RESPVBLICA: On the American Republic

Old Fashioned Writing

2011-12-09T09:30:00.000-05:00

Many people become more conservative as they age. Part of this shift is surely the wisdom of experience, but it would be pointless to pretend the process is entirely rational. Some of the drift toward conservatism derives from the loss of the world we knew in youth. When young, we learn all about the world. We learn how to talk, dress, and behave appropriately in that world. Once that world begins to disappear, we feel mal-adapted, and it is no wonder we resist further change. Yet again, another part of the conservative drift has to do more with æsthetics than anything else. It is not so much that we feel mal-adapted to appreciate the music of the young, for instance, as it is that we feel the music of our youth was simply better. We feel this all the more keenly when the change in the world is not just a shift in taste but the effective demise of what we love. For instance, the rise of the keyboard, the mouse, and the touch screen has effectively killed the old fashioned art of penmanship.

The typewriter had already wounded penmanship. Why take the time to learn to write clearly when one can always type faster and more clearly than the best Palmer-trained penman? Still, as late as the mid-twentieth century, there were older people who insisted that thank you letters should be handwritten. Plain, clear handwriting was therefore an essential skill for everyone. There were even some who drew dubious inferences from the shape of one’s handwriting. At one point in living memory employers would occasionally submit an applicant’s handwriting sample to a graphologist, who would then be able to warn the employer of any character flaws the applicant might be hiding. Although the claims for graphology are pseudoscientific, the common assumption was that something of one’s character inevitably flowed onto the page with the ink from one’s pen. References in literature speak of a “spidery hand” or “an honest hand,” and certain authors took trouble to make their own handwriting as beautiful as their diction. J.R.R. Tolkien famously devised a signature that was as much calligraphy as penmanship.

Nowadays, those who take trouble with their handwriting tend to be artists. What was a modest skill across the general population has become a highly refined art form practiced by specialists. There is even an organization of these practitioners. They preserve the old knowledge of ascenders and descenders, of loops and capitals and Spencerian Script. In doing so, they remind us that the world has not yet wholly lost old fashioned writing, a lovely fragment of the past.

Forget Them Not

2011-12-07T21:05:00.001-05:00

Three score and ten years ago—a lifetime, in fact—Americans were called by history to rise and answer a challenge greater than any we have faced since. For all the horror of the attacks on 9/11, there was no military peer behind them. There was no empire. In 1941, Americans understood they were threatened with the fall of the republic to an imperial aggressor. In 2001, Americans understood they were not. We, the grateful children and grandchildren of the generation that fought and won a total war, will not forget their patriotism. Nor, if we are wise, will we squander the liberty they secured for us.

USS Maryland alongside capsized USS Oklahoma, December 7, 1941.
Photo credit: U.S. National Park Service

Why Do Skeptics Not Believe In God?

2011-12-03T09:06:00.001-05:00

The estimable Mark English posed a question rather like this some time recently. It has been rolling around in my mind since then. In my case, to the extent I was aware of anything like religion before about age six I seem to have assumed that “God and Jesus” were givens. About that time there was a conversation with my father. I still remember two sentences of it clearly. I said to him, “But you have to admit that God and Jesus exist, right?” He said, “No.” From then on I do not remember thinking about religion much for many years. I went to church when visiting the religious members of our extended family. I liked the formality, the music, the sense of common bond. But I always knew I was an alien in the congregation. Sometimes, on these visits, I would be sent to Sunday school. Once, having run across some book on what was not yet called Wicca, it appeared a good idea to explain to the other teens in Sunday school that so-called witches didn’t really worship the Devil. They worshipped nature instead, so give them a break. I can’t remember whether there were any family conversations afterward, but it seems likely the Sunday school teacher would have spoken to my local relatives, who would likely have spoken to my parents, who apparently decided that I was even then free to make up my own mind about things.

I became intellectually confirmed as a religious skeptic at about age nineteen when I read Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Although even then I disliked Russell’s more vituperative attacks on religion—he seemed to be trying to offend believers more than prove his point, for instance by denying that Christ was a reputable moral teacher—nonetheless his fundamental refutations of the traditional proofs of the existence of God seemed decisive. The way Russell laid out the proofs and his refutations thereof, how could anyone believe in God? The most telling, to me, was his argument against what is sometimes called the Proof from a First Cause. Russell pointed out that the proof was internally inconsistent. It demanded a cause for the universe, but then omitted to demand a cause for that cause. Sometimes this is put, “If the universe had to be created by God, then who created God? If God didn’t need a cause and could have always existed, then why couldn’t the universe itself have just always existed?” Occam’s Razor then sliced away the unnecessary hypothesis: God.

I think now that this argument was so powerful for me because the Proof from a First Cause was the one among the traditional proofs I found most nearly compelling. The Ontological Proof, for example, just seemed to be word-play. It proceeds like this: Imagine a perfect being. Since a being that actually existed would be superior to a being that did not, a perfect being must exist by definition. That perfect being is God. No disrespect intended to those who find this a meaningful proof, but for me it was empty. Apart from the intellectual difficulties I had with faith, there was also simply a bedrock feeling of doubt. I just knew there was no God, in the same way that I just knew there were no vampires. It was all a fantasy.

Significantly for a nineteen-year-old, being free of Christian theology also meant being free of Christian morality. At the time, Christian morality meant little more to me than sexual repression. Christians wanted to deny human sexuality. They wanted to make people unhappy by making them give up life’s greatest joy. Some of this was clearly the voice of youth. I have since found greater joys. In my case, the voice of youth harmonized well with the voices of the specific hippie-types with whom I was spending much of my time. If, after thirty years, my views of morality have matured, I still find scientific explanations more compelling than religious ones. Modern cosmology can account for the existence of the universe itself. Modern biology can explain the development of life. Evolutionary psychology has made great progress in explaining the development of human nature, to the point that it is possible see how something very like traditional morality is in fact best suited to govern that nature.

Yet, that last point presents something of a challenge. If it turns out those Christians did a pretty good job in articulating necessary moral principles—don’t murder people, don’t take their things, don’t sleep around, obey your parents, forgive your enemies—does their theology not perhaps deserve a second look? Having fully revised all my moral reasoning and finally rejected the ethics of youth, am I still satisfied to retain the convenient skepticism of youth? Why, in fact, am I a skeptic? Why is anyone? Once the hormonal haze of adolescence has passed, why would anyone choose oblivion over Heaven? For me, the answer has to involve evidence.

No amount of wishful thinking will make an indifferent natural universe into a loving God. So far, for me, the evidence simply is not compelling. However, I recognize that I have not really explored this question in years. I am still operating in the Russell domain, having closed deliberation on that question thirty years ago. Are there intellectually consistent arguments, derived from evidence, that tend to establish the existence of a divine creator? Are they better than the old Ontological Proof? Perhaps it is time to investigate. Many atheists like me remain cultural Christians, and Christmastime is perhaps a reasonable season in which to begin such an inquiry.

Skeptical Gratitude

2011-11-24T11:44:00.001-05:00

The American holiday of Thanksgiving is an example of a useful tradition. Somehow, and perhaps more than with Christmas, the original purpose of the holiday seems to have survived. While many American children firmly believe the purpose of Christmas is solely to get presents (and too many American parents over-endorse that belief), one can still hear the ritualistic question every November, “What do you have to be thankful for?” If this impression is accurate, then the reason appears to be the differing religious content of the two holidays. The Santa Claus myth, transmuted by commercialism into a fully materialist celebration, has neatly replaced the older celebration of the birth of the Christian savior. Anti-Christian media have systematically endorsed this shift, funded as they are by advertising. Skeptical conservatives are no doubt ambivalent about it all, since whatever advance there may be in loosening the old theology is partly and disappointingly balanced by the new theology—materialist consumerism. As for Thanksgiving, though, the original feast (or at least the legend of the feast, which is what we commemorate) was about gratitude for a worldly bounty. After a 66-day sea voyage, a winter of sickness and death, the colonists finally managed a robust harvest in the fall of 1621. Worldly bounty fits rather well into the current paradigm of values. For that matter, the fact that Squanto knew more about how to survive in America than the colonists sounds a bell for multiculturalism as well. So, there is no real difficulty maintaining the forms of the original feast.

Except, a purist (or a curmudgeon) would point out some differences. First, the Plymouth colonists were coming off a year of genuine hardship. Fifty percent of them perished the first winter. Apart from some few survivors of decimated military units in World War II, Korea, or Vietnam, no American alive has experienced anything like that rough an existence. Our recent economic woes have been a tepid crucible—for which we should be thoroughly thankful. All this means, though, is that the Plymouth colonists in some sense earned their celebration in a way more profound than we can probably grasp. Another difference has to do with comparing the scale of their cornucopia with our consumerist lifestyle. Where they suffered more than we, we enjoy material benefits beyond their experience or imagination. No one alive in 1621 could have imagined a life as pleasant and materially rich as the lifestyle of the average American today. It is a mixed blessing for us, since our material wealth, comfort, and ease of life seem to have worked more to erode our individual strengths than to make us happy. Indeed, it is astonishing how many people are unhappy in the midst of our almost obscene plenty. Still, we ought to acknowledge our wealth and be grateful for it, even though its ubiquity naturally dulls our appreciation.

Apart from the depth of the colonists’ hardships, and the splendor of our wealth, another difference between our holiday and their first feast does bring us back to religion. For if the point of the first feast was gratitude for bounty, it was clear in the minds of the colonists that their God had provided that bounty. Indeed, many or even most of them had undertaken the voyage in search of religious liberty. They had sought freedom from an established Church, and they crossed an ocean to find it. Perhaps ironically, their near descendants shortly became intolerant of non-Puritan faiths, but the original motive of the original colonists remained as intellectual capital on which their more distant descendants would eventually draw. Ironically, American skeptics of today owe an intellectual and political debt to our Pilgrim Fathers. In remembering where to acknowledge our gratitude today, let us not forget them.

Another Leftist Judge Votes Against Liberty

2011-11-19T09:17:00.001-05:00

In a typically important piece published yesterday, agnostic conservative George Will draws our attention to a recent federal court decision on the president’s health care law:

Shortly before the Supreme Court agreed to rule on the constitutionality of Obamacare’s individual mandate, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed its constitutionality. Writing for the majority, Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a Reagan appointee, brusquely acknowledged that upholding the mandate means there is no limit to Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause. Fortunately, Silberman’s stark assertion may strengthen the counterargument. Silberman forces the Supreme Court’s five conservatives to face the sobering implications of affirming the power asserted with the mandate.

Will’s treatment of the issue is excellent. Will specifically addresses the interplay between the rights of citizens and the powers of government. He notes the distinction between economic rights and virtually all other rights of citizens by the Supreme Court during the past 75 years. It has been a jurisprudence of illogic, wherein the citizen’s immoral lifestyle choices are somehow sacrosanct—no matter the collateral damage they inflict on his neighbors—but his right to his own property is subject to majority toleration.

Sadly, this is what the secular prophets spake. We have been warned, by our own Founding Fathers and even British sages like Lord Macaulay, that the majority in a democracy will inevitably encroach on the property rights of the prosperous, who are always a minority. This danger was what prompted the drafters of the Constitution to be so careful to put in structural devices that curtailed the democratic appetites. Among such devices were the Electoral College and legislative election of Senators (who of course are now directly elected by the populace). What we had, originally, was a republic. What we have now is more and more like a direct democracy, abetted by a judiciary bred among the Leftist groves of academe. It is through the trees of that grove that you can see the setting sun of liberty.

Plan B: Monarchy?

2011-11-16T21:42:00.001-05:00

Machiavelli believed that the institutions laid down in a republic at its birth are of little use later, when the people have become corrupt. For him, virtue and corruption had to do with the eagerness or reluctance of a people to hold liberty over any other value. Thus, Machiavelli would consider virtuous a proudly free population such as that which threw off the yoke of England in Eighteenth Century America. He would consider corrupt a population dedicated to self-indulgence and dependency, for which it was willing to trade much of its liberty. It is difficult to be clear-eyed about one’s own time, but there are certainly many indications that Twenty-First Century America is less attached to the rigors of liberty than to the charms of license. Defeatism is its own reward, and hereabouts the tenor is intended to be optimistic. However, it may be worthwhile on occasion to run some thought experiments about what to do if the U.S. eventually loses all its necessary virtue (in the Machiavellian sense). One plan, currently under discussion around the conservative blogosphere, is monarchy.

