Liberty's Torch: conscience

Showing posts with label conscience. Show all posts

Friday, October 2, 2020

Concerning Freedom Of Conscience

“Ideas do not target police officers. Ideas do not burn down buildings, ideas do not kill innocent Americans. Organizations do.” -- Kayleigh McEnany

Mine is a minor voice in the grand scheme of things. Liberty’s Torch doesn’t have the degree of influence over opinion that the more popular and better-known sites possess. Sometimes I grouse over that, as I have some of the very best and smartest writers on the Web as Co-Contributors. But at other times I reflect upon the advantages to being a minor voice. One of them is freedom from the concerns of the big sites: over revenues, over “eyeballs,” and over the possibility of marginalization for having said something “controversial”...or outrightly condemned.

Today I’m going to exploit that freedom. I’m going to tell you something you probably already know – indeed, I’d be astonished at a Gentle Reader who doesn’t know it – but are afraid to say, perhaps even “in your cups” and among persons you know believe the same things as you. Then I’m going to challenge you to refute it if you can.

But first, “a few words from our sponsor:” i.e., the one and only freedom that cannot, by its very nature, be taken from you: the freedom to believe what you wish, a.k.a. freedom of conscience.

Not even Winston Smith could be reaved of his freedom of conscience:

     Down in the street the wind flapped the torn poster to and fro, and the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. The sacred principles of Ingsoc. Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever? Like an answer, the three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him:
     WAR IS PEACE
     FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
     IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
     He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Only in the recesses of the mind is a man truly free of all constraint. Neither the weight of the law, nor the opprobrium of “society,” nor the relentless, brutal drumbeat of aversive conditioning ceaselessly administered by a host of authority figures can reach one’s inner sanctum. Despite the “best” efforts of parents, spouses, occupational superiors, clergymen, popular opinion-mongers, and others, each of us is free to believe what he prefers to believe. Else there would be no psychoses, no delusions, and no fantasies that men can be made other than God has made us.

As Winston knew well and Americans are discovering, it’s when one expresses one’s beliefs where others can hear them that trouble can set in. For there are forces determined to establish certain beliefs, certain convictions, and the evidence that leads a rational mind to them as “unthinkable,” utterly and permanently “beyond the pale,” deserving of nothing but censure – and erasure. It has always been that way, for as far back as recorded human history reaches.

Trust a Christian to know that. The first martyrs for conscience were ours.

This nation has long been free from officially imposed censorship, at least at the federal level. (Originally, the guarantees in the First Amendment were held to apply solely to the federal government; the state governments were not bound by them.) That hasn’t kept “unofficial” censors from attempting to silence convictions they deem “unthinkable.” There have been many such. There are instances functioning among us today.

Today, certain opinions and convictions, virtually wherever and whenever they’re expressed, are immediately assailed by today’s aspiring censors – not as disproven or refutable, but as unfit for consumption by decent persons. Yet among those convictions are several that have been widely held in the past – including the recent past – and were supported and promulgated by the most prominent of men. Theodore Roosevelt was of the opinion that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Abraham Lincoln believed absolutely in the superiority of the white race. If Leviticus faithfully transcribed the statements of Moses, then that great figure believed that both adultery and homosexuality should be punished with death. And of course Aristotle, the founder of Western logical thought, held that some men were born to be slaves.

I could go on in that vein for many more paragraphs, but I believe the central point is established:

Convictions widely condemned today were once deemed “obvious” by persons of immense stature and historical importance.

Perhaps today’s would-be censors really are morally and / or intellectually superior to the titans of yesteryear. But perhaps they’re merely persons with different premises. As you know, it’s essentially impossible to argue a man out of his premises – and when his opinions are his premises, you can forget arguing him out of his opinions, as well.

I’ve said many things at many times that today’s moralist-censors would immediately condemn. A compact summary can be found here. Many on the Left – and a few in the Right – would be happy to see me forcibly silenced. But even if they were to succeed in doing so, it wouldn’t refute the convictions I’ve expressed. It would strengthen them.

Now to the meat of today’s outrage. Have a few links:

I’m sure anyone who possesses some GoogleFu could find lots more along those lines. “He / she / they / it must condemn this / them!” It’s a principal stroke in the Left’s attempt to silence everyone except the Left’s own preferred mouthpieces. But it’s sad to see the Right taking it up, even if it’s only as a weapon in a rhetorical counteroffensive.

Are there opinions and convictions I regard as vile? Why yes, there are – and you’ve seen me say so, whether here or elsewhere. I am a proponent of political freedom and Christian ethics. I reject all propositions opposed to either of those things. But I know that nothing I could say or do would displace the belief in Islam, or Communism, or the right of one people to enslave another, from the mind of anyone passionately committed to them.

