Tag: Philosophy

A Terrible Resolve

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A brief (and incomplete) overview of America’s involvement in WWIV (WWIII was the Cold War. We won that one, too.)

Nov. 4, 1979: The U.S. embassy in Tehran is taken over by Iranian “students.” The hostage situation goes on for 444 days.

April 18, 1983: A suicide truck bomb destroys the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon, killing 17 Americans and 46 others.

Oct. 23, 1983: A suicide truck bomb destroys the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241. A few minutes later, another explodes near the French barracks in West Beirut, killing 58 French paratroops.

Dec. 12, 1983: Multiple suicide vehicle-born bombs target multiple locations in Kuwait City, Kuwait, including the U.S. Embassy. Five die.

Sept. 20, 1984: Beruit again. A truck bomb is detonated outside the U.S. embassy annex. The death toll is 24.

Dec. 3, 1984: Beirut one more time. A Kuwait Airways flight is hijacked to Pakistan. Two Americans working for USAID are killed.

June 14, 1985: A TWA flight en route from Athens to Rome is hijacked. Navy Seabee diver Robert Dean Stethem was extensively tortured and then shot to death.

April 5, 1986: A Berlin disco popular with off-duty American service members was bombed by Libyan-backed terrorists. One Turkish woman died, about 200 people were wounded.

Dec. 21, 1988: Islamist terrorists with Libyan backing put a bomb on board a Pan Am flight. It detonated over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 259 on board, and 11 on the ground.

Aug. 2, 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait. January 17, 1991 the Coalition air campaign against Iraq begins. The ground campaign commenced on Feb. 24, and was over in 100 hours. U.S. losses are reported 147 combat and 325 non-combat deaths, the non-combat deaths mostly traffic and aircraft accidents. Iraqi military casualties are estimated at 20-22,000 dead.

Feb. 26, 1993: The first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center towers with a truck bomb, killing 6 and injuring over 1,000.

Oct. 3 & 4, 1993: Task Force Ranger attempts to capture Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid and get caught up in a running firefight that lasts two days. One hundred and sixty U.S. combatants are involved in the initial assault. A joint task force enters the city on the following day to rescue the trapped members of the assault force. The U.S. forces suffer 18 dead, 73 wounded. Somali losses are estimated at as much as 1,500 dead, 4,000 wounded.

June 25, 1996: A massive truck bomb explodes outside the Khobar Tower apartments in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia where U.S. military personnel are billeted. Nineteen service members die, hundreds are wounded. Osama Bin Laden is suspected as one of the planners of this attack.

Aug. 7, 1998: Simultaneous truck-bombings at the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania kill 224 and injure about 4,500.

Oct. 12, 2000: A suicide boat-bomb explodes next to the U.S.S. Cole in port in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and heavily damaging the ship.

Sept. 11, 2001: Everybody knows about that.

Oct. 7, 2001: Air strikes against Afghanistan begin. Small Special Forces groups are already on the ground in Northern Afghanistan. By Dec. 6 the Taliban was no longer in control of any major area. As of June 22, 2006 there have been 306 American fatalities and 84 other Coalition dead in Operation Enduring Freedom. About 775 American service members have been wounded. I can’t find reliable stats on Taliban casualties. They’re in the thousands.

March 20, 2003: The U.S. begins its assault on Iraq. So far, 2500 or so American service members are dead, tens of thousands of Iraqi and foreign jihadists.

What’s stands out in this?

That we didn’t get serious until a lot of American civilians got killed, and got killed here on our own soil. We seem to expect that our service members and government employees face violent death on a regular basis, but not our civilians. We seem to accept that being in a foreign land is risky, but we’re supposed to be safe here. Nick Berg was kidnapped in Iraq and beheaded. We were outraged, but restrained. Four Blackwater contractors were murdered and mutilated – again, we were outraged, but restrained. Just this week two soldiers were kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and mutilated, and still we are restrained.

Restrained? Hell, the Senate is discussing surrender.

But restrained or not, when our military kicks ass it does it far out of proportion to its size.

A while back I found a tremendously thought-provoking essay, The Jacksonian Tradition by Walter Russell Mead, which discusses the primary philosophies extant in the American polity; Jacksonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian – named, of course for their respective politicians. The Wilsonians are described by Mead as crusading moralist transcendentalists, Hamiltonians as commercial realists, Jeffersonians as supple but principled pacifists. Jacksonians, however, are described as follows:

Suspicious of untrammeled federal power (Waco), skeptical about the prospects for domestic and foreign do-gooding (welfare at home, foreign aid abroad), opposed to federal taxes but obstinately fond of federal programs seen as primarily helping the middle class (Social Security and Medicare, mortgage interest subsidies), Jacksonians constitute a large political interest.

In some ways Jacksonians resemble the Jeffersonians, with whom their political fortunes were linked for so many decades. Like Jeffersonians, Jacksonians are profoundly suspicious of elites. They generally prefer a loose federal structure with as much power as possible retained by states and local governments. But the differences between the two movements run very deep — so deep that during the Cold War they were on dead opposite sides of most important foreign policy questions. To use the language of the Vietnam era, a time when Jeffersonians and Jacksonians were fighting in the streets over foreign policy, the former were the most dovish current in mainstream political thought during the Cold War, while the latter were the most consistently hawkish.

One way to grasp the difference between the two schools is to see that both Jeffersonians and Jacksonians are civil libertarians, passionately attached to the Constitution and especially to the Bill of Rights, and deeply concerned to preserve the liberties of ordinary Americans. But while the Jeffersonians are most profoundly devoted to the First Amendment, protecting the freedom of speech and prohibiting a federal establishment of religion, Jacksonians see the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, as the citadel of liberty. Jeffersonians join the American Civil Liberties Union; Jacksonians join the National Rifle Association. In so doing, both are convinced that they are standing at the barricades of freedom.

I’ve recently read James Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, and I’m nearly finished reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which does a deft job of detailing the cultures that spawned these four very different men and their philosophies. I’m also reading Victor Davis Hanson’s Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the past Still Determine how We Fight, how We Live, and how We Think (I tend to read more than one book at a time, especially when I’m reading non-fiction.)

One interesting common thread throughout all four of these works is America’s military, and its unique combination of lethality and compassion, of general decency in action, but ruthlessness when unrestrained. The first chapter in Ripples of Battle is concerned with the battle for Okinawa in WWII. Hanson points out the absolutely horrendous casualties suffered by both sides, and the military tactics employed to produce them, such as Japan’s massive kamikaze attacks and the U.S. tactic of firing flamethrowers into enemy-occupied caves before sealing them up with satchel charges.

…American ground and naval forces suffered 12,520 killed and another 33,631 wounded or missing in the three months between the invasion on April 1 and the official end of the Okinawan campaign on July 2.

—

The defenders… suffered far worse — at least 110,000 killed or nearly ten soldiers lost for every American slain, at a sickening clip of fifty men dead every hour of the battle, nearly one per minute, nonstop for three months on end. Perhaps 100,000 civilians may have been killed — how many of them were active combatants is not known. Nor do we have any accurate idea of the number of wounded and missing Okinawans; some estimates put the number of soldiers and civilians who were sealed in caves at over 20,000. Fewer than 7,500 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner. All in all, nearly a quarter of a million people were killed or wounded in the fighting on Okinawa…

Mead notes in the opening of his essay:

In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raids claimed the lives of more than 900,000 Japanese civilians — not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.

On one night, that of March 9-10, 1945, 234 Superfortresses dropped 1,167 tons of incendiary bombs over downtown Tokyo; 83,793 Japanese bodies were found in the charred remains–a number greater than the 80,942 combat fatalities that the United States sustained in the Korean and Vietnam Wars combined.

Both James Webb and David Hackett Fischer note that America’s military muscle is made up mostly of the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants – a people with a long history of military service and martial pride, and no politician better exemplifies the Scots-Irish temperament better than Andrew Jackson. Mead explains:

Many students of American foreign policy, both here and abroad, dismiss Jacksonians as ignorant isolationists and vulgar patriots, but, again, the reality is more complex, and their approach to the world and to war is more closely grounded in classical realism than many recognize. Jacksonians do not believe that the United States must have an unambiguously moral reason for fighting. In fact, they tend to separate the issues of morality and war more clearly than many members of the foreign policy establishment.

The Gulf War was a popular war in Jacksonian circles because the defense of the nation’s oil supply struck a chord with Jacksonian opinion. That opinion — which has not forgotten the oil shortages and price hikes of the 1970s — clearly considers stability of the oil supply a vital national interest and is prepared to fight to defend it. The atrocity propaganda about alleged Iraqi barbarisms in Kuwait did not inspire Jacksonians to war, and neither did legalistic arguments about U.S. obligations under the UN Charter to defend a member state from aggression. Those are useful arguments to screw Wilsonian courage to the sticking place, but they mean little for Jacksonians. Had there been no UN Charter and had Kuwait been even more corrupt and repressive that it is, Jacksonian opinion would still have supported the Gulf War. It would have supported a full-scale war with Iran over the 1980 hostage crisis, and it will take an equally hawkish stance toward any future threat to perceived U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf region.

In the absence of a clearly defined threat to the national interest, Jacksonian opinion is much less aggressive. It has not, for example, been enthusiastic about the U.S. intervention in the case of Bosnia. There the evidence of unspeakable atrocities was much greater than in Kuwait, and the legal case for intervention was as strong. Yet Jacksonian opinion saw no threat to the interests, as it understood them, of the United States, and Wilsonians were the only segment of the population that was actively eager for war.

In World War I it took the Zimmermann Telegram and the repeated sinking of American ships to convince Jacksonian opinion that war was necessary. In World War II, neither the Rape of Nanking nor the atrocities of Nazi rule in Europe drew the United States into the war. The attack on Pearl Harbor did.

To engage Jacksonians in support of the Cold War it was necessary to convince them that Moscow was engaged in a far-reaching and systematic campaign for world domination, and that this campaign would succeed unless the United States engaged in a long-term defensive effort with the help of allies around the world. That involved a certain overstatement of both Soviet intentions and capabilities, but that is beside the present point. Once Jacksonian opinion was convinced that the Soviet threat was real and that the Cold War was necessary, it stayed convinced. Populist American opinion accepted the burdens it imposed and worried only that the government would fail to prosecute the Cold War with the necessary vigor. No one should mistake the importance of this strong and constant support. Despite the frequent complaints by commentators and policymakers that the American people are “isolationist” and “uninterested in foreign affairs”, they have made and will make enormous financial and personal sacrifices if convinced that these are in the nation’s vital interests.

This mass popular patriotism, and the martial spirit behind it, gives the United States immense advantages in international affairs. After two world wars, no European nation has shown the same willingness to pay the price in blood and treasure for a global presence. Most of the “developed” nations find it difficult to maintain large, high-quality fighting forces. Not all of the martial patriotism in the United States comes out of the world of Jacksonian populism, but without that tradition, the United States would be hard pressed to maintain the kind of international military presence it now has.

It is the Jacksonians who fight our wars, and the Jacksonians who are willing to pay for them, and – to date – it has been the Jacksonians who make up a majority of the public, or at least the part that votes.

But there is one other important component of the Jacksonian philosophy. Mead again:

Jacksonian America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting: honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all rules are off.

An honorable enemy is one who declares war before beginning combat; fights according to recognized rules of war, honoring such traditions as the flag of truce; treats civilians in occupied territory with due consideration; and — a crucial point– refrains from the mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those who surrender should be treated with generosity. Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while those who want a dirty fight will get one.

—

Although American Indians often won respect for their extraordinary personal courage, Jacksonian opinion generally considered Indians to be dishonorable opponents. American-Indian warrior codes (also honor based) permitted surprise attacks on civilians and the torture of prisoners of war. This was all part of a complex system of limited warfare among the tribal nations, but Jacksonian frontier dwellers were not students of multicultural diversity. In their view, Indian war tactics were the sign of a dishonorable, unscrupulous and cowardly form of war. Anger at such tactics led Jacksonians to abandon the restraints imposed by their own war codes, and the ugly skirmishes along the frontier spiraled into a series of genocidal conflicts in which each side felt the other was violating every standard of humane conduct.

The Japanese, another people with a highly developed war code based on personal honor, had the misfortune to create the same kind of impression on American Jacksonians. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the gross mistreatment of American POWs (the Bataan Death March), and Japanese fighting tactics all served to enrage American Jacksonians and led them to see the Pacific enemy as ruthless, dishonorable and inhuman. All contributed to the vitriolic intensity of combat in the Pacific theater. By the summer of 1945, American popular opinion was fully prepared to countenance invasion of the Japanese home islands, even if they were defended with the tenacity (and indifference to civilian lives) that marked the fighting on Okinawa.

Given this background, the Americans who decided to use the atomic bomb may have been correct that the use of the weapon saved lives, and not only of American soldiers. In any case, Jacksonians had no compunction about using the bomb. General Curtis LeMay (subsequently the 1968 running mate of Jacksonian populist third-party candidate George Wallace) succinctly summed up this attitude toward fighting a dishonorable opponent: “I’ll tell you what war is about”, said Lemay in an interview, “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.”

Hanson makes a similar point:

The American military and public also came away from Okinawa with a number of perceptions about land warfare in Asia, some of them accurate, some racist, a few entirely erroneous — but all fundamental in forming the American way of war in Korea and Vietnam in the next thirty years. After the startling array of suicides on Okinawa, Americans were convinced that Asians in general did not value life — theirs or anyone else’s — in the same manner as Westerners, and when faced with overwhelming military power and sure defeat would nevertheless continue to fight hard in their efforts to kill Americans. Because territory was not really as important on Okinawa as body counts — the fight would end not with the capture per se of strategic ground but rather only with the complete annihilation of the enemy who was trapped on the island — Americans developed a particular mentality that would come to haunt them in both the Korean peninsula and Southeast Asia.

—

Because Okinawa was the major engagement in the Pacific where civilians sometimes fought on the side of the enemy, Americans experienced the dilemma of determining which woman, child, or old man was harmless, friendly, or a killer. And because Okinawa was out of view, little reported on, and fought against a supposedly repugnant and fascist enemy, Americans left the island with the assurance that when stranded in such a hell, they should blast indiscriminantly any civilian in their proximity on suspicion of aiding the enemy — also with disastrous consequences to come in the suddenly televised fighting of the 1960s and 1970s when victory hinged not on enemy body counts alone, but also in winning the hearts and minds of supposedly noncombatant civilian populations in an arena broadcast live around the world. Japanese veterans of the rape of Nanking might murder thousands of Okinawan civilians — 40,000 adult males alone were shanghaied into the imperial army. But in such a messy battle, jaded American GIs — as purportedly more liberal Westerners — who either mistakenly or by intent shot a few hundred would incur far greater moral condemnation both at home and far abroad.