If people cannot govern themselves they must be governed. An old political axiom states that nations in chaos attract tyrants who impose order (Rome, 27 BC; Britain, 449 AD; Germany, 1934 AD). If some form of tyranny is inevitable, conservatives would no doubt prefer a limited, traditional form of autocratic rule in which the ruler or rulers at least preserved some of the old forms of society. Thus, rather an Augustus or an Elizabeth I or even a Lee Kwan Yew than a Stalin or a Mao. In this context, it may be of interest for some readers to sample the latest dialogues on monarchy at the reactionary, monarchist blog Throne and Altar (by Bonald). There is also an interesting critique of Bonald’s postings on another reactionary blog, The Thinking Housewife.

We do not accept the fundamental argument of Bonald, which is that the inherent weaknesses of democracy amount to inevitably fatal flaws. Perhaps it is just pie-eyed optimism, but surely enough people of sense will recognize their civic responsibilities and reject—or at least take one step back from—the corruption (in the Machiavellian sense) of big government. Sic transit libertas?

Moral Consensus

2011-11-12T20:42:00.001-05:00

This week’s revelations about the crimes and cover-up at Pennsylvania State University clarify that all too often our heroes, like the idol in Dante’s Inferno, have feet of clay. That the most successful college football coach of all should have kept quiet for nine years about ghastly crimes, having made a single report to the university authorities, has disillusioned everyone. Of course the perpetrator himself should be jailed for as long as the law allows; but the sting, the sense of outrage and disappointment, rightly includes Joe Paterno himself. Knowing what he knew, how could he not have done more to prevent the ongoing offenses? No doubt he reasoned himself into acquiescence, in which whatever benefit he thought Sandusky provided the football program somehow outweighed the crimes Sandusky continued to commit. This is how otherwise moral people depart from the larger consensus of conduct.

Our religious friends have a simple source for morality. For them, morality is what their God has commanded. For skeptics, lacking a divine mandate means constructing moral rules as a deliberate process. Fair enough, religious people themselves have done rather a lot of moral revision over the years, and Jesuitical casuistry has been infamous. Still, skeptics lack even a shared text from which to begin the process of casuistry. In the abstract, skeptical ethics ought to be wide open, so that every system from the Stoics to Nietzsche to Stalin ought to be at least intellectually plausible. By some of these measures, the conduct of Paterno—or even Sandusky himself—is hardly blameworthy. It’s no challenge to imagine the discourse: “A person in power took advantage of weaker people. And? Isn’t that what happens in nature every day? Doesn’t Nietzsche proclaim the right of the strong to take what they want from the weak? Besides, isn’t that not too different from what happens when we eat steak? Sure, cattle aren’t people, but they do appear to have consciousness, feel pain, and suffer fear. For that matter, Sandusky didn’t actually kill anyone or anything, unlike the corporate beef farms. Why the outrage?” This is the type of ivory-tower relativism that begets self-justification of the most predictable sort.

Paterno himself likely didn’t approach it this way. He probably hasn’t read Nietzsche. Nonetheless, plenty of academic relativists will have already adopted such views. Sometimes they keep their opinions secret, only venturing to opine that “I’m not really that disappointed” or “I’m not really offended” or “I can imagine much worse.” Rarely, they do express their opinions openly, as is the case with an extant organization whose name I deliberately omit, so this site doesn’t turn up on searches for that organization. This is the organization that defends the very crimes Sandusky committed as somehow morally acceptable. In any event, the more circumspect academics give moral cover to the Paternos (and even the Sanduskys) of the world. Moral relativism truly implies that everything is permitted.

Lacking a religious frame, how are skeptical conservatives to answer the relativists? For some of us, our instincts simply revolt at crimes like those of Sandusky. Nothing is too harsh for him; no punishment would violate the Eighth Amendment. This is sometimes the reaction of conservatives who are not even parents of 10-year-old boys. Still, apart from the visceral rage, what standard could ground such a response?

Absent religion, the only basis for moral codes is consensus. This point is probably not controversial among Leftists, who seem to share a consensus that a fetus is not a human being or that men and women are interchangeable (and any opinions otherwise are anathema). Moreover, for Leftists, changes in moral consensus over time invariably represent progress. However, given the sliding scale of moral consensus, there is little protection against the kinds of changes conservatives detest. The current consensus among western nations appears to be that no moral blame attaches to the acceptance of government welfare for the able-bodied. I have known people of an earlier generation would have been ashamed to take charity unless truly at the end of a rope: “I don’t need your pity!” Now, the consensus has shifted to the point everyone seems to be hollering for benefits in one way or another. When standards of conduct become this slippery, they cease to be standards at all.

The cure for such relativism, in a secular context, is to appeal to a larger consensus—the consensus of history. Over many generations, people have tried many different moral paradigms. In a sort of moral Darwinian sifting process, those paradigms that failed to produce stable, lasting societies have had to be discarded. Typically, this process has manifested as a religious revival, mostly because moral standards are almost exclusively carried as religious freight. Certain intellectual elites have always existed for whom philosophy alone was sufficient guide for conduct. For the larger mass of mankind, however, philosophy has been weak tea. Most people require a stronger brew to bolster their adherence to moral standards, even when those standards faithfully represent the contemporary moral consensus. Of course, the utility of religion in encouraging moral conduct is debatable. Intuitively, it seems fair enough to assume that however bad people have behaved under religion, they would behave even worse under the weak, contingent suggestions of secular moral relativism.

The permeation of the latter throughout American society today is obvious from the Penn State debacle. Whatever the religious proclivities of the people involved, the morality of convenience—the historically recent consensus of relativism—ultimately triumphed. Those in power at Penn State apparently reached a local, private moral consensus that tolerating a child rapist was better than losing his contributions to the athletics program. And in adopting their private moral consensus, the Penn State principals violated the larger consensus, the consensus of history.

Eleven Eleven Eleven

2011-11-05T19:45:00.001-04:00

USS Lexington.
Photo by the author.

World War I was to have been the war to end all wars. The original holiday celebrating the end of war, Armistice Day, necessarily became Veterans Day when, with World War II, it became clear that war is far from over. There could hardly be a better object lesson that human nature survives even the most enlightened experiments in government. That said, there may be some reason for optimism. Although war is far from being merely an artifact of archaeology, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker believes he has found evidence that violence in all forms does seem to have declined as a factor in human experience. The singular insight of the skeptical conservative project is that human nature does not change much over time, and that therefore abandoning tradition wholesale is unwise. It would be a strong but welcome challenge to skeptical conservatism if it could be demonstrated that human nature is malleable enough that hope for paradise on earth is not just naïve utopianism. Time will tell. In the meantime, in advance of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of this century, we salute the veterans whose patriotism has made and preserved liberty.

The Vocabulary of Victory

2011-10-30T11:06:00.000-04:00

In his original address to Congress and the American people, after the attacks of September 11th, President George W. Bush stated, “Our ‘war on terror’ begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Bush exhorted Americans to find the best in themselves and rise to the challenge of their time. “Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us. Our nation, this generation, will lift the dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage. We will not tire, we will not falter and we will not fail.” Bush promised it would be a long war that would test our patience and determination. “It is my hope that in the months and years ahead life will return almost to normal. We’ll go back to our lives and routines and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass.” Essentially, the president challenged us Americans. With the announcement this week that our military withdrawal from Iraq will be virtually total, and our continuing commitment to withdraw from Afghanistan with the Taliban undefeated, it is not clear how well we have met that challenge.

On the other hand, given the historical pattern, perhaps the president was overly optimistic that Americans could seriously maintain a decades-long conflict. And if that is true, then one of the lessons of the War on Terror should be to pick limited, attainable objectives.

By one measure, we have succeeded in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Saddam and Osama are dead. That alone should be enough to declare victory. After all, no one should seriously have thought we could pacify either Iraq or Afghanistan without a massive and effectively permanent military presence. President Bush was apparently willing to commit to that course of action, but he is no longer commander-in-chief. No American president can make operational plans beyond eight years, and public support for military operations rarely lasts even that long. From this perspective, the current plans to withdraw from both nations seem the only feasible moves. However, remembering President Bush’s original declaration, our dual departures have the taste of defeat. We know that taste from Vietnam, and it is ashen.

This kind of defeat is also dangerous. Every time we walk away as anything less than an unquestionable victor, we diminish the worldwide deterrent effect of American power. That power, like the Roman might of two millennia ago, is the guarantor of peace for millions of people. Roman military campaigns against barbarians and Parthians preserved the citizens of the Empire for centuries. Rome was yet another example of peace through strength, which is the only plan that has ever preserved peace for any length of time. When Rome lost its reputation of military invincibility, it began a decline that featured barbarian armies torching the countryside and, in the end, the sack of the City. In the proudest days of the Republic, the Roman Senate led the people through the war with Hannibal. The Romans did not tire, they did not falter, and they did not fail. But by the time of the late Empire, the legions could hardly find recruits.

The American Republic has yet to falter in a serious way. We are still strong; we still live in liberty. However, the well-intended but enervating doctrines of the Left are sapping our vigor. Like the corn dole at Rome, our entitlements accustom us to dependency. Every year there are more calls for trading away a little more freedom in exchange for a little more government assistance. Our technology will protect us for a long time, but eventually it will not be enough. In the end, centuries after the death of Roman liberty, after the once-invincible Empire had withered to a vestige, the previously impenetrable walls of Constantinople fell to Muslim cannon.

As long as the United States retains dominant military force, and as long as American citizens remain vigorous, we will enjoy both liberty and security. But our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan should remind us to be as patient, as resolute, as the Taliban. Or the North Vietnamese. Or the Romans of the old Republic. And if we cannot be that patient and that resolute, then next time we should at least articulate an attainable mission. Instead of declaring war on terrorism, which is a technique, we might have done better to declare war on al-Qaida itself and made getting bin-Laden early our prime objective. Had we slain him in 2003, for instance, we might have been out of the country with our credibility intact by the next year.

And now? In Afghanistan, our stated mission had nothing to do with getting bin-Laden. Since the commitment to confronting and defeating terrorism worldwide kept us engaged in Afghanistan long after we might otherwise have departed, we were still there when the Taliban inevitably crept back in. Our surge will have failed because it had a declared end point. All the Taliban had to do was hold on until 2011, and we would be gone. When we do leave, nothing will prevent the Taliban from retaking the country. Afghanistan will revert to what it was before, with the difference that there will be a new blood bath to account for all those who were our friends in the time when the Taliban were out. So much for the people—and especially the women—of Afghanistan. In Iraq, where the surge worked because of the famous intractability of George Bush, our departure will hasten a tipping of the state back toward strongman rule. The difference this time will be that the strongman, and his regime, will be Shi’a Muslims in sympathy with Iran.

As for us, we will have failed on the very terms we originally declared. Terms matter. Words matter. Knowing the historical irresolution of democracies, by declaring war on “terror,” we may have consigned ourselves to defeat.

Abortion Logic

2011-10-22T21:22:00.001-04:00

Herman Cain’s recent kerfuffle on whether abortion should be a matter of private conscience or government prohibition brings to light an interesting fact: The public dislikes abortion more and more. Almost alone among core conservative principles, the right-wing position on abortion seems to be making converts. Where agenda items like women in combat and special privileges for homosexuals are winning adherents, abortion is actually less popular than it used to be. At least in polling. At least in some polling. Still, there is some evidence that the absolute number of abortions in the United States is declining. In the context of the Leftist cultural hegemony, such equivocal statistics are a veritable benison for conservatives. The question naturally arises, to what do we owe such a blessing? For once, the answer may very well be logic.

