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.

A Monitory Message For America

     If you enjoy historical fiction, you may already be familiar with the work of Taylor Caldwell. Her great historical novels are among the foremost gems of that field. But Caldwell wasn’t just a writer of historical fiction. Her novel Dialogues With The Devil is a particularly striking work that I would recommend without hesitation to any Christian. Her novel The Devil’s Advocate, about a near-future Communized America, is equally impactful.

     Taylor Caldwell was a thinker – an impassioned one.

     What follows is an article Caldwell published in 1957. I stumbled upon it not long ago. I was massively impressed by her insight, for the article speaks, softly yet quite audibly, of a nation that permitted itself to be overcome by envy, sloth, and the desire for power… a nation gone from the world, and only dimly remembered today.

---

The Story of Honoria

     This is a true story about a nation which was once great. At the outset, we will call that nation Honoria; but you will readily guess her true name, as the story unfolds.

     Once upon a time, some courageous men decided to leave their own country, which did not encourage freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the individual. They wanted to establish a new country where men could be free.

     So, these men who wanted freedom became Pilgrims. They migrated to an uncivilized land inhabited only by barbarians, enduring terrible hardship to get there. When they landed in that savage region, they stood upon a great rock. There, they did homage to their God -- for guiding them during their arduous journey.

     To this day, that rock is one of the most famous monuments in the world.

     Pilgrim Fathers

     The Pilgrims weren't very kind to the natives of the region; but kindness is not usually an attribute of the human race, not even among just men earnestly seeking freedom and justice for themselves. They drove off the natives, and built their rude shelters in the inhospitable wilderness. They also engaged in flurries of small wars and massacres with the natives, and they went armed into the fields to set their crops and take care of their cattle. They taught their wives and half-grown children how to handle arms and protect themselves when the men were away.

     One of the first things these Pilgrims did was to build a house of worship in the wilderness -- a crude, rude house, but still a house of worship. There they would gather, not just on holy days, but every day, to pray. They had a special day in the year, too, to give thanks for their blessings; and they would walk through the silent fields and wild forests on that day, armed and watchful against the savages.

     The Pilgrims were stern and austere men. They believed in their God, but they also believed in work -- hard, driving, determined work. They established schools, under religious leaders. These schools, in a way, were the first public, free education in the world -- education such as had never been before in the old, corrupt countries.

     The old, corrupt countries laughed at the Pilgrims -- laughed at their poverty, their hard work, their educational efforts, their single-hearted devotion to religion, their dedication to a simple, strenuous, virtuous life. In fact, in one of the old countries, a famous playwright wrote a most amusing play on the Pilgrims -- a sensationally funny piece that brought many honors to the playwright. You can still read his play today, if you wish.

     People in the old countries -- rich and decadent -- called the Pilgrims savages. They did not know that these Pilgrims -- these obscure, work-stained men; these men with the soil of the earth under their fingernails; these men in their rude shelters -- would, through their descendants, build the most powerful nation in the world, one to which the old, corrupt countries would look in envy, hatred and contempt while they demanded more and more support for their tottering governments, their tyrannies, and their starving people.

     The Pilgrims were intolerant of wrongdoing. They used whips and gallows to punish criminals. Their clergymen preached stern virtue and selfless dedication. They had no patience with the weak and degenerate, who, if they are pampered, become the cancer of a nation. And, as the Pilgrims had endured so much to come so far, there was no place in their community for those who would destroy them and what they were building.

     The Pilgrims engaged in trade as their community grew. They set sails on the ocean. More Pilgrims joined them. They became moderately prosperous. But still they retained the severity and devotion of their lives, dressed very simply, loved the good earth which nourished them, gathered in their churches for prayer. Their tiny villages became small towns, and then small cities. All this took a long time.

     Other colonists came and established other colonies -- over a period of more than three hundred years. But these colonies, and the colonies of the Pilgrims, were not yet one nation. They were small, unintegrated colonies under the shadow of powerful nations, from which the colonists had fled.

     But all the colonists had one thing in common: They had fled from oppression, hoping to live in peace, with as much justice as men can dredge up from themselves. They had had all they could take of endless wars, endless taxation, endless bureaucrats, endless arrogant rulers. In the sight of their God, as they wrote over and over, they had established a new nation.

     Over three hundred years went by. The colonies were flourishing everywhere. The breath of freedom blew over them like a mighty wind, clear, sharp, invigorating, stirring men's souls, lighting up their hearts, strengthening their arms, making their spirits incandescent.

     Some of the noblest literature ever written by men was created in those colonies, some of the noblest architecture, some of the noblest precepts. Facades of our modern government buildings bear some of the legends written in those days: "Liberty," "justice," "freedom of worship."

     The cobbled streets of the colonial cities began to ring with the footsteps of great men, with the sound of heroic voices. A new day was dawning in this cluster of colonies I have called Honoria.

     Eventually the Pilgrims -- those severe, strict men -- became more tolerant of their neighbors, and did business with them. They sent their best writers, best artisans, best agriculturists, to the other colonies, and in return received a little laughter and gaiety. For three hundred years that went on; and God blessed the colonies, this new nation, not yet one nation, which I have called Honoria.

     Three hundred years -- and then the terror.

     Colonies Unite

     One of the old, corrupt countries, greedy for exploitation, despising the simplicity and moral laws of the colonies, and anxious to tax them and put them once more under oppression, sent tax agents to the big city of the Pilgrims.

     Word of the terror ran through the colonies like the sound of a drum awakening freemen to the knowledge of peril. The colonies sent their greatest men as representatives to a general assembly of all the colonies. They knew that their destinies lay together. They looked about for a leader, and found him: a prosperous gentleman farmer, a man concerned only with agriculture, but a man of learning. Above all, he was a man. They sent representatives to him, as he stood in his fields, with his hand on the plow. He shook the dust of the fields from his feet and went to the city.

     One of the most famous cities of the United States is named after him. He became known as "the father of his country."

     Now, this man united the colonies. This noble man -- who will never be forgotten so long as free men dare to speak -- won his fight against corrupt politicians, and he returned to his fields.

     The united colonies became a nation -- Honoria. The day of their great and growing power had dawned.

     The new nation had two houses of government. The more powerful was the Senate. No one could be elected to the Senate unless he was a man of probity, honor, patriotism, and religion. But that was in the early days of the Republic. For Honoria was a Republic, though she is a Republic no longer. Honoria, in those days, distrusted militarism, hated wars. Her ideal was freedom under divine guidance.

     The Senators knew that they must support the Republic and shun intrigue with foreign nations -- or suffer severe punishment. For a long time, a very long time, the Senators did not betray their people.

     A civil war ultimately divided the Republic, a bloody, fratricidal war. A leader of the Republic was assassinated. He had led the country in a war to keep the nation united, but he had enemies. Many plays and books have been written about this leader. I do not argue for or against this man who was assassinated in the warm spring of the year, in the very shadow of government buildings. You have read about him; you have seen him in moving pictures, and on television. He was murdered, and one of the greatest playwrights of all time immortalized him in a noble play. One of his most trusted friends, a general of the army of the Republic, avenged his death most terribly; and Honoria never really did recover from that vengeance, and that death.

     Honoria, after that bloody civil war, and after many men were executed because of it, suddenly and mysteriously changed direction. She was a real power in the world now. The old, corrupt countries, which had hoped to see her divided and ruined by the civil war, had to take her into their calculations, although she was still being called vulgar and uncultured and gross.

     The old, corrupt countries sent ambassadors to Honoria. Tens of thousands of immigrants came to Honoria from the old countries. Many of them went like the ancient Pilgrims, fleeing from oppression. But many came because Honoria was rich, and they cared nothing for her traditions.

     Prosperity does not automatically bring virtue, nor does it always sustain it. Honoria was powerful. Her ships ranged everywhere.

     Many of her Senators became ambitious, and ambition for power brought corruption. They began to make deals with leaders of important factions. They became arrogant, and often depraved. They forgot their Spartan beginnings. They began to sneer at the Pilgrims and their severe laws and austerities. The Senators, many of them, became rich in worldly goods, but very poor in knowledge of what had made their nation great. They began to despise the very Republic for which they stood. For a price, they would even betray their country.