And here we are again. This time we’re engaged in combat with enemies that wear no uniform, that blend with the civilian population, that use that population as a shield as well as a target, and who embrace their own deaths. Our soldiers, once again, are in the unenviable position of having to determine which woman, child, or old man is harmless, friendly, or a killer. Sometimes we make mistakes. And, as before, sometimes they might not be mistakes.

But still, we’re restrained. No carpet-bombing. No nukes. In fact, we’ve gone so far as to drop precision-guided bombs filled with concrete in order to minimize the risk of killing innocents or destroying important infrastructure. However, we’re willing to unapologetically kill women and children when the target requires it.

The question is, “How much longer will this restraint last?”

The Wilsonians want us out for diplomatic reasons. The Hamiltonians don’t want to keep paying the financial bill. The Jeffersonians don’t want to keep paying the bill in blood.

The Jacksonians want us to take the gloves off.

I noted a while back that Eric S. Raymond made this comment:

One of the reasons I support the present war is that killing 50K of the jihadis now may keep them from mounting the city-killing attack that will really enrage the U.S.. Because if that happens, millions on millions of Arabs will die and my country will be transformed by its rage into something I won’t like.

In that same comment, he also said:

These are not civilized people…. They’re barbarians — howling fanatics with a world view so close to psychopathology that I still find it difficult to comprehend even after having studied Islamic history for 31 years. Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, OBL’s mentor, once wrote of infidels: “There can no dialogue with them, save by the sword and the rifle.” Mainstream Salafists and Wahhabis and Deobandis really believe this! It’s not just posturing.

Being “reasonable” with barbarians like these doesn’t work; you have to make them fear you, and if you can’t make them fear enough you have to kill them as you would put down a rabid animal. I wish it wasn’t that way, but it is.

Sounds remarkably close to Hanson’s “Americans were convinced that Asians in general did not value life — theirs or anyone else’s — in the same manner as Westerners, and when faced with overwhelming military power and sure defeat would nevertheless continue to fight hard in their efforts to kill Americans”, doesn’t it? Just yesterday Ace at Ace of Spades HQ posted this:

If the majority of Muslims do in fact believe that an apocalyptic conflict with the west is inevitable, then 1, it is indeed inevitable, and 2, let the apocalypse begin.

If genocide is unavoidable, I choose genocide against my enemies rather than myself.

There will be one more massive outrage from the Religion of Peace, and then things are going to go rather badly for them.

Okay, let me not be so coy and cute. I am just about ready to give my blessing to a genocidal nuclear strike on the majority of the Muslim world, and I suspect many of my countrymen are similarly itchy-fingered.

One more. One more fucking mass-murder. Go for it, boys. Give us the excuse. Some of us suspect it’s inevitable and the only way to finally get it through your primative heads that we will no longer put up with being murdered by savage animals, but we need the moral pretext. We need the hot anger of fresh provocation.

So do it. If you are incapable of sharing the earth peacefully, then we will have to absent you from it. And when the nuclear fire rains down on you, you can cry out to your God and ask him “What have we possibly done to deserve this?”

In 50 years Americans will look back in horror at what we’ve done, just as they did 50 years after Hiroshima; but then, we’ll have peace for 50 years. I’ll exchange some guilt for safety.

Ace is obviously Jacksonian in philosophical outlook – and he’s quite right, many of his countrymen are similarly itchy-fingered. Francis Porretto offers a slightly less dark analysis:

Another strike with a hijacked aircraft would be terrible, but it would be a scale of destruction with which we’re already tragically familiar. It would probably precipitate a new expedition by our conventional military forces. But a terrorist act involving a biological agent, poison gas, or a nuclear weapon would reap many more lives, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. It would evoke demands that the Islamic world be punished with supreme brutality — demands that could not be denied.

—

Americans aren’t enthusiasts for the shedding of innocent blood, and either of the above scenarios would guarantee the destruction of an unthinkable number of lives, among which some innocents would surely be numbered. Yet one or the other would be unavoidable should Islamic lunatics perpetrate an atrocity with WMD. Were Washington to balk at such a response, the American people would scrape Washington hollow — and we wouldn’t wait for the next election to do it.

No, indeed. And the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians will join us. The Wilsonians never do.

All it will take is a little bit more convincing. September 11, 2001 was enough to get the Jacksonians on board to fight the war against our attackers – correctly identified as Islamic extremists, not just Al-Qaeda, and not just Osama Bin Laden. It was, to us, another Pearl Harbor. As usual, the Jacksonians are worried only that the government is failing to prosecute the war with the necessary vigor.

As Admiral Yamamoto is credited to have said after the Japanese naval air strikes on Pearl Harbor, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Okinawa, if nothing else, fulfilled that fear. If the Islamists manage to pull off a truly major strike involving thousands or even tens of thousands of American civilian casualties, the world will once again see what we moral, liberal, civilized Americans are willing to do when the gloves finally come off.

The difference between us and them is, once we’re finished we’ll pick up the pieces and wearily go home to our lives again, because we’re really not interested in running the world. As Eric Raymond so eloquently stated in American Empire Redux:

I was traveling in Europe a few years back, and some Euroleftie began blathering in my presence about America’s desire to rule the world. “Nonsense,” I told him. “You’ve misunderstood the American character. We’re instinctive isolationists at bottom. We don’t want to rule the world — we want to be able to ignore it.”

That, too, is a Jacksonian characteristic.

Contracts and Absolutes

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A couple of days ago, fellow gun- and rights-blogger Publicola posted The Minority Retort, a long-delayed piece on the topic of the Rights of Man. Pertinent excerpt:

In most things Kevin & I are in agreement. However there are a few differences.
I refer you to the following posts:


What is a “Right”?
It’s Not All Faith
Rights, Revisited
History and Moral Philosophy

In these you’ll find the main difference between Kevin & myself: He’s a Contractualist whereas I’m an Absolutist. I think we both agree as to some of the problems society currently faces about Rights: namely that we are pretty damn apethetic in general about the most important ones.

Where we differ is in the origin of those Rights.

Publicola goes on to make his argument:

A Contractualist believes that Rights are strictly a construct of the social contract. In other words Rights are dependent on society agreeing that they are in fact Rights.

An Absolutist believes that Rights are inherent & exist independently of the social contract. Rights are an inherent thing not given to men by men, but bestowed upon us by Nature or Nature’s God (depending upon your belief system).

Please, read the whole post if you haven’t already.

Let me see if I can illustrate where I see logical flaws in Publicola’s arguments.

I’ll accept – to a point – Publicola’s definition of me as a “Contractualist.” I have, however, made the point that I do believe in at least one right that exists outside the social contract. In my six-part exchange with Dr. Danny Cline on this very same topic, I said this:

Yes, I did state that “A ‘right’ is what the majority of a society believes it is,” and I’ll come back to that, but I am in agreement with Ayn Rand in her statement:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.

That right is, in my opinion, REAL, but it can be and has been trampled, folded, torn, spindled, mutilated, and – worst of all – unrealized, for the overwhelming majority of Man’s existence upon the Earth.

The source of this right?

Reason.

Or Nature. Yaweh. Christ. Vishnu, Mother Gaia, Barney the Dinosaur. I don’t know, nor do I care overly much, but reason works for me.

I believe that right is “real” because I believe that – given the chance – average specimens of humanity will conclude through reason that they are of value (to themselves if no one else), and that their physical selves and the product of their labor belongs to them and not another. However, it is difficult to build a society based on this belief alone. (The AnarchoCaptialists think it can – and should – be done, but admit that they don’t know how.)

I went on to argue that this right, the right to one’s own life, is understood only if there is sufficient freedom both of time and thought to allow reflection on the topic. It’s “self-evident” only if you have the time and the freedom to consider the question.

For millennia, that was not the case. People lived ferally at the whim of nature, then in strict hierarchies and at the whim of their social superiors. The fruit of their production was not theirs. It belonged to clan and tribe and then king. Their lives were not their own.

Publicola argues that history does not negate the fact that the right existed even when it was unrecognized. I argue that, if a thing isn’t recognized, isn’t praticed, isn’t defended, it is for all intents and purposes non-existant. Publicola argues that rights are inherent and independent from society, but then states:

If a stone falls out of the sky & kills you that’s just part of the game. It sucks, & in a bad way but those are the breaks. The rock was not acting with malice when it landed on you. It was behaving as rocks behave in gravity.

If a person walks up to you & for no justifiable reason drops a rock on you & kills you, then we have action with intent. We also have a good use of why Rights were communicated.

People. Be it a person acting singly or a group acting as a government, people are the reason it was necessary to define & articulate & communicate what exactly a “Right” is. They are, in essence, boundaries to prevent action from or by other people that would halt or slow you down in seeking or trying to achieve something that is necessary & proper for you to do.

Rights, according to Merriam Webster, and agreed to by Publicola are:

something to which one has a just claim: as a: the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled b (1) : the interest that one has in a piece of property — often used in plural (2) plural : the property interest possessed under law or custom and agreement in an intangible thing especially of a literary and artistic nature; something that one may properly claim as due

I’ve used that argument myself. But note the one commonality. Rights are, by Publicola’s definition and mine only claimable against other people – that is, your society. You cannot claim the ocean violated your right to life if you drown in it because of an accident. Your family can, however, file claim in court if someone else was responsible for your being in the ocean in deadly peril.

That is, if you live in a society that recognizes your right to life.

If you don’t, then you’re SOL. Your “just claim” would just fall flat.

I quoted MaxedOutMama yesterday:

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It’s worth it.

It’s a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else’s rights, because if you don’t there is no one to defend yours.

Rights exist when people are willing to defend them. Otherwise, they’re just some damned fool’s crackpot ideas.

I’ve discussed this before, too. I believe in “a man’s right to his own life,” and that “all other rights are its consequences or corollaries.” However, “all other rights” gets damned fuzzy damned fast. Certain Founders – among whom included James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights – believed that enumerating some of the fundamental rights in the Constitution would lead to the denegration of other, equally important rights. I quoted James Irdell from the North Carolina ratifying convention:

[I]t would not only be useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up; because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurpation; and it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let any one make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.

(From Professor Randy Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution.) Irdell argues that the rights of humanity are, essentially, innumerable. Every single human being out there can come up with a “right” that they firmly believe in. Madison even tried to forstall this danger by writing the Ninth Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

But the Ninth Amendment has become a meaningless inkblot, according to Robert Bork.

So who decides?

The society you live in, by general agreement.

That’s what defines a society.

And what defines the success of a society is whether the rights, privileges, and responsibilities they agree to result in the survival of that society.

I think you can see that the current French belief in the right to, as Nina Burleigh described it, “cheap medicine, generous welfare, (a) short workweek and plentiful child care” just isn’t going to pay off for them in the long run. Nor is England’s belief in the right to universal health care.

A society is defined by the rights, privileges, and responsibilities agreed to by the politically active majority (which may, in fact, be a tiny minority of the overall population.) When that politically active majority changes, so does the society. We no longer practice slavery. We no longer practice codified, legally sanctioned discrimination against blacks. A very vocal minority is currently attempting to change our society and manipulate what the current majority sees as our rights. Things change.

But the Absolutists say “NO!” They believe there are absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights.

I know only one. An individual’s right to his own life. There are consequences and corollaries of that one right, but people will disagree on what those are, and some will even disagree with that one. Religious fundamentalists may argue, for example, that an individual’s life belongs to his diety. I believe that’s the position the Jihadists take. Their lives are not their own.

And this is why societies clash – fundamentally incompatible belief systems. A disagreement on what are and what aren’t rights. From David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed:

We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our Republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”

We live in an open society which is organized on the principle of voluntary action, but the determinants of that system are exceptionally constraining. Our society is dynamic, changing profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable.

I think we’re witnessing a destabilization of our dynamic society. Of societies all over the world, in fact. What the Absolutists here proclaim to be Absolute Rights are, in fact, pretty radical compared to what history has shown us, and this is illustrated by MaxedOutMama’s quote:

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked.

What other society has ever been founded on a principle that embraces the radical idea that cherished principles and beliefs should be subject to question and even mockery? Yet the right of freedom of speech is one of those absolutes, is it not?

And if not, why not?

Other People’s Ideas

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(Sorry about the lull in posting. It wasn’t that Reasonable People took a lot out of me, it’s that I managed to come down with the creeping crud making its way through the rest of the family on Monday. Commenting was about all I was up for for the last few days. It still sounds like a TB ward around here.)

One of the things I often get in comments is that my posts run too long. (No, this is not specifically targeted at you, Mark.) Reasonable People runs about eight and a half printed pages. Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn’t (and Won’t) Work about eleven. Ravenwood dubbed it “Longest post ever.” The self-consciously named Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie runs about seven. I guess Reasonable People ate Cheboygan.

The point is, I’m fully aware that my posts often require a longer than average attention span. I will happily admit that they could be improved with some judicious editing for length and precision. However, while my audience is important to me, and what I’m doing is quite plainly open advocacy (thus necessitating said audience), my posts are more (and admittedly often less) than that.

Mark Alger wrote a piece at Baby Troll Blog that touched on the length of Reasonable People which inspired this post (now that I feel up to writing it.) Here’s the pertinent part for this discussion:

I want to offer this piece of gratuitous advice: an op-ed is 500 words. A regular column maxes out at 1500. By the time you get to 2,000 words, you’re in short story territory. At 7,500 words, you go into novelette mode, and at around 15,000 you make it to novella — which rolls over into a full-blown novel at 40,000 words or so.

Kevin’s post is (by MS Word’s count) 5,692 words. ‘Way too long.

So — as Kev himself might say — the fuck what?

Well, Baby Doll, it’s this: I think his thesis — as vaguely as I understand it — is worthwhile. It deserves consideration. It deserves discussion. It needs to be disseminated far and wide.

There’s a joke among writers. It goes: “Sorry it’s so long; I didn’t have the time to make it short.”

A joke I deliberately used in the post, about word 5,200, which makes me think that Mark didn’t get that far.

Distillation adds to the dwell time on an article, and delay in posting can be deadly to a blog post. By the time you consider and mull over a subject long enough to bake it down to the bare minimum necessary, a couple of days may have gone by. You’re yesterday’s news. Not exactly good for the old relevance quotient.