Indeed, just as with a religion, the attempt to suppress a political conviction acts upon it like a growth food: it causes its adherents to multiply.

The appropriate response to “I believe in X” where X offends your own convictions, is “Why?” But today few persons are equipped, whether rationally or abdominally, to face what typically follows.

Here’s the morning zinger:

IF “white supremacy” means whites have a right to rule other races,
THEN I reject it.
BUT:
IF it means that the white race should be credited with building Western Civilization,
THEN I embrace it.

Moreover, I maintain that the evidence for that latter proposition is copious, unambiguous, and conclusive.

Perhaps President Trump also believes this. I know many others who do, but who would never voice the conviction for fear of the consequences. It’s one of today’s “unthinkable unspeakables.” But that has no bearing whatsoever on its truth or falsity.

My freedom of conscience guarantees that I cannot be bullied out of my beliefs. Any attempt to do so will strengthen that belief while giving me a reason to seek vengeance against the bully. The consequences cannot, by the very nature of the human psyche, conduce to the profit of such a bully.

In closing: Among the other indelible truisms of human nature is that the bully is always a coward as well. The intellectual bully is an intellectual coward: afraid of those who differ with him. Why else would he seek to silence them if he can, and destroy them if he cannot? Why else would Leftists be talking about killing those of us in the Right — at least, those of us they cannot “re-educate?”

With that, I yield the floor to my Gentle Readers.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Diversions And Devotions: A Sunday Rumination

As has been the case rather often lately, I was casting about for something over which to waste a few minutes – that’s actually the subject of this piece, so keep it in mind – when I stumbled over the following video:

It’s one I’d seen before. (I’ve even embedded it before.) And as one who roundly and passionately hates “smartphones” and everything they’ve brought among us, when I first saw it, I appreciated it greatly.

Greatly...but not completely.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: I write these Ruminations principally for myself. They’re reflections on my own convictions and habits. If others get something of value out of them, I’m pleased, but first and foremost I’m speaking to myself – telling myself something I ought to have known.

I don’t have many talents. During my wage employment days I was an expert software architect and developer. At one time I was a pretty good guitarist. I fancy that I can tell a fair to middling story, when the spirit is upon me. And I make good tuna casserole, excellent tomato sauce, and a killer meatloaf.

That’s the FWP catalog. Those are all the things I can do even passably well. But I haven’t been doing any of them lately, and I’ve begun to wonder why.

“Why” mechanistically is easy to determine: I spend far too much time on diversions. Reading other writers’ stories. Watching movies and sporting events. Scanning the Web for interesting items I can write about here. And of course, writing about them here.

While I’m doing any of those things, I can’t do any of the things I do from which others might derive some value. Neither can I do any of the things that would bring me some added value. I’ve been diverted from them.

That, of course, is what diversions do. We seek them out specifically to take our minds off other things. That’s not inherently bad, but the downside to it is a good parallel to the practices of smartphone addicts.

I’m trying to come to grips with just how much diversion is good and necessary, and at what point it becomes something negative, an actual aversion to life.

The following might seem a swerve to a separate, disconnected topic. It isn’t.

I once prayed five decades of the Rosary every day. I did so while I drove to work. When I retired I managed to continue the practice for a little while. However, being at the wheel of my car, fending off the terrors of the Long Island traffic system in my most dashing style, was too closely linked to the practice. After a few weeks, the Rosary slipped off my daily agenda.

Mind you, that wasn’t something that simply had to happen. I could have kept on as I’d been doing. Hell, I could have sat in my car in the garage, hands tight upon the wheel, and perpetuated it that way...assuming that not being in danger of immediate gory death wasn’t integral to the discipline. More to the point, I knew I was allowing an important element of my prayer life to lapse.

I knew I should get back to praying the Rosary. I tried to work it back into my daily routine by scheduling it: At 11:30 AM, five decades. It didn’t work. I found too many reasons to slough it.

No, not good reasons. Diversions. There was always something else to do that pulled my thoughts away from prayer.

It was when I realized how easily – how willingly — I was being diverted from my previous course that I began to worry about myself.

Contemporary American life is rich in diversions. There are innumerable pleasurable things any of us can do with our time. Not all of them are dangerous. Not all of them are terribly expensive. But they share a characteristic: while we’re engaged in any of them, we’re not doing something else.

In truth, that’s the point of a diversion. We want to be diverted. We seek out diversions, and we immerse ourselves in them. But as Gavin McInnes notes in the video embedded above, there’s something else going on that we’re missing out on: life as lived.

