The Demise Of Multiculturalism

     Even five years ago, I would not have predicted this.

     Voices are rising throughout the First World for an end to the promotion of cultures alien to that of the Christian Enlightenment. The engine powering this surge was ignited by the distaste ethnic Europeans have for the arrogance and aggression of Muslim immigrants. Their governments imposed Third World immigrants upon them by mouthing pieties about “low birth rates” and “the economy.” Europeans soon discovered that those millions of Muslims would have effects far more significant than an increment to the GDP.

     Much the same has happened in Australia, Japan, and America, though the effects of those immigrants have been slower to become visible, and the official defense of them leans more on “diversity.”

     Law enforcement, particularly in the United Kingdom, has deferred to Muslims and Islam. Clashes between Muslims and other Britons have almost always been “settled” in favor of the Muslims. London is now under de facto control of its Muslim residents. The same appears to be developing in Paris and New York. The three capitals of the West are becoming alien to it.

     But wait: there’s more! As I’ve written before, success breeds emulation. As Muslims have imposed themselves ever more on the rest of us, racial and ethnic minorities have noted it and have copied their aggressiveness. A reaction to the swell of violence and predation was predictable, though I did not expect it to be so large.

     The boil might be near to bursting.

* * *

     Questions abound. What is ethically justifiable in dealing with a querulous, disorderly, and often violent minority some of whose members are innocent? Can wholesale measures be rationalized when they’re guaranteed to sweep in the blameless? If so, where do the limits lie?

     The late Jack Vance dealt with the question several times. He, who apparently disavowed any particular ideology or moral theory, seemed fascinated by the subject. Here’s one of his emissions on it:

     Xanten made an airy gesture. “A. G. Philidor, you over-simplify grievously. Do you consider me obtuse? There are many kinds of history. They interact. You emphasize morality. But the ultimate basis of morality is survival. What promotes survival is good; what induces mortefaction is bad.”
     “Well spoken!” declared Philidor. “But let me propound a parable. May a nation of a million beings destroy a creature who otherwise will infect all with a fatal disease? Yes, you will say. Once more: Ten starving beasts hunt you, that they may eat. Will you kill them to save your life? Yes, you will say again, though here you destroy more than you create. Once more: a man inhabits a hut in a lonely valley. A hundred spaceships descend from the sky, and attempt to destroy him. May he destroy those ships in self-defense, even though he is one and they are a hundred thousand? Perhaps you say yes. What, then, if a whole world, a whole race of beings, pits itself against this single man? May he kill all? What if the attackers are as human as himself? What if he were the creature of the first instance, who otherwise will infect a world with disease? You see, there is no area where a simple touchstone avails.”

     [From The Last Castle.]

     You might imagine that he would dissent from an essentially collectivist program to deal with a difficult minority. But perhaps not:

     "Why did you decide to kill these four young people?"
     "Why does the sun shine? Why does the wind blow? I admit nothing. On the Lutwen Islands live a hundred thousand folk. At Stroma are a few hundred; at Araminta a few hundred more. If every Lutwenese still on Deucas were able to kill four woskers, there would be none left."
     "Quite so. Lucidly and reasonably put." Ysel Laverty smiled grimly. "We had hoped to terminate jobs like yours by attrition. You were trusted and might have remained here as long as you liked. It seems to have been a mistaken policy. Because of your act, every Yip on Deucas will be sent home, or perhaps off-world."

     [From Araminta Station]

     The cleavage question, whose answer determines the range of ethically acceptable measures, is Are we at war? At war, things unthinkable under peacetime conditions suddenly seem reasonable. War makes possible measures such as this one. Peoples allow their governments to do “what must be done” to avert outcomes such as this one.

     And all must live with the consequences.

* * *

     I could go on, but I think my Gentle Readers will have the idea by now. Are First Worlders at war with the alien cultures that have been imported to their shores? That’s the critical decision. Who will make it? As First World governments are complicit in facilitating the Third World’s invasion of the First, we cannot expect their luminaries to admit their errors voluntarily and strive to correct them.

     But national populaces have seldom compelled war upon their States. The opposite is far more frequently the case.

     Should a great number of Britons, Frenchmen, or Germans decide that they cannot and will not abide Muslims any longer, what would follow? Do they have anything close to the means required to expel that many invaders? Were they to embark upon it, would they succeed in imposing new terms upon their States? What would follow geopolitically?

     Americans could do so. We have the means and the numbers. But is it conceivable? What would follow for federal immigration policy and American political alignments?

     This isn’t just “food for thought.” Consider comparative birth rates. Consider Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed, and Zohran Mamdani. Consider Dearborn and Hamtramck. A time of decision will be upon us all too soon.

Incomplete Questions

Let me remind you of the pilgrim
Who asked for an audience with the Dalai Lama
He was told he must first spend five years in contemplation
After the five years
He was ushered into the Dalai Lama's presence, who said
'Well, my son, what do you wish to know?'
So the pilgrim said
'I wish to know the meaning of life, father.'
So the Dalai Lama smiled and said
'Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?'

[ Procol Harum ]

     This morning, we have a provocative question:

What if the meaning of life is obvious, but nobody likes the answer?

— XCosmos (@XCosmosOfficial) November 3, 2026

     We’ve been here before, of course:

     I’ve known a fair number of reasonably intelligent people in my sixty-six years. Many of them were atheists. But they were no happier than the theists around them. In many cases they were less happy. One complained to me privately about the sense that his life was meaningless. As bright as he was – IQ around 145, by my informal estimate – he hadn’t grasped that meaning requires an interpreter.

     “The meaning of life,” as XCosmos has put it, must be completed to be of use: “The meaning of life” to whom? To God? To history? To some federally nominated Board of Life Interpreters? Or to the asker himself?

     The completions vary; thus, the possible answers vary.

* * *

     Long ago I was told about a philosophy professor who, weary of the bickering among his students, posed them an incisive question: “Why was it wrong for Cain to kill Abel?”

     The students tossed it back and forth. Many claimed that for one human to kill another is always wrong. Others took the position that it “wasn’t necessarily wrong,” that “we don’t have all the facts.” And of course there were participants between those two poles.

     The professor allowed it to go on for awhile before he hauled the class up short. He gave the only answer that the tale of Cain and Abel in Genesis will support: “Because it was.”

