The Best We Can

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I sense that this will be a special day, here at the Fortress. Unusually for these latter years, there are no irritating home-maintenance issues to labor over or spend on. The routine chores have all been addressed; nothing lingers. We have adequate supplies of everything that should be kept in stock. And – thank You, God – there’s no customer-assembled furniture to build or fix.

     It’s that rarest of all jewels, a completely free day!

     So I thought I might talk about ideology.

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     The word ideology has an irritating etymology. Given its roots, it “should” mean “the study of ideas.” But of course, it doesn’t. Rather, it’s a categorizing term that’s used to answer questions such as “What is Marxism?” or “What is Islam?”

     Here’s what the nice folks at Merriam-Webster have to say about ideology:

     Ideology has been in use in English since the end of the 18th century and is one of the few words whose coiner we can identify. The French writer A. L. C. Destutt de Tracy proposed it as a term to designate the “science of ideas,” and in that sense the word was quickly borrowed into English. Though ideology originated as a serious philosophical term, within a few decades it took on connotations of impracticality thanks to Napoleon, who used it in a derisive manner. Such connotations are still present in some contexts, but the word today is largely used neutrally, most often to refer to a systematic body of concepts, and especially to the set of ideas and beliefs held by a particular group or political party.

     Several political stances are routinely referred to as ideologies. Others tend to avert that categorization, though the reasons are often unclear. For example, while Marxism is called an ideology, capitalism doesn’t wear that label. Libertarianism, which is a relatively systematized ideology focused on freedom, does bear the label.

     Regardless of what ideas or attitudes we may discuss, and whether or not they qualify as ideologies, one set of questions stands above all others. For any Idea X:

1. What are Idea X’s goals?
2. Has it ever achieved them?
3. If so, what are its requirements?

     Every idea that aims at achieving some goal will have requirements: a set of conditions that must be met for that idea, when put into practice, to have a chance of success. Absent those conditions, the idea will fail, or will be irrelevant.

     Those conditions are called the idea’s domain of applicability. Within its domain, the idea will be effective. It will work, given some expenditure of time, money, and effort. Outside its domain, the idea is irrelevant, if not destructive.

     One of the best examples of the importance of such a domain is the nuclear family. A family cannot be operated along capitalist lines. Demanding that minor children pay for what they need is pure madness; so also with a dependent housewife. The breadwinner must practice a kind of Marxism within the family: “To each according to his needs.” Else the thing flies apart, with much destruction and sorrow.

     But when a nation-state tries to apply Marxian socialism nationwide, poverty and oppression follow. You cannot bind millions of people to one another by the bonds of love and mutual responsibility that occur within a (healthy) family. The nation-state is outside Marxism’s domain.

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     To limit the destructive potential of ideology – don’t kid yourself; your ideology can be just as destructive as any other – we must illuminate and emphasize the concept of domain of applicability. Of course, that demands that we put in the effort required to understand why Idea X succeeds in this case but not that one, and why Idea Y, which fails in the former case, succeeds brilliantly in the latter. And that demands that we be unsparing of ourselves and others in asking “What are you trying to achieve?” and “How will you know when you’ve succeeded or failed?”

     The great Thomas Sowell has proposed three questions for us in the Right to put to those on the Left when one of their proposals comes up for discussion:

1. Compared to what?
2. At what cost?
3. What hard evidence do you have?

     Sharp questions such as those clarify an idea’s proper domain of application. They can put an end to a lot of nonsense, especially the sort of starry-eyed Utopianism that propels so many fanatical evangelists. Mind you, I’m not talking here about “proving” or “disproving” particular ideologies. I merely seek to limit their power to cloud men’s minds. Proof and disproof have their own requirements, none of which are found in common discourse about ideologies and their implementations.

     We can only do the best we can.

Aiming To Misbehave

     If you enjoyed the greatly loved and much lamented television series Firefly, you probably saw the movie spinoff, Serenity, in which protagonist / tramp freighter captain Mal Reynolds utters the piercing line that I cribbed for the title of this tirade:

     Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people...better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave.