There’s a lot of life to be lived. Many chores to be discharged. Many skills to be acquired or sharpened. A lot of engagement with others. Diversions deflect us from those things. Sometimes the cost is greater than we know. Sometimes its magnitude is hidden from us for a long time, after which it’s too late to correct course.

I’m still casting about for a way to get the Rosary back into my life as a regular practice. There are a few tricks left in my bag, and any one of them might do the job. But what’s become overwhelmingly obvious to me is how important it is that I be aware of when I’m allowing myself to be occupied by some frivolous, essentially meaningless diversion.

That’s all for the moment, Gentle Reader. It’s time for Mass. May God bless and keep you all.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Death Cult News

Dear Holy Father Pope Francis: Inasmuch as you’ve been, ah, rewriting quite a lot of Christian doctrine, I must ask: Is “Thou shalt not kill” still in effect? You know, still binding? Or have you decreed a bunch of exceptions? Because we’re getting some “pushback” on it:

     Canada’s Supreme Court took democracy out of the death equation by conjuring a “right” to be made dead under very broad circumstances.
     Now, pressure is starting to force religiously-affiliated medical institutions and doctors to kill.
     After a Catholic hospital refused to euthanize a patient, who apparently received inadequate pain relief in the process of transfer, calls are being made to force Catholic and other faith institutions to commit what the Church considers a cardinal sin.

Canada’s National Post reports on the keystone case:

     Ian Shearer had had enough of the pain and wanted a quick, peaceful end, his life marred by multiple afflictions.
     But the Vancouver man’s family says his last day alive became an excruciating ordeal after the Catholic-run hospital caring for him rebuffed his request for a doctor-assisted death, forcing him to transfer to another hospital.
     The combination of the cross-town trip and inadequate pain control left Shearer, 84, in agony through most of his final hours, says daughter Jan Lackie....
     Shearer’s experience at St. Paul’s Hospital highlights one of the thorniest issues concerning assisted death: the decision of most faith-based — but taxpayer-funded — health-care facilities to play no part in a practice made legal by the Supreme Court of Canada and federal legislation.
     [Emphasis added by FWP.]

When the State pays the fiddler, the State calls the tune. That’s been established as “case law,” both in Canada and in the U.S., in a variety of settings. And so, in Canada’s “single payer” medical-care environment, the Canadian federal government can, if it so chooses, impose a legal requirement that Catholic hospitals kill its patients on request.

The next question should be “On whose request?” What about patients who are, temporarily or otherwise, non compos mentis? And what about the “quality of life” opinions of governmental medical-care rationing commissions? To this point no one has addressed it openly, but you may be sure that the death cultists have been mulling it over.

The Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch are surely bright and alert enough to see where this is headed. Why, a few of you are even Canadians, so I shan’t insult your intelligence by pressing it further. But American readers still uncertain about their choices in the upcoming election have some extra thinking to do.

Just now, the Democrats in Congress are agitating for the transformation of the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” a rolling disaster designed to be politically unworkable and financially unaffordable from the very first, into a Canadian-style single-payer system. Some of the advocates for such a system have even called for Medicare and Medicaid to be “integrated” into it, creating a single, no-escape system in which all life-or-death decisions would come under the purview of the federal government. And Hillary Rodham “I didn’t send or receive classified material on my gee-whiz / look-Ma homebrewed email server and anyway what difference at this point does it make?” Clinton is in favor of exactly that, as she established in 1993.

Still think installing Donald Trump in the Oval Office is “too big a risk?” Think it over. Your life could depend on the answer. As for His Holiness’s opinion, I’ll let you know when he replies.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Endorsements, Conscience, And Political Campaigns

There’s been a lot of noise over Senator Ted Cruz’s speech of yesterday at the Republican National Convention. Much of the noise has been to the effect that Cruz “broke his promise to endorse the nominee.” But look what I found!

I didn’t hear the word “endorse.” I heard the word support, which is not the same. One may support a candidate without granting him an endorsement. An endorsement is a positive affirmation of quality and fitness; in contrast, one may support the least of the evils, as Ann Coulter did in supporting Hillary Clinton over John McCain in 2008.

Cruz made an impassioned plea for voters to “vote your conscience.” He exhorted them to vote, up and down the ticket, for candidates they can trust to defend freedom and the Constitution. Absolutely nothing in that strikes me as objectionable...because nothing about it is to any slightest degree different from what I would do – what I always do.

Republican Party unity is at a low ebb. Many Republican diehards are unhappy about that, feeling as they do that the most important thing, the thing to be striven for at all costs, is to elect Republicans. They sense a threat from the Libertarian ticket, which is currently polling at about 10% and could be the deciding factor in November. Other minor parties could also have a disproportionate effect on the outcome, though the likelihood is considerably less.