It’s a lot of pressure. And competing needs drive the blogger — the need to get a post up in a timely manner, versus the need to exposit clearly and with economy his thesis.

As Dirty Harry said in one movie or another, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” And I know I’m not my own best editor. But I’m a blogger. I’m all I’ve got.

I also know I’m not an original thinker. I’m never going to sit under an apple tree and invent the next big thing in mathematics since chaos theory. I studied physics in college for three years before convincing myself that it wasn’t a good choice of major because I’d have to get a PhD before I could get a decent paying job. With just a wee bit of hindsight, and someone else’s quotation, I understand much better why I became an engineer:

Engineering is very different from physics.

A good physicist is a man with original ideas.

A good engineer is a man who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.

Freeman Dyson

I keep that posted above my desk at work. It draws some interesting comments.

I was not suited to a career in physics. I am ideally suited to a career in engineering. I am also not a philosopher, though I study the subject shallowly. What I do, in my spare time, is read and think. I collect bits and pieces; other people’s ideas. I store them in my head, and on my computer, and both consciously and subconsciously fit them together in different ways. I’m interested in what works – in fact, one of the things that caught my attention in Dr. Godwin’s post How I Cured Myself of Leftism was this:

(C)onservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there.

There’s a whole essay on “Right vs. Left” in that sentence, and not what most would expect, I think.

As I explained to Mark in his comments – and as I want to expand on (Run away! Run away!) here, writing this stuff down helps me get my mind around it. I’m still working out my worldview, hopefully based on what works rather than how I’d like it to be. I am a pragmatist, albeit with an ideological bent. If you want evidence of that, slog through the seven quite long pieces of The “Rights” Discussion linked on the left sidebar. Or just the two pieces on Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection?

I write a lot of this stuff to help me figure it out. And if others can follow along for the ride, the more the merrier.

The process goes somewhat like this:

A) Here’s a new (to me) idea.

B) Does it seem logical on its face?

C) Is there evidence to support it?

D) Is there evidence to invalidate it?

E) How reliable is the evidence, either way?

This can take minutes, days, weeks, months. Depends on the idea. I collect these ideas constantly.

F) Does this new (to me) idea support what I already know/believe?

Bear in mind here, I fully understand the difference between knowing via emipirical testing, and believing through mere faith. And I’m also quite aware that what one “knows through empirical testing” can sometimes be proven quite wrong – with the right test. Same for beliefs.

G) Does this new (to me) idea contradict what I already know/believe?

H) Does this new (to me) idea suggest a solution to a problem I already have, suggest a problem I haven’t previously considered, or reinforce a concept from an entirely new angle I hadn’t seen? (Otherwise, it’s not a new idea. It’s a restatement of one I’ve already seen. Though restatement can sometimes be helpful itself.)

Reasonable People is not a stand-alone essay (though it does stand quite well on its own). It’s the third (at least) in a series, beginning with True Believers, followed by March of the Lemmings. Hell, it’s part of a long ongoing theme here – coming conflict due to the the dichotomy between what works and how we’d like it to be. Eric Hoffer’s ideas simply reinforced a concept from an angle I hadn’t considered – a new rising mass-movement. But as soon as I processed his ideas it became pretty obvious what “Bush Derangement Syndrome” represents – the attraction of the “average person on the street” to the early stages of the movement. It is a movement capable, as Dr. Santy said, of “being able to convince normally sane people that the source of all evil in the world is George W. Bush.”

And that idea scares the shit out of me.

So please, pardon me for babbling.

(103 minutes, 1,250 words!)

UPDATE: D’OH! I knew Newspeak wasn’t the right piece when I wrote this seven hours ago. See what happens when you’re in a hurry? Your subconscious wakes you out of a perfectly good sleep to go fix your damned mistake at 1AM. I plead illness as an excuse. The piece has been edited to correct the error.

Reasonable People

KevinLeave a comment

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. – George Bernard Shaw

There’s some truth to that, but it is not a truism. Einstein was perhaps the most reasonable person on the planet, and he changed the universe – or at least our perception of it. Stalin was one of the most unreasonable people in the world, and while he attempted to “adapt the world to himself,” what resulted certainly wasn’t “progress” in any sense of the term – even the Marxist one. Especially the Marxist one.

Reasonable People Can Differ? Not with me they can’t.

That’s the title of a December, 2000 Slate piece by Michael Kinsley about the 2000 election debacle. It is, perhaps, the first publicly exhibited symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Charles Krauthammer’s 2003 Townhall piece describes “BDS” as a psychological condition. (As an aside, I find much of what Mr. Krauthammer writes to be pretty astute, but – as reasonable people – we differ on the subject of gun control.) Since that time, amateur and professional pshrinks alike have expounded on “BDS” with increasingly outré examples to illustrate.

Dr. Patricia Santy, author of the blog Dr. Sanity writes on the topic, for instance:

The psychology of some of the Bush Haters is pretty cut and dried. They hate Bush because he stands between them and the implementation of their collectivist “utopian” vision. I have no time to waste on them, except to note that their intentions are deliberately and decidedly malevolent toward this country. They want it to fail at anything and everything it does and they openly cheer for the barbarians at the gate.

They are indistinguishable from the barbarians we are actively fighting, with the only difference being that they have different ideas about which group of thugs will be in charge of the “utopia”. They prefer themselves–a more secularly-oriented set of thugs–to rule.

And this is undoubtedly accurate – for some. But she continues:

But what about the average person on the street who has, or has come to have a visceral hatred of President Bush? Perhaps they simply didn’t vote for him in 2000, believing the media propaganda or caricature of his intellect and capabilities; or perhaps they simply didn’t like him because he was from the opposition party, or a Texan. or any other number of normal reasons.

It seems to me that the Democrats and the Left have used their continuous propaganda well, but there is a also a strong personal psychological factor involved in being able to convince normally sane people that the source of all evil in the world is George W. Bush.

And that, dear readers, is the subject of this essay.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m reading Eric Hoffer’s 1951 treatise, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. I hadn’t heard of it prior to my writing an essay on just that topic, True Believers, where a commenter pointed it out to me. (In fact, I’d never even heard of Eric Hoffer, but he’s a thoroughly fascinating man. If you’re unfamiliar with him, I advise you to peruse The Eric Hoffer Resource page.) Hoffer was a renaissance philosopher – he was self-educated, lived simply, worked at manual labor jobs, read, thought, and wrote. And he saw things very clearly.

The True Believer, being written in the immediate post-WWII years, was primarily about the mass movements of Italian and German Fascism and the rise of Communism, but Hoffer did not limit his observations. He reflected on mass movements throughout history, including the Zionist movement in pre-revolutionary Russia, the French Revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and others. He makes a point, in fact, that,

When people are ripe for a mass movement, they are usually ripe for any effective movement, and not solely for one with any particular doctrine or program.

Which explains in a sentence the current enthusiastic crossover between the eco-movement, the gay-rights movement, the anti-war movement, the socialist movement, et al. But what is it that makes people “ripe for a mass movement”? That’s the primary topic of the book, and something I’ve been struggling with for quite a while, because I see a major conflict coming and I don’t know that my side can mobilize to face it, much less succeed. In October of 2003, just a few months after starting this blog, I wrote Not with a Bang, but a Whimper?, that began:

Everybody bitches about how bad things are, politically. (Well, everybody but Bill Whittle.) And the bitching is pretty much evenly divided on both the left and the right. But I’ve noticed something I find disturbing. It appears to me that the Right is resigning. Giving up. Leaving the field.

And I gave a couple of examples from the blogosphere. This was one of my earlier posts on the cockroach resilience of the Left. I’ve since written several posts on what I see as a coming conflict, though I’ve been (until now) unable to determine what the two sides will be. In fact, at one point I convinced myself that there wouldn’t be a second Civil War because, as I put it then:

The divide now is philosophical, too, but not as easily demarcated. It isn’t slavery vs. abolition, it’s “Left” vs. “Right.” It’s Libertarian vs. Conservative. Green vs. Democrat. Socialists vs. Capitalists. Anarchists vs. Government. Christians vs. Humanists. Jihadists vs. Infidels. Atheists vs. Christianity. Gun-grabbers vs. Gun-nuts. The perpetually disinterested vs. everyone else.

Grab any six random people off the street – chances are they’ll have strongly held (and largely unsupported) opinions on a variety of topics, and those opinions will stray all over the philosophical boundaries of the merely Left and Right. It’s not a binary division, it’s an n-dimensional space of varying density.

I’ve also recently begun reading David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, and this piece from the introduction struck me:

We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our Republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”

We live in an open society which is organized on the principle of voluntary action, but the determinants of that system are exceptionally constraining. Our society is dynamic, changing profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable.

Well, it has been remarkably stable, excepting that first Civil War, but I no longer believe that “nearly all of us support our Republican system,” and I believe the percentage is falling. Please note that Albion’s Seed was published in 1989. Much has changed since then.

Another psychology blogger, Robert Godwin, posted this at One Cosmos:

At this point in time, I am more inclined to think of leftism as an intellectual pathology rather than a psychological one (although there is clearly considerable overlap). What I mean is that it is impossible to maintain a priori that a conservative person is healthier or more emotionally mature than a liberal. There are plenty of liberals who believe crazy things but are wonderful people, and plenty of conservatives who have the right ideas but are rotten people. However, this may be begging the question, for it is still puzzling why people hold beliefs that are demonstrably untrue or at the very least unwise.

One of the problems is with our elites. We are wrong to think that the difficulty lies in the uneducated and unsophisticated masses–as if inadequate education, in and of itself, is the problem. As a matter of fact, no one is more prone to illusions than the intellectual. It has been said that philosophy is simply personal error on a grandiose scale. Complicating matters is the fact that intellectuals are hardly immune to a deep emotional investment in their ideas, no less than the religious individual. The word “belief” is etymologically linked to the word “beloved,” and it is easy to see how certain ideas, no matter how dysfunctional–for example, some of the undeniably appealing ideas underpinning contemporary liberalism–are beloved by those who believe them. Thus, many liberal ideas are believed not because they are true, but because they are beautiful. Then, the intellectual simply marshals their intelligence in service of legitimizing the beliefs that they already hold. It has long been understood by psychoanalysts that for most people, reason is the slave of the passions.

(F)or the person who is not under the hypnotic psycho-spiritual spell of contemporary liberalism, it is strikingly devoid of actual religious wisdom or real ideas. As such, it is driven by vague, spiritually infused ideals and feelings, such as “sticking up for the little guy,” or “war is not the answer.” On the other hand, conservatism is not so much based on ideas, but on simply observing what works, and then generalizing from there. It is actually refreshingly free of dogma, and full of dynamic tension. For example, at the heart of conservatism is an ongoing, unresolvable dialectic between freedom and virtue. In other words, there is a bedrock belief in the idea that free markets are the best way to allocate scarce resources and to create wealth and prosperity for all, but a frank acknowledgment that, without a virtuous populace, the system may produce a self-centered, materialistic citizenry living in a sort of degenerate, “pitiable comfort.” Thus, there is an ongoing, unresolvable tension between the libertarian and traditional wings of the movement.

There is no such dynamic tension in liberalism. Rather, it is a top-down dogma that is not dictated by what works, but by how liberals would like reality to be. This is why liberalism must be enforced with the mechanism of political correctness, in order to preempt or punish those who deviate from liberal dogma, and see what they are not supposed to see.

In another post, he stated:

People typically think that the right represents the party of sanctimonious and judgmental morality, but this is hardly the case. In fact, this is an exact reversal of the situation. Morality in and of itself is neither moral nor immoral. Sometimes–perhaps more often than not–a moral system can actually be a source of great evil. One of the things that sets human beings apart from animals is that we cannot avoid making moral distinctions. There seems to be a built in need to distinguish between right and wrong. This impulse is just as strong and ubiquitous as the sex drive, and, just like the sex drive, can become distorted and perverted. With the left, we are generally not dealing with immoral people, but with quite serious moral perversion. And I say this in all seriousness and with all due respect.

For example, yesterday on LGF, Charles linked to a photo gallery of the anti-death penalty demonstrators outside San Quentin Prison Monday night. Here are examples of some of the signs that were carried by protesters: “Tookie Has Done More For Kids Than Arnold.” “Arnold is a Nazi. Terminate Him Now.” “America is Still Murdering Blacks. Slavery: 1492-Present.” “Tookie = Greater Integrity. Worth 100 Times as Much to Our World as All of the Neocons, Hypochristians & Fascist Pigs of Profit.”

So clearly, there is an extraordinary amount of moral passion behind these sentiments. And yet, it is an insane and deranged moral passion. The philosopher Michael Polanyi pointed out that what distinguishes leftism in all its forms is the dangerous combination of a ruthless contempt for traditional moral values with an unbounded moral passion for utopian perfection. The first step in this process is a complete skepticism that rejects traditional ideals of moral authority and transcendent moral obligation–a complete materialistic skepticism combined with a boundless, utopian moral fervor to transform mankind.

“A boundless, utopian moral fervor to transform mankind.” The kind of ideal that attracts and inspires the True Believer. For a moment, let’s discuss who these people are. Hoffer writes:

The superior individual, whether in politics, literature, science, commerce, or industry, plays a large role in shaping a nation, but so do individuals at the other extreme — the failures, misfits, outcasts, criminals, and all those who have lost their footing, or never had one, in the ranks of respectable humanity. The game of history is usually played by the best and worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

 The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. They also crave to dissolve their spoiled, meaningless selves in some soul-stirring spectacular communal undertaking — hence their proclivity for united action. Thus they are among the early recruits of revolutions, mass migrations, and of religious, racial and chauvinist movements, and they imprint their mark upon these upheavals and movements which shape a nation’s character and history.

 The discarded and rejected are often the raw materials of a nation’s future. The stone the builders reject becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seeds of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it.

Or, as George Bernard Shaw put it, “Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves.” As a bit of further evidence of how “the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course,” let me reiterate on the concept of cultural “trickle up,” and how the extremes in society “play the game of history” over the heads of the middle. Theodore Dalrymple has spent most of his life working among the “other extreme” of British culture while living among the elite. His book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass is specifically on this topic. James Lileks wrote perhaps the most accurate and succinct review of the book:

“Life at the Bottom,” an account of the British underclass by Theodore Dalrymple. “Bracing” does not describe it, anymore than “Brisk” describes the sensation of a bucket of lemon juice poured on a sucking chest wound. The book concerns the ideas that animate, if you can use that word, the sullen masses of the impotent and indifferent, where they come from (two guesses) and how uncouthness becomes chic, and trickles up.