     When the conditions surrounding an event have been fully specified, and the moral-ethical standards are agreed upon, questions of morality and ethics are answerable. It was wrong for Cain to kill Abel because Abel was an innocent who didn’t deserve to die. Willfully killing an innocent man is murder, which is wrong. That’s an absolute upon which Western societies agree. To question it is to question the basis of Christian-Enlightenment society.

     Yes, there are lands whose denizens don’t hew to Christian-Enlightenment moral-ethical standards. We’re having a spot of trouble with nations of that sort. Worse, individuals and groups within our own nation are disdaining those standards, some for political purposes. Consider the Left’s attitude toward the murder of Charlie Kirk. Those cleavages are causing more horror and grief than any other abstract disagreement could.

* * *

     At the base of all of what Robert Burns called “Man’s inhumanity to man” one will always find divergences from moral-ethical standards. But we’re aware that there are other lands than those of the Christian Enlightenment. They cannot trouble us unless we permit it… and by and large, we don’t.

     The divergences from Christian-Enlightenment moral-ethical standards among Americans are more troubling. They force an uncomfortable question upon us: What do we mean by ‘an American?’ What are the qualifications? Contemporary realities compel us to include those standards among the qualifications. That implies something many people would rather not face.

     Just as one cannot inquire about meaning without specifying an interpreter, one cannot inquire about membership of any kind without specifying the qualifications for membership. Aristotle told us so many centuries ago. The question must be complete to be meaningful… which brings us full-circle to the nature of meaning yet again. Sorry about that.

Schismata Part 3: The Cracks

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

     “What is truth?” – Pontius Pilate

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

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

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

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

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

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

     [From The Book of Skulls]

     They – we – were looking for magic.

* * *

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

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

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

     More anon.

Schismata Part 2: The Unity

     A long time ago, I wrote:

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

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

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

     Though many would disagree, the unity is there.

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

     With themselves as “The Party,” of course.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

     Have a nice day.

Context Matters

     It was a long time ago that I first heard the following instructive exchange:

P1: I saw something disturbing today.
P2: What was that?
P1: An old woman was walking down the street when a young man rushed at her, knocked her down, rolled her along the ground, and slapped her all over her body.
P2: Horrible! How could anyone treat a defenseless old woman that way?
P1: Wait, did I mention that she was on fire?

     Little details such as that one matter a lot. Yet a great part of what passes for journalism today consists of concealing certain details to ensure that the story being told conforms to “the narrative,” or at least doesn’t damage it. This is also true for a lot of public rhetoric. If you tell the story just right — tell just enough truth, then shut up – you can enlist your audience in its own deception.

     Activists tend to omit details in the stories they tell, too. Smith is homeless, living on the street and begging passers-by for food? Very sad. But how did he get there? Drink? Drugs? Drawing to an inside straight? Unwise moves in the commodities markets? Give us the process, not just the consequences.

     The technique makes use of prevailing assumptions about what isn’t said. The young man in the opening vignette could be anyone, and the context could be anything. But it’s highly uncommon for young men to attack old women. It’s also uncommon for old women to be publicly on fire… in the literal sense, at least.

     Good people tend to assume the goodness of others: i.e., that unless it’s made explicit that this is not the case, other people share their ethical basis. That’s our inheritance as members of a Christian-Enlightenment culture.

     Prevailing assumptions prevail because they’re correct more often than not. Yet even when society is at its most uniform, there will be exceptions to them. More critical yet, in a society that’s losing uniformity, those assumptions will develop an increasing number of exceptions. This is especially important in a society which, for whatever reason, is shedding its cultural cohesion.

     Many First World countries are losing their cultural cohesion today. There are several reasons, which apply differentially according to the country under discussion. Rather than go into yet another tirade about immigration, I’ll say simply that as largely uniform populations become ever less uniform, the prevailing assumptions in those nations will become ever more dubious.

     Street violence? It might not be a failure of the “forces of order.” After all, certain ethnicities concentrate their numbers geographically. There are only so many police. Besides, some ethnicities regard the police as their enemies and would turn from whatever animates them to attacking the men in blue. There are a lot of guns out there, y’know.

     Open, blatant shoplifting? Don’t we teach our children not to do such things? Of course we do… some of us. Others tell their kids that “The Man” has been holding them down, and that the only way to “get a little back” is to grab it and run away. Or swagger away, if the shopkeeper is a tiny Asian man and you’re Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri.

     Idleness and shiftlessness concentrated in particular demographics? Ain’t no jobs, bro! Besides, who would hire one of us? Never mind that there’s a national labor shortage. And while it’s true that most employers would hesitate to hire one of you, don’t you think there might be reasons for it – and that you might want to put some effort into being an exception?

     The disintegration of a First World society into increasingly insular, increasingly mutually hostile subcultures makes it vitally important to be alert for exceptions to our assumptions. Maybe they’re becoming less reliable than in seasons past. As for the implied importance of preserving a common, Christian-Enlightenment culture, I trust that no more need be said.

The Greater Crime

     While I lament the slow death of Blogdom, I must admit that intelligence and insight can be found elsewhere on the World Wide Web. X / Twitter has become ever more interesting since the takeover by Elon Musk, though its mindless “Security” apparatus continues to present users with severe problems. One user who’s made some striking and thoughtful observations goes by the moniker of Black Dumpling:

     BD has made some penetrating and provocative statements, but none more so than this one:

The list of crimes I now think people should be put to death for has grown exponentially because I think it's not the crime one should be put to death for, but the mindset that informed committing it.

This is why I think people who engage in high speed police chases, torturing… https://t.co/ggKSwBhvtw

— BLACK DUMPLING™ (@BlackDumpling) June 29, 2026

     Please click through and read it to the end. For those who “can’t spare the click,” I’ll excerpt the part that hits hardest:

     What would be required for you, as an adult human being, to engage in the willful torture of a dog? Can you think of ANY rationale for why you would do such a thing? If the answer is no, then ask yourself why you would want to share a civilization with a person who not only can do such a thing but would do such a thing.

     BD’s questions cut to the heart of the matter we call justice.

* * *

     The Latin roots of the word justice mean holding rights. The philosophical basis of justice in Christian-Enlightenment societies is the proposition that we who believe in individuals’ rights have an ethical obligation to redress violations of them: if possible, to make the victim whole. That obligation strikes some people as not pertaining to them personally: “Let it be someone else’s problem.”