But will Republicans raised to federal offices improve on the performances of those there already? Some say yes, once there’s a Republican in the White House. But the matter admits of some doubt.

Others have attacked Cruz personally as somehow insincere in his exhortations to “vote your conscience” and to vote for pro-freedom, pro-Constitution candidates. Why? Has he been an insincere promoter and defender of those things in the Senate? Doesn’t his record there entitle him to the benefit of the doubt?

Political campaigns are becoming affairs where those of decent sensibilities refuse to go. No one is tolerant of a difference of opinion any longer. No one is willing to grant the other person’s sincerity or integrity. That can’t be good for the country.

Worse, not only has the political polarization of America divided Left from Right with an impenetrable wall; it’s clearly invaded the GOP as well, further reducing the possibility of a restoration of Constitutional government. This is not a state of affairs that bodes well for the preservation of any particle of our badly battered freedoms...and it casts a shadow over the candidate best known for his personal aspersions upon his competitors.

I shall echo Senator Cruz:

Vote your conscience...
if you vote at all.

UPDATE: Hearken to the esteemed Ace of Spades to much the same effect.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Constitutional Math

Oops! Sounds like it was a "Shooting & Cartooning" contest.

My husband and I had the "interesting" fortune of attending Pamela Geller's Mohammed Cartoon event in Garland, Texas, Sunday night, May 3rd, 2015. As you probably know, Bosch Fawstin was the double prize winner, making my entry a loser. (No worries, though, I'm already planning next year's entry and it's sure to be a winner.)

It was a very long night, with no physical injuries to either of us, just some stretching of our patience (towards its limits). Monday afternoon, after the long trip back to Garland, we retrieved our vehicle. Immediately we rushed back towards D/FW airport to get my husband off on a business trip he wasn't actually sure he could complete until finally stepping into the terminal in the nick of time.

Once I got back home - alone - it all hit me fairly hard, but in a way that quite surprised me. I was what I can only describe as despondent. I took a couple of days, during which I talked to my husband of course, but only briefly, after all he was "soldiering on" so I needed to as well.

But as my mood refused to budge I wondered, "Where online might I find people who've been in stressful situations, events that didn't go the way they'd planned...yet they'd made it through a little bit wiser for it?" And so I sought and recieved some timely advice from readers over at westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com.

I got my thoughts on the totality of Sunday's events together only after letting those readers' good advice sink in. I put it in a video for my YouTube channel which is as much confession as it may be advice for others. YouTube is where I keep up with many of the issues I'm interested in and so it's a natural place for me to share a lot of my "deeper thoughts" these days (sometimes attempting a tounge-in-cheek delivery style). I hope you'll let me know what you think of my thinking.

Monday, September 29, 2014

Threats? Or Action?

Reflect well on this battle cry from Robert P. George:

Last May, one of the most influential conservative and religious intellectual leaders in America gave a somber speech in Washington, declaring it to be “Good Friday in America for Christians.” In this exclusive two part video interview, Princeton’s Robert P. George admitted, “that was a hard speech to give.”
“Christians, and those rejecting the me-generation liberal dogma of ‘if it feels good do it,’ are no longer tolerable by the intellectual and cultural elite,” says George, 59, director of the James Madison program at Princeton University. Citing the political witch hunt that forced Brendan Eich’s departure as CEO of Mozilla for a small contribution to a conservative political cause, George said politically correct mobs “threaten us with consequences if we refuse to call what is good evil, and what is evil, good. They command us to conform our thinking to their orthodoxy, or else say nothing at all.”
Yet instead of accepting this liberal cultural dominance, George offers a call to arms with practical advice for the embattled faithful. Encouraging conservatives to model themselves off the early civil rights leaders who clung to noble bedrock free speech principles liberals claim to embrace today, George says “our first and most effective move is to hold these elites to their principles.”

I have only one quibble with Professor George's assessment: the PC crowd waving torches and pitchforks at us and the political elite that benefit from their madness are no longer threatening; they're acting -- ruthlessly and without remorse -- to chain us down to their dogmas, silenced and unable to escape.

They're acting because we made the fatal mistake of "compromising" with them through self-censorship to avoid "offending" anyone. But note who isn't afraid of "offending" whom, and never has been. Our pusillanimity emboldened them sufficiently to take up legal and political cudgels and have at us.

Ahhh, one-way "tolerance." Ain't it wonderful?

It really doesn't matter what your personal convictions are about sin. Christians and non-Christians differ on such things. Indeed, Christians tend to differ with one another, even intra-denominationally. Inasmuch as religious convictions are and will forever remain a wholly personal matter, it would be as wrong for us to impose our views on those who disagree as is the contemporary reverse. Yet we refrain from standing up for ourselves and one another out of...what? Fear of disapproval by persons whose behavior we deplore?