     Owing to the conditions Reynolds alludes to – i.e., the attempt by the system government to create a mind-control therapy that would expunge all aggression from the human psyche – he has elected to make the fateful transition from “mouse in the walls” to “open rebel.” It’s not the first time Reynolds has chosen to rebel. What makes his decision momentous is that this time around he, his ship, and his little crew will be utterly alone.

     It’s a striking cinematic depiction of courage placed in service to an ideal. But the viewer can’t easily imagine himself in Reynolds’s place; the odds against him and the Serenity are too great. We might like to imagine ourselves as heroes, but most of us, if compelled to face the reality, would probably opt out. Moral courage just isn’t that common.

     But when one has, in Kris Kristofferson’s words, “nothing left to lose,” the dynamic changes dramatically.

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     Sarah Hoyt’s most recent piece is a stunner:

     In the last few decades, in certain industries and certain fields of endeavor, it would slowly (or fast, in my case, since I’d seen the movie before) dawn on you that you weren’t going to get anywhere if your political opinions weren’t left. It became clear, hearing say editors talk, that the furthest to the left, the better — which is why some bright lads and lassies formed the “young communists club” for science fiction writers, AFTER the wall fell, and by the time it was formed not one of them under 30 — but if you believed in the free market, individual freedom, and despised the idea of benes for protected classes (even if — particularly if — you fit at least two of them) you’d better keep your opinions to yourself and pretend you were too stupid to understand politics. Because the moment you revealed your politics your career was done....

     This meant the minute you outed yourself as [not left-aligned,] as in fact, having too many principles for your own good, you were considered stupid, uncaring (racist/sexist/homophobic) AND insane. So it was easy enough to exclude you “per cause.” “Yeah, so and so is a good writer/worker, but he/she is insane.” “Difficult to work with.” “Couldn’t be part of the team.” “Isn’t googly.” (Follow that link if you have a strong stomach.)

     I’ll never forget — pre twitter — the day I voiced a mildly non-conformist opinion in an email list for female writers. I don’t know which was crazier: the public pile on, inferring things about me that my worst enemy couldn’t say, or the private panicked emails, saying “I agree with you, but…”

     There is a term for this. It’s preference falsification. And in totalitarian societies it can be so total that each individual can’t figure out that his opinions are in fact the majority and only a small minority at the top actually believes the opinions they enforce. It’s what explains Ceausescu and his equally brutal wife being beloved figures in the morning, and cooling piles of bullet-riddled meat by the afternoon. It’s also what gave us Trump’s victory.

     The above, most especially the concept of preference falsification, is important prefatory material. Virtually the entire point of the Left’s “long march through the institutions” of communication and education was to create a state of affairs in which it could keep small-government / pro-freedom individuals from knowing about one another. When every organ of thought and knowledge dissemination simultaneously screams at you that “Everybody knows / believes X,” it takes a fair degree of self-assertion to say “Well, I don’t”...even to oneself.

     But Sarah has a point to make. She tells us, first of all, that for many years she suppressed the expression of her political views. Before the Indie Revolution, it was that or go unpublished. But conditions changed – and not just in the rise of the eBook:

     It was only two things that allowed me [to] come out of the political closet — besides something that was either my subconscious or perhaps the divine applying iron-clad boot to my behind — a) the existence of indie. b) the fact that the left had gone so far they were demanding vocal endorsement. And that I couldn’t give.

     Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.

     The Left’s command of the mechanisms for preference falsification made all the pre-election polls report that Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in. The voters had other ideas.

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     Rebellion against the norms trumpeted by the elite doesn’t require a great deal of courage when the cost of conformity becomes the surrender of your core conceptions about right and wrong...your identity as a moral agent...your soul. The protests of agnostics and atheists notwithstanding, Man is demonstrably a spiritual being: i.e., one who prioritizes particular abstractions highly enough to pledge his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to their defense. Once his back is against the wall, even a case-hardened atheist would defend his ideals as of more importance than his personal well-being.

     In the political combat of our time, the Left’s central error was to think that it could raise the price of “going along” to that ultimate level. Yet it was an easy mistake to make. They’d probed with the bayonet for thirty years and had encountered nothing but mush. They were certain that what remained ahead of them was more of the same. It may have cost them any stake in American governance for decades to come; perhaps the 2018 midterms will tell us.