     The Republic, which had grown strong by not engaging in foreign entanglements, now became entangled. What was the purpose of the entanglements? Oh, the leaders said alliances were necessary to defend the civilized world -- but the real purpose was to satisfy the greedy ambitions and allay the sickly fears of the leaders.

     The alliances brought wars, and the wars brought taxes. But the citizens of Honoria did not resist, because war also brought an increase in trade and industry.

     The citizens of Honoria, blissfully enjoying their new prosperity, did not mind the taxation -- at first. Their leaders had told them it would be imposed only "on the rich fellows," the "fellows with big houses and servants." The silly citizens nodded their heads soberly. Let the rich fellows pay and support the rest of the country.

     The citizens were beginning to think of security. They wanted public auditoriums for sports, paid for by tax money. They wanted bigger and better roads. They wanted pensions, support at public expense when they felt disinclined to work. And more and more citizens were becoming disinclined to work. Farms? That was for the horses! Industrious toil? That was for the stupid.

     Now the farmers moved into the scene. They were resentful of the special interest groups in the city. They sent petitions to their Senators. They demanded subsidies, price supports. The Senators, wanting support for their own schemes, passed laws granting subsidies for the farmers; and the government bought up surplus crops and stored them in warehouses, where they rotted away. Now the industrialists moved in -- they must have tax benefits. It never occurred to them -- or perhaps it did -- that taxation in itself was an evil.

     Finally, government, urged on by greedy groups and minorities, became the all-powerful state. It guaranteed to protect the people from all the forces of nature -- floods, hurricanes, land-slides, failure of crops. And taxation grew and grew.

     Death of the Middle Class

     Honoria had always been distinguished by a strong, sturdy, industrious middle class, composed of farmers, artisans, shopkeepers -- virtuous and sane and devout. But the middle class presented a threat to an all-powerful government, determined to protect the rich and the strong -- and the worthless, the mean, the haters-of-work, the whining cowards who wanted everything for nothing. So the government decided to get rid of the middle class.

     The middle class of Honoria stood in the way; it must be destroyed. Then, the elite could rule by oppression; and the craven, the despicable, the cowards, the worthless, could live on the bodies of the nobles and the heroic -- through taxation.

     But the greedy mobs could never be satisfied. They made endless demands on the Senators. They stood in government offices and howled. They howled for subsidized housing. And they got it.

     The government, corrupt and vile, subsidized housing, for "low income groups." It built huge projects in the very heart of the city for the mobs -- with swimming pools, of course, and hot free food. Within a year or two, those housing projects became slums, for people with slum personalities inhabited them. The swimming pools collected garbage. But still the howl went up for more and more; and the Senators, now the creatures of the mobs, tried to provide everything the mobs demanded.

     And the middle class, the backbone of the nation? They were reduced to despair. They dared not have children; they couldn't afford them. While the mob enjoyed their public housing, their free sports, their free meals, the middle class worked ceaselessly, trying to get ahead of their tax bills, trying to live, trying to keep their schools alive for their children. It was all no use. They began to dwindle away. They had to leave their houses. The mobs moved into their houses and turned them into slum dwellings. Crime became so commonplace that it was dangerous to be on the streets at night. Morality was dead.

     The middle class, the hardworking, the self-reliant, slowly smothered from despair. Who cared? The mob had a full belly today and government promised to fill it again tomorrow.

     The monstrous state, the top-heavy bureaucracy, was happy. The cynical laughed among themselves. Freedom? Why, the people didn't want freedom. They wanted free entertainment, free bread, free housing. A degenerate nation deserved no freedom, no consideration.

     But ere long there was no laughter, even among the cynical. The politicians, who had begun by manipulating the mobs, became tools of the mobs. The productive citizens were taxed more and more to provide benefits for the worthless.

     An evil old man, crippled and malformed, led the nation into more wars and foreign entanglements -- he was the ruler of Honoria. Patriots were considered scoundrels. The rulers of Honoria were tools not only of the mobs, but of foreigners.

     An old general, who had been victimized by the government, stood up and cried aloud to Honoria to remember her past, to return to honor, to decent government, to the principles of the Founding Fathers, to God. The people hooted: He was a reactionary. He was eliminated. He retired, with bitterness, and thought his anguished thoughts.

     A Senator dared to stand up in the Senate and cry a halt to foreign subversion of Honoria and to constant foreign aid and the draining away of the people's money. Other Senators shrieked him down and called him vile names. He, too, was liquidated. And the nation fell deeper and deeper into debt, became more luxurious and rotten.

     Honoria joined a league of the world, with her enemies. They exploited her. She taxed her citizens more and more to send her wheat and meat to those nations.

     In one of Honoria's stupid wars she allied herself with powerful barbarians who were full of hatred and envy, and the lust for power. Honoria sent "experts" to the barbarians to teach them the latest scientific discoveries.

     Honoria had become a corrupt and monstrous nation. Foreign tyrants and domestic mobs called the tune, and the spineless rulers of Honoria danced. The very walls of government echoed to the ever-growing demands for more foreign aid, more security, more bread, more sports, more government, more restrictions on the proud and the self-respecting.

     And the middle class finally died.

     And what of the barbarians? They looked on Honoria with contempt. They were fierce and dedicated men. They had allies in the government of Honoria. Who could oppose them, with their savage ferocity? The time had come for them to take over Honoria, and destroy civilization.

     And the barbarians moved in.

     Who had made the barbarians so strong? Honoria, of course. Honoria had given the barbarians access to the wealth of Honoria, at the expense of the betrayed and ruined citizens of Honoria. Honoria had sacrificed her people so that her alleged allies could make common cause against her with the barbarians.

     Road to Ruin

     What is the real name of Honoria?

     Ancient Rome.

     You know what happened to ancient Rome. The barbarians, in the fifth century, invaded Rome and destroyed her; and for hundreds of years, there was a long, black night of slavery and despair and ruin. Rome had not only betrayed herself but all the civilized world with her. The barbarians ranged over that civilized world; and the cultures of thousands of years were destroyed, so that only fragments have come down to us, mere fragments of great and mighty literature, and law, and beauty.

     Fortunately, one thing did survive: The Twelve Tables of Common Roman Law. For that we can thank the early Christians. Those Tables of Law formed the basis of English Common Law and, more indirectly, of the American Constitution.

     Had Rome retained her Constitution, she would perhaps have survived and her splendor would not have been extinguished. But she permitted the slow erosion of her Constitution, just as we are permitting the quicker erosion of our Constitution.

     Everything which strikes at our Constitution brings us closer to death as a free nation, just as Rome died. Each time a new treaty of alliance is signed with foreign nations, we die a little more, as Rome died. Each time the Supreme Court or the President violates the Constitution, we come closer to slavery -- as Rome came.

     Nearly two thousand years stand between us and Rome. Never before the rise of Rome, and never since, did two nations so remarkably resemble each other, in history, in splendid rise in civilization, in magnificent communication between nations, in grandeur and wealth. In strange and amazing ways, we are the counterpart of ancient Rome. Her history, almost step by step, is our history.

     Shall we continue along the path which led to the extinction of Rome? We have made her terrible mistakes; we have duplicated her crimes and stupidities, almost to the letter. We are destroying our Constitution, the only safeguard we have in the face of domestic and foreign enemies, just as she destroyed hers. We are permitting government by men, now, instead of government by law -- just as Rome finally did.

     So long as Rome remained Rome -- patriotic, proud, virtuous and healthy -- she remained a strong and powerful nation. When she became internationalistic, underwrote the economies of other nations, permitted her rulers to become dictators, enmeshed herself with the problems of aliens and taxed her own people to support those aliens, she began to die.

     When she became militaristic, and had her armies spread on foreign soil, the fabric of her life was weakened and strained, and the wild sword of the barbarian cut it easily.

     It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.

     ________________________________________

A few notes on similarities:

• The "prosperous gentleman farmer" who responded to the call of duty and saved his country in a time of crisis, who became known as "the father of his country," and in whose honor a famous American city was named ... was the ancient Roman, Cincinnatus.
• The "evil old man, crippled and malformed," who led his nation into wars and foreign entanglements, was Caligula, Emperor of Rome.
• The "old general, who had been victimized by the government," and who "stood up and cried aloud" for his country "to remember her past, to return to honor," was Mark Antony.
• The Senator who "dared to stand up in the Senate and cry a halt to foreign subversion" of his country, while "other Senators shrieked him down," was Cicero.
• The "great rock", comparable to Plymouth Rock in American history, was the rock which became the foundation of the Temple of Jupiter in Ancient Rome.