Examples range from multiple out-of-wedlock births by different (absent) fathers, to ubiquitous tattooing and piercings, all encouraged as “authentic behaviors” by the liberal intelligentsia, who are just as wholly without reverence towards the present.

Hoffer writes:

A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or by remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves — and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.

It is obvious, therefore, that, in order to succeed, a mass movement must develop at the earliest moment a compact corporate organization and a capacity to absorb and integrate all comers. It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated. Where new creeds vie with each other for the allegiance of the populace, the one which comes with the most perfected collective framework wins.

—

The milieu most favorable for the rise and propagation of mass movements is one in which a once compact corporate structure is, for one reason or another, in a state of disintegration.

—

The general rule seems to be that as one pattern of corporate cohesion weakens, conditions become ripe for the rise of a mass movement and the eventual establishment of a new and more vigorous form of compact unity.

—

Another and final illustration of the thesis that effective collective bodies are immune to the appeal of mass movements, but that a crumbling collective pattern is the most favorable milieu for their rise is found in the relation between the collective body we know as an army and mass movements. There is hardly an instance of an intact army giving rise to a religious, revolutionary or nationalist movement. On the other hand, a disintegrating army — whether by the orderly process of demoblilization or by desertion due to demoralization — is fertile ground for a proselytizing movement. The man just out of the army is an ideal potential convert, and we find him among the early adherents of all contemporary mass movements. He feels alone and lost in the free-for-all of civilian life. The responsibilities and uncertanties of an autonomous existence weigh and prey upon him. He longs for certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility, and a vision of something altogether different from the competitive free society around him — and he finds all of this in the brotherhood and the revivalist atmosphere of a rising movement.

And, most interestingly, Hoffer discusses the love-hate relationship rising mass movements have with the military:

It is well at this point, before leaving the subject of self-sacrifice, to have a look at the similarities and differences between mass movements and armies.

The similarities are many: both mass movements and armies are collective bodies; both strip the individual of his separateness and distinctness; both demand self-sacrifice, unquestioning obedience and singlehearted allegiance; both make extensive use of make-belief to promote daring and united action; and both can serve as a refuge for the frustrated who cannot endure an automomous existence. A military body like the Foreign Legion attracts many of the types who usually rush to join a new movement. It is also true that the recruiting officer, the Communist agitator and the missionary often fish simultaneously in the cesspools of skid row.

But the differences are fundamental: an army does not come to fulfill a need for a new way of life; it is not a road to salvation. It can be used as a stick in the hand of a coercer to impose a new way of life and force it down unwilling throats. But the army is mainly an instrument devised for the preservation or expansion of an established order — old or new. It is a temporary instrument that can be assembled and taken apart at will. The mass movement, on the other hand, seems an instrument of eternity, and those who join it do so for life. The ex-soldier is a veteran, even a hero; the ex-true believer is a renegade. The army is an instrument for bolstering, protecting and expanding the present. The mass movement comes to destroy the present. Its preoccupation is with the future, and it derives its vigor and drive from this preoccupation.

—

Being an instrument of the present, an army deals mainly with the possible. Its leaders do not rely on miracles. Even when animated by fervent faith, they are open to compromise. They reckon with the possibility of defeat and know how to surrender. On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present — for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender.

Thus the psychological projection of the Left impugning its opponents as “drinking the Kool-Aid” of the Right – invoking the image of Jim Jones.

The spirit of self-sacrifice within an army is fostered by devotion to duty, make-believe, esprit de corps, drill, faith in a leader, sportsmanship, the spirit of adventure and the desire for glory. These factors, unlike those employed by a mass movement, do not spring from a deprecation of the present and a revulsion of an unwanted self. They can unfold therefore in a sober atmosphere.

See the recent Wall Street Journal piece by ex-journalist and new Marine 2nd Lieutenant Matt Pottinger for an example of devotion to duty unfolding in a sober atmosphere. Just an aside, the modern military no longer “fishes in the cesspool of skid row” for recruits – which is one reason the Left is having a harder and harder time finding examples like Jimmy Massey and Pablo Paredes to promote their cause. The rising mass-movement sees in the military a vast repository of raw recruit material – that has been co-opted by the hated enemy. The soldiers, the “cannon fodder,” are merely confused! The officers are the true enemy – thus the exhortations to the soldiers to “frag” their officers and join the mass movement.

What we have in America today is the result of about a hundred years of Leftist influence in American culture, best exhibited by the rise of “Transnational Progressivism” (read the whole thing) – an ideology that essentially places the blame for all iniquity around the world at the feet of a single enemy, the United States; and one group in the United States, heterosexual conservative white males. That’s rather narrow. For some it’s just “white people.” For others it’s anyone who is “conservative.” (Especially if they, themselves, are white males.) For groups outside the U.S., (and some inside it) it’s more broadly “Americans.” However defined, this group is symbolized in effigy at the present time by one individual – George W. Bush. But that won’t last forever.

Remember Hoffer’s words: “It is futile to judge the viability of a new movement by the truth of its doctrine and the feasibility of its promises. What has to be judged is its corporate organization for quick and total absorption of the frustrated.” It doesn’t matter if the idea is illogical, ridiculous, or outright insane. It matters if you can mobilize the disaffected to the cause.

What we are seeing today is the coalescing of a new mass movement. There are many disaffected out there who are members of various fringe groups and organizations – the ones Dr. Santy defines as those who “hate Bush because he stands between them and the implementation of their collectivist “utopian” vision.” But the efforts of the Leftist intelligentsia and the “underclass” have splintered our culture. We are no longer “one people.” We are no longer one culture made up of many smaller, meshing cultures. We are “Red America” and “Blue America.” There is sand in the gears, and corporate cohesion is being lost. As a result there is a slowly rising tide of the disaffected, frightened of the future and looking for someone to blame and someone to promise them utopia.

Hoffer again:

Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. It pulls and whirls the individual away from his own self, makes him oblivious of his weal and future, frees him of jealosies and self-seeking. He becomes an anonymous particle quivering with a craving to fuse and coalesce with his like into one flaming mass. (Heinrich) Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil. When Hitler was asked whether he thought the Jew must be destroyed, he answered: “No…. We should have then to invent him. It is essential to have a tangible enemy, not merely an abstract one.” F.A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.”

Meet the new Jews, and George W. Bush as Satan incarnate.

As an example, let me quote Forrest Church from his Sept. 2002 New Republic essay, “The American Creed”:

In many quarters of the world today America is resented–even hated–for its perceived embrace of godless and value-free materialism and the felt imposition of this moral “decadence” on world society. The first American armed conflict of the twenty-first century is being cast by its aggressor in religious terms as a jihad against the infidel, with America blasphemed as “the great Satan.” Osama bin Laden proclaimed that those who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were martyrs, servants of Allah dying for a holy cause–a view not restricted to terrorists alone. America is caricatured in much of the Muslim world as a godless society wedded to materialism and wanton in the exercise of its power around the globe.

On the other hand, inside the U.S. it isn’t “godless and value-free materialism” that is hated, it is the concept of a rising theocracy and value-free materialism (at least they’re consistent on one point.) Read Jane Smiley’s most recent Huffington Post piece where George W. is at once responsible for every evil out there. And she’s serious. Or just read Robert Godwin’s dissection of it, if you can’t stomach it unfiltered.

As of yet this mass movement is also splintered, but as Hoffer noted, when people are ripe for a mass movement, any mass movement will do. And the mass movement that is best equipped to absorb them, wins them.

I noted recently that I received a solicitation from “Rev. Billy Bob Gisher” to exchange links to his website Less People, Less Idiots. In an interesting coincidence I came across a comment by Eric S. Raymond at his blog Armed and Dangerous today concerning the kidnapping of four members of a group called Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq who are now threatened with beheading by the very people they went there to “protect.”

I like it when villains or dangerous idiots are killed by their own folly. That seems just to me. More importantly, it’s how other people learn not to be that way. It’s evolution in action; it improves the meme pool, or the gene pool, or both.

This is actually one of my gut reasons for favoring drug legalization, though I’d never thought it through quite so far before. I don’t think we have enough selective pressures against idiocy any more; I’d like idiots to have more chances to kill themselves, ideally before they get old enough to vote or reproduce. Not because I relish their deaths, but because I want to live in a future with fewer idiots in it.

By the way, I’m using “idiot” in its original sense here. To the ancient Greeks, an “idiot” was a person too closed in on himself to be a net plus to his neighbors and his society. Distinctions between mental impairments, communicative defects like deaf-muteness, or insanity were not clear and not considered important; the important question was whether the ‘idiotes’ (private person) was capable of discharging the responsibilities of a citizen in the agora.)

Somehow I don’t think that Eric’s position is the same as “Rev. Gisher” on the topic. Read the comment thread. Very interesting.

The Rev. Gisher is on a quest, to wit, from the link entitled “Do you want to see changes for the better?”:

Do you believe that lobbyists, who write most of the bills that are passed to become our laws, control the American government? Do you believe that it does not matter which party is in office, that other than small shifts in agendas, both sides of the aisle have to cater to the people that fund their reelections? Do you really believe it was absolutely necessary that we sent our young men to Iraq to die? Do you believe that questioning what our government does is not unpatriotic? Do you believe that in less than a hundred years, humans will be in serious trouble, because of the effects of overpopulation, and toxic chemical concentrations, as well as possible wars that break out from a desperate grab for diminished resources? Do you believe that the trouble may be brought upon us faster, because of possible major shifts in climate? Do you believe that the “Crossfire” mentality of arguing a point to death, rather than working towards common ground might be great entertainment, but is putting nails in humanity’s coffin? Do you care about what kind of world we are leaving our children and our grandchildren? Do you want to see changes; do you want things to improve?

—

So what can you do to try and turn all of this around? How do you perform this trick without bringing more violence and death to mankind, through yet another armed revolution?

You have something in your possession that you are looking at right this moment that is called a computer. The device sitting right in front of you allows you to reach out and contact anyone in the world who has access to a computer, and the Internet.

You can help humans to move away from the paralysis caused by, greed, apathy, and polarization that infects our current system of government. You can do this by reaching out to someone who has just a slightly different view of the world from your own, and finding areas that you can agree upon. If the other party reaches out to someone else who differs slightly from them, and this process of reaching out continues, eventually it is possible for everyone that has access to a computer to be linked into a system where everyone is attempting to find common ground and moving forward to try and resolve some of our problems.

I won’t reproduce the whole post, please read it yourself. What the Rev. is trying to do is reach out to the “reasonable people,” to form a network of those who do not necessarily agree on everything, but who are willing to A) agree on some things, and B) agree to at least discuss their differences on other topics. I’ve got, for example, a problem with some of the items on his laundry-list of grievances, and I’m not sure that he’s one of those David Hackett Fischer refers to as being supportive of our Republican system.

It’s a noble idea, though. It’s an idea made practical by the revolution that is the internet – communication so cheap that all it costs you is your time. (I’ve been working on this essay for the last four hours, and I haven’t edited it yet. And yes, I edit. Voltaire once wrote “I’m writing you a long letter because I don’t have time to write a short one.” Hoffer once wrote “There is not an idea that cannot be expressed in 200 words or less.” With that thought, he established the “Eric Hoffer-Lili Fabilli Essay Award” at the University of California, Berkeley, for the best essay on a topic in 500 words or less. I’d never win it.) At any rate, if the idea appeals to you, go to this link and read more.

I’m not convinced that the Rev’s idea will work. The mass movement is growing, and it’s not made up of “reasonable people.” Perhaps his idea would serve to keep “reasonable people” from becoming disaffected fodder for the mass movement, perhaps not. Perhaps not enough. In another idea, Kim and Connie du Toit are trying to establish a Nation of Volunteers organization, which is much the same idea, but narrower, with a bit more activism involved. And money.

Again, Kim and Connie are trying to reach out to “reasonable people” – mostly conservatives. I applaud the concept – and again wonder how much success it might have in the face of a growing mass movement.

I said at the opening of this piece that I was unable to determine what the two sides will be in the coming conflict. It will be the “True Believers” of the new mass movement against the “reasonable people.” And it won’t be pretty. Stopping a mass movement can be done – bloodily – by an army. Or from within, by washtubs filled with poisoned Kool-Aid after a Congressional investigation. Hoffer writes:

The problem of stopping a mass movement is often a matter of substituting one movement for another. A social revolution can be stopped by promoting a religious or nationalist movement. Thus in countries where Catholicism has recaptured its mass movement spirit, it counteracts the spread of communism.

The example he was probably thinking of there was post WWII Greece.

In the comments to that piece at Armed and Dangerous, Eric Raymond says:

One of the reasons I support the present war is that killing 50K of the jihadis now may keep them from mounting the city-killing attack that will really enrage the U.S. Because if that happens, millions on millions of Arabs will die and my country will be transformed by its rage into something I won’t like.

That is an example of how one mass movement can be stopped. As Hoffer says:

This method of stopping one movement by substituting another for it is not always without danger, and it does not come cheap.

No indeed.

But there is a mass movement gathering, and it must be stopped. And reasonable people may not be enough to do it.

It Takes a Lot to Piss Me Off.

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Getting blatantly lied to generally does it. People displaying ignorance, on the other hand, just piques me a bit. But when someone takes ignorance, ingests just enough fact, and then regurgitates – let’s not pussyfoot – vomits their asshole opinion, sometimes that’s enough.

Today, I had just such an experience.

The lefty blog The People’s Republic of Seabrook, run by one Jack Cluth, has as its address “intellectualize.org” – just so we know that Jack’s an intellectual, I suppose. Jack is an unabashed Leftist, victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome, and all-around opponent of the war in Iraq, given the postings I’ve reviewed there. But one really took the cake. Not the post, so much. That’s just a combination of his personal political bias combined with his ignorance of matters military and his knee-jerk reaction to a three-hundred word “news” story.

No, what pissed me off was the picture he chose to illustrate his post. I don’t know if he created it, or if he plucked it off the web somewhere because it appealed to him – and in either case I don’t really give a damn – because it illustrates his derangement perfectly.

Let’s discuss the story – hell, let’s reproduce it in its entirety:

Family Upset Over Soldier’s Body Arriving As Freight

Bodies Sent To Families On Commercial Airliners

There’s controversy over how the military is transporting the bodies of service members killed overseas, 10News reported.

A local family said fallen soldiers and Marines deserve better and that one would think our war heroes are being transported with dignity, care and respect. It said one would think upon arrival in their hometowns they are greeted with honor. But unfortunately, the family said that is just not the case.