     By electing to rebel, we’ve made it possible to find one another. Ironically, the very mechanisms the Left has sought to dominate were the conduits that have brought and are bringing us together. And the masters of those conduits are discovering, albeit slowly, that the price of kowtowing to the Left’s demands that we be ostracized and isolated is steadily rising. It may already be greater than they’re willing to pay.

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     In politics and social dealings, nothing can be guaranteed. Things will change. Some of the changes will surely diverge from our expectations. Nevertheless, at this moment the tide is favorable to the Right and to freedom generally. You know what Shakespeare said about that:

     There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. [From Julius Caesar]

     And please read Sarah’s piece in its entirety. It’ll put a smile on your face.

Grand Ideas And Unifying Conceptions

     During my years in physics, I was mesmerized by the really “big ideas:” the attempts to arrive at grand unifications of the major physical laws. Anyone who’s progressed far in the sciences will tell you that that’s a short cut to professional irrelevance. Normal science – what Thomas Kuhn called “mopping-up operations” – is performed at the margins of already-established major theories. Grand ideas that propose to introduce wholly new fundamental concepts that unite all previous learning are the province of very few – and very few who’ve dedicated themselves to exploring such ideas are remembered as significant.

     But grand ideas have an undeniable appeal. They promise something the more common reaches of scientific investigation do not: top-down simplicity.

     A proposed grand idea entices investigators and adherents with the siren song of unlimited knowledge: a broad-spectrum ability to predict outcomes that more limited conceptions cannot equal. That’s the whole reason such ideas matter. Einsteinian general relativity didn’t merely clarify a set of minor cases in gravitation, relevant only to enormous masses you and I will never visit. Rather, it encompassed Newtonian gravitation completely, by extending the ability to predict gravitational phenomena beyond the domain in which Newtonian gravitation is accurate. In doing so, it upset quite a lot of academic applecarts, which is why Einstein received his Nobel Prize not for general relativity but for his much later work on the photoelectric effect.

     Grand ideas in the sciences are revolutionary (cf. Kuhn). Most revolutions fail of their purpose: i.e., the overthrow and replacement of the existing order. Which is why young researchers are advised to moderate their ambitions if they want to be “successful” scientists.

     But let’s not spend an entire screed on the sciences. Grand ideas are even more important in the day-to-day lives of ordinary men.

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     Grand ideas in religion, politics, economics, and general ethics have shaped the history of the world – and not by animating individual “great men,” but by energizing their followers. Consider all the following:

• Confucius’s Brazen Rule: "Repay kindness with kindness," said Confucius, "but evil with justice." Judaic thinker Hillel is recorded as enunciating a version of this rule: “What is hateful to you, do not do unto another.”
• Christ’s “Golden Rule:” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (From the Sermon on the Mount.)
• John Locke’s theory of natural individual rights.
• Adam Smith’s conception of economic freedom.
• Karl Marx’s theories of socialism and communism.

     ...and so forth. (I’ll leave contemporary “thinkers” on “ethics,” nearly all of whom are villains, to my stronger-stomached Gentle Readers to investigate, should the fit take them. It’s a nice day, and I don’t want to spoil it.)

     The most important thing about the above ideas and similar ones is their utility as simplifying constructs. Each of them permits the easy deduction of rules applicable to more specific situations. Also, because they derive from a common “ancestor” rule, the “descendant” rules exhibit consistency. Ralph Waldo Emerson and his frequently misquoted maxim notwithstanding, people value consistency greatly. We prefer to see it exhibited in the words and deeds of those, near or far, whose decisions and actions affect us.

     Which is why so many Americans have come to hate government and politicians with an incandescent fury.

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     The most powerful ideas among the grand ideas are those which are consistent with one another. This has proved to be the aspect of American thought contemporary “thinkers” and “educators” are most ardent to obscure.

     The grand idea Americans probably value most commonly is that of the rule of law: the idea that the law is superior to individual identities. Isabel Paterson considered this the cleavage idea that separates the “Society of Contract,” wherein all men are under the same binding rules, and the “Society of Status,” in which one’s identity determines which laws apply (or don’t) to him. Under such a unifying conception, a public official could not – in theory, at least – get away with behavior that would get a private citizen prosecuted. Under the implied framework for law and justice called constitutionalism, no organ of government could legitimately transgress those bounds, for a government of any sort is merely an agent – a hireling – with assigned responsibilities and delegated powers. What is illegal for a private citizen would be just as illegal for any agent of the State.

