A Vital Insight

     Quite soon it will be a year since Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk was murdered in the open air in Utah. The anniversary date, September 10, will surely bring a number of reflections on Charlie’s life, the brutal tragedy of his murder, and the consequences for political discourse in these United States. No doubt those who were glad to see him taken from us will have their own little celebrations.

     Charlie was a phenomenon. He seemed to have “come out of nowhere.” He demonstrated a talent for verbal engagement that’s become rare among political and para-political figures. Given his youth, it seemed to have been innate. Many have lamented the loss of that skill quite as deeply as the loss of the man himself.

     Yet beneath Charlie’s facility was a simple fact that anyone imbued with sincerity and good will could employ. The difficulty in making use of it isn’t intellectual. It’s quite easy to understand why and how it facilitates outreach. But putting it to work demands humility and benevolence of its employer.

     The fact is as simple to state as Henry Hazlitt’s “lesson:”

Outreach is not warfare.
The activist isn’t there to defeat an enemy.
He’s there to make a convert—a friend.

     It’s been reported that when a woman asked him why he did not destroy his Confederate enemies, Abraham Lincoln replied thus:

     When an old woman rebuked him for his conciliatory attitude toward the South, which she felt should be “destroyed” after the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln replied, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

     That attitude colored Lincoln’s interpersonal relations. It was that attitude that moved Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, as he looked down upon the dying Lincoln, to say: “There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen. Now he belongs to the ages.”

     Charlie had internalized that sentiment. He treated those who came to debate him as potential allies in the quest for freedom and the renewal of Christian society. If some were unconvinced and hostile, more were struck by his sincerity and benevolence. He was a “warrior for Christ” who regarded even one who approached with drawn sword as a potential friend and ally.

     What did Jesus say to those who gathered to hear Him?

     “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” [Matthew 11:28-30]

     Christ didn’t “defeat” the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and so on. He simply preached a better message: an easier yoke and a lighter burden. When a Scribe responded positively to His message, Jesus complimented him:

     And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all?
     And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
     And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he: And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.
     And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.

     [Mark 12:28-34]

     The effective evangelist, whether his message is religious, secular, or other, is there to liberate: to offer his listeners something that would make them freer and better off. Defeating them is nowhere in his thoughts. By contrast, most political polemicists – and, sad to say, no few Christian preachers – treat the holder of opposed views as an enemy to be brought down, even subjugated or destroyed.

     I’m no saint. I’ve made that mistake many times. Sometimes it was out of frustration at “not being able to make them see.” Sometimes it was out of an unadmitted conviction of superior wisdom. Whatever the case, it’s always a mistake even when you “win.”

     Charlie Kirk was effective because he knew better. He treated his “opponents” as potential friends and allies. And he won quite a few of them to his side. It was probably the principal reason for his murder. Why bother to kill an ineffective evangelist?

     On the anniversary of Charlie’s death, let’s celebrate that aspect of his outreach along with the rest of his life. Let’s urge it onto others who would take up his cause. There seems to be a shortage.

Some Fiction Natterings

To those Gentle Readers who stop by only for the political tirades: Sorry, folks. I just can't bring myself to write about that crap today. If you like, you might blame it on my having busted my lawn tractor yesterday.

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I recall, from a few years back, an exasperatingly supercilious article that condemned the thriller genre so many contemporary readers love as "a pornography of the nerves." The author and the various "literary authorities" he cited were utterly dismissive of story, and laid 100% of the emphasis on style. I also remember snorting in dismissal and thinking, "I'll bet he wishes his sales figures would ever get that high."

The thriller genre owes much of its popularity to its readers' desire to escape from the mundane. To satisfy that desire, it must provide the reader with a compelling reason to detach his attention from his daily routines and the pedestrian environment in which they're embedded. That demands a certain density of high-voltage crises and events: life-and-death stakes pursued by characters appreciably larger than life. Such crises and events are unlikely to resemble the sorts of problems ordinary people face in their normal affairs. More, they wouldn't benefit from the sort of self-glorifying, "Look Ma, I'm a literary writer" lucubrations the Style Uber Alles types deem superior to plot.