     As with many other chores we’d rather not be bothered by, we’ve “outsourced” justice to a third party: The State. But while private individuals are largely unwilling to take personal responsibility for justice, popular sentiment about State justice is negative. Witness the tremendous outpouring of applause for the recent movie Citizen Vigilante.

     Black Dumpling’s proposition in the previous segment accords with the general conviction that at this time, State justice is inadequate. Citizen Vigilante and its popularity underscore that conviction. It’s been called “a feel-good movie.” Ponder that for a few seconds and feel your brain itch. But what matters above all else is the subconscious quasi-logic behind it.

     We entrusted the maintenance of justice to the State. The consequences include an expanding tide of violence and predation against peaceable citizens. That is unacceptable. Therefore, the maintenance of justice cannot be entrusted to the State; other enforcers must step forward.

     Note that the above paragraph makes no mention of what “justice” is supposed to mean. Indeed, it could mean nightly Bingo tournaments, or free durians on national holidays, or anything at all. All that matters is that unacceptable consequence. The implication follows directly, though with imperfect logic.

     Ponder that for a moment before continuing on.

* * *

     Most people don’t think about fundamental things. They’ve had terms such as justice indoctrinated into them. “Justice? Isn’t that what the courts do?” You won’t find many high school graduates who answer some other way.

     But as we can see from the previous segment, in the popular conception, “justice” isn’t about correcting violations of rights. It’s about the protection of the innocent from the violent and dishonest. By that criterion, State justice is a failure. But what else is there?

     Only vigilantes. Only killing.

     A people who feel imperiled will countenance the killing of miscreants. They’ll tolerate it, even if at some level they disapprove of it. They’ll know, without needing to reason it out, that when State justice fails, “private justice” – i.e., vigilantes – becomes the only recourse. Many will deem that to be acceptable. But they won’t have considered the second-order effects.

     The masters of the State will note the developments. They will reason that if the populace tolerates vigilantes doing the only thing vigilantes have ever done, then they’ll tolerate a State justice system that executes more often than it currently does. Moreover, the justifications for execution will embrace a wider spectrum of reasons, including imputed intent.

     If you must have a State, do you really want to empower it to kill a man because of what it conceives his mindset to be?

     Black Dumpling has fingered a fundamental question: what shall we do with persons too mentally aberrant to be tolerated among us? Are there any answers other than the one she propounds?

     Have a nice day.

Could We, Should We Dept.

     Actor Kevin Sorbo asks:

     Muslim militants post selfies with thousands of dead civilians after conquering major Sudanese city! So what are we going to do about it??

     Hm. Sudan, you say? That’s in Africa, isn’t it? What we used to call the “Dark Continent?” Doesn’t Sudan, a sovereignty with a seat in the United Nations General Assembly, have its own military? Couldn’t they do something about the violence? Or is the Sudanese government disinclined to act?

     If that last is the case, an American expeditionary force would have to contend with both the Muslim militants and the Sudanese army. We might have to destroy the latter before we could confront the former. What then? More “nation building?” Perhaps another massive occupation force, to give our precious diplomats and experts time to teach the Sudanese to be civilized members of the global community? That worked out well in Afghanistan, didn’t it?

     And there’s this question to answer: What American interests would be served by intervening in Sudan’s internal chaos?

     Yes, I’m being a bit heavy-handed here, but the impulse demanded some air. We forget so swiftly what our other foreign interventions have wrought. We overlook the savagery that characterizes all of Africa. We think ourselves too powerful to be gainsaid... and too benevolent to be wrong.

     But maybe this time it will be different, you say? What evidence exists for that proposition? And what degree of bloodshed on the part of young Americans would you be willing to invest in the possibility?

     I am so tired of this shit.

---

     Intervenors of every variety call for America to fix other peoples, other nations, other continents. Some of them are genuinely benevolent. Some of them sincerely believe in America’s omnipotence. And some of them see an opportunity for power or baksheesh. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. We can’t do it.

     With all our power and wealth, we cannot raise savages to the level of intelligence and clarity required for the job. I wrote about this long ago:

     America is what it is because it is a made society, founded on clearly understood principles by a pioneer people. The societies of Africa are legacy societies, weighed down by the tribal traditions, superstitions and animosities of thousands of years, unleavened by the Enlightenment from which our core concepts sprang. Until Africa renounces its past, there will be no room in which to build a new future.

     But Africa will not renounce its past. It hasn't yet outgrown its belief in magic. Combatants in the Liberian nightmare are eating their slain enemies' vital organs, in accord with the ancient voodoo belief that this will add the strength of the vanquished to their own. So Liberians look across the Atlantic and cry, "Help us, Lady Liberty! Feed us! We are poor and terrified, you are rich and strong! Bring your breadbasket and your gun and deliver us from the darkness!"

     You cannot have a civilized nation without civilized people. You cannot have a civilized people without both Christian ethics and the Enlightenment. Haven’t our previous ventures into civilizing other lands made that clear yet?

     But that do-gooding impulse can be so strong.

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     The West can’t help Africa. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself. – Kim Du Toit

     Painful truths are the most aggravating kind. Where’s the Advil? Never mind that; where’s the Oxy? Let’s forget our record of failure at uplift, roll up our sleeves, and get on with it! After all, we’re Americans! And this time, we have experience to draw on, right, guys?

     Experience is supposed to teach. And it does: it tells you why you’ve just busted your skull... after you’ve busted it. But the test comes first; the lesson comes afterward. We’ve had the test several times. We’ve “busted our skull,” figuratively at least, on each occasion. Yet many have failed to absorb the lesson.

     Christian missionaries have strained to bring Christianity to the Dark Continent. Their successes were mostly in European colonies. When the colonial powers retreated, Christianity and its influence began a steady retreat. That wasn’t (and isn’t) because there was something lacking in those missionaries’ efforts, or in Christianity itself. It’s Africa itself: the African mentality in the African environment. Kim Du Toit’s essay, quoted above, delineates the matter too well, and too painfully, for an intelligent reader to miss it.

     Islam found a fallow field in Africa. It appeals to the savage mentality: conversion by the sword! If they won’t accept Allah, kill or enslave them! Scant wonder Islam is sweeping through the continent. Africa couldn’t be more suited to Islam if they’d been designed for each other.

