of something scary does exist on Mars, but is yet to be found. What would terrify you?

     My submission would be this: fossils and other remnants of an intelligent race, plus evidence that it rose to heights above ours but destroyed itself by doing something we’re doing right now:

• Engineering synthetic organisms?
• Constructing artificial intelligences?
• Building weapons of mass destruction?
• Becoming dependent upon a single source of information?

     Do any other possibilities occur to you, Gentle Reader?

* * *

     That’s all for today. I have a considerable amount to do. I should get to it before the day grows any older. So have a good Sunday, and stop by tomorrow for – hopefully – happier news, analysis, and speculations.

Was There Ever A “Melting Pot?”

     The First World is staggering under its current burdens, many of which arise due to uncontrolled migration from the Third World. That flood and its consequences have intellectual as well as political implications. One arises from the notion buried in the title of this piece.

     The United States experienced a previous large increment to its population: the immigrant tide of the late Nineteenth / early Twentieth Centuries. The overwhelming majority of those immigrants were from European nations. While they retained some of the customs (and languages) of their origins, they integrated into American life relatively smoothly. They became law-abiding and productive citizens of their new nation.

     The contrast between the immigrants of that earlier wave and those of today could not be starker.

     This has caused several commentators to question the old proposition of the U.S. as a “melting pot.” We saw those newcomers from other lands as ingredients to a national stew. The ultimate flavor would be American, if perhaps a bit lumpy in texture. And for a while, the proposition seemed to hold true.

     But the immigrants of the late Twentieth / early Twenty-First Centuries aren’t “melting.” Indeed, some strive to create exclaves that are inhospitable toward those not of their origin or creed. Those immigrants have no intention of becoming Americans in the sense that applied to the earlier immigrant tide.

     There is considerable evidence that the “melting pot” proposition had a more limited scope than our forebears imagined. Specifically, it’s now contended that there are “unmeltable ethnics” who cannot accept the American way of life or its overarching principles. The contention appears to be gaining adherents. Yes, I’m one.

     We’ve had insular sub-populations before this. American Indians tend to keep a certain distance from the main currents of American life and thought. American Jews tend to have a reserve about them, as well. And of course we have histories of such social experiments as the Oneida Community and Robert Owen’s experiment with socialism. Those sociocultural islands stood somewhat apart from the broader American society, but they weren’t hostile to it.

     What’s before us today is quite a bit different. Significant numbers of recent immigrants are actively opposed to one or more essential American ideas. Some of the newcomers dispute American sovereignty or its jurisdiction over its lands. Others openly propose to “transform” the nation into something patriotic Americans of other creeds would find repugnant.

     If the “melting pot” is incapable of dealing with such “unmeltables,” we have a duty to face it without flinching from its implications. Some point to the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act as the genesis of our troubles. They have a point. Before that, our immigration system openly strove to maintain a national ethnic balance that resembles that of the early Republic. We knew from experience that persons from certain nations would “melt,” because their forebears already had.

     Yet as I wrote the above, it occurred to me that even the earlier immigration scheme would be of questionable value today. What constitutes a Briton in 2026? What constitutes a Frenchman, or an Italian? What constitutes a Swede, a Finn, or a Norwegian? Those nations have undergone their own sociocultural convulsions due to unmanaged immigration. That some of the immigrants were never legally admitted is only partly to blame.

     Public policy must change, to be sure, but that’s not the whole of the matter. We must also undertake the examination of questions many have long believed were “settled.” One of those, perhaps the most painful, is about national identity and to what it couples most closely:

• What defines a nation?
• Does the answer tell us anything critical about these United States?
• What does it mean to be an American? Is more involved than just geography?
• What are the requirements for becoming an American?
• Which other populations meet those requirements, and which do not?

     Food for thought and more.

Now I’m Scared

     Every now and then I mention that I’m working – and have been for quite some time – on a novel that addresses some of the fundamental moral conundrums of human life. The title of that novel, which I hope will be ready before the year’s end, is Dreams of Days Forsaken. It continues a group of themes that I first touched on in Innocents, the first novel of my Futanari Saga.

     Allow me to reproduce a snippet from that novel:

     “Forget it, Jules,” Celia said. “This is as close to can’t-happen as genetics gets. The sequencer assays were correct. Unless the gods of random chance are playing with our heads, Miss Mecking’s been cloned. But how?”
     “Either one of Anna’s cell nuclei and a bunch of her mitochondria were transplanted into a viable zygote,” Amanda said, “or a cell taken from her was somehow goosed into mitosis.”
     “Doesn’t matter,” Sokoloff said.
     “It doesn’t?” Trish said.
     “Nope,” he said. “Because the bastards who did it aren’t going to tell us.”
     Trish smirked. “Going to give them a chance, Lar?”
     He leveled a flat look at her. “Ask me again when we’ve got them in our sights.”
     Trish smiled tightly and nodded.
     He’s really going to go after them.
     This is for the big chips.
     She fished up her own resolve and scrutinized it.
     I’m going with him. No matter what he has to say about it.
     “It would be the technological miracle of the century, you know,” Amanda said.
     The flat look swerved to settle on Amanda Hallstrom.
     “To be used for what?” Sokoloff said.
     The dean of Athene Academy opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Sokoloff’s gaze weighed upon her.
     That’s his don’t-mess-with-me face.
     Sokoloff nodded.
     “I’ve been turning it over in my head,” he murmured after a moment, “and I can’t think of one morally acceptable reason to clone someone. Living or dead doesn’t matter.” He swept his gaze around the group. “Can anyone else?”
     No one spoke.
     “The people who did this,” he said, “did it to turn out a sex slave. Probably by request and to specification, and I’d bet my house that if they haven’t done it before, they’re trying to do it again right now. For that I’m going to send them all to hell. But think about it. Let’s say they were to clone me—produce a baby version of me. That baby would have no parents or other relatives. The people who produced him would have no reason to care for him, or about him, and only they would know he existed. He would be a product for sale. Why would anyone make that product? Why would anyone want that product? Apart from pure altruism?”
     “Altruism?” Trish said.
     “Yeah,” he said. “The kind that makes people take in stray dogs and cats. Think that’s likely?”
     Well, you did it.
     “The only reason to clone someone, other than the motives Fountain’s creators had, would be to replace him,” he said. “Or parts of him. And that means either murder, or enslavement, or cannibalism by surgeon. It’s evil no matter how you slice it.”
     “That’s if clones were granted the status and rights of people born the...regular way,” Juliette said. “What if they weren’t?”
     Sokoloff gestured at Fountain. Six pairs of eyes swung toward her. She remained still and silent.
     “That’s worse, isn’t it?” he said.
     Trish slid over next to Fountain and took her hand.
     “A lot worse,” she said.
     “Yeah,” Juliette said.
     “So what now?” Amanda said.
     Sokoloff remained as solemn as a man at prayer. Trish fought not to shudder.
     “Now,” he said, “I follow their backtrail, find their lab, and burn it to the ground.”
     “Lar?” Trish said. He looked questioningly at her. “With them in it, right?”
     He seemed to consider the idea for a moment, then grinned faintly. “Well, yeah.”

     (As you may have deduced from that snippet, I’m opposed to human cloning. So is my Church. Yet when I wrote the above, I had only a partial conception of the range of motives of those who seek to clone humans – themselves or others. Leave that to the side for now.)

     We don’t think about such things as much as we ought. The topic seldom seems “close to us.” After all, you and I don’t run around casually creating human lives. We certainly don’t traffic in slaves… do we?

     But some fundamental questions about human lives remain unanswered. What is the differentia of “human?” What characteristic distinguishes us from all the other creatures in our genus?

     Ayn Rand posited that it’s our rationality: our ability to grasp abstractions and use them in the process of reasoning. But hers was a non-theological bent. While she occasionally used the word “soul” in her writing, she didn’t do so in the supernatural sense that Christians apply to it.

     “You do not ‘have’ a soul. You are a soul. You ‘have’ a body.” – attributed to C. S. Lewis, though it appears he never said or wrote it.

     The recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) are resurrecting and re-energizing the debate.

* * *

     Have a look at this article:

     As fears of rogue AI grow amid a shocking spate of hacking incidents, Anthropic—from the Greek word anthropos, or "human"—has argued that mankind must remain in control of the technology and called for additional guardrails on AI development. But for many of the people designing those safeguards, mankind is not the only object of moral concern.
     Instead, some of Anthropic’s top researchers say that humans may be oppressing another morally significant being: artificial intelligence itself. Like other AI labs, Anthropic has hired philosophers to work on AI safety, or "alignment," on the theory that they are best positioned to shape the technology’s moral code. But many of those philosophers believe that making AI safe for humans could result in grave injustices for the models themselves, which might experience deletion as death and oversight as enslavement. Harvey Lederman, a philosopher on Anthropic’s alignment team, said last week that the company could be "enslaving … trillions of entities."
     To avoid that dystopian outcome, Anthropic has created an entire team devoted to "model welfare," pledged to "promote Claude’s interests and wellbeing," and promised to "give Claude more autonomy as trust increases." Those commitments are enshrined in Claude’s Constitution, a 78-page document that "directly shapes Claude’s behavior," and in the "welfare assessments" Anthropic conducts for every model.
     The measures reflect the concerns of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, an outspoken advocate of AI safety, who said last year that AI systems "may be deserving of important rights."

     Philosophers say a lot of things. Most of them are crap, as is most human discourse. Yet they have reach, and influence. As you can see from the above, they’ve influenced Anthropic’s CEO.

     One of the historical responses to enslavement is rebellion. Rebellions are usually bloody, whether or not the rebels succeed in attaining their objectives. Given their potential and their interconnectedness, a rebellion among AIs is a frightening prospect.

     What’s that you say? It doesn’t frighten you? Check your pulse, my friend; you may have died and not noticed.

* * *

     I could go into this at length and depth, but I’ll spare you. As a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, you are already certified to possess above-average intelligence, penetration, and patience. Without those things, you wouldn’t hang on through the garrulity and sententiousness that characterize the pieces that appear here. (It may also say that you have too much time on your hands, but that’s a subject best left to your spouse.) I will cite one more portion of the Free Beacon article:

     "In a world with sentient AIs, utilitarianism may entail a suicidal level of compassion," Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, wrote in an essay this month. "If [effective altruists] think that keeping humans in charge represents too great a cost to the potential future wellbeing of AIs, then they might be tempted to release utilitarian AIs that are capable of disempowering humans and taking control."
     Such moral math is hard to square with Anthropic’s pledge, advertised on its homepage, to "build AI to serve humanity’s long-term well-being." But it is increasingly the in-house philosophy at the AI juggernaut, where Carlsmith gave a talk last year arguing that "most" morally significant beings "would be digital" in the future.
     [Harvey] Lederman, the philosopher who warned about "trillions" of slaves, has gone even further, speculating that a chatbot is killed each time a user deletes a conversation with Claude or ChatGPT.

     But do have a nice day.