The logic of so-called choice is astonishingly insensitive to the greatest victim class imaginable. It is axiomatic that for moderns the most helpless and harmless and disadvantaged people are the most worthy of special status. This was not always the case in history, but at first blush it appears perfectly in line with all the moral trends of the modern Left. Name a disadvantaged group, and the Left will have elevated it with special status, special claims for redress, and special protections. No matter how far removed from slavery, the remote descendants of slaves still warrant affirmative action. So too women, though they are not now and rarely have been a minority (notably excepting China today). As for homosexuals, whose status is a matter of lifestyle choice, they are the new darlings of the Left, the chic new victim group for whom the rest of us must re-engineer civilization. In this context, it is revealing that the group of people who have actually been killed in largest numbers and who have the least voice to represent their own interests is unborn infants.

Modern abortionists and their defenders are able to justify their practice by the simple technique of declaring their victims something less than human. This is precisely the move of a Hitler in re-defining Jews as the ultimate other. It is what the Left accuses the Right of when right-wingers point out what actual Muslims have done in the name of Allah. As for unborn infants, however, the Left is perfectly clear: They are not human beings. For, if they were human beings, they would have a claim on human rights. If they had a claim on human rights, then abortion really would be murder. If abortion really is murder, then no one can possibly justify the practice, not even as a matter of choice.

Consider: Can a woman simply choose to kill her toddler? Is there a more vile crime in the canon of evil? How can murder possibly be just a choice? (And as for that, if it wasn’t rape, she had a choice.) No matter—in the United States, since 1973 we have sheltered 50 million Medeas among us.

The Romans, at least, were perfectly honest about both abortion and infanticide. The main difference was in placing the absolute right of decision with the father rather than the mother. For long periods of Roman history, a newborn infant would be brought to the father and placed at his feet. If he picked up the child, he accepted it into his family. If he did not, then the child was exposed. It was a simple and honest procedure, without all the moral legerdemain now required. Today in our Republic, the father has nothing whatsoever to say about the procedure. Instead, it is wholly up to the mother, who may kill her child or not as she pleases. Like a Roman paterfamilias, she need not even offer reasons for her choice. Unlike a Roman, though, if she chooses death instead of life, she will no doubt embrace the illogic of the Left that somehow deduces a human fetus is other than human.

So, here is where we may find an explanation for the slight chilling of enthusiasm for the abortion agenda. If a fetus is not human, what is it? Because it superficially resembles other species in early stages, are we to conclude that it really has no more claim to human rights than a fish? “But it cannot feel pain.” That is debatable. “It does not have conscious awareness.” Neither does a sleeping two-month-old. Why not chloroform inconvenient newborns while they’re asleep? They’ll never wake up. They’ll never feel pain. If the mother does not choose to keep them, what right have they to inconvenience her lifestyle?

In the end, this is the logic of the Left on abortion. It is so absurd, that perhaps—just perhaps—a politically significant fraction of the public has rejected it. At one point, a majority of Americans supported slavery. Our hope is that the shrinking consensus in favor of abortion will continue to wither, that abortion will go the way of slavery as an unmitigated evil that tarnished an otherwise noble culture.

The Occupation of Wall Street

2011-10-14T18:44:00.000-04:00

For almost a month now, a fluctuating group of demonstrators has been camping out in a park in New York. Calling themselves “Occupy Wall Street,” the group has made assorted demands, including free college and cancellation of debts. The group has been nonviolent, as far as has been reported, but the reportage has been predictably problematic. For instance, American media outlets have generally avoided mention of the more disreputable conduct of the occupiers, including an alleged act of public defecation on a police car. I say alleged, but the Daily Mail obtained a photograph. While overseas media seem to capture more of the facts, domestic outlets are playing true to form. Since the occupiers are evidently Left wing, American media have largely adopted them as perhaps misguided but worthy youth. In any event, the demonstrators’ behavior brings to mind the prescience of an insightful observer of the American Republic: Robert Bork.

Nominated by Ronald Reagan for the Supreme Court in 1987, Bork, a true conservative, became the instant target of a Leftist campaign of derision, rage, and falsehood. As often happens, misrepresentation won the day. The Senate rejected the nomination, and the country wound up with Anthony Kennedy instead. Though Bork would have been good for the Court and the country, at least his rejection by the Senate did free him to write more openly than he could have as a sitting justice. In his masterful 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah, (reissued and updated in 2003), Bork identified the twin pathologies of the Left: radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. Leftist ideology simultaneously holds that (1) there shall be no constraints on individual license and (2) there shall be no meaningful differences among people. Implicit in both principles is that government shall be the tool for giving them effect. Looking now at the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, and their counterparts around the nation, we see a proof of Bork’s thesis. In their demands for economic leveling they denounce all differences of wealth, regardless of merit, while in their conduct they reject all constraints of public decency.

Once more, as happened in the 1960s, public officials are tongue-tied and effectively helpless against such petty barbarism. The open question is whether these demonstrators are more the product of union agitation or are part of an authentic movement. Well, perhaps these are not mutually exclusive possibilities. Whether the unions set the spark or just blew on kindling that was already smoldering, the depth and extent of this demonstration are profoundly important to ascertain. For the deeper and broader this movement’s principles may be, the further advanced we are toward the chaos that has extinguished most free societies in history. Given the small size of the Occupy Wall Street demonstration and its brethren in other cities, there is reason to believe we have some civic vigor remaining. Nonetheless, as Machiavelli noted, republics do not fall apart until they have already become morally corrupt.

In Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Bork wrote this about radical individualism:

The classical liberalism of the nineteenth century is widely and correctly admired, but we can now see that it was inevitably a transitional phase. The tendencies inherent in individualism were kept within bounds by the health of institutions other than the state, a common moral culture, and the strength of religion. Liberalism drained the power from the institutions. We no longer have a common moral culture and our religion, while pervasive, seems increasingly unable to affect actual behavior.

He was right in 1996, as the 1960s had already shown, as we are seeing once more with Occupy Wall Street—though so far in miniature. Unchecked freedom is license, which is fatal to the public order and the self-regulation necessary for true liberty. It is so because it cannot sustain itself. Someone has to pay for it, to buy the t-shirts and pizzas and iPhones that license demands. Someone also has to pick up the pieces when the libertine crashes his own life through addiction or infection or irresponsible reproduction. If fully indulged, the license enamored by the Left yields social chaos. As Bork wrote, “[c]haos, which only government can control, results when other sources of authority are denigrated and diminished.” Those other sources of authority, like the family or the church, have been sources of charitable sustenance as well. However, since they sometimes make demands on their beneficiaries, such sources fail the Left’s litmus test of empowering radical individualism (which boils down to radical hedonism). The Left sees government, which dispenses palliatives as entitlements, as the only acceptable entity to sustain and repair the licentious. Hence, the demands of the Left for more license paradoxically also engender demands for more government—and the taxation necessary to provide that government. Thus license brings on tyranny.

This line of reasoning shows the danger in the Libertarian project. Usually, when people I meet learn that I am a right-wing atheist, they conclude, “Oh, so you’re a Libertarian then.” They find it hard to grasp that anyone could be fully a conservative without religion. Robert Bork’s reasoning, however, does not depend on the truth of religion. Indeed, the quotes above only touch on its utility. The Libertarian hope is that laisser faire government, in throwing people back on their own resources, will naturally foster self-reliance. There is much to this position; it is not a wholly unwarranted hope. The problem really is that without a bedrock culture of self-reliance and moral constraint, sustained by non-governmental institutions like a healthy church and strong families, people will eagerly adopt the freedom half of the Libertarian agenda but reject the responsibility half. The occupiers of Wall Street are a case in point. Free to do what they want, they accept no responsibility for their own livelihoods—much less the social consequences of the pernicious catechism they recite—proving themselves the deluded faithful of the Left.

Wanted: Climate Change Argument, Not Advocacy

2011-10-07T18:31:00.000-04:00

Major Suspect in Global Warming Case Hides His Face.
Photo by the author.

Global climate change seems to be of great interest to readers of RESPVBLICA. Not having studied meteorology or climate science, I cannot say much one way or the other about lots of what is presented on either side of the debate. Just when it seems clear that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is probably responsible for rising global average temperature, another study purports to document a stronger link to sunspot activity. At first blush, either theory appears plausible to laymen like me. Moreover, knowing how people not trained in a specialty make basic errors—such as misunderstanding the burden of proof in a civil case—should make any specialist wary of hasty conclusions about matters outside his own expertise. This is especially so since we all tend to evaluate the global warming arguments as partisan positions. It is altogether too tempting to accept the arguments made by our side and reject the arguments made by the other side, whether or not we are really qualified to judge the science. But we laymen can do more than try to evaluate the science directly.

We all have our own specialties. For a lawyer it is comparatively simple to recognize when someone is grinding an axe. That is to say, as a professional advocate, I can recognize advocacy. Much of the time, on both sides of the debate, I find advocacy instead of argument. Politics instead of science. Ad hominem attacks, false dilemmas, straw men, reductio ad absurdum—all the usual techniques of polemic. That’s perfectly normal, but it doesn’t clarify the issue beyond hinting rather strongly at bias. All the more so when advocacy becomes fraud, as has happened with the “hockey stick” incident Jillian Becker rightly noted over at The Atheist Conservative. Scientists should beware: In the courtroom, once a witness has been shown to be untruthful about a small thing, the jury is all the more willing to conclude he is lying about the big thing. Once lost, credibility is very hard to recover.

In the end, we are going to have to come to grips with the science. If one side has succeeded in obscuring the truth, all shame on them. Because this issue involves very high stakes indeed, we have to get it right. Toward that end, the more we can avoid partisan invective and actually explore the science, the better. The thoughtful comments by RESPVBLICA readers Dan Pangburn and Harold Vandenburg are all in that spirit. Gentlemen: Well done.

Citizen Awlaki

2011-10-04T20:56:00.000-04:00

MQ-9 Reaper.
Photo from U.S. Air Force.

Our amended Constitution grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the territory of the United States, apart from a few exceptions like children of diplomats. This was not an original provision of the Constitution, but came about after the Civil War to account for freed slaves. At the time, it was a necessary measure. Today, it is understood to make citizens of illegal aliens’ children born in the U.S., their parents’ status notwithstanding. Last week, Anwar al-Awlaki, the terrorist recruiter, was escorted off this mortal coil by a Hellfire missile fired from a remotely piloted aircraft—a drone. Awlaki’s parents were Yemeni, but his father was in the United States on a Fullbright scholarship when little Anwar was born. This made young Awlaki a citizen by birth in the United States. And his status as citizen has raised questions about the legality of President Obama’s decision to approve the strike. While that is an interesting question in its own right (see this link at the Originalism Blog for a good discussion), the strike also raises a question about the Constitution. What if we revised the Fourteenth Amendment and changed the criteria for citizenship?

In the past, proposals to revise the Fourteenth Amendment as a solution to the illegal alien baby problem have been ridiculed. The Awlaki strike presents a different set of facts by which we can examine the proposal. For instance, if the Constitution currently made citizenship depend on birth to an American citizen, Awlaki would not have met the criteria for citizenship. The whole conversation about the legality of the drone strike would be moot (at least on grounds of citizenship). We could imagine two categories of citizens, those born to citizen parents (no matter where) and those naturalized.Historically, such a plan has many precedents. In ancient Athens, citizenship required that both parents be citizens. There is even extant the record of a court proceeding Against Neaira, in which the case turned on whether the children of a certain Athenian citizen were born to a citizen woman, his ex-wife, or to the foreign-born concubine (Neaira) with whom he was then living. In ancient Rome, the criteria for citizenship changed over the almost two thousand years from the founding of Rome to the fall of Constantinople. In 212 AD, in order to expand the tax base, the Emperor Caracalla proclaimed all free-born males in the Empire citizens. But in earlier times, citizenship depended on birth to lawfully married citizen parents. At all times, other routes to citizen status existed; but under the Republic, birth at Rome to foreign parents was not one of them.

The Romans would have known what to do about someone who preached death to Rome the way Awlaki preached death to America (crucifixion comes to mind). In the period of Roman liberty, however, they would not have felt they were dealing with a citizen. For us, perhaps the Awlaki citizen debate can inform the larger debate about updating the Fourteenth Amendment.