Dead heroes are supposed to come home with their coffins draped with the American flag — greeted by a color guard.

But in reality, many are arriving as freight on commercial airliners — stuffed in the belly of a plane with suitcases and other cargo.

John Holley and his wife, Stacey, were stunned when they found out the body of their only child, Matthew John Holley, who died in Iraq last month, would be arriving at Lindbergh Field as freight.

Matthew was a medic with the 101st Airborne unit and died on Nov. 15.

“When someone dies in combat, they need to give them due respect they deserve for (the) sacrifice they made,” said John Holley.

John and Stacey Holley, who were both in the Army, made some calls, and with the help of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, Matthew was greeted with honor and respect.

“Our familiarity with military protocol and things of that sort allowed us to kind of put our foot down — we’re not sure other parents have that same knowledge,” said Stacey Holley.

The Holleys now want to make sure every fallen hero gets the proper welcome.

The bodies of dead service members arrive at Dover Air Force Base.

From that point, they are sent to their families on commercial airliners.

Reporters from 10News called the Defense Department for an explanation. A representative said she did not know why this is happening.

Now, I’d like some follow-up on this piece. “With the help of Sen. Barbara Boxer” Matthew Holley was “greeted with honor and respect.” Even though, I suppose, he was shipped as (gasp!) AIR CARGO!

This isn’t, however, what pissed Jack Cluth off. Let me quote from his post:

OK, let’s imagine something for just a second. Let’s say that Bill Clinton was still in office. And let’s say that the bodies of dead American soldiers were being shipped to their families as freight, stuffed in the cargo hold of a plane along with the luggage?

If Republicans were to get wind of this sort of Democratic perfidy, CAN YOU IMAGINE THE WEEPING AND GNASHING OF TEETH, AND THE PEALS OF RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION that would be raining down upon a Democratic Administration? And guess what? They’d have a damn good point. So why then is it acceptable for Our Glorious Leader’s Administration to be shipping the bodies of fallen soldiers as they would Aunt Ethel’s luggage? It’s simple, really; because Democrats simply lack the cojones to to raise Hell and demand that this disrespect stop IMMEDIATELY.

Old Jack is angry because the Democrats haven’t made a talking point out of it.

Here’s a clue, Jack: The military has always shipped deceased service members home by air cargo – with escort. Why the Defense Department representative didn’t know that is beyond me. Perhaps the reporter didn’t call the right department? Regardless, what would you prefer – private jet? Wouldn’t you then complain about the expense? Ship them in a first-class seat with a martini to hand? Detail an Air Force cargo jet for each individual soldier?

If you knew anything about the military, you would know that usually – not always, but usually – they treat their dead with the utmost honor. And if you read any of the right-wing or milblogs, you would have read this Rocky Mountain News in-depth report on just how the Marines honor their fallen, Final Salute. However, it runs a wee bit longer than 305 words and it requires an attention span. And some shred of honor.

Let me quote some of it:

The American Airlines 757 couldn’t have landed much farther from the war.

The plane arrived in Reno on a Friday evening, the beginning of the 2005 “Hot August Nights” festival – one of the city’s biggest – filled with flashing lights, fireworks, carefree music and plenty of gambling.

When a young Marine in dress uniform had boarded the plane to Reno, the passengers smiled and nodded politely. None knew he had just come from the plane’s cargo hold, after watching his best friend’s casket loaded onboard.

At 24 years old, Sgt. Gavin Conley was only seven days younger than the man in the coffin. The two had met as 17-year-olds on another plane – the one to boot camp in California. They had slept in adjoining top bunks, the two youngest recruits in the barracks.

All Marines call each other brother. Conley and Jim Cathey could have been. They finished each other’s sentences, had matching infantry tattoos etched on their shoulders, and cracked on each other as if they had grown up together – which, in some ways, they had.

When the airline crew found out about Conley’s mission, they bumped him to first-class. He had never flown there before. Neither had Jim Cathey.

On the flight, the woman sitting next to him nodded toward his uniform and asked if he was coming or going. To the war, she meant.

He fell back on the words the military had told him to say: “I’m escorting a fallen Marine home to his family from the situation in Iraq.”

The woman quietly said she was sorry, Conley said.

Then she began to cry.

When the plane landed in Nevada, the pilot asked the passengers to remain seated while Conley disembarked alone. Then the pilot told them why.

The passengers pressed their faces against the windows. Outside, a procession walked toward the plane. Passengers in window seats leaned back to give others a better view. One held a child up to watch.

From their seats in the plane, they saw a hearse and a Marine extending a white-gloved hand into a limousine, helping a pregnant woman out of the car.

The piece runs twelve pages. I guarantee you that if you have a soul, you’ll be in tears by the end of it. Barbara Boxer need not apply.

Now I ask you: Which party do you think would be more willing to ship our honored dead home like this:

That’s the picture Mr. Cluth used to illustrate his outrage. Which party is shouting “We can’t win! Cut and run! Cut and run!”

Marines not honoring their dead? Not on this planet. But I’ve about concluded that the Democrats in power and their vocal supporters have lost any hint of that virtue.

UPDATE: In true compassionate, inclusive, diversity-embracing Leftist style, Jack’s most recent post suggests that he’s in favor of the homosexual rape of prisoners by prison guards. So long as the rape victim is a Republican.

But his side deserves to be in charge.

Update II: Jack’s discovered this post, and has a reply up. Read the comments.

Update III: Jack seems to think that posting a Ted “I’m a piece of human excrement” Rall “cartoon” is a rebuttal. Or he never bothered to read the Rocky Mountain News piece. Wouldn’t want to confuse himself with anything like facts.

On Partaking of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge

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I’ve been running this blog now for about two and a half years. I started it because I had something to say on the specific topic of gun control, and on the more general topic of individual rights. I’ve been posting on the web, in one form or another, since about 1995 – usenet, bulletin boards, blog comments, and finally my own blog – but I’ve read far more than I’ve ever written, both online and in dead-tree format. My wife says that the computer is my mistress, as I spend more time with it than with her. She has a point. And when I’m not in front of the screen I’ve usually got my face stuck in a book. It’s a wonder she puts up with me.

But I don’t do this because it’s an enjoyable pastime (though sometimes it’s very enjoyable). It’s a lot of work, and much of it isn’t all that pleasant. I started writing on the web because I was driven to. I could sense that something wasn’t right, and I felt that I had to do whatever I could to determine what that something was, and try to correct it. I’m more interested in fact than in feeling. I’m more pragmatic than idealistic, though I hold my few ideals dear. I’m bright, but not brilliant. I’m not an original thinker, but I’m good at collecting, sifting, and collating information. I’m not inspirational, but I’m a good, technical writer. I understand my skill set and my limitations, which is apparently more than many college professors and most journalists manage, but I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have chosen one of those professions rather than engineering. (My job cuts drastically into my reading and writing time, you see.) But then, I’m not PC enough for either job, really, and the money’s better in engineering.

Anyway, I’m writing this exposition because all this reading and thinking has been leading somewhere, and the following essay, I hope, will help explain it to both you, the reader, and me.

The way I write essays varies. Sometimes I’ll have a specific point to make, and I’ll collect the links and quotes as I write. Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection? is a good example, or Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn’t (and Won’t) Work. Those pieces are time consuming, but otherwise pretty easy. Sometimes I do a stream-of-consciousness piece, and am surprised by just where I end up. On Guillotines and Gibbets was one of those. I had the title in my head, but just sat down and hammered the piece out. (I’m quite pleased with it, too.) This piece is one. Usually, though, I collect snippets over a considerable period of time; a link to an op-ed or a news story, commentary on it by bloggers or their readers, pieces from books I’m reading or have already read. I’ll Google the topic and research it in more depth. I’ll re-read some of my older stuff that may be tangentially associated with it, and I’ll read the comments to those pieces again, following the links to other pieces at other blogs. Then I collect it all in one place and try to make a coherent whole out of it.

The longer I do this, the more information I have to sift through. It’s like building a jigsaw puzzle, but collecting the pieces in little lots. Here’s a batch that assembles to make a picture, but it’s only a small part of the whole, and there are leftovers. Here’s another batch that makes another part of the picture, and you know they’re associated, but the intervening pieces are missing.

I said in Fight Evil. Speak Up. that I write because:

I’m one of those who chooses to be concerned. I’m one of the tiny, but not silent voices in this culture who is willing to stand up and say “I don’t agree,” and why. I recognize the clash between our sense of life and our culture, and I’m willing to try to help expose it and reconcile it in those who are putting us in such danger because of it, and I hope that in some small way my efforts will result in individual conscious convictions – and eventually a culture – that I am happy and proud to call American again.

And that’s true, it is one of the reasons I write. Another is to help me form and understand my own beliefs – to actually consider what it is I believe, and why. That’s why I like discussing things with people who don’t agree with me – it forces me to consider other perspectives that I might not otherwise. In fact, I started blogging for precisely this reason, with the debate with Jack at The Commentary that produced The Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie, and I’ve tried to continue it with my debate with Alex on gun control, my debate with Dr. Cline on the topic of rights, or my long commentary discussions with Sarah on the topic of religion.

I do this for me, to help me understand.

But sometimes I’m envious of the ignorant. That tree of knowledge parable is a bitch.

True Believers

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Warning: This piece is going to be long. It is also, in a weird way, a review of Joss Whedon’s Serenity, since that movie finally released the block that’s been keeping me from writing this essay for about a week, though work has conspired to keep me from posting it for the last four days. (Congratulations, Joss. I walked out of the theater Wednesday night with my mind whirring at mach 6, as the gears meshed and the tumblers tumbled and the mechanism, with groaning protest, unlocked. Serenity was excellent mental lubricant.) By now, I hope, most of my readers have already read one or more reviews of the film or have seen it, and have some familiarity with the background of that universe and its characters. Anyway, to proceed:

As I said last weekend, I watched the Jim Carrey movie The Majestic, and it inspired the idea for not one, but two posts. However, I was only able to write the first post. The second stubbornly refused to gel in my mind. I fought with it most of last week, and then Wednesday night I went to the Tucson Serenity sneak preview.

I don’t think I got out of the film what most of the rest of the audience did. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much, but the underlying theme of the film spoke to me. We in the audience were not, of course, allowed to record anything, so lines I “quote” will be my best recollection or paraphrasing (and if you’ve not yet seen the film and don’t want to know anything in detail about it, stop reading now.) The theme is “true believers.”

Captain Malcolm Reynolds, the protagonist, was once, but is no longer a True Believer. One of the rebel “Browncoats,” he had his belief beaten out of him at the battle of Serenity Valley. Now he just wants to be as free from the interference of the Alliance government as is humanly possible. He wants to be an individual. He wants his freedom. He is, if you want to draw a contemporary parallel, a practicing anarcho-capitalist living on the fringes of a totalitarian society (with the exception of the fact that he sees no problem with stealing from the Alliance at any opportunity). Although he’d probably have a hard time discussing his personal philosophy in detail, he has his own code that he lives by strictly.

The antagonist in the film, The Operative (since he is given no name), is a True Believer, and it is what he believes that grabbed my attention more than anything else in the film. The Operative believes that the Alliance is “building a better world – better worlds,” and he acts as a mechanism to enable the Alliance to achieve its ends, even though he describes himself as “a monster, who will have no place” in those better worlds. The ends justify his means. “I don’t murder children,” Reynolds husks. “I do,” replies The Operative, with a gentle smile.

Glenn Wishard, in a post at Canis Iratus last year entitled A Thumbnail History of the Twentieth Century wrote:

The rise and fall of the Marxist ideal is rather neatly contained in the Twentieth Century, and comprises its central political phenomenon. Fascism and democratic defeatism are its sun-dogs. The common theme is politics as a theology of salvation, with a heroic transformation of the human condition (nothing less) promised to those who will agitate for it. Political activity becomes the highest human vocation. The various socialisms are only the most prominent manifestation of this delusion, which our future historian calls “politicism”. In all its forms, it defines human beings as exclusively political animals, based on characteristics which are largely or entirely beyond human control: ethnicity, nationality, gender, and social class. It claims universal relevance, and so divides the entire human race into heroes and enemies. To be on the correct side of this equation is considered full moral justification in and of itself, while no courtesy or concession can be afforded to those on the other. Therefore, politicism has no conscience whatsoever, no charity, and no mercy.

(Emphasis in original.) One of the themes that I repeat on this blog is the cockroach resilience of socialism/communism. The line that piqued me from The Majestic was a line that wasn’t even in the original script. Set in 1951 during the McCarthy period, that film’s protagonist has been subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Adele, the love-interest in the film, utters this:

This is a free country, you can be a communist if you want to be a communist!

I think Glenn’s declaration that the 20th Century “neatly contains” the rise and fall of “the Marxist ideal” is a bit premature, but I fully concur with his conclusion that “politicism” has neatly divided societies in the manner described, and now, as Yeats put it in 1921, “The best lack all convictions, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” (That’s a bit overstated, but we’re talking poetry, not engineering.)

All of human history has encompassed the struggle to “create a better world.” The question, “A better world for whom?” has often been glaringly omitted, but nevertheless, history has shown a continuing progression of improvement for the average individual in freedom, general health, life expectancy, and material wealth. Just ignore those hundreds of millions who have died along the way in misery, squalor, and agony from warfare, disease, starvation, malign neglect and deliberate murder. Don’t you understand? They bore the cost of getting us here, and are bearing the cost of future advancement. As I quoted James Lileks in On Guillotines and Gibbets:

Personally, I’m interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process.

Human history is one of constant warfare, and the deadliest warfare hasn’t been over land or over resources, but over ideology. Further, the deadliest warfare has arguably occurred during the last century, and worse, it has been committed by governments not against the military forces of other governments, but against civilians, both foreign and domestic. According to this site run by Rudolph J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii:

Nearly 170 million people probably have been murdered by governments in the 20th Century, 1900-1987; over four-times those killed in combat in all international and domestic wars during the same years.

America isn’t left off this list, either.

During our takeover of the Philippines between 1899 and 1902, American soldiers undoubtedly tortured and deliberately murdered several thousand Philippine civilians, and tens of thousands more died of disease and starvation. This war, and our acts during it, was savaged by Mark Twain in his essay “A Defence of General Funston” in 1902. In the collection of Twain’s works On the Damned Human Race, the preface to that essay includes this speech given by Massachusetts Senator George Hoar from 1903:

You, my imperialistic friends, have had your ideals and sentimentalities. One is that the flag shall never be hauled down where it has once floated. Another is that you will not talk or reason with people with arms in their hand. Another is that sovereignty over an unwilling people may be bought with gold. And another is that sovereignty may be got by force of arms….