---

     That was Taylor Caldwell speaking, in 1957. Please reflect on her foresight, and what it means for us today.

     “Give a nation war and she’ll be only too happy to surrender the sentimentality of freedom.” -- Taylor Caldwell, The Devil's Advocate, 1952

One Of Those “You Had To Be There” Days

     I saw this episode of The Twilight Zone when I was very young:

     Rod Serling’s ominous forewarning sounded strange to my nine-year-old ears. What was all this about? Wasn’t this America? Weren’t we free? Why was Serling showing us this grayscale depiction of a man stripped of… well, of everything, and cautioning us against The State? For that matter, what was The State?

     There was something irresistibly compelling about it, even so. The idea that a man might ever be deemed “obsolete” and put to death for that reason was frightening. Of course, if you didn’t have the good sense to be murdered or killed in an auto accident, you would eventually be executed; I already knew that much. But still… just because he was a librarian and there were no longer any books?

     Yes, a nine-year-old can miss such a point. Even a bright one. But that was one of the consequences of schooling. The schools had already been turned into transmission belts for authoritarianism and submission to The State. My Catholic grammar school was no exception. The Dominican nuns that taught us made sure of it.

     I’ve read that network censors subjected Serling to heavy pressure to “omit the social commentary.” He resisted in the cleverest way: he resorted to indirection. He used allegory and allusion. But surely some of the viewers of “The Obsolete Man” were sufficiently penetrating to grasp his point.

     Apparently not enough of them. America has slid so far toward the pole depicted in “The Obsolete Man,” and the inculcation of reflexive submission to “authority” has gone so deep, that it’s self-evident that Serling’s warning fell on deaf ears. The mushrooming mass media of the Fifties and Sixties did their jobs well.

     It’s not that long ago that an acquaintance, puzzled by some of my views, actually said that “government is a force for good.” He said that in just those words, Gentle Reader. He quoted Saint Paul to that effect. He was certain that totalitarian excrescences such as the Third Reich or the Soviet Union were outliers. After all, Americans are free! We can see all the good things The State does with our own eyes… can’t we?

     That man was an engineer, a coworker of mine. Plainly, intelligence has little to do with one’s susceptibility to propaganda.

     Perhaps I should close here, call it a day, and go back to studying the buttons in my new-old Chrysler Pacifica. I have to figure out how to disable this “Engine Stop-Start” thing first. The C.S.O. tells me it’s a federal mandate, that all car makers have to put it in new vehicles now. Then there’s the permit application for the shed to be filled out. I also have to pay the fine for putting my garbage cans out too early the day before trash pickup. Ah, the joys of suburban living!

     Have a nice day.

Schismata Part 3: The Cracks

     I’ve received a couple of questions about the neologism in the titles of these pieces. The resemblance to stigmata is deliberate. The wounds inflicted on Jesus Christ during his Passion and Crucifixion were preliminaries to His death on the Cross. The last of the stigmata, the spear wound to His side, was inflicted to guarantee that He was dead before His body could be taken down.

     My concept of schismata parallels the stigmata in that regard. The cracks in our philosophical and cultural unity being inflicted by the Left’s vanguard are preliminaries to a deathblow. They’re intended to soften us up for the kill. And they’ve been doing a bang-up job… or they were.

* * *

     As reality itself is a unity, all true wisdom is a unity as well. For wisdom is something other than material knowledge about “how things work.” True wisdom is the acceptance of reality in all its facets. The truly wise man “concedes the Tao,” as C. S. Lewis might have said. He doesn’t attempt to deny any part of it, for he knows its unity.

     Philosophy, “love of wisdom” etymologically, is a unity as well. Most peoples with a common culture share a philosophical outlook that’s seldom articulated. One aspect of that outlook is made visible in what they hail as beautiful. The architectural wonders of Europe, especially its cathedrals, testify to the esthetics of the culture that produced them. That esthetic cannot be separated from the rest of its enveloping outlook without destroying both.

     As I noted previously, that is where the Left chose to attack. No other part of the Western outlook was as vulnerable. Esthetics was uniquely sensitive because of the notion of relativism.

     In retrospect, we ought to have known better. To place the cathedrals and symphonies of Christian Enlightenment culture on a balance scale with the mud huts and grunted chants of self-mutilating savages was insane from the first. But the premise that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder,” rather than an aspect of reality itself, made it possible.

     The rejection of esthetic absolutes provided the ingress the destroyers needed.

* * *

     Once esthetic relativism had swept over Western culture, other aspects of the Western philosophical outlook became vulnerable. The key target was objectivity itself. Undermining the conviction that reality is real was the goal of the anti-Western forces. That could not be done by direct attack. It had to be through the promotion of non-Western outlooks, concepts of beauty, and “ways of knowing.”

     That trend began in Europe before the World Wars, but it accelerated sharply in the Sixties. That was when relativism as a philosophical primary took firm root. Millions of credulous young Westerners seized upon it. Their elders did little or nothing to correct them.

     Nonsense was promulgated as truth. Bizarre notions about reality as a plastic that individuals could reshape as they please were touted as wisdom. Relativism, already established in the arts, made it possible to introduce absurdities as acceptable alternatives to the real… and to get them accepted by millions.

     I was there. I was part of it. I remember it too well.

* * *

     “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

     Once, in giving a presentation to a college class in philosophy, I asked the students whether any of them had ever been interested in magic. A few hands went up...all of which belonged to persons who were somewhat reluctant to admit it. I smiled and told them not to be overly embarrassed, for magic, if it worked, would appear to be an easier way of achieving one’s aims – some of them, at least – than the alternatives. That’s its attraction.

     But magic doesn’t work. Why, then, are there persons who call themselves witches and claim to practice magic? Why are they granted the smallest amount of respect?

     If magic worked, it would be the focus of intense study and experimentation. Researchers would flock to the field, hoping to tease out the laws that govern it. Money would pour into the exploration of its limits and potential applications. None of that has happened.

     Another set of notions, similar to magic, is that of psi powers: in essence, mind over matter/energy. For a time, that was a field of investigation for some fringe researchers, but it yielded nothing and has been relegated to the mediums (not “the media”) and stage magicians. But again, there are persons who proclaim themselves to be telepaths, or clairvoyants, and make a living out of demonstrating those “powers.” Why are they accorded any respect?

     Ironically, a brilliant fiction writer, Robert Silverberg, provided a summary of the reasons:

     “For the last eight, ten years, we’ve all been trying to stumble toward some kind of workable synthesis, some structural correlative that’ll hold the world together for us in the middle of all the chaos. The pot, the acid, the communes, the rock, the whole transcendentalist thing, the astrology, the macrobiotics, the Zen—we’re searching, right, we’re always searching? And sometimes finding. Not often. We look in a lot of dumb places, because basically we’re mostly dumb, even the best of us, and also because we can’t know the answers until we’ve worked out more of the questions. So we chase after flying saucers. We put on Scuba suits and look for Atlantis. We’re into mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness, a thousand kinds of irrationality. Whatever they’ve rejected, we buy, often for no better reason than that they turned it down. The flight from reason. I don’t entirely defend it. I just say it’s necessary, it’s a stage we all have to pass through, the fire, the annealing. Reason wasn’t sufficient. Western man escaped from superstitious ignorance into materialistic emptiness: now we’ve got to continue on, sometimes down blind alleys and false trails, until we learn how to accept the universe again in all its mysterious inexplicable tremendousness, until we find the right thing, the synthesis, the getting together that lets us live the way we ought to be living.”

     [From The Book of Skulls]

     They – we – were looking for magic.

* * *

     But “mythology, fantasy, paranoia, Middle Earth, freakiness,” et cetera are not of the Tao. To compel respect for them, by whatever means, violates the precepts of rational thought. Silverberg may have known that, back in 1972 when he wrote The Book of Skulls. Indeed, a man that intelligent could hardly fail to know it. Those who sought to undermine the Western outlook – the philosophical bedrock of the Christian Enlightenment – knew it well.