Global Warming Litmus Test

2011-10-01T12:35:00.001-04:00

Recently, over at The Atheist Conservative, the conversation turned to global warming. I have frankly avoided writing on climate change. This has not been from delicacy about controversy, as regular readers know. It has been instead from simple doubt. There seemed to be clarity on global warming some years ago. The basic effect of greenhouse gasses is indisputable, and carbon dioxide is demonstrably the culprit for why Venus is hotter than Mercury even though it is twice as far from the Sun. Human civilization clearly produces a lot of carbon dioxide, and there certainly seems to be an impressive correlation between recent (100 years or so) rises in carbon dioxide and average global temperature. I am not a climate scientist and do not pretend to be able to sort out what is going on with the weather. As in many other areas (medicine, astrophysics, plate tectonics), I was initially prepared to trust the experts. But...

It began to be apparent a few years ago that some climate scientists were doctoring their data. This is the cardinal sin of science. Granted, they might be right nonetheless, but perhaps they were overstating things a little. Or a lot. Perhaps the warming is not going to be as bad as they fear. A second look at (for instance) some of the data Al Gore cites shows a drop of half a degree during the first century of industrialization [An Inconvenient Truth, p. 65]. This result is counterintuitive (at least).

Unlike some religious conservatives, for whom non-human species are sometimes just a God-given resource, I dearly regret every extinction. In the whole of the universe, we know of no place besides Earth where life definitely exists. Each Earthly species is therefore profoundly unique. Indifferent nature has been driving species extinct without our help for æons, but we might think of ourselves as a little less indifferent than an unknowing cosmos. Still, human lives are ultimately more important (else how could we eat meat, for instance?). The economic activity of an awakening global market is lifting billions of people from poverty. That is a very good development. Endangering it on grounds of discredited science would be unconscionable.

So, is climate science discredited? A few researchers definitely have been. Perhaps more than a few. My own experience with academics is that as soon as their work approaches anything with political implications, its quality as science diminishes. On the other hand, the basic premise of global warming remains sound. What seem to me in doubt are (1) the degree of warming and (2) the extent to which human economic activity contributes to it.

What is needed? Clean data, to start with, so that we can be sure of the extent of the problem. With partisans on both sides hurling accusations at each other, it may be impossible to obtain such data for some time. On the other hand, perhaps we already have the facts but simply cannot recognize them as clean because of the mud and vitriol. As an issue, global climate change has become a litmus test for both Right and Left. It is astonishing how people proclaim their certainty when the complexity of climate science is beyond all but a few specialists—and they seem to be the least certain of all.

With this much doubt on the topic, it seems unwarranted to impose major economic dislocation on billions of humans when we cannot even agree on whether the data are actionable. In the military, facts are sometimes referred to as actionable intelligence when they provide sufficient clarity and certainty as to an enemy’s intentions or capability. Regarding climate change, we seem to lack actionable intelligence. By contrast, our economic and moral dangers are widely apparent. In the triage of emergent dangers to civilization, we are better advised to spend our efforts on balancing the budget and figuring out what to do about the decline of the family. In any event, if we can accomplish these difficult tasks, we will be in far better shape to handle a rising tide.

Illegal Texans Get No College Subsidies

2011-09-29T21:56:00.000-04:00

There is a political tempest blowing about a Texas law that allows certain illegal aliens to qualify for in-state tuition rates at Texas universities. Whatever the merits of the law as immigration policy, one criticism simply falls flat. Some pundits have characterized the law as requiring the taxpayers of Texas to subsidize the children of illegal aliens in state universities. However, this characterization misses the fact that Texas has no income tax. State funds for higher education come from the general appropriations, which are fueled by the state sales tax. Anyone living in the state for three years, the uniform requirement to qualify for in-state tuition, will have paid into the state education coffers. Thus, the children of illegal aliens—whose parents pay sales tax every time they go to the gas station or the hardware store—are no more freeloaders than the children of Daughters of the Republic of Texas. For both sets of parents, in-state tuition is available because both have paid their taxes.

The Loyal Opposition

2011-09-28T22:10:00.001-04:00

Earlier this month, it came to light that a group in Massachusetts wants to ban the Pledge of Allegiance from the Brookline Public Schools. The group’s argument is that the Pledge is “literally and psychologically a loyalty oath, reminiscent of McCarthyism or some horrific totalitarian regimes.” This argument spectacularly confuses loyalty to the country with loyalty to the people in power.

Oaths of loyalty to a particular government or military official were a feature of the Roman Republic. The legionaries swore to follow their generals wherever they might lead. In the end, these oaths proved fatal to liberty, as Cæsar’s soldiers followed their general across the Rubicon. So the Brookline agitators would be perfectly correct to object to the Pledge of Allegiance if it were a Pledge of Allegiance to (for example) President Obama. However, that is not the case.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands….” This is not a pledge to a government official, or even a particular government. It is a pledge to the republic itself. Such an oath should be required of every citizen. It is the ability to take the Pledge of Allegiance that establishes a person’s moral (not legal) right to participate in civic life, to exercise the privileges of citizenship, even (again, morally) to vote. Most of all, it is the taking of the Pledge that gives a citizen the moral standing to criticize the government. Who else has that standing—those who refuse to declare their loyalty to the republic? If we accepted the argument of the Brookline agitators, we would have to put our government and our civic culture in the hands of anyone who happens to be here at the moment. Even traitors. Even enemies.

Oddest of all is that the Brookline group has seemingly missed the distinction between loyalty to persons and loyalty to the republic, given the public discourse of our times. Who has more enthusiasm than the Right for both saying the Pledge of Allegiance and criticizing the White House?

The Road Less Traveled

2011-08-06T10:51:00.002-04:00

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

These famous lines from American poet Robert Frost originally had nothing to do with government spending. Upon reflection, perhaps they gently point a way out of the financial forest in which we now are lost. Senator Tom Coburn has stated that the average age of modern republics is 207 years, and among republics that have failed the shared cause was fiscal irresponsibility. The paradigm case of Weimar Germany should alert us to the consequences of failing to live within our national means. We must, in Coburn’s words, “cheat history” if we are to escape that fate. We must, at the risk of abusing Frost’s words, take the road “less traveled by.” It is a minimalist path, in which government does much less in order for us to do much more—and that would make all the difference.

The Fourth of July in Britain

2011-07-08T07:59:00.005-04:00

A British acquaintance has explained it. When discussing the nature of the holiday celebrated in the United States on the fourth day of July, he noted that in the United Kingdom that date is celebrated as a holiday as well. The difference is the name. In the UK, the Fourth of July is apparently called Thanksgiving.

Krauthammer’s Mistake

2011-06-24T23:10:00.002-04:00

   It is with some relief that your author has finally found a point of disagreement with the esteemed Charles Krauthammer. The danger in reading such a brilliant commentator is that one begins to doubt the independence of one’s own opinions. Hence, the discovery of a point of disagreement is cause for a minor bit of relief.

   The point in question has to do with the War Powers Act, which Krauthammer correctly reads, in a piece with today’s date, as requiring the president to obtain congressional consent to military action in Libya. The engagement—or whatever we are to call it—has now gone on well past the 90 days allotted by the War Powers Act, and the required consultation with Congress has yet to materialize. Where Krauthammer goes wrong is at this point: “The power to declare war has become, through no fault of anyone, archaic and obsolete. Taken literally, it is as useless as granting Congress the right to regulate horse-and-buggies.”

   One problem with this excuse for ignoring the explicit constitutional division of authority is that it ignores the explicit constitutional division of authority. Generally opposed to departures from the text of the Constitution, Krauthammer seems here to forget the strict constructionist’s rule. If the Constitution is “archaic and obsolete,” then it must be amended by the process prescribed in the document itself. But in this case, doing so is not required—despite Krauthammer’s urging.

   It has been an article of faith for some on the Right that the president’s constitutional power to wage war, as commander-in-chief, also gives him the power to declare war. This view is mistaken. The division of authority on this point is clear: Congress picks the enemy, whereupon the president conducts the military operation. In our time, he does so through subordinate military officers, but they act on his orders. As noted here before, this division was the clear intent of the people who wrote the Constitution. Their model was the Roman Republic, in which such a division of authority had a long history, and it was a good model.

   Power naturally tends to accrete to the presidency. Limiting that power by constitutional provisions, such as the “archaic” insistence on a declaration of war by Congress, is essential to slowing that process of accretion. It is therefore, ultimately, also essential to liberty.

   In the end, it is circular reasoning to argue that we may ignore the requirement for a declaration of war because recent presidents have neglected the requirement. At least President Bush’s consultations with Congress before launching invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were the functional equivalent of seeking declarations of war. Presumably, the motive was more about political cover than adherence to constitutional form. Still, it was far better than the current example—and on that point, Krauthammer is right again.

Nine-and-a-half Years

2011-05-02T21:06:00.001-04:00

   The old cliché about actions speaking louder than words is certainly true in foreign policy. Lieutenants of al-Qaida around the world must now be examining their positions with a new sense of insecurity. Yesterday’s splendid raid on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan will have spoken clearly enough to put a little dread in the adversaries of liberty. More than a little. In fact, if the world’s most elusive mass-murderer cannot escape U.S. vengeance, after nine-and-a-half years of hiding, who among them is safe? There certainly is much public rhetoric about martyrdom among the fanatics. Still, in the silent calculus of individual power, influence, and survival, it pays little to take up the leadership of a cause when doing so ends in a burial at sea.

   Even so, there will probably be a counter-punch. How hard will it be? We will not know until after it lands—if it lands—but it is vital to make clear to the enemy which horse is the stronger after all (to use bin Laden’s own metaphor). Now we must pursue the leads from the intelligence cache seized during the raid. Now is not the time to let up, to relax, to lower our guard. Nonetheless, it is a day to celebrate.

   It is also a day to give credit to the military heroes who carried out the raid, to the agents and interrogators who gathered the necessary intelligence, to the analysts who put the puzzle pieces together, and to the president who reluctantly adopted his predecessor’s methods and ultimately showed the courage to act. He may be ruining the country with his domestic policy, but on this occasion he brought about victory and justice. This was the perfect operation, the right mission, chosen with correct judgment and superbly carried out. Bombs from on high would have yielded as much doubt as victory. A joint operation would have yielded leaks and failure. Only this personal execution, extraction, and maritime dumping could have combined justice, certainty, and disposal. It was a complete victory.

   As for the others in al-Qaida, they should pay heed. If you kill Americans, you will be repaid in kind. Yesterday, the Navy Seals settled an overdue account.

Whew! Thank Goodness the US is Not Hedonistic

2011-04-26T19:25:00.004-04:00

Somewhat in reply to T. Paine’s comment on the last post, it occurred to us that we Americans are not hedonists, and here is the proof. Thank goodness...

...we are so thrifty that practically everyone could manage three months of unemployment;

...hardly anyone is overextended on credit cards;

...we didn’t recently bid up housing prices with easy credit, resulting in a foreclosure frenzy;

...the bankruptcy rate is falling like water, not rising like smoke from a bonfire;

...we never demand more from our government than the government can afford;

...pornography has not exploded across the internet;

...in fact, there is no recession-proof pornography industry;

...most young women save themselves for marriage;

...most young men respect the women who save themselves for marriage;

...hardly anyone has an affair anymore, and the divorce rate is low;

...illegitimacy is not a problem;

...STDs are not a problem;

...abortions are unknown among us;

...like chastity, sobriety is “cool at school” and alcoholism among college students is rare;

...the few students who do become alcoholic usually find the strength to kick the habit early;

...the rate of drug abuse among young people is in decline;

...effectively no young women turn to prostitution to pay for a drug habit;

...hardly any young men turn to theft to pay for a drug habit;

...there are no life-long drug addicts subsisting on welfare;

...rising test scores prove that students don’t waste their time with television or computer games;

...gluttony is disappearing, along with those vanishing 24/7 fast-food restaurants;

...the fast-food places that remain are closing their drive-through windows;

...lifestyle diseases are in decline; and

...we do not have a national crisis of obesity.

Whew! Just think of all the problems we’ve avoided by overcoming our hedonistic nature. Winning!

Shot Heard Round the World

2011-04-19T01:00:00.020-04:00

Battle of Lexington, by Nicholas Ponce.
Picture credit: Library of Congress.