     Continuous tribal warfare is equally well suited to Africa. It’s returned in force in every country where Europeans once ruled and have retreated. Only watchful, unrelenting, greatly superior power can keep the peace when the natives’ fondest wish is to slaughter one another. Well, yes: first they go after any whites that were foolish enough to remain. Then, the fun really begins!

     Islamic forces are rapidly expunging Christianity from Nigeria and any other parts of Africa where it’s hung on. The Enlightenment finds few fans among Africa's savage, bloody-minded natives. There’s one and only one cure:

     So here’s my (tongue-in-cheek) solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.

     Kim may have intended that facetiously, but it’s no less true for that.

Vacua

     It seems that for some kinds of learning, you have to get old.

     I’m old. I’ve lived 73 years as of the fifth of September in this Year of Our Lord 2025. And I sometimes thank God that I can’t clearly remember the foolishness I espoused in my younger days. I’d die of embarrassment if some of it were to come to light. And that’s enough for personal disclosures.

     I was educated as a physicist. I’ve retained very little of that knowledge. I couldn’t solve a Schrodinger’s Equation problem to save my life. But I did hold on to one critical insight. It’s one you probably acknowledge, too, even if you would express it in other terms.

Excepting the effects of entropy,
The universe is ruled by equilibrium.

     Practical living incorporates that insight in particular ways: “The goldfish will grow to the size of the bowl.” “Water seeks its own level.” “Dirty is automatic; clean takes work.” “Nature abhors a vacuum.”

     That last one is much on my mind this morning. No calculus will be required to follow it out.

***

     Experimenters create vacua for specific purposes, often to gauge the consequences of a reaction that cannot occur in air. Vacua are also required for certain types of high-tech manufacturing. But have you ever contemplated the production of vacua by activists and politicians? Why would they do it?

     (Before we proceed further, yes: the plural of vacuum is vacua. The alternate plural vacuums is best reserved to the discussion of floor-cleaning devices.)

     Nature abhors a sociopolitical vacuum just as much as the physical kind. Indeed, a sociopolitical vacuum is often paralleled by a physical one. Both demand to be filled by something. All it takes is time.

     Now consider what’s happened to birth rates in the First-World nations. I don’t know of any advanced nation other than Israel that’s reproducing at or above replacement rate. Without an influx of immigrants, those countries would “empty out” within a few generations. The effects are already visible in Russia and Japan.

     Those declines in fertility don’t create a hard vacuum... but they indicate a reduced pressure within the affected countries. The pressure against their borders is higher than the pressure to maintain racial, ethnic, and cultural norms can resist. Moreover, there are elements within those countries that want a flood of immigrants, regardless of any countervailing considerations.

     Those pro-immigration elements have effective control of the governments of Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

     Yes, movements have arisen in all those nations to agitate against unrestricted and unqualified admission to their lands. But to this point, the pro-immigrant elements in their governments are holding sway. It’s unclear whether the balance will tip in the other direction in the near future.

     I’d bet against it, because of a cooperating vacuum that’s been under construction for several decades.

***

     Moral and ethical norms are best inculcated in the young person by his parents. Should they fail to do so, he might manage to acquire them in some other fashion, but he’d likely give and receive a lot of pain and damage in the process. Some of that damage would be to his beliefs about individuals’ rights.

     For decades the trend in Western nations has been away from firm moral-ethical norms and toward a freewheeling relativism: “whatever’s right for you.” Parents have been swayed in that direction as much as anyone else. But relativism acts like a vacuum. Under the guiding principle of “whatever’s right for you,” even a nation whose heritage is strongly Christian will lack the will to defend Christian norms against an incursion by an aggressive and confident opponent.

     Relativism synergizes with the reluctance to confront – an unwillingness to risk conflict, even if it’s just verbal conflict. The relativist will not argue for any absolute norm. How can he? Under the relativistic principle, there are “no right answers.” Everyone is entitled to “his own truth.” But a time may come when someone else’s “truth” mandates the relativist’s subjugation or death.

     That’s what’s happened to Canada, Britain, and Australia. It’s beginning to raise its head here in the United States. The great majority of Americans are at least nominally Christian. Our Nation’s laws were founded on Commandments Four through Nine of the Decalogue. But we have exhibited an increasing disinclination to take up cudgels in support or defense of Christian norms.

     Those norms will not prevail without a stouthearted defense. Their adversaries’ numbers are growing while ours are stagnating. Do the math.

***

     My personal conviction is that Islam is toxic to human life and must be destroyed root and branch. I feel similarly about the tide of Negro savagery that’s manifested in recent years, most notably in the larger cities. But underlying those threats to Christian-Enlightenment civilization are the vacua of relativism and non-confrontation. Those vacua will be filled by something. It behooves us of the Christian Enlightenment to be ones to fill them.

     Time is not on our side.

The Foundation Is Gone

     “Politics is downstream from culture.” – Andrew Breitbart

     A few years ago, I wrote a pair of essays on the deterioration of male-female relations and its most important secondary effect: the declines in marriage and marital stability. Here are the links:

• The Crumbling Cornerstone
• The Crumbling Cornerstone Part 2: Mental Avoidances

     I’ve written other pieces on the subject, of course, but I regard those two as the warning siren that – if I had anything like a wide readership – “should” have alerted Americans to the future they faced. Well, that future has arrived, and its implications for further deterioration are even uglier:

     Fewer U.S. adults now than in past years believe it is "very important" for couples who have children together to be married. Currently, 29% say it is very important that such a couple legally marry, down from 38% who held this view in 2013 and 49% in 2006.

     Another 31% of U.S. adults currently say it is "somewhat important" for couples with children to be married, bringing the total to 60% who consider it important to some degree. Meanwhile, four in 10 say it is not too (18%) or not at all (22%) important.

     In 2006, Americans were more than twice as likely to say it is very important (49%) for couples with children to wed as to say it is not important (23%).

     The latest results are based on Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 1-13. The poll updated several trends on Americans' views about marriage asked previously over the past two decades.

     The above statistics capture a trend away from marriage and family formation that couldn’t be clearer if it were sky-written in blacker-than-black thousand-point type.

     The easiest thing in the world is to predict that a trend in progress will continue. You’ll eventually be wrong, of course (“Trees do not grow to the sky.” – Baron Philippe de Rothschild) but averaged over time, you’ll be right more often than not. Therefore I predict, with fair confidence, that the trend away from marriage and family formation will continue.