No. Just as in the post below, the magic word was and remains "compromise." Except in this particular case, the "compromise" went as follows: "You folks agree to accept our deviances in every way, and we'll agree not to prosecute you for 'discrimination.'" Until the Left had command of the nation's legal and regulatory mechanisms and could act against us penally, we could at least speak our minds and follow our consciences in our private actions. "Anti-discrimination" laws and the vicious regulatory bureaucracies that enforce them have made it hazardous even to voice a complaint to one another.

All rights fall dead when the banner of "discrimination" is waved at them, including the right of freedom of expression.

I think it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, generally no friend to freedom, who wrote that real freedom of expression must include "freedom for the thought we hate." If that isn't obvious to you, the problem lies with you, not with the concept of freedom. A "freedom" that ceases as soon as someone declares himself "offended" or "discriminated against" is just a cosmetic applied to totalitarianism: "You want to remain free? Just agree with us in all things and do exactly as we say." The Soviets and Red Chinese honor that sort of "freedom."

Freedom -- political freedom, the guarantee against a State-imposed penalty for saying or doing as you please -- must include all the following, without exception:

Freedom of thought and conscience;
Absolute rights to control one's own body;
Freedom of expression, regardless of medium;
Freedom to acquire and retain any item of any description;
Freedom in economic matters: i.e., in production and commerce;
Freedom to choose one's own associates, including for economic purposes;
Freedom of travel through both unowned and "public" lands and thoroughfares;

...with the sole limitation that one must not inflict objective damage upon others in the enjoyment of one's freedom. "Offense" is not objective damage; neither is "discrimination." Yet these are the shillelaghs that have been used to browbeat us out of virtually all the freedom our great grandparents enjoyed.

There cannot be a "right" to demand that to which you have no right. That includes any demand that others forgo the exercise of their rights. But this is the regime under which we suffer today.

Professor George has given us our marching orders. Unfortunately, given the current legal and political milieu, those of us who rally to his banner are likely to take casualties: We will be reviled -- and "discriminated" against -- at the very least. But if you genuinely believe in freedom -- the right to do as you damned well please as long as you refrain from harming others -- that's not a sufficient reason not to march.

The marshaling area is freedom of expression. From there, all else won't necessarily follow, but we cannot have any of our other freedoms back until we insist on this one.

Offend.
Joyously and unabashedly.
Be braced for nasty consequences.
This wont be a bloodless campaign.
Do it anyway.

And pray.

Saturday, May 17, 2014

An Instructive Throwaway

Good morning, Gentle Reader. What with all the Sturm und Drang about how those eeeevil heartless Republicans are trying to starve low-skills types to death by opposing an increase in the federally mandated minimum wage, it tickled me considerably to encounter this Instapundit squib, which was almost certainly meant for no purpose but entertainment.

Please sift through the comments to that post. They confirm my overarching thesis that the principal malaise of American society is that we've got too much time on our hands. I know that puts me at odds with all the Anything Authorities on the talk shows, who all swear that we're getting to be too busy and too regimented to live "human lives," but so be it. When so many of Professor Reynolds's readers display that much, ah, topically focused erudition, it leads to certain inferences about how much of their time they've devoted to reading comic books and watching Saturday morning cartoons. The conclusion follows naturally.

All the same, even a bit of fluff such as that one can teach us something. I recall, back in my own younger days, learning that:

Superman came about as a character during the Great Depression, somewhat before the onset of World War II;
A significant number of readers demanded to know why Superman didn't participate in the war -- on the side of the Allies, of course;
The editors of DC Comics replied that their superhero believed the Allies could and should win the war through their own efforts, and that he could do better service to "truth, justice, and the American way" on the home front.

It gave me a chuckle even back then. A comic-book character is supposed to participate in a real-world war? Suppose the war didn't eventuate as the comics would have it? What would that have done to the franchise? C'mon, boys and girls: this is just cheap, colorful, escapist entertainment!

(Yes, I was about this dour and cynical even as a ten-year-old, but I'll bet you'd already guessed that. Curmudgeons Emeriti don't spring full grown from the brow of Zeus, after all.)

Indeed, one of the inexorable constraints upon writers such as myself, who are given to creating larger-than-life heroes and villains, is the requirement that such figures be kept well away from real-world events. For one thing, you run the risk of polluting your tales with contradictions drawn from those events. For another, escapism must allow the reader to escape. But that's tangential at best to my larger point today.