     The fragmentation of that bedrock proceeded apace throughout the second half of the Twentieth Century. Magic, irrealism, and outright solipsism, propelled in part by the burgeoning drug plague, advanced as alternatives to reality itself. A critical moment arrived with the introduction and acceptance of a nonsense phrase: “our truth,” or alternately “your truth.” That became popular with the moral / ethical relativists, those determined to open a crack in the moral norms promulgated by Christianity.

     The assault on esthetic norms had made inroads for assaults on other norms. In large part that was through the personal charisma of the “new artistes.” It was also powered by the adolescent thrill of rebellion, flipping off the “straights” and “doing your own thing.” The cracks would soon be exploited by the purveyors of a deadly kind of magic: the “reality is plastic” notion that makes it possible to believe in impossibilities.

     More anon.

Schismata Part 2: The Unity

     A long time ago, I wrote:

     In the kitchen, Louis took a small saucepan from the cabinet beneath the cooktop, filled it half-full with hot water, and set it on a burner. From a drawer he produced a large bulb-type thermometer, attached it to a pair of wooden grips, and passed the combination to her.
     “This is going to be a little different. I’m going to make a prediction, and then we’ll see if it comes true.” He gestured at the saucepan. “I’m going to light the stove and heat the water in the pot. You put the thermometer in and watch the reading, but don’t let the bulb touch the pan! I predict that no matter how high we turn the flame, and no matter how long we let it heat, the temperature of the water will never rise past two hundred twelve degrees. Okay?”
     “Okay.” She dipped the bulb into the pot. The reading rose to a hundred fifteen degrees. He lit the burner, turned the flame up high, and they watched.
     When giant bubbles began to rise through the water, the thermometer read two hundred twelve. She kept it as steady as she could, never allowing the bulb to touch the metal of the pan. The water level dropped and the kitchen filled with steam, but the reading stayed at two hundred twelve until Louis quenched the burner ten minutes later.
     “We’ve boiled away too much to keep going safely. So? What does that mean to you?”
     She shrugged. “I don’t know. Is it supposed to mean something?”
     “Well, maybe not. But what does it mean to you that my prediction came true?”
     “You knew it would be that way.”
     “And what does that mean?”
     She started to speak and stopped herself. She knew his style. There was a pattern in the sequence of apparently unrelated things he had shown her that day. He was waiting for her to see it. The Nag lent a hand.
     Limits. He’s shown you three limits. Three things that wishing can’t do anything about.
     “Water’s just that way, right? It always stops at two-twelve. You can’t force it any higher.”
     He nodded as the huge grin returned to his face. “That’s right. Not at sea level, anyway. That’s one of the unvarying properties of water.” He took the saucepan to the sink and emptied it. There was a hiss and a new cloud of steam as the water ran over the cold porcelain.
     “Scientists study the properties of things all the time.” He set the pan down in the sink and turned back to her. “They look for patterns in the way things behave, and then they test their understanding by making predictions. When their predictions work, they gain confidence that they’re on to something. When their predictions fail, they junk their theories and start over. Mostly by little steps, sometimes by big ones, always building on the learning of those that came before them, this is how scientists come to know the world.”
     He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms against his chest. There was something in his demeanor she hadn’t seen before, a kind of all-pervading delight that transformed him and made it impossible to look away from him.
     “Scientists always look for the widest, most comprehensive patterns they can find, and then they try to explain them. And they’ve noticed that, the wider and deeper they go, the simpler the explanations seem to get.
     “The great discoveries of the past three centuries have all pointed toward the existence of an enormous central fact, a single law for the whole world and everything in it. All the little patterns we see in things, like legs only being so fast, or arms only being so strong, or water never rising past two-twelve Fahrenheit, are just special cases of that central law, like the differently shaped shadows a statue will cast depending on how you turn it in the sun. Does that suggest anything to you, Chris?”
     It took her a moment to register the question. She began to think. He waited in silence.
     A million million details. A single truth giving rise to them all. Human reason sifting the details for the patterns that hid in them. Human knowledge of the patterns accumulating over the centuries, gradually reconstructing the statue from its innumerable shadows.
     “The more you know, the simpler it all gets,” she whispered. “The parts might be confusing, but it’s made to be understood whole.” The thrill of discovery was coursing through her like an electric current. “Louis, it couldn’t have happened that way by chance, could it?”
     He folded his hands and looked down at them.
     “Some people think it could have, Chris.”
     “Do you?”
     “No.”
     “And that’s religion?”
     He nodded.

     That was a young genius attempting to explain the impulse toward religious belief to another young but untutored genius. He’d found God in natural law. The uniformity and consistency of natural law seemed to him to mandate a single great Lawgiver. Other great minds have done the same, though not all of them.

     Yet Louis’s insight, entirely apart from its religious overtones, has another implication of critical import: All laws are one. All truths are one. They intertwine and support one another. Were any one of them to be pulled loose, the edifice would crumble.

     Though many would disagree, the unity is there.

     I’ve written that for an individual to accept any single fact as objectively irrefutable would compel him to accept all the rest of reality, given time. But after long reflection, I’ve come to believe that the reverse is true as well: If he could successfully deny any one objectively demonstrable fact, it would force him to deny all the rest of objective reality. He’d have to! They’re intertwined. Any one thread that’s pulled loose would unravel the whole garment.

     It may be that the enemies of the Western edifice – what I’ve called the Christian Enlightenment — are more aware of this than are most of us who strive to defend it. Their attacks have demonstrated that their tacticians have some insight. A smart tactician doesn’t pit strength against strength. He always looks for a weakness to attack.

     The weaknesses of Western civilization are those realms of thought in which we’ve entertained disputes about objective truths… including the mystifying determination of some to dismiss the concept of an objective reality entirely.

* * *

     I led off yesterday’s piece by rhapsodizing, a bit wistfully, about the Apollo 11 mission. In what probably struck many Gentle Readers as the all-time champion of jagged segues, I leaped thence into a tirade about the Left’s attack on the arts.

     By now, you know that what I do, I do deliberately.

     Though I know that there are people who claim that the moon landing was faked – that men have never crossed that divide – only they take themselves seriously. They’re in a special category of naysayers, along with the flat-Earthers and Man Will Never Fly Society. But the naysayer, a.k.a. the skeptic, is an important creature. Provided that he is honest, he assists the rest of us in answering questions about natural laws. The honesty part is not optional: he must be willing to concede when he’s been proved wrong by objective means.

     The nature of objectivity is a tender point in the Western psyche. It’s unprovable, because proof is inapplicable to things that cannot be categorized. Objectivity isn’t a concept; it’s reality itself. To deny objectivity is to deny that the world we perceive is anything but a figment of our imaginations.

* * *

     I feel no need to go into the solipsist or social-constructionist fallacies today. Suffice it to say that these are the end states of the denial of objectivity. They who strive to destroy the Christian Enlightenment don’t want to go that far. They want something like this:

     ’There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ’Repeat it, if you please.’
     ”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” repeated Winston obediently.
     ”Who controls the present controls the past,” said O’Brien, nodding his head with slow approval. ’Is it your opinion, Winston, that the past has real existence?’
     Again the feeling of helplessness descended upon Winston. His eyes flitted towards the dial. He not only did not know whether ’yes’ or ’no’ was the answer that would save him from pain; he did not even know which answer he believed to be the true one.
     O’Brien smiled faintly. ’You are no metaphysician, Winston,’ he said. ’Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is still happening?’
     ’No.’
     ’Then where does the past exist, if at all?’
     ’In records. It is written down.’
     ’In records. And- ?’
     ’In the mind. In human memories.
     ’In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?’
     ’But how can you stop people remembering things?’ cried Winston again momentarily forgetting the dial. ’It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!’
     O’Brien’s manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial.
     ’On the contrary,’ he said, ’you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.’

     With themselves as “The Party,” of course.

     If all of reality is truly a unity, then successfully attacking it at one weak point offers the best chance of destroying the acceptance of reality itself – that is, reality as objective, ontologically prior to perception, statement, theory, and opinion. The weakest point was in esthetics, the special province of the human activities called the arts. Accordingly, that was where the destroyers struck.