What has been the practical statesmanship which comes from your ideals and sentimentalities? You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives, the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest, bringing their sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane….

The book also quotes Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge:

(God) has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America… The Philippines are ours forever. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.

The more things change…

The Philippines only started our 20th Century democidal activities, according to Professor Rummel. The sack of Peking after the Boxer Rebellion, the deliberate bombing of civilian populations during WWII, Korea and Vietnam followed. Rummel concludes:

Putting together all the subtotals in this century the United States probably murdered about 583,000 people, conceivable[sic] even as many as 1,641,000 all told. Virtually all of these were foreigners killed during foreign wars. Domestically, throughout this century the American Federal or state governments were responsible for the murder of about 1 out of every 1,111,000 Americans per year.

And we’re pikers.

According to Rummel:

Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering liberal democracy.

Or, as he puts it on his main page:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
—-Lord Acton

Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely.
—-This Web Site

And ideology kills, but the only thing that can oppose it is another ideology.

BELIEF

At war today are three mutually opposing ideologies. The first striving to “create a better world” is socialism. In its most virulent form, communism, it is responsible for the deaths of over one hundred million people. It has failed everywhere it has been tried; some failures being more spectacular (and bloody) than others. Glenn Wishard believes that “the Marxist ideal” is on its way out with the ending of the 20th century. I’m not so sure. I don’t think that species of cockroach is down for the count, apparently not here in the U.S., and certainly not in Europe. Not by a long shot.

The second ideology is “liberal democracy.” We are, right now, engaged in warfare in the middle East trying to bring sovereignty and liberal democracy to fifty million people by force of arms. So far it has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars, and about two thousand of the flower of our youth with many more wounded, and it shows no sign of ending soon.

The third ideology has been named “Islamism” – the forced spread of Wahabist Islam and the imposition of Sharia law upon the entire world. It is unknown how many that ideology has killed so far, but it’s definitely in the hundreds of thousands at least, millions if you include the internecine warfare between the different islamist sects.

There are, of course, other ideologies extant in the world, but these three are predominant and currently in open warfare, both cold and hot. Many people have commented on the apparent willingness of those of the socialist ideology to act as a fifth column for the Islamists. Why, they wonder, do people who espouse a belief in fairness, equality, justice, religious freedom, and tolerance support an ideology that puts religious leaders above all, that makes women chattel, that makes homosexuality a capital offense, that makes the practice of any religion other than Islam a crime?

Because they BELIEVE – they believe that theirs is the only “true way” to utopia, and that America with its individualism, consumerism, and capitalism is the one true enemy, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The Islamists won’t spare them, but they don’t care. Guillotines or car bombs in the public square, either is justifiable if it hastens the process. They have passionate intensity.

Following his own personal code, the character Malcolm Reynolds once again finds something to believe in. At the end of the film he and his entire crew embark on an almost certainly suicidal mission to tell the universe of the horrible secret they have uncovered. “The universe is gonna know the truth,” he says. The Operative asks, “Are you willing to die for that?” He replies, “I am,” and means it. Peter Appleton, Jim Carrey’s character in The Majestic stands before the House Un-American Activites Committee and speaks of his belief in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, fully aware that he could go to jail for contempt of Congress (a valid charge, since he holds the proceedings in contempt.) He believes in something enough to take a risk, for the first time in his life.

We have people in the White House who believe. They believe that we can bring sovereignty to an oppressed people by force of arms. They believe that people – everyday average people, everywhere – want to be free. They believe that liberal democracy is the best form of government for that. They believe in capitalism. They believe in individualism. They believe. The people in our military, in the overwhelming majority, also believe. They are willing to die for it, and have been.

This is America. You can be a communist here if you want to be (but given its track record, I cannot imagine anyone of sound mind actually wanting to be.) We won’t kill or even merely imprison you for your belief – unless you actively work to overthrow the Constitution of the United States, and even then your odds are pretty good. Socialists and their fellow-travellers are disproportionally represented in all levels of public education and the media, and have had literally decades to direct public thought. Yet (by the slimmest of margins) we’ve elected a leadership of True Believers of a different creed. This means that Yeats was wrong – the best do not lack all conviction. However, that doesn’t make us True Believers, either. We are jaded by government. We are often disgusted by the things our government has done in our name, for us and to us and to others. Not enough of us are willing to risk for our convictions. We would rather try to be as free of government interference as possible, because we know that power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely. In the Firefly episode “War Stories,” Shepherd Book speaks a line of great truth:

A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned.

But we are at a crossroad of history. Of the three ideologies that are fighting for the future, only one promises at least the possibility of restraint on the power of government. If we don’t support that ideology, one of the others will most certainly be ascendant. People will die. Governments will kill them. The question is, how many, and will they die in vain?

What do you believe?

Fight Evil. Speak Up.

KevinLeave a comment

While I was working on the California project I didn’t have a lot of spare time, but as I’ve said before I tend to read a great deal. I took three books with me; a pulp sci-fi novel, Ayn Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It, and Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom – the book James Lileks characterized:

“Bracing” does not describe it, anymore than “Brisk” describes the sensation of a bucket of lemon juice poured on a sucking chest wound.

You could say much the same about Rand’s collection of essays.

No wonder so much of the population of the world avoids thinking about this stuff. It’s remarkably unpleasant to immerse yourself in much of it. Sucking chest wound, indeed.

Dalrymple describes the life of the British underclass vividly, and in great detail. He describes the self-destructive behavior he observes on a daily basis, and attributes it to one, specific source: the leftist intelligentsia.

Human behavior cannot be explained without reference to the meaning and intentions people give to their acts and omissions; and everyone has a Weltanshauung, a worldview, whether he knows it or not. It is the ideas my patients have that fascinate – and, to be honest, appall – me: for they are the source of their misery.

Their ideas make themselves manifest even in the language they use. The frequency of locutions of passivity is a striking example. An alcoholic, explaining his misconduct while drunk, will say, “The beer went mad.” A heroin addict, explaining his resort to the needle, will say, “Heroin’s everywhere.” It is as if the beer drank the alcoholic, or the heroin injected the addict.

Other locutions plainly serve an exculpatory function and represent a denial of agency and therefore of personal responsibility. The murderer claims the knife went in or the gun went off. The man who attacks his sexual consort claims that he “went into one” or “lost it,” as if he were the victim of a kind of epilepsy of which it is the doctor’s duty to cure him. Until the cure, of course, he can continue to abuse his consort – for such abuse has certain advantages for him – safe in the knowledge that he, not his consort, is the true victim.

I have come to see the uncovering of this dishonesty and self-deception as an essential part of my work. When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behavior, that he is easily led, I ask him if he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs. Invariably the man begins to laugh: the absurdity of what he has said is immediately apparent to him. Indeed, he will acknowledge that he knew how absurd it was all along, but that certain advantages, both psychological and social, accrued by keeping the pretense up.

The idea that one is not an agent but the helpless victim of circumstances, or of large occult sociological or economic forces, does not come naturally, as an inevitable concomitant of experience. On the contrary, only in extreme circumstances is helplessness directly experienced in the way the blueness of the sky is experienced. Agency, by contrast, is the common experience of us all. We know our will’s free, and there’s an end on’t.

The contrary idea, however, has been endlessly propagated by intellectuals and academics who do not believe it of themselves, of course, but only of others less fortunately placed than themselves. In this there is a considerable element of condescension: that some people do not measure up fully to the status of human. The extension of the term “addiction,” for example, to cover any undesirable but nonetheless gratifying behavior that is repeated, is one example of denial of personal agency that has swiftly percolated downward from academe. Not long after academic criminologists propounded the theory that recidivists were addicted to crime (bolstering their theories with impressive diagrams of neural circuits in the brain to prove it), a car thief of limited intelligence and less education asked me for treatment of his addiction to stealing cars – failing receipt of which, of course, he felt morally justified in continuing to relieve car owners of their property.

In fact most of the social pathology exhibited by the underclass has its origin in ideas that have filtered down from the intelligentsia. Of nothing is this more true than the system of sexual relations that now prevails in the underclass, with the result that 70 percent of the births in my hospital are now illegitimate (a figure that would approach 100 percent if it were not for the presence in the area of a large number of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent.)

Literature and common sense attest that sexual relations between men and women have been fraught with difficulty down the ages precisely because man is a conscious social being who bears a culture, and is not merely a biological being. But intellectuals in the twentieth century sought to free our sexual relations of all social, contractual, or moral obligations and meaning whatsoever, so that henceforth only raw sexual desire itself would count in our decision making.

The intellectuals were about as sincere as Marie Antoinette when she played the shepardess. While their own sexual mores no doubt became more relaxed and liberal, they nonetheless continued to recognize inescapable obligations with regard to children, for example. Whatever they said, they didn’t want a complete breakdown of family relations any more that Marie Antoinette really wanted to earn her living by looking after sheep.

But their ideas were adopted both literally and wholesale in the lowest and most vulnerable social class. If anyone wants to see what sexual relations are like, freed of contractual and social obligations, let him look at the chaos of the personal lives of members of the underclass.

Here the whole gamut of human folly, wickedness, and misery may be perused at leisure – in conditions, be it remembered, of unprecedented prosperity. Here are abortions procured by abdominal kung fu; children who have children, in numbers unknown before the advent of chemical contraception and sex education; women abandoned by the father of their child a month before or a month after delivery; insensate jealousy, the reverse of the coin of general promiscuity, that results in the most hideous oppression and violence; serial stepfatherhood that leads to sexual and physical abuse of children on a mass scale; and every kind of loosening of the distinction beween sexually permissable and the impermissable.

The connection between this loosening and the misery of my patients is so obvious that it requires considerable intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to be able to deny it.

But deny it they do, and seemingly without effort.

What Dalrymple describes as Weltanshauung, or worldview, is at its base philosophy. It is, in the cases he describes, flawed philosophy, but it is philosophy nonetheless. Rand writes in her title essay:

The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them – from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handfull of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default. For some two hundred years, under the influence of Immanual Kant, the dominant trend of philosophy has been directed to a single goal: the destruction of man’s mind, of his confidence in the power of reason. Today, we are seeing the climax of that trend.

She wrote that in 1974. Dalrymple’s book was published in 2001. Both Rand and Dalrymple point out that a relatively small group of people control the culture – that the ideas of these people radiate outward, affecting some more than others. Dalrymple illustrates that this effect has a pernicious tendency to migrate upwards from the bottom, generally through the cultures of youth. Ignorance, it seems, is not necessarily bliss. In her essay Don’t Let it Go, Rand writes about the influence of the minority:

A nation, like an individual, has a sense of life, which is expressed not in its formal culture, but in its “life style” – in the kinds of actions and attitudes which people take for granted and believe to be self-evident, but which are produced by complex evaluations involving a fundamental view of man’s nature.

A “nation” is not a mystic or supernatural entity: it is a large number of individuals who live in the same geographic locality under the same political system. A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a “culture” is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.

(The dominance of certain ideas is not necessarily determined by the number of their adherents: it may be determined by majority acceptance, or by the greater activity and persistence of a given faction, or by default, i.e., the failure of the opposition, or – when a country is free – by a combination of persistence and truth. In any case, ideas and the resultant culture are the product and active concern of a minority. Who constitutes this minority? Whoever chooses to be concerned.)

Remember this, because it’s the key point of this rather long piece of mine.

Rand continues in her discussion of culture:

A nation’s political trends are the equivalent of a man’s course of action and are determined by its culture. A nation’s culture is the equivalent of a man’s conscious convictions. Just as an individual’s sense of life can clash with his conscious convictions, hampering or defeating his actions, so a nation’s sense of life can clash with its culture, hampering or defeating its political course. Just as an individual’s sense of life can be better or worse than his conscious convictions, so can a nation’s. And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger – no matter how good his subconscious values – so can a nation.

This is the position of America today.

If America is to be saved from destruction – specifically, from dictatorship – she will be saved by her sense of life.

As to the two other elements that determine a nation’s future, one (our political trend) is speeding straight to disaster, the other (culture) is virtually nonexistent. The political trend is pure statism and is moving toward a totalitarian dictatorship at a speed which, in any other country, would have reached that goal long ago. The culture is worse than nonexistent: it is operating below zero, i.e., performing the opposite of its function. A culture provides a nation’s intellectual leadership, its ideas, its education, its moral code. Today, the concerted effort of our cultural “Establishment” is directed at the obliteration of man’s rational faculty.

She wrote that in 1971.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a column in yesterday’s Slate entitled Losing the Iraq War: Can the left really want us to? The simple answer is “Yes.” And the reason it can is because the Left’s sense of life clashes violently with its conscious convictions. The Left very easily, as Dalrymple put it, has the necessary intellectual sophistication (and dishonesty) to do so. Hitchens writes:

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of “missing” Iraqis, to support Iraqi women’s battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

From my perspective it’s fairly obvious: the small elite that has controlled the culture is seeing its sense of life conflict with its conscious convictions, and its sense of life is losing, badly. Yet there is hope. More and more of those on the Left are awakening to this internal clash – and reconciling it. Hitchens is a good example himself, and ever-more-blatant examples of the dichotomy such as Dick “The most dishonest, ungodly, unspiritual nation that has ever existed in the history of the planet” Gregory and Harry “Colin Powell is a house slave” Belafonte are making the contradictions more obvious and the transition easier. Writer Nick Cohen wrote a particularly good piece printed in The Guardian on Sunday about his “excommunication” from the orthodox Left because of his recognition of that clash:

I’m sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance? But his criticisms would have little impact. It’s like a religion: the contradictions are obvious to outsiders but don’t disturb the faithful. You believe when you’re in its warm embrace. Alas, I’m out. Last week, after 44 years of regular church-going, the bell tolled, the book was closed and the candle was extinguished. I was excommunicated.

The officiating bishop was Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman and a friend of long-standing, who delivered his anathema in the Guardian. The immediate heresy was a piece I’d written about how difficult the courts made it to deport suspected Islamist terrorists. As I’d campaigned to protect asylum seekers in the past, Wilby used the article as damning evidence of ‘a rightwards lurch’. The old bat didn’t understand that genuine asylum seekers are the victims of the world’s greatest criminals – four million fled Saddam Hussein – not criminals themselves.

Even if he’d grasped that the Mail was wrong and real refugees weren’t villains, I doubt it would have made a difference. My mortal sin had been to question ‘harshly the motives of the anti-war movement’, and to that I had to plead guilty.