     If this trend continues much further, it heralds the end of Christian-Enlightenment civilization.

---

“But it's alright, it's alright
For we lived so well so long.
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on,
I wonder what's gone wrong...
I can't help but wonder what’s gone wrong.”

[Paul Simon]

     The political morass of our era consumes a great deal of popular attention. (Yes, mine too.) It makes me wonder how many people are familiar with the Breitbart quote at the top of the previous segment...and how many of them actually believe it.

     Among the things that most strongly shape our culture is our attitude toward the future. Do we care about the future? How far forward do our cares extend? Why? What predisposes a man to care about the years that will follow his departure from this veil of tears?

     The answers are not hard to find. Our concern for what might follow our deaths arises from those things we hope to survive us:

• Our progeny,
• Our businesses,
• Our reputations.

     Let’s leave businesses and reputations to the side for now. He who has children is most likely to be concerned with the future. (Yes, that assumes that he loves his children.) He who has seen his children become adults and produce children of their own has doubled reasons. But he who has not produced offspring has a nearer horizon for his decision-making. All other things being equal, he will care less about what will follow his death than the man with progeny.

     Marriage has been the traditional method for protecting the well-being of fertile women and the children they have borne. No other method known to Mankind has worked nearly as well at safeguarding those interests. But any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch will be aware that marriages in our time are more fragile, are shorter on average, and tend to produce fewer children than the marriages of previous generations of Americans. Combine those trends with the suspicions and animosities that bedevil relations between the sexes. What does the combination say about our interest in our future?

     Need I say explicitly that a people unconcerned with the future are unlikely to build a stable society, nor to preserve and nurture the social supports bequeathed them by their forebears? Perhaps not, but as is my wont I’ve done so anyway.

     Without a preponderance of stable families that produce and cherish children, Christian-Enlightenment society – especially its highest expression, the United States of America – cannot long endure. It will lack the foundation it needs to sustain it.

---

     “Ve get too soon old und too late schmart.” – Old World maxim

     Rather than flog this beast all the way to the glue factory, I’ll close with an observation from about forty years back. It’s a semi-hopeful observation, which might presage the end of the destructive anti-marital, anti-natal trends. However, it would be foolish to presume that it means anything more than what it’s meant to my Long Island neighborhood: i.e., a reduction in the traffic on Friday and Saturday nights.

     There was a developer who’d received approval for a multi-family compound on a nearby plot of land. He was licking his chops over his prospects, for he had noted the trends toward ever more single people living alone, along with ever smaller families. So he planned for an apartment complex that was heavy with one-bedroom units: the sort of pad that would appeal to bachelors, bachelorettes, and the divorced. After all, if they were “the future” – and given the trends, he had good reason to think so – then marketing to them was the smartest course. At the time Long Island didn’t have much convenient housing for singles, so he’d be tapping an underserved market.

     Sounds like good market analysis, doesn’t it? It certainly did at the time. Working from that vision, the developer produced a 200-apartment complex that was heavily weighted toward small units. It quickly attracted exactly the sort of tenant he sought. It also acquired a moniker: Sin City. (I have no idea whether he was aware of that, nor if he was, whether he cared.)

     That apartment complex is almost empty today. I believe the company that operates it has gone into receivership. I can’t say why of my own knowledge. Certainly such an enterprise is subject to many influences, currents, and vicissitudes. Regardless, the original flood of tenants has left and has not been replaced by tenants like them. Why not?

     Time passes. Things change. People’s desires change. Some regret their earlier ways and strive to change them. Then there’s technology to consider, and its response to the changes in human desires. One advancing technology is making it possible for women to have healthy children safely at a later age than ever before in history...and an increasing number of women are discovering, much to their own surprise and chagrin, that marriage, a stable home, and a husband and children to love are the things they really want and should have pursued from the outset.

     Naturally, the radical feminists eager to keep “the war between the sexes” hot and bloody condemn this development. Could they counteract it and keep the anti-marriage, anti-natal trends “healthy?” It remains to be seen. But at least the evidence is not wholly in their favor.

     That’s it for me for today. Enjoy your Sunday.

A Premise We Can’t Do Without

     I subscribe to a service that presents me with some inspirational Catholic reading each morning. It’s a “game starter” that’s served me well. (Among other things, it reminds me to pray.) This morning it led off with a quote that immediately got my gears turning:

     "I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand." — St. Anselm of Canterbury

     This is more than merely a statement of faith. It goes to the heart of all human reasoning: the unavoidable requirement that we accept certain unprovable propositions as true, simply because without them we can do no reasoning at all.

---

     In response to the St. Anselm quote above, the scrap-lumber room of my often annoying but sometimes useful memory has just tossed up two fragments of unusual relevance. The first is from that perennial visitor to this site, the late, great Clive Staples Lewis:

     From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. [From The Abolition of Man]

     Long-time Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch have surely seen this quote before. It goes to the heart of human ratiocination, the process by which our conscious minds approach decision-making. We cannot reason without premises: statements of fact that, while not provable, are not disprovable and have survived attempts to contradict them in observation. Even completely formal systems, derived entirely from the mind of Man, require premises, despite Giovanni Saccheri’s refusal to accept it.

     The second fragment is from the late Dr. Clarence Carson, in discussing the effects on philosophy of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason:

     What Kant took away with one hand—the Pure Reason—he returned with the other—Practical Reason. What we cannot know—that is, God, freedom, immortality, moral imperatives, principles, ideals—must be assumed. To accomplish this intellectual feat, Kant resorted to the traditional distinctions between appearance and reality. The phenomenal world, the world accessible to the senses, the only world that can be known, is only an appearance. The real world is unknown and unknowable, as Kant had earlier demonstrated to his satisfaction. Yet it must exist. No, that is not quite right. We must act as if it existed.

     Kant affirmed the traditional morality, insisted upon the necessity of faith, and proclaimed that man participates in a moral order. Practically, Kant would have it, we do seem to know that there are moral imperatives. There may even be generally accepted beliefs about what many of these are. They can even be "proved" by the Practical Reason, by which Kant means reason operating upon assumptions about what reality must be like in order for appearances to be as we perceive them. Yet this kind of reason operates upon possibilities, not certainties, so far as philosophy is concerned. Kant said as much himself:

     It is just the same as if I sought to find out how freedom itself as causality of a will is possible; for, in so doing, I would leave the philosophical basis of explanation behind, and I have no other. Certainly I could revel in the intelligible world, the world of intelligences, which still remains to me; but although I have a well founded idea of it, still I do not have the least knowledge of it, nor can I ever attain to it by all the exertions of my natural capacity of reasons.