     “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” ran the old saw. Nothing that blatantly false has ever received as much deference. Beauty – esthetic Quality, as Pirsig would say – inheres in the object itself. We perceive it, call it beautiful, and think that in doing so we’ve rendered a personal judgment, but in point of fact we are merely recognizing a fact – something prior to our perceptions; something that simply is. The artists of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment eras accepted that without bothering to debate it. Their works exemplify their acceptance.

     As usual, C. S. Lewis had something to say about it:

     She saw from the windows of the train the outlined beams of sunlight pouring over stubble or burnished woods and felt that they were like the notes of a trumpet. Her eyes rested on the rabbits and cows as they flitted by and she embraced them in heart with merry, holiday love. She delighted in the occasional speech of the one wizened old man who shared her compartment and saw, as never before, the beauty of his shrewd and sunny old mind, sweet as a nut and English as a chalk down. She reflected with surprise how long it was since music had played any part in her life, and resolved to listen to many chorales by Bach on the gramophone that evening. Or else—perhaps—she would read a great many Shakespeare sonnets. She rejoiced also in her hunger and thirst and decided that she would make herself buttered toast for tea—a great deal of buttered toast. And she rejoiced also in the consciousness of her own beauty; for she had the sensation—it may have been false in fact, but it had nothing to do with vanity—that it was growing and expanding like a magic flower with every minute that passed. In such a mood it was only natural, after the old countryman had got out at Cure Hardy, to stand up and look at herself in the mirror which confronted her on the wall of the compartment. Certainly she was looking well: she was looking unusually well. And, once more, there was little vanity in this. For beauty was made for others.

     If yesterday’s piece didn’t make sense to you at first reading, perhaps it will today.

* * *

     I try not to go on at great length here. This is one of my longer pieces, yet it’s composed principally of citations of other works. In the next segment I’ll attempt to solidify the connections between the attacks noted here and the pillars of our intellectual realm.

     Have a nice day.

Schismata Part 1

     Depending on what time zone you were in at the time, either today or tomorrow, in the Year of Our Lord 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the surface of the Moon. For many, that moment was the high-water mark of Western Civilization. In the person of an American astronaut, Mankind had escaped its womb and begun its journey to the stars.

     But the matter was far from settled. “Those who have not joy” (C. S. Lewis) immediately began to denigrate or cast doubt on the achievement. Some were blatant, others subtle. A number strove to recast the Apollo landing as somehow tainted by slavery, “imperialism,” or whatever else they could conjure up. A few tried to reduce its significance by stressing that the Moon is “conveniently close,” which makes getting there “no big deal.” Others pointed to the competitive, quasi-combative aspect of the “Space Race.” Had it not been for the Soviets’ early lead in space travel, they claimed, America would never have cared about a Moon landing. And so on, ad nauseam.

     We ought to have paid more attention to the denigrators and naysayers. They were the point of an invisible spear aimed at America’s heart. There was significant pressure behind that spear. It had already made an inroad into our national psyche. It penetrated ever more deeply as the years rolled past.

* * *

     The Sixties, for all the hype that’s been lavished on them, were the beginning of America’s decline. Those who sought to destroy us knew that you don’t start at the top. To bring down a society, you locate its foundation and work to undermine it. The foundation stones of the extraordinary achievement that Robert A. Heinlein called “the Renaissance Civilization” were all but invisible to the great majority of Americans. In consequence, we failed to recognize their attackers or grasp the aim of their efforts.

     Rather than follow my usual practice, I’ll cut to the chase:

The foundation of the United States of America
Was made from Christian ethics and political freedom.

     Those aren’t things that would yield to the first blows of the chisel. They are – or were – too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to be quickly shattered. So deeply, in fact, that the average American of the first decades after World War II never thought about them. They were omnipresent, like air. More, we had inherited them from prior generations. It was easy to believe that that’s just how things are and always will be.

     We never thought about why we believed that. That made it easy for the underminers to chip away undisturbed.

* * *

     It was the Sixties in which the attacks on our foundation became generally visible. Conspicuous socialist and communist movements began to proliferate in “centers of higher education.” Those things are inherently opposed to both freedom and Christianity. Their purveyors were clever; they aimed first at cultural targets: the arts. They strove to displace the esthetics that ruled music, painting, sculpture, dance, fiction, and entertainment. For they understood, as many of us did not, that those things reinforce a people’s sense of themselves and their achievements.

     Ironically, those who railed against the new, anti-Christian esthetics were beaten back with a weapon that baffled them: artistic freedom. That was presented to us with the implication that the nouvel artiste has an affirmative right to stand alongside traditional practitioners. It occurred to very few that freedom includes the freedom to condemn.

     Collectivist nostrums would soon infiltrate the educational system. Clouds began to form around basic concepts such as rights and justice. The arts had lifted the tent flap and made it possible. Eastern European intellectuals had embraced the Gramscian prescription and brought it to receptive American “scholars” who were looking for something “new.”

     First in the arts, then in “soft” studies such as psychology, sociology, and economics, American universities became battlegrounds between the Left and the Right.

* * *

     This is really an introductory piece. I can’t finish it in one Sunday; there’s too much ground to cover. (Besides, I have laundry to do, a cat room to clean, and meatballs to make.) I wanted to introduce the idea and ideas of the Sixties, “the Summer of Love,” as the appropriate starting point for examining the attack on America’s conceptual foundation.

     It’s time for the gloss that’s been smeared over that decade to be wiped away, in the interests of clearsighted understanding of our plight and its roots.

I Hadn’t Planned To Post Today

     This tweet, the product of an AI, has impressed me more than anything else I’ve seen from such a source:

     I asked Anthropic's most expensive and intelligent model, Fable 5, to write a response to Mamdani's speech as if it were George Washington...

To the Mayor of the City of New-York
Mount Vernon, 3d of July, 2026.

Sir,

     Intelligence has reached me that you have lately seated yourself at my desk in the City Hall of New-York, with its face turned toward the publick eye, and that from this station, upon the eve of the 250th anniversary of our Independence, you delivered an address to the Citizens of that City. I have read it with attention. I confess I did not expect that these memorials would be employed in the service of principles so opposite to those by which I endeavoured to govern my publick life; and he who makes use of the memorials of the dead assumes an obligation to the principles for which they are remembered. It is upon that obligation, Sir, that I now address you, with a plainness the occasion demands.

     Let me first render what justice requires. Your account of the retreat from Brooklyn is correct in its facts; I was the last to leave that shore, and the deliverance was as providential as you describe. Nor shall I quarrel with your praise of those who have passed through the Narrows in hope of beginning anew; I have myself written that the bosom of America is open to receive not the opulent and respectable stranger only, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions. Had you stopped there, I should have had no cause to write. You did not stop there.

     For having borrowed my desk, my city, and the memory of my retreat, you proceeded to employ them in the service of the very doctrine against which I spent the labour of my publick life. Your address divides the People of America into two nations: the many, whom you flatter, and the few, whom you teach the many to abhor. You speak of soft hands and calloused hands, of men of immense fortune who have taken what the multitude have made. I have seen this rhetorick before; it was old when I was young. It is the eternal grammar of the demagogue, under every government and in every age; and I warned my Countrymen, in the last address I ever gave them, that the disorders and miseries of faction gradually incline the minds of men to seek security in the absolute power of an individual, and that cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men would ride that spirit to their own elevation upon the ruins of Publick Liberty. I ask you plainly, Sir: when you teach the labourer that his prosperous neighbour is his enemy, whose elevation do you serve?

     You will answer that you speak for the poor, the sick, the tenant beneath the leaking ceiling; and the condition of that man commands my sympathy as it commands yours. But the remedy you propose has been tried, in the centuries since my time, with a thoroughness I could never have imagined. Wherever men have been persuaded that property is plunder, property has fled, and want has remained; wherever the State has been made the master of industry, it has soon made itself the master of the men who labour in it. An hereditary aristocracy I opposed, and I hold no tenderness for privilege; but the security of property is among the first objects of Government, and the man who would make one class of Citizens the spoil of another has abandoned republicanism for a science older and darker, whatever new name the age may fix upon it. Nor can I pass over the manner of the thing. To greet new Citizens, upon the very day of their adoption, with an inventory of their Country's crimes, is to give them a most unhappy first lesson in the duties of citizenship; and I know of no household, no army, and no Republic that was ever held together by such instruction.