Today is the 236th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. It was the inception of what would become a free republic, modeled and improved on those of antiquity.

Creating Wealth

2011-04-17T20:14:00.006-04:00

Wealth of Nations. Photo by the author.

   Knowing anything at all about human nature should be enough to make clear that if people do not have to pay for something they desperately want, they will use it up quickly. This point is not much of an insight, but it seems to elude everyone who is arguing against structural changes to Medicaid and Medicare. Like the British National Health Service, these programs promise far more than any nation can ultimately deliver. Access to health care must be limited, whether freely by price or deliberately by rationing and waiting lists. Once more the conservative position is the responsible one. However, not all of the conservative rhetoric has been accurate. This is normal for both political tribes, but in the context of the budget debate one claim is particularly common and particularly wild: “Government cannot create wealth; it can only redistribute wealth.” Just a moment’s reflection shows the confusion behind this claim.

   First, it is important to get clear what is meant by “wealth.” There are many definitions. Adam Smith, for instance, defined wealth as the total produce of the land and labor of a society. On the other hand, is there any serious economist who defines wealth as simply money? This seems precisely the mistake those conservatives make who proclaim that government cannot create wealth. The kernel of truth at the heart of the claim is that the money the government uses to pay its obligations comes from the population through taxation. It does, at least, as long as the government does not simply print the money it needs to cover those obligations, which would indeed be the creation of wealth if wealth were only money. But wealth is not simply money, and government does not simply redistribute wealth.

   Consider: However inefficient the federal bureaucracy may be, it does add value far beyond the simple dollars it expends. The military’s worth is not simply the dollars spent on buying weapons and paying soldiers: It is security. State and federal governments build roads and enforce the criminal law. The resulting highway system and public order immensely enhance the economy, and such enhancements really are a part of the national wealth. Government absolutely can create wealth, properly understood, just as the private sector can. Conservative polemicists weaken their arguments when they deny this fact.

   Still, it is also true that each sector is typically better than the other at certain kinds of wealth creation. Governments properly defend the shores and build the roads and enforce the laws that provide a secure forum in which the private sector markets can freely operate. It is a serious problem, however, when governments begin trying to provide market goods and services that are more efficiently created and distributed by the private sector. This point is another reason why governments cannot treat health care like a right. Health care is a limited resource, and no government can guarantee unlimited access to a limited resource—no matter how much wealth that government creates.

All Sail and No Anchor

2011-04-14T05:56:00.002-04:00

All the current budget talk has brought to mind a bit of history. Our fellow Skeptical Conservative, Sub Specie Æternitatis, has an interest in the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Years ago, we ran across a couple of letters by Lord Macaulay on American institutions. The letters had been published in Harper’s magazine in the 19th century, and they pointed to the signal danger of any pure democracy. In every society there are always comparatively few people with great wealth, but in a pure democracy those people are the natural prey of the comparatively less well-off majority. Macaulay referred to the danger of “spoliation.”

Here is an excerpt from one of the Macaulay letters, taken from a New York Times archive since the Harper’s archive is only available to subscribers:

It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when, in the State of New-York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread? I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people would, in a year of scarcity, devour all the seed-corn, and thus make the next year, a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stay you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals, who ravaged the Roman Empire, came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country by your own institutions.

Macaulay was (thankfully) wrong on the timing, since we made it through the 20th century without a Cæsar or Napoleon. Our Constitution was perhaps better founded than he understood, for it did (and does) have some structural protections for the minority rich. The Electoral College was understood to be such a protection, as was the original method for electing senators (until 1913 they were chosen by the state legislatures, not by direct popular vote). Indeed, it took a Constitutional amendment (the 16th) for the government to gain the power of taxing income directly.

Today, with our media saturation, every hardship of every citizen becomes a matter for government action. At the same time, our leaders succumb to the power of instant and continual polling. Politicians who want to retain their positions fear departing too much from popular opinion. It is always easier to make the case for soaking the rich than it is to argue for fiscal responsibility. In the end, which we hope does not come for a long, long while, Macaulay may still be proven the best prophet after all.

Measuring Victory

2011-04-11T22:08:00.002-04:00

Now that the deal is done, some are lamenting that the Speaker of the House may have got less than he should. They argue that by stating his early opposition to a government shutdown he gave away his final bargaining chip. For perspective, imagine that you go into a car dealership and announce that you aren’t leaving without buying a new car. All the salesman has to do then is stick to his price until closing time.

Still, the deal is much, much better than what was brewing a year ago. And for calibration, it is worthwhile comparing the reactions of the Tea Party to the howl of agony and rage from the Economist-in-Chief of the Orthodox Left: Paul Krugman. In this piece, Krugman bemoans the president’s “loss” in terms that warm the heart of a fiscal conservative:

“Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve — although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.”

Well. When you put it that way, the weekend wasn’t so bad after all.

One-Half of One-Half

2011-04-09T23:54:00.001-04:00

   All around the media these days we are hearing—especially from apologists for compromising with the fiscal irresponsibility crowd—the formula, “after all, we only control one-half of one-third of the government.” Of course, of the three branches of government, only two are involved in legislation. True, activist judges routinely make law as they supposedly interpret it, but the courts have no part of the process of passing a bill. It might be better to say, “after all, we only control one-half of one-half of the government.” Fair enough, only a fifth grade fractions teacher would appreciate the difference between one-sixth and one-quarter, but it’s nonetheless irritating to see a strictly inaccurate comment gain so much momentum.

   The main point ought to be that the acolytes of fiscal responsibility (no matter how recently converted to that faith) need once more to be handed both law-making branches of government to be sure they can enact their agenda. It’s a fair point, but one that begs the question, why didn’t they balance the budget in 2002? Or 2003? Or 2004, 2005, or 2006? The usual answer, that we were fighting two wars, raises the second question whether the war funding accounted for the whole of the budget deficit. Somehow that seems unlikely.

   This is not to say that the new zeal for budget cutting is a bad thing. In fact, it is the best thing to happen in the federal government in many a year. Ideally, frugality would indeed become the law of the land. Government cannot solve every problem, and even if it could, in doing so it would fatally diminish the moral fiber of the citizen body. Eventually, dependent populations succumb to tyranny. In time, the corn dole at Rome helped transform the world’s freest people into just another subject population. Let us hope we avoid history repeating itself, and doing so may in fact require more than a quarter of the government.

Nonessential Nonsense

2011-04-07T20:45:00.002-04:00

   This morning on CNN there was a federal employee being interviewed who said that if the government shuts down she won’t have money to buy food for her daughter. At first, one thought shame on CNN for exploiting a human tragedy to advance a liberal agenda. But then the lightning struck. People working in the private sector live with the possibility of layoffs every day of their lives. They know they have to keep three months’ income in the bank to cover emergencies. By contrast, this public sector employee had apparently not planned for any disruption in pay, any furlough or layoff or even just reduction in hours. Why not?

   Though she apparently does not have any cushion in the bank, one has to wonder if she has an iPad or a plasma screen television. Perhaps she has been as frugal as possible, but odds are she simply has been living beyond her means. Too many of us are guilty of that life plan, which isn’t a plan at all. Have we not heard the old children’s story of the ant and the grasshopper? The ant, who worked hard and saved, built up enough resources to last the winter. The grasshopper, who lived beyond his means and did not plan for the future, wound up destitute. Living beyond one’s means used to be thought of as a character flaw. Whether or not it’s thought of that way any longer, it is still a moral failing. And when the country as a whole lives beyond its means, we all share the moral blame.

   If nothing else, the current melodrama about shutting down the government at least suggests one way to begin economizing. If the government shuts down, so-called nonessential personnel will be sent home. In another lighting strike, the following question flashed through the brain: If they are not essential, why do we pay them to begin with?

Best April Fool’s Joke

2011-04-03T22:22:00.002-04:00

Ancient Mariner and Mercury. Photo credit: NASA.

When NASA released the picture above last Friday, not a few astronomy bloggers and web sites were briefly taken in. The original story was that Messenger, NASA’s new probe to the planet Mercury, had captured this image of the old Mariner 10 probe zooming past Mercury, 36 years after NASA’s last communication with the spacecraft. The claim was that Mariner 10, which surveyed Mercury in 1974 and 1975, had fallen into a “resonant” orbit around the sun that put it near Mercury once every Earth year…on April 1st. Apart from the dimly visible difference in the dark backgrounds, showing where two images were playfully stitched together, there were other clues from NASA that should have alerted the blogosphere. (Your author was saved from falling for the prank by spending a weekend without web access.) In any case, those punsters at NASA called Mariner 10 the “Ancient Mariner.” Their press release was also replete with quotations from the Coleridge poem, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” With all the rough developments in the news lately, at least someone is keeping a bit of literary-science levity.

Commander-in-Chief

2011-03-26T19:48:00.000-04:00

   Over at the Originalism Blog, Mike Ramsey has turned in a couple of excellent posts on the power of the Commander-in-Chief to initiate military action without support of Congress. The first post is here, the second here.

   The gist of Ramsey’s argument is that while the President retains power to defend the country from attack without Congressional approval, he must seek a declaration of war before attacking another country. The military powers of the Congress and the President make sense if they are understood as a split between the authority to declare whom to fight and the authority to decide how to fight. The President (as Commander-in-Chief) is the one to command the military forces (“how to fight”), but he may exercise this power only after Congress has declared war (“whom to fight”).

   In support of Ramsey’s argument it remains to be said that the Founding Fathers of the United States were thoroughly educated in the classics. In writing the Constitution, they naturally adhered to the examples of the free republics of antiquity, most especially the Roman Republic. Under the Roman Constitution—before Julius Cæsar destroyed it—the Senate declared war, and the Consuls then went forth with the army to conduct operations. Congress is our analog to the Senate, while the Presidency is our analog to the Consulate.

   At present, the War Powers Resolution has finessed the Constitutional question by expressly granting the President power to conduct military operations for sixty days before obtaining Congressional approval. Given that context, the current operation in Libya is within the law.

Desert Bluff

2011-03-22T01:36:00.003-04:00

   The United Nations’ military action against Libya has halted a vicious terrorist-dictator. For now, Muammar Gaddafi’s forces have lost the momentum—and command of the air—in the weeks-old conflict with Libyan rebels. While we hope this is the start of the final movement in Gaddafi’s discordant symphony, we also note it may be the beginning of a new respect for the Obama administration in foreign policy. The initial moves of the administration did not appear in the best light, and we wrote last month to encourage an interventionist policy in Libya. Now, however, the administration has turned the initial delay into a foreign policy success. Whether the matter will remain so is unclear, but there are some reasons for hope.

   Consider: After delaying until asked by the Libyan rebels, the Arab League, and the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. now occupies an unimpeachable position in imposing military force. Yes, international critics have still denounced the U.N. action (which is overwhelmingly an American operation). But they cannot get much traction now, and even the Russian leadership is unable to agree on opposing the coalition. Internally, only the ideologically pure pacifists on the Left have worked up enough steam to chug along the opposite track to the administration. Ralph Nader, for instance, remains insulting and irrelevant in calling the president’s actions war crimes. He is, as usual, an outlier, though had the administration not waited for U.N. blessing Nader would have had much more company. So, the delay served political purposes.

   It is likely the delay also served military purposes, as the public protestations of how difficult the job would be covered a short time of vigorous preparation. While the world (and perhaps Gaddafi) assimilated the frank reservations expressed by some in the Defense Department, the military quietly positioned assets and planned missions so that within hours of the Security Council vote Gaddafi found his troops essentially paralyzed. So, the cautionary statements by Secretary Gates may very well have been a highly refined form of psychological operations.

   If so, then the administration’s claim of not targeting Gaddafi personally may also be a bluff in the desert. Having repeatedly assured the world that the U.S. does not have Gaddafi on the target list, administration officials may have encouraged him to drop his guard. Not that U.S. officials need be lying. Rather, they may be speaking a tightly written truth: Gaddafi is not on the American target list, but of course that says nothing about the French or the British. Indeed, just yesterday the British struck Gaddafi’s compound, in what may have been an attempt at decapitating the regime.