A story in which the crises and events are the central point must be told in a straightforward fashion.

That doesn't mean a thriller should be acted out by stick figures, nor that the author needn't concern himself with the fundamentals of good storytelling. It does command the thriller writer to eschew baroque involutions of wording, unnecessary devices and irrelevant descriptions, and lengthy musings that don't contribute to the elucidation or effectuation of the Marquee characters' motivations.

Ultimately, it's about the point of all fiction, whatever its genre: to provide the reader with a unique and satisfying emotional experience.

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Two and three centuries ago, when the first English-language novels were being written and published, pastors in the English-speaking world condemned the reading and writing of fiction more often than not.

Surprised to learn that? I was. But it's consistent with the time and the milieu. Ordinary people didn't have the wealth of free time we enjoy today. Their lives were shorter and far more arduous. They often perched on the ragged edge of starvation. So their clerics wanted them to use what little leisure they had in religious pursuits and devotions. You were supposed to devote your reading time to the Bible.

The fictioneers of that time were just learning how to capture an emotional journey and convey it in an affecting manner. Many of the stories from then seem stilted, awkward, even clumsy by the standards of today. But just as writers of our time strive to do, those writers sought to engage the reader's emotions and take them for a ride. Because they wrote about contemporary events and people, they were able to deflect attention and affection from the dry, exhortative stories told in Scripture.

As is usually the case, those early fictioneers improved with practice, and left valuable lessons for their successors. Over time, clerics stopped trying to discourage the reading of fiction, realizing it was hopeless, and bent their efforts toward the promotion of storytellers who emphasized Christian virtues and piety. Even so, the need to capture the reader's attention with emotional evocation remained paramount; no virtue of any category can be effectively illuminated and efficiently encouraged by dispassionate exhortation.

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About twenty years ago, a fellow libertarian storyteller and I were bemoaning the difficulty of promoting the importance and understanding of freedom in an emotionally adequate story. "How do you write a story whose central theme is the importance of the gold standard?" he lamented. I could only sympathize. (I had no solution for him. However, I rather suspect that he hadn't intended to write such a tale in the first place. Even so, it makes for an interesting challenge.)

It can take a while to get certain of the high principles of storytelling firmly seated in one's head. Neither my friend nor I had fully grasped one of the critical ones. I recall feeling a great light dawn when I first ran across it in its most compact form:

John Brunner's First Law Of Fiction:
The Raw Material Of Fiction Is People!

To write about freedom, you must write about protagonists who are passionate about freedom, not about the political imperative of freedom to all men everywhere.

One of the reasons -- probably the most important one -- that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is so popular on the Right is that Rand succeeded in personalizing the struggle for freedom. That is, she gave the reader attractive, passionate protagonists who were caught up in terrible crises that arose from infringements on freedom, and so dramatized the importance of freedom in an exciting, challenge-filled tale. The theme is freedom, but the story is intensely personal. Had Rand not managed to create such magnetic characters and embed them in a plot of such difficulty, she would have produced a mere polemic.

The same holds true for any imaginable theme. The theme of a story must be integral to the protagonists' passions and the challenges they must face. The events of the story must emphasize, albeit subtly and often indirectly, the importance of the theme to the solution of the protagonists' problems and their route toward the climax. It's about people, always people.

Brunner's First Law isn't a panacea, of course. The storyteller has plenty of work to do beyond what that recognition addresses. (Brunner's Second Law -- "The essence of story is change" -- helps a lot with the rest of it.) But until the fledgling storyteller has properly internalized the First Law, his stuff will leave the reader shrugging and muttering "So what?"

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In just about every instance, when I write about fiction and its infrastructure, I'm mainly talking to myself. That's certainly true here, though I allow myself to hope that any other storytellers and aspirants reading this will get some value out of it as well.

In dark and troubled times, the storyteller's work waxes in importance. A good story well told has persuasive and instructive power beyond any amount of exposition or exhortation. It can propose approaches to problems the reader might never have considered. It can illuminate laws of human conduct that altogether too many of us haven't recognized, or are prone to forgetting. Best of all, it can refresh the reader's spirit and renew his hope.