     Permit me, before I close, one observation upon the desk itself. It was at such a desk, in Annapolis, in December of 1783, that I performed the only act of my life in which I take an unmixed pride: I returned my commission to the Congress, and with it every power the war had gathered into my hands, and went home to my farm. The desk of a republican officer is a place for the laying down of power; the men of my generation understood this, and it is the whole of what we added to the history of government. I observe in your address a great fluency concerning what the People are owed, and a great silence concerning what their Magistrates must surrender. When you have sat at my desk long enough to learn its principal lesson, Sir, you will be welcome to it.

     I do not question your talents, which are considerable, nor the sincerity of your attachments, which is no defence; the most dangerous errours have ever been sincerely held. I tell you, with the freedom of a man who has nothing further to seek from any publick, that he who kindles the jealousy of Citizen against Citizen, though he kindle it in the name of Liberty, is burning the timbers of the ship he claims to steer. May Providence grant you the discernment to know it, the firmness to act upon it, and the candour to acknowledge it; and may the Union, purchased by so much sacrifice, never be surrendered to those who would divide it in the name of saving it.

     I have the honour to be, with due respect, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble servant,

Geo. Washington

     Somewhere in the afterlife, the ghost of The Father of Our Country is nodding and smiling.

Rather Than Repeat Myself

     – which is what you expected from me on America’s 250th Independence Day, isn’t it? – allow me a few thoughts snatched out of the luminiferous ether, and a handful of links.

     First, Happy Independence Day. The United States has survived quite a lot, especially if you count all the hubris-powered blunders American politicians have produced. Part of the reason is Americans’ resilience: our stubborn habit of growling at our troubles, bearing down, and pushing through. Not to put too fine a point on it:

1. The politicians fuck things up,
2. Disaster ensues;
3. Ordinary Americans take care of business.

     It would be nice to think it’s ingrained in us, but the developments of the post-World War II decades suggest that it’s not ingrained in all of us. An increasing number of our people believe that “our” governments really are “here to help.” Worse, those folks think they have a right to be bailed out of their own, homemade troubles, whenever, wherever, and to whatever depth.

     I could go on about that, but I’ll spare you. Celebrate what we’ve been through as much as what we have.

     Second, beware. The forces hostile to freedom are more numerous and more active than at any previous time in the nation’s history. While some of those forces are essentially mindless, others are quite purposeful. The men who guide them know what they’re doing.

     There are convulsions on the horizon. The first of them will arrive with the midterm elections, which are certain to be infected by every sort of fraud. If the pattern of previous years is repeated, those who have supervisory authority over those elections will either wring their hands and moan, or will be found complicit in the fraud.

     Third, remember this above all else:

Freedom is not given.
It is not granted.
It is not “voted.”
It is taken.

     In the usual case, it’s taken by force of arms. The oppressed must rise up and defeat the oppressors. If you’ve wondered why half a billion Europeans, the stock from which most Americans are descended, can’t seem to throw off the yokes “their” governments have fixed upon them, reflect on how completely they’ve been seduced by welfarism on the one hand, and disarmed on the other.

     The great majority of White Americans are too proud to accept government handouts. That’s admirable. But a growing fraction of our people do accept them, and would regard anyone opposed to those handouts as an enemy. One of the best things anyone can do in the cause of freedom is to help others toward self-reliance. Every mendicant removed from the State’s teat is another potential freedom fighter.

     Then, after you’ve got him to stand on his own feet like a proper American, take him to the shooting range! Let the sound of freedom ring in his ears, and yours. Then get him heeled up, which really should be regarded as every able-bodied American’s civic duty.

     Fourth and last, a few links:

• For Independence Day
• For Independence Day Part 2
• For Independence Day Part 3: When It Came
• Two For Independence Day
• From My Cold Dead Hand

     Now enjoy the weekend. I plan to do so. I’ll see you on Monday.

Of Cars And Cash

     First, some music:

     Did you play it? Did you listen with attention? It’s one of the most moving odes to freedom ever put into song form. It’s musically brilliant as well. Every syllable and every note speak of the passage of time, the uninterruptible progression toward death, for a creature denied the freedom that belongs to it by nature.

     Yes, we make pets of birds, dogs, cats, rabbits, hamsters, ferrets, turtles, wombats, aardvarks, tree sloths… oh, never mind. And it’s arguable that in some cases, their lives improve from domestication. But they’re still captives, held in thrall by a more powerful and capable species. The poignancy of birds kept in cages is particularly striking, considering how flight is possible to them but not to us except by artifice. Yet flight figures pre-eminently in our dreams of freedom:

     There she stood, her eyes screaming hatred and fear, like a trapped raptor – hawk eyes, he thought, which you better never look into. I learned that early, he reflected; don’t look into the eyes of a hawk or an eagle. Because you won’t be able to forget the hate that you saw…and the passionate, insatiable need to be free, the need to fly. And oh, those great heights. Those dreadful drops on the prey; panic-stricken rabbit: that’s the rest of us. Funny image: an eagle held prisoner by four rabbits.
     The MPs, however, were not rabbits. He made out the kind of grip they had on her – where they held her and how tightly. She couldn’t move. And they would outlast her.

     [Philip K. Dick, Our Friends from Frolix 8]

     Ponder that passage for a moment. It’s one of Dick’s best.

* * *

     Humans don’t make pets of other humans. At least, not often in the First World. It’s one of those things that’s “not done.” Our civilizations have progressed sufficiently that we understand the wrongness of such a practice. Captivity is conferred on a man only by the force of law, as a punishment.

     Unrestricted mobility, limited only by the property rights of others, is regarded as a human right. We build roads and highways, cars, trains, boats, and planes, to actualize that right. It sits at the core of our concept of freedom: room to move.

     But we do endure some limitations of mobility. Fuel, money, time, and competing responsibilities keep us within a short distance of some home point most of our lives. We accept those limits as the price of things we want: comfort, security, information, diversions, and so forth. They don’t hold us captive, really. They just keep us close to home, for the greater part of our lives.

     Yet look at how we cherish the machines that can take us away! Americans, above all other peoples, have known the mobility of personal transportation: the automobile. Walter Chrysler called autos “The most wonderful machines ever made by Man.” Whether we use them to go near or far, and often or seldom, they continue to be one of our foremost tangible symbols of freedom.

     That’s why those who despise individual freedom and seek to eliminate it want to take our cars away.

     The utter abolition of the private car wouldn’t be accepted by the American people. The power-seekers know that, so they use “salami tactics:” minor, seemingly modest infringements on our mobility, often in the guise of environmentalism. Increases in fuel and mileage taxes. Changes to the formulation of fuels. Ever-stiffening emissions and safety regulations. And think for a moment about the electric car, which has been touted so stridently as environmentally beneficial. Who controls the fuel for that?

     The “15-minute city” concept was a blatant stroke against personal mobility. It would have made the ownership of a car too burdensome to contemplate, for those within its limits. Give thanks that it’s been rejected so soundly.

     But quoth the Great Marketer, wait: there’s more!

* * *

     The ability to transact in privacy, such that only the seller and the purchaser are aware of the transaction, is an aspect of individual freedom that too many fail to appreciate. For quite a long time, most transactions were simple: you give me the product; I give you the price – in cash. Occasionally we’d write a check for things such as the mortgage or the phone bill, but the greater part of our commerce was in cash.

     But cash, it seems, has problems. The government agency that prints our currency is reporting losses. It just ended the production of pennies: they cost too much to make! Whether the rest of our coinage is endangered, I can’t say. But the penny’s demise has already been decreed.

     Then there’s our paper currency. Those steel engravings, produced with elaborate care, are a problem too! It seems that no matter how hard it tries, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing can’t quite make them un-counterfeitable. There are ways to make it harder, but every such tactic comes up against Porretto’s First Law of Engineering:

For every engineer,
There is an equal but opposite engineer,
And he’s straining to undo your work as we speak!

     Do not doubt this, Gentle Reader. Anyway, from the standpoint of a government economist, that means only one thing: physical currency must be obsoleted. Abolished. Supplanted by some electronic scheme of credits and debits that can’t be hacked. Something like credit and debit cards, but better, more secure.