A great many of my fiction readers, the preponderance of them female, have written to express extravagant emotions toward two of my characters: Louis Redmond and Armand Morelon. (A somewhat smaller number of readers, mostly male, have expressed equally extravagant though considerably less refined sentiments about Christine D'Alessandro, Althea Morelon, and Helen Leverrier and Martine Arnault, but we'll let that pass for the moment.) In a way that's confirmation that I did what I'd set out to do: to create figures that embody ideals we can and should aspire to attain, even if their fictional embodiments are "too good to be true." People need heroes, and the need is greatest at those times when the darkness seems to be closing in around us, every man for himself, his hand raised against his neighbor out of sheer survival instinct.

The superhero phenomenon is like that. Superman was engendered, in a sense, out of the desperation of the Great Depression. When it seems that ordinary human powers are insufficient to reverse the tide of destruction, we're most prone to imagining, and wishing for, the superhuman to arrive and save us from ourselves. It can provide a species of relief and refreshment that's not available from other kinds of fiction. Yet there are dangers in such imaginings. If we invest too deeply in them, they can blind us to the real-world necessity to act for ourselves, from the dictates of our consciences and according to our best judgment. For there are no superheroes. Neither Superman nor Thor nor any of the others loiters just beyond the margin of sight, awaiting the perfect moment to intervene.

All we have are men: fractious, fallible, corruptible men. Men can achieve mightily, no doubt about it. But we can also screw up mightily, as history tells us we've done repeatedly for six thousand years at the very least.

The Green Lantern Corps will not arrive in the nick of time to thwart Islam, or political evil, or the MERS virus. We're on our own, naked before the laws of Nature and the consequences our screwups entail.

This is a dark time, for the United States and the world generally. Totalitarianism of several forms is on the march. The world economy has stumbled and fallen, and might not be able to get up. The races seem to have declared war against one another. Individuals' ethics are less trustworthy than they've been for many years. Americans are more fearful than we've been for a century or more.

The swelling popularity of superheroes correlates perfectly with the rise of those other conditions. It's not all just children's fantasies; quite a number of nominal adults are hooked on them, too.

Yes, we need heroes. But we need to live in reality as well. And reality has laws that not even a superhero could break. Which brings me back to the Instapundit post.

Superman, as postulated by his creators, is so strong that he can make coal into diamonds with his bare hands. So why doesn't he do a lot of that, distribute the results, and thus solve the problem of poverty? There's plenty of coal, isn't there?

You understand why he couldn't achieve any such thing, don't you? Neither could he do so by canvassing the galaxy for all the gold in existence, bringing it back to Earth, and distributing it equitably.

Superman could conceivably win any war single-handed...as long as the enemy could be denied access to Kryptonite, of course. The same could be said of several other superhero characters. But they won't be doing any such thing, the ardent wishes of the Ukrainians notwithstanding.

We're stuck with ourselves, and with one another.

"There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself." -- Albert Jay Nock.

When I wrote about conscience a couple of days back, I was in one of the grimmest moods I've ever endured. I've been personally blessed in many ways. A lifetime of thought, study, work, and saving have put me and mine in a position many other families would envy. Yet we are just as vulnerable as anyone else. The least of the tentacles of the darkness enveloping Mankind could dash our little fortress to flinders. I'm all too aware that no man is an island -- that developments well beyond my power to countervail could sweep everything I've achieved into the abyss.

But that's why I wrote that essay:

We are too concerned with what others are doing or not doing, and not concerned enough with what we can do, as individuals and voluntarily assembled groups.

That, in a nutshell, is why the tempers of the politically engaged are so strained, and why such elevated emotions dominate public discourse. We seek to lasso the forces the threaten us and rein them in, and the preponderance of them appear to be political in nature. But what are the limits of political power? What if a Stephen Graham Sumner were to lead a libertarian-conservative tide throughout the nation -- hell, make it the whole world, as long as we're fantasizing -- and free us of Obamunism, Islam, Communism, Eurosocialism, race hatred, welfarism, cronyism, and all the rest of the evils against which we regularly rail here at Liberty's Torch and at many other sites? What if the bells of freedom were to ring worldwide, all oppression and political malice forever extinguished? What then?

You would still need to earn a living.
You would still bear responsibilities for your dependents.
You would still have to contrive defenses against predators, human and otherwise.
You would still grow weaker and wearier with the passage of time, eventually becoming useless.
And you would still depend upon others to produce the goods and services you can't produce for yourself.

Dr. Strange can do nothing about it.

It's long past time we stopped awaiting the arrival of a superhero, whether four-colored or political, who'll save us from ourselves, and started listening attentively to the "still, small voice."

All we have are ourselves and one another.
Politicians cannot augment that.
Use what God has given you.
Life is terrifyingly short.
Start now.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

The Supremacy Of Conscience

A somewhat odd title for a Liberty's Torch article, you say? Well, yes. But I write about what's uppermost in my thoughts, and that's what occupies the top spot today. Please bear with me as I develop some ideas you're less likely to see elsewhere in the DextroSphere.