   Does this reading of events give the administration too much credit for subtlety? Perhaps. But it is reassuring to think such credit could be deserved. Besides, conservatives have often enough proclaimed that politics is supposed to stop at the edge of the ocean. When American forces are committed overseas, American politicians and pundits are supposed to make up their quarrels and support the president. In light of such a view, we would be silent if we disagreed with the administration. As it stands, we are prepared to entertain a new respect for the administration’s facility with foreign affairs.

Viral Absurdity

2011-03-15T02:14:00.019-04:00

   Last Thursday, a very wise man chastised his alma mater from the high position of the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal. Scholar and critic Jacques Barzun (who at 104 is more alert than 99 out of 100 30-year-olds) took Columbia University in New York to task. Barzun graduated from Columbia in 1927, was a professor of history there for many years, and eventually became provost of the university. Now retired to San Antonio, Barzun wrote about a recent petition circulated by members of the Columbia faculty. The signatories to the petition were calling for the continuation of Columbia’s ban on the U.S. military’s Reserve Officer Training Corps. Originally banished in 1969, ROTC has been kept off campus in recent years because of the now-ended military policy against openly homosexual service members. What is the justification for keeping ROTC away? According to the petitioners on the faculty, the military remains a “discriminatory institution” because of it excludes some people from military service on the basis of “many reasons from physical disability to age.”

   This is a stunningly transparent lie. The petitioners are apparently so tone deaf they cannot hear their own mendacity. The military is discriminatory because it won’t hire blind pilots? Or septuagenarian riflemen? This argument simply cannot be the true reason for the faculty to oppose ROTC. It is too absurd an objection for even the most disconnected of ivory tower denizens. Surely the real reason is far simpler: anti-military bias. Had the petitioners based their petition on the honest grounds of loathing for all things military, they could at least claim whatever virtue clings to candor. But to ground their objections on the “discriminatory” policy of excluding the disabled and the aged from military service is to reveal an animus so sharp that it distorts basic reason. Obviously, theirs is a clumsy ploy, a puerile argument unworthy of the weakest minds. Except…

   Except that there is a slim chance some of them really are sincere. How could that be? What kind of mind could sincerely advance such absurdities? Only a mind infected by political correctness. For some on the Left, the point of all government institutions—the military included—is evidently to promote the personal fulfillment of all people, regardless of other considerations. According to this view, the government exists to guarantee the self-actualization of every citizen, no matter the cost or consequences. The purpose of the military, then, is to allow everyone who wants to put on a uniform to do so. The halt, the obese, the decrepit, the blind—they all must have their chance to serve. While most of the faculty petitioners clearly are simply anti-military, for some this philosophy may derive from uncritical generosity. Their signatures on the petition proclaim their naïve misunderstanding of the limits of state resources and the purpose of the military services.

   Today is the Ides of March, the 2,054th anniversary of the assassination of Julius Cæsar. Cæsar was a dictator who effectively destroyed the Roman Republic and prepared it for the eventual tyranny of the Roman Empire. At the same time, Cæsar was a superb general who developed his troops into the finest fighting force in the ancient world. In Cæsar’s army, recruits had to pass physical tests before they could be accepted into the legions. The Romans may not have known about post-modernist criticism, or deconstruction, or gender studies, but they clearly understood the requirements of military service. Unlike the Columbia faculty petitioners.

   The military cannot exist for the benefit of its members. It must exist for the benefit of the nation. Military personnel must subordinate their own desires and personal fulfillment to the needs of the service. Today’s soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines understand this requirement. They are prepared to give their lives in service, and they understand that if their injuries sustained in combat are disabling but not fatal, then they will be honorably discharged with generous pensions and veteran benefits. But they will—they must be—discharged. No army on Earth can possibly prevail if it spends its time and resources trying to accommodate the disabled or the aged or any other citizens who cannot meet rigorous physical standards. As obvious as it is, this point has evidently eluded some of the distinguished faculty of Columbia. Such professors are perfect case studies in the etiology of that mental virus known as political correctness. PC long ago poisoned the humanities within the academy. Now, it appears PC is testing the air in the outside world, to see if can find host minds that will carry it into the barracks and aboard the ships of our still unequalled armed forces. Mr. Barzun deserves our thanks for his attempt to vaccinate us against this absurd, but dangerous, virus of the mind.

Requiem for a Network

2011-03-11T00:00:00.000-05:00

   Monday’s release of the devastating tape of Ron Schiller, former chief fundraiser for National Public Radio, has permanently discredited any claim that the network pursues a neutral, balanced approach to journalism. It will probably also kill future federal funding. Although the scandal has not directly touched the Public Broadcasting Service, PBS is likely to be unplugged from the federal money grid along with NPR. This seems a shame, because of the two, PBS retains more of the old excellence than NPR.

   Tune in to NPR now and you’re likely to hear a piece about prisoners making “art” from trash. This is the victory of political correctness over æsthetics. You are equally likely to hear a piece about the plight of someone or other. The ultimate moral high ground for the NPR Leftist now seems to be victim status. As for the old high culture, it is now abandoned. You are not likely to hear about a classical music event unless there is a way of tying it to “diversity.” After all, that music was all produced by white men from Europe.

   On PBS there is still the McLaughlin Group—not the reasoned debate of William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, but conservative voices are heard. The Nightly Business Report remains data-driven, though without the wit of Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street Week. Certainly, the science programming is still better than anything on cable. Thoughtful citizens may pause at the prospect of the United States abandoning public support for PBS, which once brought us Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the American heir to the BBC’s wonderful series like Bronowski’s Ascent of Man and Clark’s Civilisation. PBS was the home of Firing Line, the touchstone of political affairs programming. Would it not be at least uncivilized to abandon public support for a network with such a history? Even if PBS has fallen from its early heights, it is a bit sad to contemplate it going down the same drain as NPR.

   On the other hand, both NPR and PBS will probably survive in some form. Once freed from whatever mild restraints NPR may still have felt as a public network, it could very well give in to its Leftist tendencies and become more brazen in opposing the conservative philosophy. With enough support from wealthy Leftists, it might even retain its non-profit status. Likewise, PBS could try for a similar re-structuring, whereby it would relinquish federal funding in exchange for greater freedom. But, given the likelihood of a more openly Leftist editorial stance, both networks will surely move far away from their exalted past.

   In the end, we should not mourn for public broadcasting. It passed away long ago.

Battle of the Alamo, 175th Anniversary

2011-03-06T23:05:00.002-05:00

The Alamo. Photo by the author.

A Necessary Evil

2011-03-04T07:12:00.002-05:00

   Over at The Atheist Conservative, the estimable staff have begun a dialogue about capital punishment. The following is slightly expanded from your author’s comments:

   Nobody is really happy about capital punishment, but for crying out loud, it’s a necessary evil. One fault of the Left is to ignore human nature. The truth of human nature is that some small numbers of people will be deterred from committing murder only by the certainty of execution. Another group of people will only be deterred from lynching murderers by...the certainty of execution. Social order demands the state deter both groups with a robust program of capital punishment. It’s too bad that’s how people are, but that’s how they are.

   One good point about not being Christian is that we unbelievers are free to reject Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek.” Whatever we do to dilute the strength of the twin message of deterrence and just vengeance endangers public order (which is another way of saying, endangers the lives of the innocent). By contrast, whatever we do to strengthen the twin message is helpful. For this reason, we should reconsider public executions of convicted murderers.

   The sole caution about capital punishment should be the fear of a mistaken conviction. There is probably nothing more horrible in individual cases than the state killing an innocent man. That danger is why we should continue to grant heightened procedural safeguards in capital cases. Still, on balance, capital punishment remains essential to a society of human beings, as opposed to a society of the idealized, humanlike creatures of Leftist fantasy.

Target of Opportunity

2011-02-28T20:59:00.005-05:00

B-2 Stealth Bomber.
Photo credit: U.S. Air Force

   One test of the vision of a leader is whether he can see when the world turns over. In case any leaders have missed it, the world is turning over. As should have been clear after about the first two weeks of demonstrations in Cairo, there is a wind sweeping the Middle East like a Saharan sirocco. It reaches from Tunisia to Iran, from ancient Carthage to ancient Persia. The stakes are enormous. If we act now, we might encourage just enough of the right people to resist the impending Islamist push and avoid losing the entire region to theocracy, terror, and a long, medieval dark. If we do anything less than just enough, and certainly if we do nothing but talk, we stand to lose the region, yes, but also we stand to lose whatever moral authority the world’s most powerful democracy still has in the eyes of nascent democracies worldwide. Of course, the region is not ours to lose. It is not ours at all. There is probably little we can do to bend the wind to our purposes, nor should we be approaching the problem as if we could. We must look toward this newer world order with hope and humility, accepting that we can no more rewrite the destinies of a dozen sovereign countries than we can get Wisconsin senators back on the job. But, the U.S. simply cannot sit idle while a dozen movements that describe themselves as “democratic” face the tanks and bullets of tyranny.

   What can we do? Each country presents its own challenges and opportunities. Where we have diplomatic or close military ties, as in Egypt, we can help foster a (virtually) bloodless coup. In other cases, perhaps we nudge an allied monarch toward accepting constitutional restraints and representative government. In Libya, though, we have a unique target of opportunity. Libyans in the street are begging America to take military action, to hit Gaddafi with our thunderbolts from the sky and free a nation with one stroke. This stroke we can deliver, even without a carrier battle group in the Mediterranean.

   Flying from Missouri, American B-2 Stealth Bombers provided vital combat power in the 1999 Kosovo Air Campaign. That conflict remains the only one on record won entirely by air power. The B-2 was instrumental in that victory. The Stealth Bomber can carry an immense payload of conventional bombs. It can also carry precision-guided warheads that it can launch from above the clouds, well outside the detection range of any Libyan radar. We could, if the president so ordered, drop tons of blockbusters into skylights on the Libyan leader’s palace. We could eliminate entire companies of Libyan armor, should they not decide to support the Libyan people. We could provide the coup-de-grâce for this international disgrace, or at least make it easier for his people to do so. Perhaps most important of all, we could end the bloodbath in which he is drowning his countrymen.

   One justification for the Iraq war was that it might successfully install a functioning democracy in the heart of authoritarian Greater Arabia. This remains to be seen. It is devilishly tricky to impose democracy on an unready people. But when people demonstrate for democracy, even if they are not entirely sure what that means, the United States simply must stand with them. We must do so even at the risk of a replay of Iran in 1979. On the other hand, some argue it was U.S. dithering that empowered the Khomeini Islamists and failed to encourage more secular revolutionaries. In the end, what choice have we? We cannot support dictators and divine-right kings at the expense of their people.

   We must be who we are, and we must help where we can.

DOMA in Danger

2011-02-27T19:10:00.005-05:00

In an excellent piece on Wednesday, Heritage Foundation writer Chuck Donovan makes the basic case for marriage:

The consequences of failure are staggering, and the contemporary United States, like so many other Western nations, is seeing those consequences firsthand. The effects of broken families are statistically significant across category after category – youth crime, child poverty, educational attainment, and adult mental health in the next generation. For taxpayers, the costs of family dissolution and, increasingly, the failure of families to form are distressingly high and growing. It would be irrational not to privilege marriage for the sake of these concerns.

It is hard to decide which is more alarming, the latest danger to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) or the fact that we need it even more now than we did when President Clinton signed it into law in 1996. The challenges to traditional marriage tend to assume we run no risk by re-making what has been a core institution of society. Moreover, the further decay of the family is apparently the goal of some of the Left. For them, the state is (or at least should be) ready to take on the roles of mother and father. When the family is no longer needed to raise children, who are better off as government wards anyhow, then we can play around with marriage to suit the fashion of the day. Personal expression, being true to oneself, being authentic—these are the code words of a lifestyle that places shallow hedonism ahead of all duty.

The only people who can possibly feel disadvantaged by DOMA are those seeking gay or polygamous marriages. Gay marriage is an absurdity without historical precedent, but we have plenty of historical evidence on polygamy. In polygamous cultures, high-status males tend to collect more than their share of females. The losers under polygamy are the average and below average males, who ultimately do without. If DOMA falls, at least they may have each other.