     This stolid German, this resolute metaphysician, this determined moralist, had left the house of philosophy in ruins: of this there should be no doubt. Let us review the "achievement." Kant had changed the meaning of "objective" from something which exists outside the mind to make it refer to a property of mind itself; he had brought it into the interior world of consciousness. He had taught that mind can only know phenomena. Reason can only deal with reason. Then he declares that phenomena is only appearance, that reality is unknown and unknowable.

     [From The Flight from Reality]

     In other words, Kant refused to treat the indispensable premise of the Christian Enlightenment – that the universe is inherently lawful, that its laws impose a moral order on us, and that this order is independent of human conceptions and norms — as sufficiently demonstrated and without counterexamples to be treated as a fact. He is unwilling to concede it the status of a fact, but mealy-mouths around the matter by claiming that “we must act as if it existed.”

     “Must act.” Must! Kant says so in letters of fire. But then C. S. Lewis, that inexorable debunker of intellectual pretense and twaddle, arises to ask the most fateful of all questions:

Why?

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     “Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.” – Charles F. Kettering

     Paranoid: A logician with a fractured premise. – Arthur Herzog

     Althea: How do my accomplishments, as you put it a moment ago, bear on this realm?
     Probe: You are Hope’s first metaphysicist, Althea. You alone have thought to alter the properties of space itself. It is how you constructed your superluminal vessel.
     Althea: Then to alter the permittivity of the vacuum is an act of meta-engineering?
     Probe: Yes. It requires an assumption realist physicists would dismiss out of hand. Their assumptions are wholly incompatible with it.
     Althea: What are those assumptions?
Probe: They pertain to the undefined term existence. If asked “does space exist?” the realist physicist would decline to give a definite answer. Space, he would say, is nothing: the absence of anything real. Therefore, the concept of existence does not apply to it. You, by contrast, have treated space as having existential properties. You have treated nothing as being something, and so have succeeded in making changes to it.
     Althea: Which of us is nearer to the truth?
     Probe: Surely that question answers itself.

     [From Freedom’s Fury]

     Kant’s obfuscation of reality as an objective matter was accepted by a number of later thinkers, including a few for whom I have some regard. Nevertheless his notion that reality is a matter of belief rather than fact is fundamentally unsound as a matter of metaphysics itself. Metaphysics is the study of what is prior and superior to our reasoning processes. If nothing is prior and superior to ratiocination per natura, then there can be no objection to solipsism and all the madness that follows in its train.

     In other words, we need to accept reality as an objective fact, prior and superior to our opinions and evaluations, to construct any sound notions about what to do in it and with it.

     The moral order inherent in the laws of this universe is completely consistent with the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind. (You knew I’d get here eventually, didn’t you? I mean, I did lead off with a quote from a saint.) Thus, our indispensable premise of an objective reality that’s “indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve” (John Varley) is identical to Christ’s teachings. While one may choose to remain unconvinced by the evidence for His miracles, Passion, and Resurrection, one cannot rationally object to His prescriptions:

     And behold one came and said to him: Good master, what good shall I do that I may have life everlasting? Who said to him: Why asketh thou me concerning good? One is good, God. But if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments.
     He said to him: Which? And Jesus said: Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness. Honour thy father and thy mother: and, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. [Matthew 19:16-19]

     ...without denying reality itself.

     In this Saint Anselm was a forerunner to C. S. Lewis:

     “I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun: not only because I see it, but because by its light I see everything else.”

     With this premise as its foundation was all of Western Civilization erected...and if deprived of this its foundation, all of Western Civilization will fall.

     Have a nice day.

A Few Words From Some Astute Observers Of The West

     I found these pithy observations at the Spectator:

     Progressives hate this, but the extraordinary influence of the Bible on history — and Western civilization in particular — is undeniable. The Bible gave rise to Western law, government, art, literature, and science. According to sociologist and Pulitzer Prize nominee Rodney Stark, because the West believed in a God of logic and order, they believed his creation was likewise logical and orderly and should be explored, subdued, and studied. Stark writes, “Most non-Christian religions do not posit a creation at all … it is without beginning or purpose, and, most important of all, having never been created, it has no Creator. Consequently, the universe is thought to be a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and arbitrary. For those holding these religious premises, the path to wisdom is through meditation and mystical insights, and there is no occasion to celebrate reason.” Eminent mathematician, philosopher, and agnostic Alfred North Whitehead is again instructive here on what set the West apart: “When we compare the tone of thought in Europe with the attitude of other civilizations when left to themselves, there seems but one source of its origin. It must come from the Medieval insistence on the rationality of God.” This faith in rationality catapulted the West ahead of the rest of the world culturally, militarily, technologically, and economically. So intrinsic is Christianity to the fabric of the West, wrote T. S. Eliot, that “It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning.… I do not believe the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”

     Christianity, the only faith that posits both unbreakable natural laws and the benevolence of God, is the foundation upon which the whole of the Western edifice – what I’ve often called the Christian Enlightenment — is built. Remove Christianity and you undermine the lot: individual rights, political freedom, reason and science, good will among men, the belief in the possibility of progress, and all the things that go with them.

     Now reflect on the influence the following incursions into Christian-Enlightenment societies have had:

• Solipsism / Social-constructionism
• Gender-war feminism
• Deconstructionism and associated theses
• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
• The Frankfurt School
• Islam

     Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Audiences

     We’ve had enough political crap for a day or so, I think. The merry-go-round won’t stop turning because the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch have looked aside for an article or two. Besides, by my current estimate, the Democrats’ hunt for an impeachment pony under the eyelash-deep pile of FBI, DoJ, and Deep State corruption manure will still be in progress on January 19, 2025. So let’s talk about something else.

     Like why you come here to read the drivel we post, perhaps?

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     One of the mantras relentlessly repeated by and at writers of all varieties is that you must know your audience. In other words: know what sort of reader you’re writing to attract, and what it is he wants that you can offer him.