The times in which we live are both dark and troubled. That's why, despite the difficulties and the frustrations involved, I write fiction, and not just these endless essays. I've come to think it's the most important work I do -- that if I have any prospect of influencing America's future course, it's far less likely to arise from the op-ed pieces here than from the stories I tell.

Why Fiction?

Due to the rapid success of Freedom's Scion, which has in turn stimulated fresh interest in Which Art In Hope, I've been getting quite a pile of email. The question most frequently asked in those emails is "Why?"

No, no! Not "Why do you waste your time writing this crap, Fran, when you could be doing something constructive, like putting diapers on piss clams or sifting the fly dung out of pepper," but "Why do you regard fiction as a suitable vehicle for popularizing the ideas of freedom, Christianity, and perpetually hot intramarital sex?"

In a sense, my correspondents' questions are their best answers. The great majority of them express admiration for the story of Hope and the ideas it promotes. But then, my typical reader is already in 95%-or-better agreement with me on those ideas, so the sample does possess a certain bias.

Nevertheless, the core idea is reliable: Fiction is a more effective vehicle for the promotion of an idea than non-fiction. Ask any of the millions who've been enthralled and uplifted by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, or...or...well, I can't think of another novel that promotes perpetually hot intramarital sex at the moment. Perhaps one will come to mind later.

Fiction sells an idea by depicting attractive, plausible characters as they put it into action.

This is true even with some ineptly written fiction. No one in his right mind would call Edward Bellamy's proto-Socialist novel Looking Backward a piece of great fiction qua fiction. But it did inspire the Progressive movement of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, which grew inexorably into the horrors we suffer today. The power of Bellamy's ideas eclipsed the one-dimensionality of his characters and the dreadfulness of his prose.

Non-fiction works principally through abstractions. Yes, the non-fictional expositor of an idea can cite examples of the ideas he's promoting as they've occurred in the real world. Indeed, he must. But such depictions are, to use a term I generally try to avoid, bloodless. They cannot move the reader as fiction could, for the "characters" of real life don't get much opportunity to win the reader's affections and engage his allegiance. A novel, to be effective at its primary mission of entertainment, must show its protagonist(s) in a fashion that makes the reader root for him/them. That greatly amplifies the power of the ideas beneath the protagonist's course of action.

Think of it as hero-coupling. The reader hitches his emotional wagon to the protagonist's star. Having done so, he cannot root for the protagonist without also rooting for the success of the ideas that animate him. Should the protagonist succeed, the reader cheers for him and his cause at the same time. Should he go down to defeat in a "new wave" Unhappy Ending, the reader will feel a surge of anger and sorrow...once again, out of sympathy for both the character and the ideas that move him.

So I write fiction. Not quite as much, damn it all, as the voluminous opinion-editorial tirades that appear here, but I'm working on that. My day job tends to get in the way, though I'm certain that once I'm retired I'll find another excuse.

And I hope you who drop a few piasters on one or more of my books will keep writing to me with your ideas. Fiction isn't just a more effective idea-salesman than non-fiction; it's also one hell of a lot tougher to produce. I can use all the help I can get!

Slow And Steady Wins The Race: A Manifesto

I was minded to write about abortion today, specifically why the right to do as you please with your body does include poisoning yourself with drugs but doesn't extend to murdering an infant developing in your womb. However, this post at Cold Fury has reoriented me for the nonce.

Mike Hendrix has long been one of the clearest and most stalwart defenders of freedom in the DextroSphere. Indeed, he's many cuts above quite a large fraction of the salaried commentators of the Right, for two overriding reasons:

• He sees clearly;
• He's consistent over time.

This morning, he cites the value of those virtues...to the other side:

The Left, as always, is playing a long game, while we sit back and tell ourselves it couldn’t possibly be happening, and then are shocked–SHOCKED!–when each new piece of the puzzle slips softly but firmly into place.

Update! Prime example, via Glenn:

As annoying at Toomey is, we should remember that this is like 2% of what the libs sought. They’re grabbing crumbs and calling them a cake.