     In his 1850 manifesto The Law, Frederic Bastiat laid great emphasis on this principle:

     But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

     Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law—which may be an isolated case— is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system....

     Can the law, whose necessary sanction is force, be reasonably employed upon anything beyond securing to every one his right? I defy anyone to remove it from this circle without perverting it, and consequently turning force against right.

     Note how neatly Lockean natural rights, the rule of law, and Confucian / Christian ethics mesh. They’re entirely consistent with one another as regards the principles of secular law and justice. (Judaism comes a-cropper on the subject of the punishment of “sin” according to Mosaic / Levitical prescriptions; cf. John 8:1-11.) Note also that the convergence of those three grand ideas in the United States was the first time it had ever happened. It required the combined efforts of several geniuses, Thomas Jefferson most notable among them, which makes it small wonder that it should have taken so long.

     I’ve suggested in the past that these three ideas are like quarks: no one of them can be pulled away without causing the product to decay irreversibly. Which is why the attempt to insert an alien grand idea into our national mélange is ringing an alarm bell heard from border to border and coast to coast.

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     The rule of law in the U.S. has already sustained considerable shocks due to “anti-discrimination” laws that tread on our freedom of association in the commercial sphere. Further damage to it arrived in the form of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and various court rulings concerning mandatory “reasonable accommodations” on the grounds of various physical handicaps. But as bad as these things are, there was more and worse to come, owing to the swelling numbers of Muslims resident in the U.S.

     Regulatory bodies petitioned for mandatory religious accommodations to Muslim employees – in particular, exemption from certain duties and the mandatory provision of prayer breaks during the work day – have been all but unanimously favorable to such demands. That Islam is not a “handicap” in the exact sense, and that “freedom of religion” cannot imply the privilege of imposing one’s personal religion and its obligations upon others, have been granted no weight in the arguments over such accommodations. Yet employers who seek to exclude Muslims from their workforces face extraordinary legal and social pressures to accept them.

     Yet this is not the thrust of my thoughts for this morning. Rather, I’m here to point out that Islam and its demands are wholly inconsistent with the three consistent, coherent grand ideas cited in the previous segment. If I may be permitted a physics analogy, Islam is a speeding neutron aimed point-blank at our national ideological nucleus – and no American literate enough to read an English translation of the Qur’an can legitimately be ignorant of it.

     Ironically enough, Islam is itself a grand idea. It unifies religion, governance, all matters of ethics, and all aspects of daily life however trivial within a single envelope. Its guiding principle is “Allah wills it.” Its inconsistency with Americanism is total. The two can never, ever be reconciled. Yet our political elite continues to demand exactly that, while working to import ever more Muslims to our shores. To suspect them of a hidden agenda is only natural.

     Islam isn’t the only threat on our national radar. There are other grand ideas, such as socialism, that are just as inconsistent with the American nucleus. All such ideas must be resisted a outrance. However, our ability to resist them has already been weakened by prior incursions such as those mentioned above. It calls into question whether our national identity and our confidence in it will suffice to beat them away.

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     This has been a rather discursive essay. Grand ideas are like that: they imply many things; their threads of implication trail off in many directions. That doesn’t diminish their importance. Indeed, if anything, it heightens it.

     I’ve recently taken some flak from one particular Gentle Reader about my choices of subjects. He should know better; I write about what’s uppermost on my mind, without regard for anyone’s preference of topic. However, knowing better and doing worse is part of our human folly. Among those who find the thoughts I’ve set down today important and stimulating, let the discussion commence.

Canons

     Catholics are made aware, fairly early in life, of canon law: the set of rules that govern:

• The Church hierarchy;
• The way in which rules are arrived at, modified, and enforced;
• And of course, the behavior of lay Catholics, including their relations with the hierarchy.

     That’s usually our first encounter with the term canon. The modifier specifically addresses the Churchly aspect of its laws: their position in Catholic life above and apart from civil law. Civil law, the theory runs, is impermanent, often arbitrary, and not to be relied upon for moral guidance in day to day life. Canon law derives from a far more authoritative Authority, at least in theory.