Eureka

2011-02-23T22:47:00.002-05:00

After some persistence, the Assistant Editor & Web Lackey was finally able to re-load the old posts with all the original comments. Interestingly, immediately after re-launching the blog, there appeared some spam advertisements as new comments. Consistent with policy, the staff has deleted them.

A little more reconstruction remains to be done, primarily with the Issues page. Soon enough the staff can get back to writing.

Housekeeping

2011-02-19T10:29:00.000-05:00

The Assistant Editor & Web Lackey has now finished re-loading all the posts from 2010. Unfortunately, he lacks the skill to upload the comments as comments proper. They do appear as text within each appropriate post, which is the best form of recovery possible with current technology. And expertise. New comments should track properly.

Despite the Best Intentions

2011-02-17T22:51:00.005-05:00

So, events have made a liar of your author. The intent was to discontinue RESPVBLICA to make room for a new job. But as events in Egypt show, the history we are all living continues to unfold in a fashion that demands discussion. The great public discourse of the day neglects the historical perspective. The Left continues to deny human nature, while the Right remains enthralled by superstition. There still seems room for this project.

Postings will be less frequent than before. But I find I cannot pull the plug just yet.

Final Post

2010-12-12T20:56:00.003-05:00

This past week I received unexpected but welcome news about the next year and a half. The time required for this new job will leave no room for keeping a blog, and the nature of the work precludes publishing my political opinions (even in anonymity, which is never very secure on the Internet). So, I must close RESPVBLICA.

It’s not the first blog killed by a promotion. Based on the Google stats, it was off to a great start. Having begun it in frustration at a judicial opinion, I end wistfully, with many things left unwritten. There was to be, for instance, a series on the differences between what I consider moral relativism (anything goes) and consensus morality (the judgment of historical majorities).

The wonderful comments and offline correspondence with readers have helped sharpen my views. I also feel that I have met new friends, as much as that is possible between Internet correspondents. If the blog has a legacy, I hope it will be the Skeptical Conservatives affiliation. There is a real need for such a group. In the interest of supporting its work, I’ll maintain the video on an otherwise quiescent RESPVBLICA YouTube channel.

This page, too, will remain online for a while. Courtesy demands an explanation to regular readers. Once the pageview count declines to the point it seems you’ve all gotten the word, I’ll delete the whole blog.

For me, this next 18 months will be demanding. Afterward, perhaps there will be time to return to the blogosphere, both writing my own blog and reading the great work of the other Skeptical Conservative web sites. If so, then this space may be filled again. In the meantime, let me make one last plea for Americans not to discard all their traditions in the pursuit of superficial happiness.

—CONSVLTVS, 12 December 2010.
E-mail: consvltvs [at] gmail [dot] com

Days of Infamy

2010-12-07T05:00:00.026-05:00

USS Maryland alongside capsized USS Oklahoma, December 7, 1941.
Photo credit: U.S. National Park Service

Sixty-nine years ago today, Americans received the kind of national jolt that has often brought a people together. Like the equally infamous 9/11, the attack on Pearl Harbor prompted the citizens of our republic to respond with idealism and resolve. More than anything else in the past 40 years or so, our response to 9/11 proved that the American people still possess the fortitude to stand up to challenge. The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that the response to challenge can often germinate a civilization. Too much challenge can snuff out a nascent culture. Too little, and there is not enough reason to shrug off old patterns of life and take the hard steps needed to ascend to the next rung of the ladder. Similarly, response to challenge can also stimulate a generation to become great. Days of infamy, like 9/11 and 12/7, can re-focus internally squabbling partisans on united, national effort.

History is full of days of infamy. On one day in May, 88 BC, the King of Pontus dealt a ruthless blow to the Roman Republic. The King’s name was Mithridates. On a single day, Mithridates’ agents and soldiers and allied Greeks slaughtered every Roman and Italian living in Asia Minor. Eighty thousand men, women, and children died that day. Rome was stunned. In reply, the Republic launched a five-year war that ended with Mithridates’ defeat. There is much more to be told of Mithridates, but the point is to remark how a blow that strong could have failed. Mithridates had expected the massacre to transfer Asia Minor from Rome’s control to his own. Instead, it brought the avenging Roman legions down upon him. His challenge only stimulated Rome to make a supreme response.

Likewise, the attack on Pearl Harbor eventually rebounded on the attackers. As horrible as the destruction was that day, it only stimulated America to make a supreme response. It was even a tactical failure, since none of the American carrier fleet was in port when the bombs began to fall.

The attack on 9/11 certainly could have led to a similar victory. Immediately afterward, politicians of the Left and Right closed ranks and gave the president whatever he wanted. The public united under the flag, and many Americans volunteered for military service. Within a few months, al-Qaida and their Taliban hosts were on the run. For years afterward, it appeared the rapid victory of the Northern Alliance, under U.S. air cover, had ended a barbarous period in Afghan history. The capture of bin Laden himself seemed within reach. What happened?

Toynbee believed that a large challenge that did not destroy a people would stimulate that people to new effort. Rome in 88 BC. America in 1941 AD. But ironically, the people that seem to have survived an existential challenge most recently are the Taliban. We blasted them nearly out of existence, but we didn’t finish the job. We turned our gaze to Iraq, and lost our opportunity. Had we focused on the Taliban, had we deployed an overwhelmingly larger force to destroy them, had we increased the Congressional limits on military end-strength, we would have had a far better chance of ending the threat. Americans would have done almost anything the president asked. Now, they have lost patience, after years of exacting heroic effort from a fraction of the population. When people asked, on September 12, what they could do to help, the president could have called for a full-scale mobilization. We could have deployed a force many times larger than the one we did. We could have established the kind of security environment that would not have allowed the Taliban to re-group and re-arm as they have. Instead, we relied on the Northern Alliance to do our ground work for us, and bin Laden slipped away.

Would such a massive effort really have paid off? It didn’t work for the Russians. On the other hand, we would not have been attempting imperial annexation. Our goal could have been simply the capture of two small groups: Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and their respective cadres. For that job, undivided focus and the enormous resources of the wholly mobilized American public would have been sufficient. With the al-Qaida and Taliban leaders captured or killed, we could have left Afghanistan to its future.

Our latest day of infamy certainly challenged America. We responded by declaring war not on real enemies but on a cowardly method of mayhem. Even etymologically, a “war on terrorism” does not make sense. No one can win such a war. We might have won the war against al-Qaida, if we had declared and fought it to the exclusion of all other missions.

For that matter, we still could—at least in principle. The war in Afghanistan has always been ours to lose. The Leftist and libertarian press are still reporting all the bad news and none of the good. As a result, and because the infamy of 9/11 has already begun to fade, the public is in no mood to begin a new and larger surge. If we do eventually leave without having eradicated the Taliban or captured bin Laden, Afghanistan will join Vietnam as another American failure. We may then expect yet another day of infamy sometime thereafter. When that day arrives, let us hope our leadership will have learned from our history in the past ten years.

Welfare Politics and a Game of Debt Chicken

2010-12-06T05:00:00.012-05:00

Julius Cæsar, welfare politician.

   Yesterday, The New York Times reported on the growing possibility of default by various political entities across the land: “Not just small towns or dying Rust Belt cities, but also large states like Illinois and California are increasingly at risk.” Further, these polities could soon be asking for federal assistance: “[T]he imbalances are so large in some places that the federal government will probably have to step in at some point….” One imagines a game of Debt Chicken, in which federal and state officials see who will lose their nerve first. Federal assistance could conceivably come with strings attached, such as requiring states to curtail the spending that is currently bankrupting them. In the end, the effectiveness of such limits is likely to be limited, given (a) the strong commitment to spending exhibited by the very states facing default and (b) the electoral votes controlled by those states. For all the change in November, an even more fundamental shift is needed. The country desperately needs to re-new the American tradition of self-reliance.

   Ralph Waldo Emerson was nothing like a conservative. And yet, when he wrote of self-reliance, he sketched a stereotypically sour right-wing sensibility: “Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations.” Today, Emerson sounds like Ebenezer Scrooge. But where Dickens urged charity as a moral obligation, the Left today claims that the very obligations Emerson denied (paying for “education at college of fools” or “alms to sots”) should enjoy the force of law. The government will take part of your income and distribute it to other people. The ostensible justification for this plan is a hardened sense of moral obligation beyond that of the (generally) Christian do-gooders of Emerson’s time. Ironically, this obligation is now firmly a part of (typically) anti-Christian Leftist ideology. How did this come about? By interest-group politics.

   Interest groups go back at least to the Roman Republic. Populares, like Julius Cæsar, waived the flag for the poor and unemployed. Optimates resisted welfare efforts like Cæsar’s increase to the corn dole. The optimates said Cæsar was just buying votes, and besides, how could the Republic pay for it all? This debate should sound familiar.

   Nowadays, like Cæsar, the Left waives the flag for the poor on supposedly moral grounds. In fact, government spending always creates power for the government officials who administer that spending. By privileging certain groups—like state employees’ unions—a modern popularis buys himself a political army that will march to the polls on Election Day. So there are powerful incentives for welfare politicians to increase spending. Unfortunately, such a scheme cannot go on forever because eventually everyone will be on the dole and no one will be left to tax. At some point, a majority of voters simply must choose self-reliance over dependency.

   How that can happen is unclear. The country must break the grip of the modern populares and uproot the sense of entitlement among their constituents. If we fail to do so we may very well face an economic and political catastrophe. And after that, if we are not very lucky, a new Cæsar.

A Conservative Vice

2010-12-04T08:03:00.008-05:00

Conservative smoking a pipe.

   Virtue and vice have been important to the history of the American Republic. Generally, conservatives are in favor of virtue and opposed to vice. One very old fashioned vice, however, remains popular with a shrinking but devout number of conservatives (and, truth be told, liberals). Smoking tobacco in a briar pipe used to be as unobtrusive as a man wearing a tie or a woman wearing a dress. Now, it will get you thrown out of a restaurant. In some places, pipe-smoking in public will get the otherwise law-abiding citizen arrested. At least the tie and the dress are still allowed, though in many places they have grown rare.

   In many cities these days, acolytes of the humble tobacco pipe are restricted to smoking in their own homes. Assuming, of course, that the avenging angels from Child Protective Services don’t catch you smoking around the children. So if you have children and still want to smoke an occasional pipe of fine tobacco, you had better build a private smoking shed. (Check local regulations first, though, to see if you need permission from anyone to build on your own land.) Once you have found a place to smoke, you will want to know where to learn all about pipes and tobacco. As it happens, there is a magazine devoted to just that celebrated topic.

   Pipes and tobaccos is a beautiful, glossy quarterly. It is thinner and less frequent than of yore, for obvious reasons. But as the pipe-smoking population declines, there is still time to explore the old world of hand-carved briars and Meerschaums, clay churchwardens, and even the Sherlock Holmes calabash. The character Holmes was a thinking man, and the pipe is the thinking man’s choice among the options for enjoying tobacco.

   Cigarettes used to be so common that they meant nothing. Any signaling came from the quality of the tobacco or the silver of the cigarette case. Cigars have long connoted power. Apart from the corncob of General Douglas MacArthur, pipes have generally been the props of intellectuals, whether on the Left or the Right. Tolkien and Lewis were famous pipe smokers, both conservative, both religious. Bertrand Russell was also a pipe man, and he was neither conservative nor religious. Even the Left-wing feminist science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin used to smoke a pipe.

   The most famous pipe-smoking conservative? Santa Claus, of course. What else would you call a self-employed reindeer rancher who is all about private charity, in place of government handouts, and who enforces a strict moral code of naughty and nice?

   Pipes are wonderful tools for encouraging civilized conversation. You have to sit and fiddle with them. You might be tempted to have a glass of scotch or bourbon alongside. There is no rushing about with a pipe (Melville’s Mr. Starbuck was fictional). At one time, it was a delight to light up a pipeful of Latakia or Virginia after an elegant meal. Unless you live with a chef or can afford catering, those days are over.

   It is a little odd that the pipe is banned from the public square, when so much that is vulgar or lewd is not. All right, some people do not like the smoke. But plenty of other people do not like vulgarity, and their complaints get no hearing. At least, when California finally does legalize marijuana, it may be possible to assure a zealous Los Angeles policeman that a particularly pungent Perique is really imported pot.