Who needs philosophy? Everyone does. Everyone has one, be it as simple as his or her Weltanshauung, or as rigorously strict as Rand’s Objectivism. For the majority of people in any culture, however, their philosophy is absorbed through osmosis, and the source of that philosophy is from a relatively small number of people in that culture; those, as Rand says, who choose to be concerned.

In her essay What Can One Do? Rand considers the question “What can one person do?” if they want to affect cultural change. She answers:

“The immense changes which must be made in every walk of American life” cannot be made singly, piecemeal or “retail,” so to speak; an army of crusaders would not be enough to do it. But the factor that underlies and determines every aspect of human life is philosophy; teach men the right philosophy – and their own minds will do the rest. Philosophy is the wholesaler in human affairs.

Man cannot exist without some form of philosophy, i.e., some comprehensive view of life. Most men are not intellectual innovators, but they are receptive to ideas, are able to judge them critically and to choose the right course, when and if it is offered. There are also a great many men who are indifferent to ideas and anything beyond the concrete-bound range of the immediate moment; such men accept subconsciously whatever is offered by the culture of their time, and swing blindly with any chance current. They are merely social ballast – be they day laborers or company presidents – and by their own choice, irrelevant to the fate of the world.

I think Dalrymple illustrates that the “social ballast” has more impact of the fate of a society than Rand allows, but continuing:

Today, most people are acutely aware of our cultural-ideological vacuum; they are anxious, confused, and groping for answers. Are you able to enlighten them?

Can you answer their questions? Can you offer them a consistent case? Do you know how to correct their errors? Are you immune from the fallout of the constant barrage aimed at the destruction of reason – and can you provide others with antimissile missiles? A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war.

—

If you like condensations (provided you bear in mind their full meaning), I will say: when you ask “What can one do?” – the answer is “SPEAK” (provided you know what you are saying).

A few suggestions: do not wait for a national audience. Speak on any scale open to you, large or small – to your friends, your associates, your professional organizations, or any legitimate public forum. You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results – but it is of such activities that public opinion is made.

Do not pass up a chance to express your views on important issues. Write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines, to TV and radio commentators, and above all, to your Congressman (who depend on their constituents). If your letters are brief and rational (rather than incoherently emotional), they will have more influence than you suspect.

(As the Geek with a .45 puts it, “Democracy works for those who show up.” Continuing:)

The opportunities to speak are all around you. I suggest that you make the following experiment: Take an ideological “inventory” one week, i.e., note how many times people utter the wrong political, social, and moral notions as if these were self-evident truths, with your silent sanction. Then make it a habit to object to such remarks – not to make lengthy speeches, which are seldom appropriate, but merely to say: “I don’t agree.” (And be prepared to explain why, if the speaker wants to know.) This is one of the best ways to stop the spread of vicious bromides. (If the speaker is innocent, it will help him; if he is not, it will undercut his confidence the next time.) Most particularly, do not keep silent when your own ideas and values are being attacked.

Do not “proselytize” indiscriminately, i.e., do not force discussions or arguments on those who are not interested or willing to argue. It is not your job to save everyone’s soul. If you do the things that are in your power, you will not feel guilty about not doing – “somehow” – the things that are not.

Now, at the end of all of this, we reach the point of this rather long essay: Why I blog. This is it. I’m one of those who chooses to be concerned. I’m one of the tiny, but not silent voices in this culture who is willing to stand up and say “I don’t agree,” and why. I recognize the clash between our sense of life and our culture, and I’m willing to try to help expose it and reconcile it in those who are putting us in such danger because of it, and I hope that in some small way my efforts will result in individual conscious convictions – and eventually a culture – that I am happy and proud to call American again.

Something’s apparently doing some good (no, I’m not taking credit). Crime has declined remarkably over the last decade, and according to this David Brooks NYT editorial (I know, I know…)

The number of drunken driving fatalities has declined by 38 percent since 1982, according to the Department of Transportation, even though the number of vehicle miles traveled is up 81 percent. The total consumption of hard liquor by Americans over that time has declined by over 30 percent.

Teenage pregnancy has declined by 28 percent since its peak in 1990. Teenage births are down significantly and, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the number of abortions performed in the country has also been declining since the early 1990’s.

Fewer children are living in poverty, even allowing for an uptick during the last recession. There’s even evidence that divorce rates are declining, albeit at a much more gradual pace. People with college degrees are seeing a sharp decline in divorce, especially if they were born after 1955.

I could go on. Teenage suicide is down. Elementary school test scores are rising (a sign than more kids are living in homes conducive to learning). Teenagers are losing their virginity later in life and having fewer sex partners. In short, many of the indicators of social breakdown, which shot upward in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and which plateaued at high levels in the 1980’s, have been declining since the early 1990’s.

Something good is going on, and I’d like to see it continue – because we’ve still got a long, long way to go. Brooks acknowledges the source, though:

I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We’re in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent’s social duty to be a rebel.

In short, we’re rejecting the Left Intelligentsia’s bad philosophy. “I don’t agree, and here’s why….”

The blogosphere, I hope, will be a bigger part of that – exposing bad ideas immediately and mercilessly, and accessible to all who choose to be concerned. A free market of ideas is critical, and the Left has had a stranglehold on that market for far too long. What has resulted, as Dalrymple has repeatedly illustrated, is The Frivolity of Evil, and we cannot survive if we do not pull back from that abyss. Rand, Dalrymple, Hitchens, Cohen see the dangers of not speaking out. So do I.

I hope you do too. Make your voice heard.

Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part III.

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Dr. Cline replied to Part II early last week. I’ve been putting this off, quite honestly, because I’m on vacation and I’m still recovering from the sprained frontal lobe that Part II cost me last time. Once again, I’m posting Dr. Cline’s reply in its entirety, to be followed later, but predated, by my response which will appear below this one. Give me a day or so to complete it.

Without further ado, I give you Dr. Cline:

First, let me say, regarding your suspicion that we are nearing agreement that I am not quite so optimistic. I think we have already reached agreement on some points, or nearly so, but I suspect that what we are really doing in the greater part of our discussion is uncovering a fundamental point of disagreement. Maybe you’re right, though.

I’m glad you brought up the difference between physics and mathematics. I don’t have the same disdain for physicists that you attribute to mathematicians in your post, but it is useful to examine the differences. Mathematics operates by proof, by moving logically from premises to whatever conclusions can be derived from the premises. A statement such as the “twin prime conjecture” (which states that there are infinitely many distinct pairs of primes whose difference is two) is therefore suspected to be true in mathematics, but it has not yet been proven. Until recently, Fermat’s famous “Last Theorem” suffered through its existence in the same limbo realm. (Although, at the time, it should have more properly been called Fermat’s last conjecture.) The greatest problems of mathematics have traditionally spent long years in this state.

Physics on the other hand, operates by disproof (or, as Karl Popper called it, by falsification), as does all of science. Nothing is ever proven (in the positive sense) in science. Science operates by making claims that can then be tested against empirical observations. No number of observations can grant us a satisfactory verification of any scientific claim. What we must settle for in science, then, is to be able to test our claims and eliminate those that do not agree with our observations. Once I discovered Popper’s works on the philosophy of science, I was amazed that people had not discovered this sooner. (They didn’t, and many still deny it – there are still yet those people, even some scientists, who claim that somehow a finite number of observations can conclusively verify a scientific theory.)

This distinction gives us a nice way to look at the internal workings of thought itself. Both math and science operate according to the rules of logic. Further, both math and science implicitly accept certain additional premises or axioms as true. In mathematics these additional premises are, stated simply, “logic is true” and “arithmetic is true” among others. Until Popper’s work, in science there were several, (again among them that “logic is true”) but notable among them was the claim that scientific induction worked – i.e. that we are eventually supported in a universal claim by examining a finite number of particular cases. After Popper, even if this premise is no longer necessary to us, we still have other premises that we accept as true without any attempt at proof in science. Notable among these is the supposition that our observations reflect some independent, actually existing reality. Now we can avoid this question by claiming that our observations do not actually represent anything else at all. Indeed, no less a luminary of physics than Stephen Hawking has stated more or less this very position, that science has no independent meaning – we are just playing a game (one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “language games”) when we are doing science. If this is all science is for us, I’d argue it is not of much value. Fortunately, this view is incorrect.

Primary among the questions we ask regarding physics, mathematics, and even metaphysical questions such as questions of morality are questions about our justification. How and when (and why) do we say we are justified in a determination of fact in one of these areas? The answer that skeptics (at least certain skeptics, those we might call “hard skeptics”) reach to this question is that no answer is justified in any area. Indeed, this is a difficult position to argue against in one sense, as knowledge in virtually any subject matter is open to doubt. However, this sort of skepticism is very unproductive. Further, as stated above, it is self-contradictory, as it announces in absolute certainty that nothing can be known for certain. Other skeptics might only express doubts of this level of severity for certain knowledge, and hold other knowledge as absolute truth (or at least very resistant to doubt). This was the method of the logical positivists (whom I mentioned last time) who said only answers to questions of science are justified (or even meaningful). Unfortunately, this statement is itself an answer to a non-scientific question and the belief of these more limited skeptics also is self-contradictory. A skeptical view that might not contradict itself could be “all or nearly all knowledge is open to some doubt.” However, this view says almost nothing and still leaves us with the open question – where is doubt valid, and in these cases, how much doubt is reasonable?

The question of how much doubt is reasonable applies in questions of morality as well as in science or knowledge in general. I have suggested in my previous letters that we can know certain rules of morality (of what is right and what is wrong) such as “murder is wrong” or whatever. However, my main point is rather not that we know specific rules of morality with absolute certainty – at least not without a great deal of work (as even rules as seemingly obvious as “murder is wrong” may contain subtleties as, indeed, “murder is wrong” seems to in regard to the difference between murder and other forms of killing). Rather my main point was that we know, with whatever level of certainty possible in knowledge, that there are such rules. We must accept that such rules exist before we can find them.

Your note that rights are not completely interchangeable with morals is at least possibly true. Rights are a way of stating certain “negative moral rules,” i.e. what things are not morally acceptable for one person to do to another. There may well be (and many would no doubt say that there are) other “positive moral rules,” rules of obligation rather than rules of freedom – things we must do for others if we wish to live morally. Others would disagree with the claim that there are positive obligations that others place upon us if we wish to live a moral life. Ayn Rand I think would be foremost among the claimants that all we really owe each other is our absence and thus might claim that all there is to morality are questions of individual rights. However, even she might grant that there are certain rules of obligation in morality, though if so, she would no doubt say our obligations are to ourselves.

Your claim of the tale of the Maori and the Moriori as evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality seems false to me. Again, morals are not inviolable. Saying that the fact that not everyone obeys whatever moral rules there might be is evidence for their absence seems to be expecting a little too much of morality. I might wish morality was self-enforcing, but that will not make it so. Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices. Your claim that condemnation of them is inappropriate as their behavior was moral according to their society is simply wrong. Any such claim negates entirely the validity of the rights of the individual, subjecting them to a test by opinion poll or ballot. My claim is that the primary position is that of the individual (a thing with both physical form and, more importantly, a mind) and the individual ONLY. Your earlier claim (following Ayn Rand) was that “the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, ‘moral.'” I’m not quite so sure that the source of morality is survival only, but whether or not I agree with that, the survival that Rand was alluding to was NOT survival of society, but rather the survival of the individual. The necessary condition upon an entity to have rights seems to me to be either the presence of a mind or, at the very least (and probably not nearly enough), some sort of physical existence. A society, the thing to which you claim that at least some rights (and apparently from your argument, those that trump all others) are given, has neither of these qualities. In the end, if the primary position as holder of rights is granted to the society (or the nation or the collective or the volk) the end of all individual rights is the result.

Your examination of things regarding how well they “work,” whether science or morals, again misses the fundamental point of difference between the two. Morality is not science. Moral questions are not posed in a way as to be falsifiable; there are no scientific tests we can perform to determine whether a moral claim fails to hold or not. This points us to the flaw in your Heinlein quote:

“A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.

“We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.”

You rightly recognize that a “scientifically verifiable theory of morals” is nonsense. However, your supposition that Heinlein’s talk about such a “science of morality” was the kind of thing I was referring to is wrong. The realm of morality is different from the realm of science. Moral rules are a priori, in the sense that they are unprovable, and indeed untestable.

The claim Heinlein makes for his future society is unsupportable for two reasons. First, science does not work through verification, but through falsification. Second, moral claims are not falsifiable. This does not make them false, merely not science. Karl Popper understood this. His critiques of certain ideas (notably the later form of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis) were based on their proponents’ claims that these ideas were science. They were not falsifiable, and thus, they were not science. Popper recognized, however, that all knowledge is not necessarily scientific. Some knowledge must exist before science in order to make science a method of divining truth. If we claim that science is all there is of knowledge, we are making the logical positivist fallacy. If only statements of science are true, or meaningful, or valuable, then the claim itself that science is all there is fails the same test for truth, or meaning, or value. Examining everything with regards to whether it “works” or not puts us in the same quandary. If, as I suspect, you mean that something “works” when it has so far passed every scientific test devised by us, then the statement that only things that “work” are true (or meaningful, or valuable) is just as untestable and so just as untrue (or meaningless or worthless). Even Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his logical positivist days, recognized this. He said:

6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — but it would be the only strictly correct method.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way; he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

In 6.54, he recognizes the self-contradictory nature of his own claims, which presumably led to him eventually (somehow not immediately!) abandoning them and taking up (amazingly) other self-contradictory claims. Of course, if we throw away our ladder after we have climbed up it, and knock out the legs of the platform we are standing on, we must wonder what is left holding us up? If the only things we recognize as valid are questions of science and answers found through scientific means, we must in the end accept that there is no justification for science itself. Note that I am not saying we must accept that there is no justification for science, but that science’s justification must be found outside of science. If science’s justification lies outside of science, we might well expect other justifications (such as moral ones) to lie outside of science.

In the end, the existence of a society must be of (distant) secondary importance to the existence of the individual. The individual does not exist to serve society; the individual exists for his or her own purposes. Society, inasmuch as it exists at all, exists only to further the purposes of the individual. If we grant, as you clearly do in your statement:

There are MANY moralities, one for each society extant, of which the objective question is “do they work?” Do they support the continued existence of their societies?

that the existence of society is the primary purpose of morality and even existence, we should not be surprised when individual rights are denied, even by those agreeing with us. In any case, whether we regard the individual and its existence as primary (as I do) or the society and its existence as primary (as you seem to), we may (and probably will) have to fight for the continued practice of our rights, but their protection and their existence are not the same things. If we grant society the top spot in existence, we lose the justification we have in our fight.