     However, the term canon is used to describe certain things that aren’t explicitly religious in nature. In particular, there’s been a great deal of talk about the Western canon: that set of great books that articulate and defend the core ideas behind Western Civilization.

     (I’ve often referred to Western Civilization as Christian-Enlightenment Civilization. The melding of Christian moral codes with the Enlightenment understanding of the supremacy of the indivdual’s rights over the claims and representations of the powerful was what made freedom possible. Before that marriage, freedom as Americans understand it had never even been conceived. But this is a subject best left for another time.)

     In similar fashion, various collections of literary works have been described as canon or canonical, meaning that they express the ideas at the heart of some current in the evolution of fiction, or a category thereof. A recent encounter struck me as particularly revealing...and somewhat humorous as well:

     The end result is that you now hold a new Tomb Raider story. It is canon. Its events are now part of Lara’s life and the origin story that is currently being told. [From the Foreword to Tomb Raider: The Ten Thousand Immortals. Emphasis added by FWP.]

     Mind you, Lara Croft is the heroine of a video-game series. Surely no one is less real than a video-game heroine who explores tombs, warrens of caves, and mystically infested islands. Yet the adoption of the bosomy adventurer by millions of fans has resulted in two slam-bang action movies starring Angelina Jolie, a number of spin-off novels, comics and fan fiction, a “reboot” of the franchise to give her a more complete, more human “biography”...and the need for her creators to say which works in which Lara appears are “canonical.”

     I’m in something of the same position at the moment, having surrendered to pressure from my readers to extend the Realm of Essences series, and to connect it somehow to my Spooner Federation series. The problems that face a writer in this sort of effort can be quite severe. He’s basically writing a “future history” of the sort Asimov and Heinlein once essayed – and once it’s been declared canonical, even he won’t dare to violate its precepts.

     The amount of Sturm und Drang surrounding the idea of literary canons is difficult to overstate. Some writers regard the Western canon as quasi-sacred: not to be questioned, much less violated. Others, obsessed with being regarded as “innovators,” treat it as a target to be punctured. (Those latter ones often regard the existence of a canon as an affront to their “creative freedom.” Given the generally abysmal quality of most of their fiction, I’m tempted to say that they could use a little discipline...in some cases more than a little.) The volume of the argument occasionally violates the pain threshold, to say nothing of the accusations and epithets the participants sling around.

     Universities are often major participants in the “canonist vs. anti-canonist” cage matches. There’s a certain logic to this, as the University of Chicago, under the leadership of the brilliant Robert Maynard Hutchins, was instrumental in the compilation of the Great Books curriculum, which has come to be regarded as essential to if not identical with the Western Civilizational canon. Those who seek to “make their mark” often choose that series as a target: to be extended, amplified, edited, or destroyed.

     Lesser canons have become significant in genre writing. For example, there’s been a lot of back-and-forth over what John C. Wright and others have proposed as the canonical works of fantasy and science fiction. Some of the exchanges, like the Cherry Fondue from the Whizzo Quality Assortment, have been extremely nasty. (No, we can’t prosecute for that.) Yet the veneration of those canonical works, their immense popularity, and their importance as points from which thousands of other writers have chosen to pursue elaborations, cannot be disputed.

     What the literary anti-canonists refuse to accept, in virtually every case, is that a canon does not exist because it was declared from On High. It emerges from the widespread recognition of the quality of its components, and their formative importance to later writers. In the usual case, that’s because their attempts to gain fame by dismissing or contradicting some canon fail miserably. The execrable quality of most of the crap that’s won awards stands in testimony.

     The same is true for canonical ideas. The ideas and principles at the foundation of Western Civilization were, at some point, original. But they would not have become a canon if they hadn’t succeeded in practice – and so brilliantly that the rest of the world is divided between camps that seek to emulate us and camps that seek to destroy us.

     In a way, the emergence of a canon demonstrates that Aristotelian essentialism and Platonic idealism can be harmoniously fused. Horses must pre-exist “horseness,” except in the mind of the Creator, but once one has recognized the commonalities of horses, their differences from other mammals, and the perpetuation of those characteristics from generation to generation, “horseness” becomes equally real and equally powerful. So also with canons.

     More anon.