There are few things of which any man, myself included, can be perfectly certain. Indeed, "perfectly" isn't the right word, but I could find no better one. Say rather that there are few things in which a man can afford to invest so much confidence that he needn't bother to search for counter-evidence of them.

One of those things is the conscience.

Even a wholly untutored individual -- raised by wolves? -- will possess a sense for right and wrong. That sense is trustworthy. Even when it proves impossible to articulate the conscience's decrees, if followed it will steer you down the correct path.

(Some claim that the conscience needs to be "formed" before it becomes trustworthy, but to me that sounds like a denial of the goodness of the God who made us. He doesn't make garbage -- and besides, who among us is qualified to do such "forming," and who "formed" him? A charming infinite regress, no? It sounds to me like an attempt to assert an authority that springs from nothing or close to it.)

We sometimes hear of persons who appear devoid of conscience, for whom the diagnostic term sociopath was coined. I've come to believe that the sociopath, too, has a conscience, but that he's succeeded in deafening himself internally to what his conscience is trying to tell him. After all, we ordinary types do it on occasion, so why should it be thought impossible that a "dedicated" sort might make such deafness permanent? It seems far more plausible than that a man might be born with no ability to perceive nature and its laws.

"Let your conscience be your guide" is one of the oldest of civilization's maxims. If taken literally, it leads to some interesting conclusions.

In analyzing any human institution, I start from a few simple premises:

Institutions are human artifacts.
Men build things to serve a purpose.
Therefore, every institution is intended to serve some purpose.
However, tightly bound to every purpose is a set of constraints:
- What methods of achieving the purpose are permissible;
- The maximum price, in whatever terms, that achieving the purpose is worth.
An institution that fails of its purpose, or exceeds the maximum price that purpose may command, should and must be corrected.
An institution that successfully resists correction may rightfully be destroyed.

...to which it seems only reasonable to me to add the following candidates:

Repeated failures to build an institution for a specific purpose suggest with increasing emphasis that no institution can do so at an acceptable cost.

And:

Persons who oppose some specific purpose will work to deflect, corrupt, or destroy whatever institutions serve it effectively.

These are metaphysical precepts. They precede and envelop all concrete applications of human imagination and artifice. If Man has a nature -- and you may rest assured that he does -- they cannot be wrong.

However, they can be ignored or dismissed...and they often are.

The institution of marriage developed to protect us from our weaknesses. The marital promise of fidelity and constancy is intended to protect vulnerable women and minor children from abandonment and abuse, and men from faithless exploitation and obligations they never agreed to accept. If marriage should fail to serve those purposes, or if the price should rise unacceptably high, marriage will cease to exist, de facto if not de jure.

I contend that marriage is expiring as we watch.

When marriage was regarded as an institution mediated and enforced by one's community, as is proper, it worked very well. It was very difficult for a faithless spouse to hide his transgressions from his neighbors -- and equally difficult to escape the penalties for them. Granted that I speak here of a time when one lived essentially one's whole life within the community of one's birth, but the principle has not expired. To serve its proper purposes, marriage must include the promise of fidelity and constancy, it must be enforced by those who are best positioned to know the married couple, and it must be free of external meddling by irresponsible busybodies, including governments.

Conversely, there's no point to marriage if it's severed from its purposes, which renders the cries for "marriage equality" -- i.e., same-sex marriage -- ridiculous in the extreme.

How high a price are we willing to pay to have marriage's purposes served? Plainly, there are limits. We're not willing to execute adulterers or women who deny sex to their husbands. Neither are we willing to sacrifice all familial privacy. (Admittedly, in medieval times those statements were questionable at best.) But we are willing to endure certain discomforts, including stoic tolerance of the frictions that have always arisen among faithfully married couples.

At least, we were willing, once upon a time.

Owing to the extraordinary hostility of various groups to marriage as it arose and was traditionally practiced, and the willingness of governments to stick their thumbs into the stew, marriage as an institution is near to extinction. Its promises are no longer enforceable. The potential penalties for failing at marriage are both asymmetric and draconian. Moreover, men have come to realize this. Women, including many women who've cheered the very developments against which men are rebelling, are lamenting the "marriage strike" that has resulted.

It was all foreseeable. It should have been foreseen. Some did foresee it, and many thereof spoke and wrote about it. But no one troubled to countervail it until the rot reached a terminal stage.

Natural Law 1, Wishful Thinking 0.

Because of this book, this book, and this book, and in a few cases because of this book as well, quite a number of readers have written to ask whether I believe that government is inherently evil. For a while I resisted those inquiries. They made it seem that there was something "off" about my thinking on political matters.