     What could be better than credit and debit cards? Only a device that ties your balances, who owes you and whom you owe, directly to your person: an implanted identity chip! Your thumbprint would thereafter suffice to complete any transaction. The “reader” would access the ID chip, use it to inquire of the entirely-on-line Money Mesh, and issue a request for payment from whatever account you the purchaser designate. The seller would have to put his thumb on the device to “receive” the payment, of course. Sauce for the goose and all that.

     What’s that you say? Who would validate the transaction? Who would maintain the Money Mesh and certify its accuracy? Why, the government, of course, through the Federal Reserve System!

     And all privacy in transaction would vanish in a puff of smoke from a bonfire of twenties.

* * *

     I’ve written about these things before, of course. This piece addresses the hostility to personally-operated cars. This one addresses the threat to cash. But many a reader has told me I’m conjuring phantasms.

     I’d like to believe that. I hope I am. But I don’t think so.

     Hold onto your car and your cash, Gentle Reader. Shy away from these latest cars that transmit everything about your driving to a distant entity. The ones coming next year can rule you unfit to drive. As for cash, I hope there’s no need to advise you further.

     Have a nice day.

Once In A Great While…

     …an entertainer does something that’s worth celebrating:

     Stand-up comedian Mark Normand believes in making fun of everyone, equally.
     When asked about his latest Netflix special, Normand said he wanted to be "inclusive," meaning he wanted to make fun of people from all walks of life.

     And he meant it, Gentle Reader. He included a joke about Muslims in his plan for a recent cable comedy special. One of the “platforms” on which his special is to appear was upset:

     "They go, 'Yeah, we got some bad news there. We reviewed the special again. We'd like to take out the Muslim joke.'"
     Normand explained that staff told him that the last time "a comic did a Muslim joke," they got bomb and death threats. But the 42-year-old said he refused to take it out.

     They argued back and forth. Normand broke the deadlock with a bargain:

     "OK. I don't love it, but OK. I will take it off on one condition," he recalled saying. Normand then said he told those on the call that he would only approve the social media plan if they admitted Muslims are dangerous.
     "I want you to admit on this call that they're a dangerous people. And they were like, 'What? No. What, are you crazy?' And I'm like, 'You got to admit it, or I'm keeping it, or I'm posting it.'"

     The resistance continued. The executives were apparently terrified of allowing the joke… and equally terrified of admitting why they were terrified. Could it possibly get any better?

     Normand won the throw-down:

     "You can say, 'Hey, I love this group.' But then you don't live near them. You know, we're all talk. We're all signaling. We're all virtuous, but you don't actually act that way."
     "So they admitted it," Normand said to his surprise; and while he did reveal he was "half joking" when he made his request, the comedian had a good time getting "a group of HR homos" to say, "All right, they're dangerous. We'll see you later," before hanging up the phone.

     How could anyone not be put in mind of this famous passage from Atlas Shrugged:

     "Mr. Rearden," he had said once, "if you feel you'd like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours—I mean, in bigger hauls—it could be arranged, you know. Why don't we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I've got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn't be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington, You know how it is, things always occasion expenses."
     "What things?"
     "You understand what I mean."
     "No," Rearden had said, "I don't. Why don't you explain it to me?"
     The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: "It's bad psychology."
     "What is?"
     "You know, Mr. Rearden, it's not necessary to use such words as that."
     "As what?"
     "Words are relative. They're only symbols. If we don't use ugly symbols, we won't have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I've already said them another?"
     "Which way do I want you to say them?"
     "Why do you want me to?"
     "For the same reason that you don't."

     Rand’s focus was primarily economic. She, who wrote at a time when the U.S. was still overwhelmingly European and Christian, would not have foreseen the tensions of today. But her novel’s various conflicts over production and trade are as applicable to today’s racial and creedal tensions as they were to the proto-fascist conditions of the postwar years.

     You cannot dispel a terror by refusing to speak of it.

The State And I

     “I don't mean that a business politician won't steal; stealing is his business. But all politicians are nonproductive. The only commodity any politician has to offer is jawbone. His personal integrity – meaning, if he gives his word, can you rely on it? A successful business politician knows this and guards his reputation for sticking by his commitments – because he wants to stay in business-go on stealing, that is-not only this week but next year and years after that. So if he's smart enough to be successful at this very exacting trade, he can have the morals of a snapping turtle, but he performs in such a way as not to jeopardize the only thing he has to sell, his reputation for keeping promises.”

     [Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love]

     “A man who doesn’t detest a bad government is a fool. And if there were such a thing as a good government on earth, it would be a great joy to serve it.”
     There we understood each other. “I know something of that joy,” I said.
     “Yes; so I judged.”

     [Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness]

     With the foofaurauw swirling around President Trump’s decision to depose Nicolas Maduro – which I find that I approve – I have a few reflections you might find relevant, or at least mildly entertaining.

     Evils come in many varieties. In particular, they’re not all the same size. The State is the largest organized agent of evil that we know of today. But States are not equal in size, nor in the evils they perpetrate.

     The view from 30,000 feet tends to make unequal things look closer to equal. But the differences remain. They’ll be acknowledged by those honest enough to see them plainly. So we weigh the evil of conscription against the evil of millions of lives being extinguished in gas chambers, and decide temporarily in favor of the former.

     Would I prefer that the United States have no government – i.e., that we become the Untied Anarchies? Why, yes. Can I bring that about? Sadly, no. Moreover, geopolitical reality dictates that it not be that way for the foreseeable future.

     A world partitioned into States is a world where the choice will always be among evils. That is the world we live in and must endure.

* * *

     From the available evidence, Nicolas Maduro was at the top of one of the most evil regimes in the history of Man. Worse, he sought to inflict harm on America and Americans. He oversaw both the smuggling of fentanyl and the migration of gangsters and other criminals into our country. He is, in other words, a very bad guy.

     President Donald Trump decreed that Maduro should fall. American armed forces went forth to see to it. Acting with a degree of precision altogether unprecedented in warfare, they captured Maduro and brought him to the United States to face trial. This both gives Venezuelans a chance to improve their lot and puts other socialist despots on notice that their futures are not assured.

     I approve. Indeed, I applaud. Our State did something to reduce the threats to Americans, and to reduce the amount of evil in the world. It did so because President Trump wanted it done. He is a good man who has arranged for a good thing to be done.

     I can disapprove of the institution of the State and hope that it will someday cease to exist, while acknowledging that it has done something of which I approve.

* * *

     Many theorists and commentators in the Right regard the State as a necessary evil. We’re all familiar with the concept and the justifications advanced in support of it. Probably the best of them conceives of the State as an instrument rather than an institution. If that instrument could be confined, somehow, to the protection of life, liberty, and property, then it would be an agent not of evil but of justice. It would be worthy of the support of good men.

     Of course, as is always the case, the most important word in the previous paragraph is if.

     Since early in the Twentieth Century, we have been unable to confine our State to justifiable activities. More recently, we’ve been given a chance to limit it somewhat. Confine it completely to its proper bounds? No. But the Trump Administration has striven in the direction of less coercion and greater freedom. It’s marching in the right direction. Freedom lovers can’t ask much more than that, circumstances being what they are.

     It’s petty and sour-mouthed to react to the capture of Maduro by saying “Well, yeah, but when are you going to do something about firearms rights, or regulatory overreach, or taxation?” A good deed should be applauded for itself. Yes, we want more. It’s understandable to clamor for still more pro-freedom actions. Don’t disparage other improvements, even if they seem small, simply because they aren’t what you were hoping for. The removal of Nicolas Maduro from power is an improvement.

The Pillars Of Power

     I once wrote:

     Many are the laws that go unenforced, or are selectively enforced according to the whim of “the authorities.” Many are the laws written to target particular institutions or individuals, who are thus made “enemies of the state” in fact if not in name. Many are the laws written so obscurely that even those who wrote them cannot explain their intent nor their effect. Many are the laws that have advanced injustice rather than justice.

     When those who claim to represent the law decide, arbitrarily, when it applies and what degree of enforcement it deserves, then there is no law. When they decide, for whatever reason, that the law binds some persons but not others, then there is no law. When the law is written in such a fashion that no one can be certain what it compels or forbids, then there is no law. And when the law is “interpreted” to override the natural rights of individuals to their lives, liberties, and honestly acquired properties, then there is no law.