     “Who is my audience?” isn’t a question to be answered with a list of names. It’s concerned with the qualifications, convictions, and specific desires the writer imagines his reader to possess: his background, intelligence, degree of literacy, other eruditions, orientation, and appetites. Despite the aforementioned mantra, very few writers ever think about the specifics of those things. In consequence, we mostly wind up writing to please ourselves.

     Mind you, that’s not a bad thing. If you can’t please yourself with your written work, you’re unlikely to carry on with it for long. Nevertheless, it helps if, once in a while, the writer asks himself the questions implied by the above. As I’m of an analytical bent, I probably do so more often than most.

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     I conceive of the audience for what’s posted here at Liberty’s Torch as above-average in intelligence, and at least moderately knowledgeable about such things as history, current events, and contemporary controversies. While it is a commonplace that readers gravitate to op-ed sites such as this one not for enlightenment but for confirmation of their existing opinions and beliefs, I’d like to think that our readers are open to a change of opinion should hard, verifiable evidence point in an unexpected direction. In other words, I imagine the typical reader of this site to be bright, erudite, and intellectually honest.

     Consider for a moment the reinvigorated issue of pornography, which is more easily obtained today than ever before. Recently op-ed articles have appeared claiming that scientific evidence has established that porn is harmful to its consumer, irrespective of his age, sex, or orientation. The proponents have claimed that this constitutes an argument for outlawing porn. Now, that’s not a complete argument for outlawing something; if it were, cigarettes would have been outlawed decades ago. But it does at least suggest that the sober-minded citizen should review the evidence, if only for his own sake and the sake of his dependents.

     Consider also the claims of gun-control advocates and groups that both interpersonal violence and suicides could be greatly reduced by banning the private ownership of firearms. Now, those claims have been refuted in case after case – but to refute them, rather than simply dismiss them, is the obligation of an intellectually honest man. Fortunately, the evidence that countervails the gun-controllers’ assertions is publicly available. But what if it pointed in the opposite direction? Once again, the intellectually honest man would be required to concede that point, whether or not there remains any argument that private firearms ownership should be legal.

     Readers who can grasp what I’ve said in the above and agree with the principles involved are my target audience here at Liberty’s Torch.

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     When I write fiction, it’s always to please myself. Whether it be science fiction, fantasy, supernatural events, romance, a family saga, or erotica, the “first consumer” – myself – is the one it must satisfy. Even so, I have a conception of the sort of person who’d enjoy delving into the kinds of stories I choose to tell and the way in which I tell them. And yes, I have him in mind at least some of the time as I fashion my tales.

     First, he must be unafraid of my tendency to imbue a story with the Christian moral / ethical framework. That’s absolute, as I never write anything from which those moral and ethical principles are absent. Sometimes – often – they’re “the stars of the show.” Indeed, they’re the main reason I write at all.

     Second, he must be willing to accept, at least for fictional purposes, the existence of heroes: persons of high character who are willing to place themselves at risk, or to embrace extraordinary tasks that require great effort and personal sacrifice, for something they deem more important than their own interests or well-being. Many readers are unwilling to believe that such persons could exist. They’re “too much larger than life.” Even some of my Supporting Cast characters have a hard time with the notion. But I consider the absence of genuinely heroic figures from contemporary fiction to be a major contributor to the cynicism and malaise common among today’s young people. I want to give them models to emulate, as best they can.

     Third, he must be able to endure my writing style, which is somewhat high-flown, moderately fussy, and a trifle archaic. I know many readers are miffed by the intricate involutions I indulge and the prissy phrasings I prefer. (Some of them are offended by alliteration as well, but there’s a treatment for that now.) It takes a somewhat quirky sense of humor to enjoy the way I tell a tale. The willingness to consult a dictionary every so often helps, too.

     (An English teacher once said of my style that “It went out of style around 1910,” so it would be foolish of me to regard the dislike of my style as some sort of bigotry. Chacun a son gout, as they say.)

     Fourth, he must not be looking for a retread of some sort. I can’t bring myself to write stories that involve old, overused settings and motifs, such as:

• Space wars (i.e., spaceships shooting at one another);
• Galactic empires;
• Time travel;
• The end of things as we know them (i.e., post-apocalyptics);
• Traditional monsters (e.g., vampires, werewolves, zombies);
• Quest stories about a hunt for some critically important object;

     I’ll occasionally read such a story, but I can’t overcome my desire to explore genuinely original motifs and settings when I write. That leaves me off all the bandwagons to which writers looking to “get on the gravy train” are attracted.

     That’s my target audience: the readers I can imagine would enjoy the tales I tell and the way I tell them. It’s also why I can hardly give my novels away.

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     Audience awareness, whether or not his audience is consciously imagined and chosen, is fundamental to a writer’s chances of being read. Yes, he must please himself. But if he manages to please himself only, he’ll languish in obscurity. Few writers aspire to be unknown, unsung geniuses.

     If you write – fiction, exposition, op-ed, travelogues, cookbooks, what-have-you – how do you envision your audience? Co-Contributors? Colleagues from elsewhere on the Web? Graduates of the Famous Writers School? Bueller?

Moral Fundamentals Part 3: The Most Debated Concept

     I hope those Gentle Readers who’ve been waiting for this essay have not lost patience with me. It’s been simmering for a while now. I didn’t want to serve it before it was cooked all the way through.

     The previous two segments in this little series have laid groundwork upon which I intend to build a case for the most debated proposition in all of human thought: specifically, that there are laws of morality / ethics built into the very fabric of reality. This, at a time when the premise of the existence of an objective reality is itself under attack! From Part 1:

     The gospel of our era is relativism in all things: cultural, moral, logical, even scientific. Claims of absolute truth are sneered aside as conclusively refuted without trial. Feminist author Sandra Harding referred to Isaac Newton's three laws of mechanics as "Newton's Rape Manual," nor is there any reason to believe she was being facetious. Physicist Alan Sokal revealed the extent to which relativists will descend with a facetious article our cultural glitterati took quite literally.

     So those of us who, with Samuel Johnson, kick a stone and proclaim "I refute it thus" are in a distinct minority. In consequence, a debate that requires that one's interlocutor accept the existence of evil, a concept relativists categorically reject, is problematic from the start.