I eventually decided that what was "off" was my appreciation for the dynamics of political power and how they operate over time.

Yes, government is evil. There is no imaginable moral rationale under which some may assume the power of life and death over others. But government is also inevitable, at least from a certain perspective:

Any group ready, willing, and able to impose its will on an individual or other groups by force constitutes a government for the duration of those conditions.

Yes, you read that correctly. A lynch mob, if not effectively opposed by some other force, constitutes an ad hoc government. Moreover, no matter how large, how organized, nor how constituted, no government has any greater moral warrant than a lynch mob.

What a particular government does about a particular event at a particular time might well be universally approved. Indeed, it might well be right and necessary. But we could say the very same thing about a lynch mob that seizes upon a murderer and hangs him, at least if his commission of the murder was sufficiently far beyond doubt. The justice of the act reposes in the act and its enveloping context, not in who or what acts upon it.

The largest and bitterest of our modern totems, "democracy," is a con job, a public-relations attempt to blind us to the inescapable facts about governments: they are all corrupt. The occasions on which they administer genuine justice are minuscule in number compared to the occasions on which they inflict grievous injustices upon men -- and they strive to hide behind one of the oldest and most pernicious of all maxims: Vox populi, vox Dei. "The voice of the people is the voice of God."

"Vox populi, vox Dei" is bad law.
It's even worse as religion.
And it's terrible Latin.

Yet we persist in erecting governments, somehow persuading ourselves that we've learned all the necessary lessons from the failures of six thousand years of human history, saying to one another that "this time it will be different."

What was that Einstein quote about insanity again?

The oldest formal institution of all is the church. Not any particular church, but the concept of an organization formed to promote, and in some cases to enforce, the acceptance of a religious creed and its associated code of conduct. There have been many churches throughout human history, and all have shared certain characteristics:

The creed was formalized by a clergy that sprang from some isolated event and thereafter became self-perpetuating.
The clergy asserted authority over the creed and the code of conduct, which authority was eventually extended to encompass the privilege of modifying either or both.
Lay members of the church are encouraged to exalt the clergy above themselves, not merely as authorities but also as paragons worthy of emulation.

Let's pass over matters such as the plausibility of the creed, the ethical quality of the code of conduct, and whether the clergy continues to deserve the elevated respect it tends to receive from the church's lay members. The institution exists to serve a purpose, as do all institutions. What, then, becomes of a church that effectively abandons its purpose -- that is, a church that ceases to promulgate its creed and exhort its members to adhere to its code of conduct as those things were originally formulated?

A church that metamorphoses in that way might persist for a considerable time. But it has ceased to be the church that it was. It has become an institution of some other kind, perhaps one whose sole purpose is its own continuation. In the most terrible cases, a church that started with a wholesome creed and ethos becomes an instrument for the salving of guilty consciences, or worse, the forcible oppression of dissidents.

Is it imaginable that God, Who equipped each of us with a conscience, would approve?

I begin to feel that an apology might be appropriate here. These are frightening ideas to entertain, whose implications are awful to contemplate, and here I am ladling them out to my Gentle Readers in place of the usual semi-harmless political drivel for which Liberty's Torch is best known. All I can say in my defense is that they're on my mind, and I can't write about anything except what's uppermost in my thoughts.

Perhaps we should have a nice, anesthetic quote:

A blade which is designed both to shave and to carve, will certainly not shave so well as a razor or carve so well as a carving-knife. An academy of painting, which should also be a bank, would in all probability exhibit very bad pictures and discount very bad bills. A gas company, which should also be an infant-school society, would, we apprehend, light the streets ill and teach the children ill. -- Herbert Spencer, "Over-Legislation"

Many of the failures of Man's institutions do arise from "mission creep," as Spencer pointed out in the above. But mission creep isn't a primary consideration in institutional design; it's a consequence of the desire for power and prestige that inheres in those who rise to authority within institutions. It can be thwarted from within, though it seldom is, or from without, by disaffiliation and destruction.

When institutions go bad, the ultimate blame lies with those who saw the rot first take hold but ignored their consciences' commands to do something to thwart it. For conscience is supreme. It trumps the dictates of law, the decrees of tradition, and the currents of fashion, always and everywhere.

Yet the great majority of Man's institutions, in this year of Our Lord 2014, are either wholly and irredeemably corrupt or failing before our eyes. And the great majority of us are sitting quite still, content to watch from the sidelines as our political, social, and moral decay marches on. Believing against all good sense that we might yet be spared the consequences. Stubbornly resistant to the dictates of our consciences, perhaps in the hope that they will cease once and for to torment us.

What purpose do we serve in sitting so still, Gentle Reader?

Forgive me.