Uh huh. Why, we’re WINNING!, gang! And the Left continues hacking merrily away at our rights, while we deceive ourselves so as to avoid facing the facts and fighting back against them. And thus the frog eventually boils. Sorry, Kurt, losing a little more slowly is NOT winning. A slave who is granted one day a week of partial freedom to remove his chains and do more or less as he wishes before stepping back into harness for the other six is still a slave.

What Mike calls "the long game" has been in progress for centuries. Indeed, it will never end. It consists in one and only one thing: persistence in pursuit of a clearly envisioned goal.

Of course, there are prerequisites to that sort of persistence:

• You must see your goal clearly;
• You must never, ever accept any setback as final.

The Left has these things corporately if not individually, because from era to era it has possessed a vanguard of aspiring slavemasters: persons whose lust for power is all-consuming and ineradicable. The Right, whose allegiants would love more than anything else in the world to be able to say, "we did it; it's over; we're finally free," and thus be able to ignore politics and government in favor of commerce, family, and the pleasures of civil society, is predisposed in a diametrically opposite direction. Which is why, as "Cato" said in one of the Federalist Papers, the natural course of things is for Tyranny to swell and Liberty to cede ground.

In a "game" that stretches unendingly over the centuries, the Left's clarity and persistence is a winning combination. No logical argument, no moral consensus, and no amount of pleading to be left alone can match it.

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It becomes ever clearer that the Right must equal or exceed the Left's clarity and persistence if freedom is to be preserved for our posterity. There might be a "right" to ignore the State, though I doubt it; after all, you can't have a right that requires the cooperation of unnamed others. What there is, and what always will be given the nature of Man, is political combat: the forces of freedom against the forces of slavery.

Clarity requires comprehension, most importantly comprehension of fundamentals. The critical fundamental here is, of course, the nature of freedom:

Freedom is exactly and only the right to do as you damned well please with what is rightfully yours, bounded only by the equal freedom of all others.

All the "freedoms" vulgarly spoken of -- freedom of expression; freedom of religion; freedom of association; freedom from interference in one's private affairs; freedom from unwarranted search and seizure; and so forth -- are special cases. Infringing on any one of them weakens freedom in general, and thus all the other "freedoms" as well. There is no room for compromise with the Left -- on anything.

Deserving special mention in this connection is the right to keep and bear arms. One cannot claim a right that doesn't imply the right to defend that right. After all, if your "right" can be plucked from your unresisting hands (or your dead body) by armed agents of the State, how real could it be? Which is why the right to keep and bear arms must be defended absolutely, and to the death.

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Because persistence in orientation and effort is married to consistency of thought and expression, I exhort all freedom-lovers to adopt the following terminology and stick rigidly to it:

A man who is subject to being told what he must, may, and may not do with his life and property, on pain of punishment, is a slave.

That the "teller" is the State changes nothing but who will receive the profits from his enslavement. That the Left prefers enslavement to and by the State changes nothing but the tools preferred by its aspiring slavemasters. In this connection, it's important to remember, and to emphasize at every opportunity, that every Leftist imagines himself as a future commissar: a high member of an American nomenklatura privileged to ignore the constraints laid upon the rest of us. Characterize them as such, fearlessly -- and do so without qualification.

They won't like it. They'll scream like raped apes. Don't be daunted; don't concede to considerations of "civility." Their screams are the music for our victory parades.

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Part of the reason I'm back here at Liberty's Torch is that I came to understand that I have a responsibility. Few persons on the Right are clear and consistent about the points above, or capable of articulating them properly. I have those gifts. Think what you like about my supposed arrogance; my motto is "if you can do what you've said you can do, it ain't braggin'." Libertarians are as bad as anyone else; the majority of them continue to demand open borders, "abortion rights," State-recognized same-sex marriage, and a handful of other things inconsistent with the notion of a free people in a freedom-respecting polity. The great majority of "conservative" pundits and spokesmen aren't worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

Freedom needs a new cadre.
Its vanguard must overmatch that of the Left.
Its members must be clear and consistent about their aims.
They must use strong words and uniform rhetoric.
And I want you to be among them.

Let's get to work.