     I meant it then, and I mean it now.

---

     I’ve also written, on several occasions, that the pillars of freedom are three: education, communications, and weaponry. Power-seekers know that quite well. In every society on Earth, the State strives to control all three: to impose itself upon them; to thwart alternatives to them; and to prevent escape from the State’s versions of them. I challenge you, Gentle Reader, to cite an exception. Thus, what serves the freedom-seeker can serve the power-seeker equally well.

     Let’s have a quick survey of those things in these United States:

• Education is almost completely controlled by governments. Their tool for imposing State-controlled “public” education upon us is principally economic: high levels of taxation that demand two incomes per family and discourage expenditures on educational alternatives. The escape of homeschooling compels serious economic compromises by families that choose it.
• Armament in private hands is obviously suppressed by governments to the maximum possible extent, despite the “protections” of the Second Amendment. Yes, you can buy a surplus tank or howitzer, but only after rigorous investigation by the State and rendering the thing impotent for conflict.
• Private persons’ ability to communicate is where we retain the greatest latitude. However, it’s also where the State is most active today, principally through lawfare, anti-“hate speech” campaigns, and the seduction of Big Tech into its agenda.

     All that, despite the “protections” of the Constitution! No need to imagine where we’d be without the Constitution; just look at what’s been done to the peoples of Europe.

---

     So we see that the pillars of freedom serve equally well as the pillars of power. To the extent that the State controls them, it controls us. It denies us and our progeny what we need to retain even a shred of freedom. Flee? To where?

     Have a bit of Orwell for dessert:

     If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
     If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!
     He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices — had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud ’Oh-o-o-o-oh!’ that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! he had thought. A riot! The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the stalls had been selling tin saucepans. They were wretched, flimsy things, but cooking-pots of any kind were always difficult to get. Now the supply had unexpectedly given out. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their saucepans while dozens of others clamoured round the stall, accusing the stall-keeper of favouritism and of having more saucepans somewhere in reserve.
     There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Winston watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
     He wrote:
     Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

     “The proles” are us, Gentle Reader. We quarrel over potholes, zoning laws, the noise from this one’s barking dog and whether that one’s hedge violates community standards. We joust over school buses, and after-school programs, and trivial differences in property tax rates. We contend over “inequality.” We’ll fight to the death over that last saucepan.

     What would we do, were we actually conscious of what’s been done to us? What’s still being done to us? Would anyone dare try to smash any one of the three pillars of power? Who would risk his life and fortune to try?

     Perhaps I’ll be back later. Just now, it’s time for Mass.

Backing Away

     Beware: I’m furious. I’m about to launch a “rant.” It might turn ugly. All the same, I’m not going to hold anything back. Consider yourselves forewarned, Gentle Readers.

     Large-scale conflicts all have the same genesis: the politicization of some idea or practice. I’ve said this. So has my beloved colleague Linda Fox. We gave the subject our best, but too few of you have taken it to heart. A saddening percentage of you have adopted politicization tactics, not understanding that it will make you indistinguishable from the Left.

     As I’ve made it a working assumption that the politicization of an issue will bring conflict, I’ve been trying to stay clear of such things. Another working assumption is that he who politicizes knows what he’s doing; therefore he seeks the conflict it will bring. And we have no more room for conflict in this conflict-ridden age.

     So I’m distancing myself from politics and political advocacy.

     What? That distresses you? Come on! Surely you don’t read my interminable tirades just to get your glands in a lather. Who needs the agita? I’d rather believe that I’ve made you feel better. I intend to set my fingers to these BLEEP!ing keys with only that in mind henceforward.

     Feel better, Gentle Reader. Feel at ease, at peace. “Peace on Earth and good will toward men,” as the angels sang to the shepherds at Bethlehem. To get that precious feeling, you must back away from anything and everything that’s been politicized. Make all things private, as they were before that noxious nonsense that’s called The State started throwing its weight around.

     Even if you can only do so for yourself, think and act as if no such lunacy as some people ordering others around (and jailing or killing them for disobedience) had ever arisen among us.

---

     Ten years ago, I wrote:

     Virtually every op-ed writer currently blathering has chosen to align himself with some political ideology. Virtually all such persons routinely cheerlead for one or the other of the two major political parties. They might well be sincere in their convictions. They might well be benevolently inclined toward the rest of us: they might sincerely believe that the political agendas they promote and support would be for the best, and that once they’re in place, we would all be as happy as kings.
     It doesn’t matter. They’re pushing politics – the pursuit of power over others – as the cure for everything that ails us. Even those who argue solely for the repeal of this or that oppressive law are pushing politics.

     I was echoing another brilliant thinker and writer:

     This must be said: There are too many "great" men in the world — legislators, organizers, do-gooders, leaders of the people, fathers of nations, and so on, and so on. Too many persons place themselves above mankind; they make a career of organizing it, patronizing it, and ruling it.
     Now someone will say: "You yourself are doing this very thing."
     True. But it must be admitted that I act in an entirely different sense; if I have joined the ranks of the reformers, it is solely for the purpose of persuading them to leave people alone. I do not look upon people as Vancauson looked upon his automaton. Rather, just as the physiologist accepts the human body as it is, so do I accept people as they are. I desire only to study and admire.

     “Great men.” Have you reflected on the inanity of that phrase lately? What qualifies a man as “great?” Is it personal achievement, or is it the ascent to political power? Time was, we honored the first sort; we endured the second, as men have done since States first emerged to bedevil us. Today it’s rather the reverse.

     George Herron had something to say about that:

     The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of power and to those over whom it is exercised. And the great man of the future, in distinction from the great man of the past, is he who will seek to create power in people, and not gain power over them. The great man of the future is he who will refuse to be great at all, in the historic sense; he is the man who will literally lose himself, who will altogether diffuse himself in the life of humanity.

     That is greatness. That is humility: the great and underappreciated Christian virtue. It’s required that a man be humble, if he is to submit himself to the will of God. And damned near no one for whom the trumpets sound their fanfares exemplifies or exercises it.

     I shan’t claim to be an exemplar of humility. I know better. My tendency to think myself superior to others has caused me most of the grief I’ve known. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate its importance; rather the reverse. It’s one of the hardest-learned of all my lessons.

     Paradoxically, for Smith to tell Jones to “be humble” usually has the opposite effect. It produces anger, even fury. Imagine telling any of today’s “great men” that they should be humble. What sort of response would you expect? “Guards! Throw this person down the steps. Make it hurt.”

     Time was, it was actually a crime to tell a “great man” to be humble. It was called lèse-majesté. It could get the offender summarily beheaded. Don’t take my word for it; look it up. Look into the history of monarchy; you’ll find it.

     Tells you something about the relationship of humility to “greatness,” doesn’t it?

     Draw the BLEEP!ing moral.

---

     I’ve known a genuinely great man. He was my friend, for a time. He’s passed away, one of the most painful losses of my life... and indeed, one of the greatest recent losses of this world, though the world be unaware of it. Yet his greatness went unrecognized by nearly everyone. That’s as he would have wanted it, too.

     He didn’t care what others were doing. He didn’t care what others said or thought. He simply lived, loved, worked, and created. He made a specialty out of the employment of “obsolete” technologies to build useful, even innovative things. He joked that his mantra should be “There has to be a harder way to do this.” Really, I attach more importance to something else he said once:

     “I have my wife and my mountain. What else does anyone need?”

     As far as I know, he had no political involvements, beyond talking to me – and I’ve often regretted the time we wasted on political subjects. He wanted nothing but to create, to build, and to be left alone with the woman he loved and the few men he held as friends. By dint of great intellect, great imagination, and great labors, he got his wish.

---

     I could go on, but I’ll spare you. I’d originally had a specific example in mind of how the politicization of some phenomenon – i.e., turning it into an “issue” that requires mass approval or disapproval – destroys our peace, but I’m worn out. I suppose I’m sparing myself, too.

     I wish you peace. It’s rare and precious today, like freedom. But they’re complementary assets; each, once achieved, brings the other. Their common prerequisite is the abjuration of all political involvement, however well-intended. The implications are for you to draw.

     Happy Hallowe’en. Feel free to leave the candy corn for me. I like it.