     But I intend to immunize my contentions against the frequent objection that “it’s all just about cultural customs.” From Part 2:

     The root of moral is the Latin word mores, which means customs. When Cicero exclaimed “O tempora, o mores!” he was bemoaning what he saw as a deterioration in the customs of the Roman people, not their moral choices as we English speakers might have imagined. To English speakers, moral pertains to the rightness or wrongness of a given decision.

     To compound the damage, the societies from which America was germinated often confused matters of right and wrong with considerations of what “simply isn’t done.” The notion of behavior that’s morally neutral but “simply isn’t done” conjures up images of Victorian England and the straitlaced customs to which the upper classes were expected – and “compelled” by the prospect of social disapprobation – to conform. But here context matters; Victorian customs about what “simply isn’t done” involved the setting and the persons who would witness the deed in question. Many a thing about which the Victorians would say “That simply isn’t done” most certainly was done, by many persons and quite often, in other circumstances and with other participants.

     As you can imagine, I have my work cut out for me. But then, I don’t do the easy stuff.

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1. The Nature Of The Beast We Hunt.

     As I stated in Part 1, a moral fundamental – i.e., a principle of right versus wrong in human action – must perforce be a premise. Therefore it cannot be reached by deduction, for all deduction proceeds by implication from previously agreed premises. While we do need certain premises to attain our goal, deduction isn’t the mechanism by which we employ them.

     A useful premise must be tightly tied to observable facts. If observable facts contradict the premise, it’s flatly false. This is the uber-premise of an objective, metaphysically given reality, which cannot be changed merely by the exercise of opinion or willful disbelief. The Berkelian idealist, whose metaphysics is indistinguishable from solipsism de facto, must therefore be excluded from this investigation, no matter how furiously he pounds on the door.

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2. The Danger Of “Why?”

     Many years ago, a professor of philosophy assigned as in-class reading material the Biblical story of Cain’s murder of Abel. When the students had had a few minutes to read the tale, he asked them, “Why was it wrong for Cain to kill Abel?”

     Let’s leave aside the virtually guaranteed allegorical nature of the Old Testament Book of Genesis. It was intended from the first to teach certain moral lessons, rather than as factual history. What was the moral lesson in that story about the murder of one brother by the other?

     The professor fielded several answers from his students, and showed the fault in each one. At last, an exasperated student said, “Well why, then?” The professor smiled and said “Because it was.”

     “Why,” when applied to a moral premise, is an attempt to justify it through its consequences. That’s not entirely invalid, but it’s open to counterfire. For example, the consequence of Cain’s act was exile. He didn’t suffer a penalty comparable to his crime. Indeed, many present-day murderers are never caught or punished. Therefore, we cannot soundly “argue” that one “shouldn’t” commit a murder because of the inevitable negative consequences to oneself. A moral premise must have a firmer foundation than that.

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3. Rejections.

     It’s always possible to reject a premise, if one is willing to accept the consequences. The Berkelian, the relativist, the social-constructionist, and the solipsist cannot be “compelled” in any sense to accept moral premises that clash with their metaphysics. However, such persons almost all live as if they accept the moral premises on which Christian-Enlightenment society is founded. The consequences of doing otherwise are repugnant to them, regardless of the philosophical problem that causes them. Occasional exceptions, such as were once found among the Oneidans and the Doukhobors, have generally suffered for their willfulness...but not always.

     It’s permissible to draw conclusions from this...but only for one’s personal use!

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4. Useful Data.

     One implication of an objective reality is the availability of useful data that can be gleaned from observation and accumulated over time. This, of course, is essential to the sciences, which operate on a combination of observation, inductive inference, hypothecation, deduction, and experimentation. While it’s also useful in probing for the existence of moral fundamentals, it has a weakness best illustrated by the tale of Plato and the “plucked chicken.”

     In Plato’s effort to define the human being, at one point he proposed that Man is best defined as “the featherless biped.” According to the accounts available today, that spurred Diogenes the Cynic, who considered himself a Socratic, to present Plato with a plucked chicken and exclaim “Here is the Platonic man!” We may take it that Plato resumed his quest for a workable definition immediately afterward.

     Plato’s error was a focus on nonessential aspects of Mankind. Diogenes could have presented him with a kangaroo to the same effect, were any to hand in classical Greece. Despite that, he was engaged in a worthwhile effort: an attempt to summarize human nature in a useful fashion. Reality does provide enough data to distinguish Man from other creatures, though “featherless biped” fails to capture our essence.

     My point here is simple: As it is Man who inquires into such things, then if there are moral fundamentals, they would apply to Man, but not to any lesser order of creature. Thus to settle on moral fundamentals, we must know ourselves – Man as a species of creature – rather than the entire order of Nature.

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5. Essence, Accident, And Exceptions.

     Definitions apply to categories: groups of real items that share:

• A genus, or base category of which they are all members, and:
• A differentia, a characteristic that applies only to members of the newly defined category and not to other members of the genus.

     This presents a problem to those who seek an intensive definition of Man, for there are exceptional members of the human species that challenge any definition that has yet been proposed. In some ways the problem is a lot stiffer than posed by Diogenes’s chicken.

     Consider Ayn Rand’s attempt to define Man as “the rational animal.” Rand had an agenda, into which her proposed definition fits nicely. However, it omits persons of defective mind, including imbeciles and small children. That leads to unpleasant possibilities, for example that the omitted persons’ lives may be sacrificed without moral weight. We recoil from this notion from visceral repugnance, even though Rand’s thrust comes closer to capturing human nature than most others that have been proposed.

     It is the essence of Man that matters to moral fundamentals. This must include the presumed destiny of his children as moral agents. Neither should it exclude those whom accidents of genetics, gestation, or post-natal experience have deprived of one or more qualifications for inclusion.

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6. Today’s Breakpoint.

     Whether human nature is “real” is indeed “the most debated concept.” We must settle on a widely applicable concept of human nature as it pertains to human behavior before we can sensibly discuss moral fundamentals. To be of any importance, moral precepts would apply to human action, though not necessarily to all human action. We would be willing to judge the actions of a man “in his right mind,” but would shy back from similarly judging the actions of a man who was deeply asleep, or who was in the grip of a hallucinogen. (We might question the moral validity of his decision to take such a hallucinogen, but that’s an exploration for another time.)

     Thus, we cannot avoid considerations of perception, volition, and context. However, these things don’t muddy the picture. Rather, they compel us to be precise in the application of any moral standard we might propose.

     More anon.