You finally say:

It is not enough to believe that there is a single objective standard of morality, based on the corollaries of the fundamental right to one’s own life. It is necessary to convince others of the “rightness” of that standard and those corollaries, and to inspire them to support and defend that standard against attack by others who hold different moralities as “right.”

which I agree with. It is not enough to simply hold that there is a single true standard of morality. However, though it is not sufficient, it IS necessary. If we accept that there are several moralities, each true in its own right and perfectly good for a certain society, be it the New Guinean cannibals, the Maori, the Moriori, or the American Revolutionaries, we have removed our justification for choosing one over another, other than claiming “it’s good because it’s ours,” perfectly unsatisfying reasoning to me. If we insist that how well they “work” (assuming that we have a clear definition of what we mean for a morality to work, which I don’t think we do) is the only means allowing us a preference between them, we again find that we can only say that moral questions are answered “it’s good because it happened” or perhaps “it’s good because the society was successful” or other such after the fact answers. As far as convincing others of the rightness of our standard (and before that, convincing others that there are standards in the first place), I agree that it is an important goal. In fact, convincing you that there is such a true standard (which we must accept before we can say what the standard is that is “good” or “right” or “something that works” or whatever) is my main purpose in writing all this.

Expect the response to be long and involved. I certainly do.

UPDATE, 4/16, 3:35PM: Part IV is up.

Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part IV

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(Continued from Part III)

In regards to reaching an agreement, I think we’re going to shortly reach a point where, unless Dr. Cline changes his mind, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

If I grasp Dr. Cline’s position correctly, he believes that rights – human rights, individual rights, fundamental rights, however you want to describe them – are like mathematical axioms, where an axiom is defined as:

A fundamental element; a basic principle; something assumed without proof as being self-evident or generally accepted, especially when used as a basis for an argument

He believes further that the corollaries to these axiomatic rights can be discovered a priori from the application of logic to a knowledge of these rights, and an an objective system of morality that is valid for all people, everywhere, at all times can be constructed from these rights.

To that I say, and not as flippantly as it sounds, “Welcome to the United Federation of Planets.” I mean no insult. Please bear with me as I explain the problems I see in Dr. Cline’s philosophy.

Dr. Cline and I have agreed, I think, to at least one fundamental right. That right was described by philosopher Ayn Rand as “A man’s right to his own life.” Rand also stated that all other rights “are its consequences and corollaries.” He and I both agree that this fundamental right is the basic postulate, the self-evident truth, upon which a system of morality should be built. But it’s necessary here to reiterate what I stated in Part II: we have to understand the difference between rights and morality, because the two are NOT equivalent.

Dr. Cline wrote:

Your note that rights are not completely interchangeable with morals is at least possibly true.

No, it is absolutely true, as I tried to explain before. Morals are the rules of behavior of a society, what is and what is not acceptable from its population. This is a critical thing to understand: morality can exist independent of any concept of individual rights, and has for the overwhelming majority of the history of man. Rights may exist as logical postulates, but they have had little to no effect upon human history until very, very recently.

A society is defined by its morality. A society is described as:

A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.

They usually live in the same general geographic area, and they share a common belief system that defines the limits of acceptable behavior – their morality.

Rights may exist independent of society, but morality cannot. Morality is the set of rules by which people interact, whether those people belong to a band of hunter-gatherers, a tribe of farmers, a chiefdom, or a State. Their morality tells them how to deal with each other, and (hopefully) how to deal with “outsiders” – people with different moralities. The purpose behind having a set of rules of behavior is, at its base, survival. An individual, alone in the wild, has no need for morality. His right to his own life is absolute – and dependent entirely on his ability to survive in the wild. Only when confronted by other people does a question of morality arise – how to best survive as part of a group. Groups of people have a survival advantage over individuals, but membership in a group requires acceptance of the rules of that group – and those rules are learned. They’re first learned through direct experience, and as the society matures, they are learned through instruction.

This brings me back again to Heinlein, and the “History and Moral Philosophy” speech where Col. Dubois states that “man has no moral instinct.” This is the first major problem I have with Dr. Cline’s philosophy. In What is a “Right” Revisited, Part II I stated “I think Dr. Cline believes that man has an innate moral instinct,” to which he replied in his next piece:

Well, I’m not going to argue much against this statement. I do indeed believe that man has innate moral knowledge (I wouldn’t say an instinct, but that’s a pretty minor problem). I should say rather that I believe that I have innate moral knowledge. I’ve never been very convinced of the applicability of knowledge about one’s self to knowledge about others. So instead let’s say that I believe that I have moral knowledge and I suspect that some others do as well.

Yet, in that same piece I stated:

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

He and the other Founders may have held those “truths to be self-evident,” but for centuries if not millenia before they were neither self-evident nor true. In fact, even today those “self-evident” rights are not acknowledged in much if not most of the world.

In Dr. Cline’s reply to that he says:

This statement is only half-correct, and in that half you don’t go far enough. In the millennia before, the statements were true – but they were not then, nor were they in Jefferson’s day, nor are they now self-evident. These truths, like all a priori knowledge are not things that we can prove, but are things that we must discover. It is not easy to uncover reality or truth – not in mathematics, not in morality, and not in science.

I see a problem here. Dr. Cline’s philosophy is based on a concept of rights that exist and are self-evident, as axioms requiring no proof, yet he concurs with me that Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rights weren’t self-evident, then or now, though he holds them as true (and in retrospect, I agree with him – largely – on both accounts.) As I said before:

Dr. Cline believes that he has a personal “innate moral knowledge” and he “suspect(s) that others do as well,” but by stating that I think he admits that such knowledge may not be and probably is not universal. That “innate moral knowledge” is akin to Newton’s ability to develop the Calculus by his pure logic, or Einstein’s conception of the Theory of Relativity through his. These are talents that are rare in humans, and when such people apply themselves to the questions of morality, we call them “philosophers” – people like Rand, Kant, Popper, and Aristotle, and also Marx, Neitzche, and Kierkegaard. It is important to understand that when humanity is the topic, “irrational” implies much more than “the square-root of 2.”

Dr. Cline objected to the tale of the Maori and Moriori, saying:

Your claim of the tale of the Maori and the Moriori as evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality seems false to me. Again, morals are not inviolable. Saying that the fact that not everyone obeys whatever moral rules there might be is evidence for their absence seems to be expecting a little too much of morality. I might wish morality was self-enforcing, but that will not make it so. Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices. Your claim that condemnation of them is inappropriate as their behavior was moral according to their society is simply wrong. Any such claim negates entirely the validity of the rights of the individual, subjecting them to a test by opinion poll or ballot. My claim is that the primary position is that of the individual (a thing with both physical form and, more importantly, a mind) and the individual ONLY. Your earlier claim (following Ayn Rand) was that “the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, ‘moral.'” I’m not quite so sure that the source of morality is survival only, but whether or not I agree with that, the survival that Rand was alluding to was NOT survival of society, but rather the survival of the individual.

First, the story of the Maori and Moriori wasn’t presented primarily as “evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality.” It was presented as an illustration that there are many moralities, one for each society extant, each based on the experiences learned by the members of that society, and passed on to other members. Dr. Cline states that “Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices.” If I’m reading this correctly, he’s stating that the Maori “made their choices” to not accept his “objective standard of morality.”

But how could they choose it? What opportunity did they have? Is this objective moral standard self-evident, or isn’t it?

The point I was trying to illustrate was that they had no concept of his objective moral standard, no concept even of individual rights, at least outside their own culture. The Moriori were “others,” and as such the Maori attack was moral in accordance with Maori custom. Any attempt to convince the Maori that their behavior was immoral would have been met with a blank stare if not outright hostility. They had no concept of any moral standard other than the one they lived under. They didn’t “make their choices” – they had no choices, because man has no moral instinct. They believed and acted on what their culture told them was moral. An agrarian tribal warrior society doesn’t support much in the way of a philosopher class, and their morality worked until they met Europeans who could overpower them.

As an aside, I don’t attribute my assertion that “the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival” to Rand. For one, I ammended that statement, and second it’s not her idea, to my knowledge, it’s Heinlein’s if not some other, earlier philosopher. What I said was this:

There are at least two bases for morality: survival, and individual rights. For the overwhelming majority of the existence of Man, the morality of any society has been based strictly on survival – anything that worked to ensure survival was, by definition, “moral.”

—

Man has existed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, and our social structures have struggled slowly and painfully up from the band, to the tribe, to the chiefdom, to the state over that long time period. Throughout all of it we have done so without an ideal system of morality, just as we did without mathematics, agriculture, metallurgy, chemistry, or physics. We’ve been too busy just surviving. A theory of individual rights is much like mathematics – something of great value that requires time and resources to explore and develop.

It’s not a matter of the Maori (or any other culture) choosing to reject Dr. Cline’s objective moral standard. Such a standard is still largely undefined today. And one reason it is still undefined is because, aside from Rand’s “one fundamental right,” very few rights of the individual are axiomatic. For example, the right to arms isn’t an axiom, it’s a corollary to “a man’s right to his own life.” It’s the means by which he can defend his life and property. (“IF we know that P implies Q AND we know that P is true THEN we know that Q is true.”) It is the work of philosophers to do the logic necessary to “prove” the corollaries, and I don’t believe that there were too many Maori Jeffersons, or Poppers, but probably a couple of Neitzches.

Morality is, then, by Dr. Cline’s definition, a “science.” It’s based on hypotheses formed from observation, and it’s tested constantly in the laboratory of life. If a particular morality is ever disproved, as the Moriori’s was, the society generally fails and is replaced by a new society, often but not always made up of members of the previous society who have learned that their morality was inadequate the hard way, no matter how well it worked previously. The failure may be catastrophic, as it was for the Moriori and uncounted thousands before and after them, or it may be almost unnoticeable culturally, as it has been for America over its history, as our morality has slowly and incrementally morphed from seventeenth-century agrarian state to twenty-first century information-age state.

But all this takes opportunity and effort, and we’ve only had that opportunity and effort available to us for a short while historically. We’re still working on it, and Dr. Cline alludes to this when he states:

I have suggested in my previous letters that we can know certain rules of morality (of what is right and what is wrong) such as “murder is wrong” or whatever. However, my main point is rather not that we know specific rules of morality with absolute certainty – at least not without a great deal of work (as even rules as seemingly obvious as “murder is wrong” may contain subtleties as, indeed, “murder is wrong” seems to in regard to the difference between murder and other forms of killing). Rather my main point was that we know, with whatever level of certainty possible in knowledge, that there are such rules. We must accept that such rules exist before we can find them.

But accepting that such rules exist is not the same as knowing what they are. Figuring out what they are is the job of philosophers, and they have yet to reach anything resembling a consensus after at least 5,000 years of considering the questions.

Dr. Cline argues that rights, at least the fundamental ones, are axioms. Acted on with logic, we can determine their corollaries. From these we can build an objective morality.

I agree, mostly, with the primary argument – fundamental rights are axiomatic; unverifiable and (hopefully) self-evident, given the opportunity to consider them. Once you’ve overcome the problems of day-to-day survival, you might actually have the time to consider them, if you are of a philosophical (and socially benign) bent. Most people are not though, and through most of human history, the problems of day-to-day survival denied the opportunity anyway.

I agree that some corollaries can be discovered a priori through the application of logic, but as with the greatest problems in mathematics, the greatest problems of those corollaries will take long years to wrestle with, and we may never get a “right” answer. But when it comes to morality, we’re going to remain stuck in the realm of science: Apply the theorem, test in the laboratory of life, and keep testing until it fails. Learn from the failure, work up a new theorem, and try again. Heinlein’s “scientifically verifiable theory of morals” (as he meant it) is nonsense, as science doesn’t prove a scientific theorem the way that a mathematician “proves” a mathematical theorem.

Science just tests to destruction.

Dr. Cline states:

In the end, the existence of a society must be of (distant) secondary importance to the existence of the individual. The individual does not exist to serve society; the individual exists for his or her own purposes. Society, inasmuch as it exists at all, exists only to further the purposes of the individual. If we grant… that the existence of society is the primary purpose of morality and even existence, we should not be surprised when individual rights are denied, even by those agreeing with us. In any case, whether we regard the individual and its existence as primary (as I do) or the society and its existence as primary (as you seem to), we may (and probably will) have to fight for the continued practice of our rights, but their protection and their existence are not the same things. If we grant society the top spot in existence, we lose the justification we have in our fight.

I believe Dr. Cline has misinterpreted what I’ve said on this point, and I have to correct him here. What I have illustrated is that, throughout history, the individual has existed to serve society, but – and historically very recently – that has started to change. Rand said it, and I quoted it before:

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.

The idea that society exists to to further the purposes of the individual,

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

is very, very new. Our own government, in the case of Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez as recently as 1963 stated:

…for while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.

Survival, it seems, is still the primary basis of our morality, not individual rights.

I was not endorsing the idea that “man serves society,” but recognizing the fact that it has been that way for millennia. Dr. Cline judges these previous societies against his “objective moral standard” based on the rights of individuals and finds them wanting. I judge them against the question “did they work, and for how long?” because I understand that Dr. Cline’s “objective moral standard” has yet to be even mostly defined. It may exist, I think it does, but we haven’t discovered it all yet.

I repeat: No society currently exists based on that ideal single objective standard, and I honestly think it will be centuries – if ever- before one might. If we do, perhaps then we can build an anarcho-capitalist paradise where coercive governments no longer exist, and we can all live in harmony.

But I severely doubt it.

Even the United Federation of Planets had conflicts with other societies who didn’t share their morality. 😉

Until we do, rights will remain what the majority of a society believes and is willing to defend.

Edited to add: I hardly ever do this in these philosophy pieces, but I ran across a Mark Steyn column that said something I think is related to this discussion and illustrative of the point I’m trying to make about how the role of the individual in society is shifting:

The most vital economic resource is people, and that’s the one thing much of the Western world is running out of. The anti-globalists can demonise sovereign states and sovereign companies — the Dells and other multinationals — but we’re entering the age of the sovereign individual, and that will be a lot harder for the anti-glob mob to attack. By 2010, a smart energetic Chinaman or Indian will be able to write his own ticket anywhere he wants.

Read the whole piece, but that quote directly relates to my point that, more and more, society is beginning to serve the individual, and not the other way ’round.