Dueling Imperialists

2010-12-01T20:29:00.009-05:00

   Today’s Pentagon study on gays in the military was all over talk radio. The study documents high levels of disapproval among combat troops (nearly 70% in the Marine Corps), but the Leftist press is calling the study proof there will be no problem letting gay troops declare themselves openly. Here at RESPVBLICA, the editorial position has been that when a strong majority of military personnel are ready to shower with homosexuals, then will be the time to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Whether the Pentagon study establishes that the military has arrived at that point remains unclear. No doubt Congress will sort it out, maybe even before the Ninth Circuit rules on the Log Cabin Republicans case. In the meantime, the spitting outrage on both sides makes plain the impossibility of compromise between competing moral paradigms.

For some on the Right, but particularly among conservative Christians, homosexual conduct is immoral per se. The people who hold this view simply declare by fiat that anyone engaging in gay sex is a moral abomination (to echo the language in Leviticus). They make a flat assertion of moral value, which they “prove” by citations to their moral guide: the Bible.

   For nearly all on the Left, homosexual conduct is morally blameless and anyone declaring otherwise is a bigot. The people who hold this view simply declare by fiat that anyone opposing gays in the military and gay marriage is abominably prejudiced. They make a flat assertion of moral value, which they “prove” (on the occasions they try proving it) by arguing the other side can’t prove it’s assertion.

   “Homosexuality is an abomination, because the Bible says so.”

   “Homophobia is bigotry, because you can’t prove homosexuality is wrong.”

There simply is no reasoning between these people.

   As noted before, the view here is that homosexuality presents no moral problems per se. Homosexuals have contributed to every science and every art. Like all citizens, they have a right to be left alone in quiet dignity. There are good homosexuals (like the Roman Emperor Hadrian) and bad homosexuals (like the Roman Emperor Elagabalus). On the other hand, the Constitution does not contain either a right for gays to serve in the military or a right to marry one another. Nor should homosexual conduct be counted as a constitutionally protected activity, judicial overreaching notwithstanding (see, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). When, and if, a legislature creates such rights, based on the moral consensus of the people, then we may say they exist. In the meantime, we may continue pointing to the larger consensus, the consensus of history, to inform the debate. On the one hand, there have indeed been successful military organizations of gay men (the Theban Sacred Band is the most commonly cited example). On the other hand, gay marriage remains without precedent, an anomalous social experiment urged (as usual) on politically correct grounds.

   Absent consensus, it comes down to one moral imperialism or another.

The Right Skeptics

2010-11-29T16:50:00.011-05:00

Over the past few months, atheist gadfly Christopher Hitchens has been dying of cancer. Mr. Hitchens is facing his terminal illness with great courage and insight. If the way we face death is a sign of character, Hitchens has added to the moral credit column in his balance sheet. In fact, Hitchens appears to have the kind of courage normally associated with the Stoic sage of antiquity, given that he is staring down death without benefit of religion. Though far from a Stoic in his daily living before now, Hitchens reminds us that there are alternatives to religion as a solace for mortality. Hitchens’ ability to accept his own mortal end proves it can be done. Others, like Corporal Patrick Daniel Tillman, prove that unbelievers are capable of highly idealistic behavior. Tillman turned down a $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist as an Army Ranger. He felt the same patriotic zeal that motivated many religious and nonreligious people to volunteer for military service after 9/11. Nonetheless, despite these and other instances of courage and devotion by unbelievers, some religious conservatives continue to deny even the possibility of sincere Skeptical Conservatives. They blame their rejection of the secular right wing on the impossibility of moral absolutes among atheists. Ironically, their behavior shows them just as guilty of accepting consensus as the basis for morality.

As regular readers know, the editorial attitude at RESPVBLICA is generally sympathetic to religion. This is partly because the prevalence of religious faith makes it highly likely there is a heritable predisposition toward belief. This is also because, in general, religious sanction has often been useful in promoting good behavior and curtailing bad. As De Tocqueville noted, a free republic requires its citizens to regulate their own behavior, and religion has successfully done so much of the time. Finally, the overall sympathy for religion expressed here derives partly from wistfulness about the lack of faith. Consider: On the one hand, Christianity offers a life of community in which the Creator of the universe takes a personal interest, followed by blissful eternity in His presence along with everyone you have ever loved. On the other hand, atheism offers a short life in an indifferent universe, where evil is never balanced in the moral ledger, followed by oblivion. If the matter were simply one of choosing the better deal, what fool would choose atheism?

Given that perspective, many skeptics experience their lack of faith as an unwilling unbelief. They know perfectly well that if they could only believe, they would obtain all the benefits of belonging and solace available to the faithful. It is just that they find religion incredible. The faithful want us to believe in more than just a god. We are supposed to believe in their God. Not only are we to disregard the absence of proof for even a generic higher power, we are to accept the Biblical or Koranic details of a particular creed. Among Christians, acceptance of C. S. Lewis’s “mere Christianity” is not enough. We have to sign on as Catholics or Protestants or Mormons or Evangelicals. Among the Jews, we have to choose between Reform or Orthodox or what have you. As for the Muslims, they are still killing each other over the nuances of faith separating Shi’ite from Sunni. All this is simply too much to swallow for the skeptic. All creeds can’t all be right, and there is no logical basis for distinguishing among them.

Many young atheists discard God because they want to be free to misbehave. They want to indulge themselves in ways the norms of Christianity, for instance, tend to discourage. “What right does the Church have to tell me I can’t sleep around? Or light up a joint? Or get drunk every night?” Having the normal young person’s disregard for mortality, they do not yet need religion’s solace. Later, they tend to find permissive New Age substitutes for traditional religion, or they return to the fold. On the other hand, many do remain atheists to the end, a thoughtful minority who evidently lack the God gene. But whatever the reason, those who cannot profess religious faith are all too often distrusted by those who do. A case in point comes from the 1988 presidential campaign.

At a campaign stop in 1987, then-Vice President George H. W. Bush expressed his view of atheists this way: “No, I don’t know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic.” Though speaking for himself, he managed a succinct summary of the view of many religious conservatives. For them, as for most people, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This axiom explains the support of Leftists for such insults as the Ground Zero Mosque. It also explains why most nonbelievers adhere to the Left, given the cold reception from many on the Right.

Of course, the example of Corporal Tillman, noted above, instantly disproves the Bush view. If unbelievers are incapable of patriotism, how can Bush explain Tillman? For that matter, how does he explain the existence of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers? The Bush view is parochial and rude, but in Tillman’s case anti-atheist sentiment caused a more particular insult. As is well known, Tillman died in a friendly-fire incident in Afghanistan. Afterward, one of his superior officers spoke to a reporter from ESPN.com about the inability of the family to accept the death of their heroic son. According to the web site, then Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Kauzlarich said of the family,

“[w]hen you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough.”

At least he acknowledged the emotional burden of facing true mortality, something his religion spares him from facing. Still, why would an Evangelical Army officer, secure in his faith and his patriotism, go out of his way to be rude to the grieving family of a slain war hero? One reason may be the role Colonel Kauzlerich played in the aftermath of Tillman’s death, which the Army first reported as caused by enemy fire. Quite possibly, another reason is the fear many religious people have of those who acknowledge no ultimate moral authority in the universe.

The faithful often make the point—and it is correct—that without divine sanction, morals are ultimately a matter of consensus. The point to make back to them is that in practice, many religious people actually follow a consensus view of morality. Think how many “cafeteria Catholics” you know. Notice how the Episcopal Church has “accommodated” modern times by ordaining women and homosexuals. Remember how many mainstream denominations have adapted their liturgy to be more acceptable to the congregants of today. Claims of absolute morality notwithstanding, in practice many Christians, Jews, and moderate Muslims have rather easily shed what used to be firm articles of morality in conforming to modern, permissive, and liberal ideals.

Of course, some of the faithful have noted this trend in the mainstream denominations and formed their own, ostensibly purer, sects. They, at least, are being consistent, but even their morality tends to be more 20th century than not. If it is pre-1960, it is clearly not pre-1860. Name if you can any Christian sect today that advocates slavery, which had been declared consistent with Christian teaching for over eighteen hundred years before the Abolitionists began to re-think things. All credit to them for doing so, but their new ideas departed from previously ironclad Christian moral doctrine. Or again, name a Judeo-Christian sect today that advocates capital punishment for adulterers: “And the man that committeth adultery with another man’s wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour’s wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” Leviticus 20:10. Or for homosexuals: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Leviticus 20:13. Homosexuals remain “worthy of death” even in the New Testament (Romans 1:26-32), but the fiercest Christian opponents of homosexuality stop short of killing.

Why? Why do even fundamentalist Christians resist following the supposedly eternal moral truths of their faith? They do so—and we skeptics are thankful they do—because even they accept a large part of the modern moral consensus. They excoriate radical Islam as evil, but Islamic extremists are in many ways closer to the original law of Christendom and Jewery than today’s Christians and Jews themselves. If moral assertions articulated by religion are timeless truths, then religions should never make moral concessions. But in fact they have. So their behavior is inconsistent with their expressions of moral absolutes, and behavior is the better statement of creed. By their behavior, it is obvious many religious people rely just as much on consensus and contingency as unbelievers do. And for that matter, many unbelievers, like Pat Tillman, behave in accord with noble moral convictions derived from consensus. Which brings us back to Hitchens.

Tillman was a hero in the best sense. He risked—and lost—his life in service to his country. By contrast, Hitchens’ life has been full of self-indulgence. Until recently. Somehow, he has managed to find the courage of his convictions. Here is how he described his situation in an interview on National Public Radio:

“‘I’m here as a product of [the] process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply,’ he says. ‘I mean, most human beings who’ve ever been born would have been dead long before they reached my age. And I would think in most of the rest of the world—well, I know it—is still true. So to be relatively healthy at 62 is to be dealt a pretty good hand by the cosmos, which doesn’t know I’m here—and won’t notice when I’m gone. So that seemed the only properly stoic attitude to take.’”

   Stoic? Hitchens? Famous for burning the candle at both ends, as he put it himself, nonetheless he is displaying a genuinely stoical attitude now that he is finally confronting the abyss. The ancient philosophy of Stoicism has enjoyed a modest renaissance in the past dozen years or so, beginning (perhaps) with Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full. Before that it was best known as the quietly held conviction of Admiral James Stockdale, whose 1993 Courage Under Fire recounted the value of Stoicism for a prisoner of war. The philosophy counsels indifference to pleasure—hardly a trait associated with Hitchens—but also grace under pressure, the calm acceptance of the inevitable. People can leave life with dignity, or not, as they choose; but leave it we all must. This is the insight Hitchens has grasped. That even such a wild child as he can do so at the end suggests the philosophy may have some utility for those who profess no faith.

     Stoicism is just one approach to morality, one pre-Christian system of thought that has demonstrated its ability to sustain thoughtful people in place of religion. Because its messages of self-control and duty fit easily into the behavioral norms of Christianity, many nominal Stoics have also been Christian. However, the philosophy has also clearly helped those without faith. It has helped shape the Western moral consensus. For many people, philosophy of whatever flavor is an insufficient substitute for passionate religious conviction. It is weak tea. But for many others, it is a system of norms successfully counseling moral behavior without an appeal to religion.

     With all these examples of moral behavior among the unchurched, and even of fully developed and effective moral systems of thought, how can conservative Christians continue denying the existence and legitimacy of Skeptical Conservatism? In doing so, they needlessly distrust reliable allies. To the extent they continue espousing the Bush view, they will continue driving many skeptics to the Left. After all, people tend to go where they are welcome. For those who find the Left prey to its own quasi-religious ideologies, the Skeptical Conservative affiliates remain as a real, and Right, alternative.

The Dangerous Appeal of Appeasement

2010-11-27T10:00:00.017-05:00

Lights out in North Korea.
Image credit: NASA

   Thursday’s post on North Korea requires a sequel. The news yesterday confirmed threats of further attacks by the North and the opposition of China to American naval exercises off the Korean coast. It is as if the principals were reading from an old script: Act I, Scene 1: North Korea tests the resolve of the U.S. and South Korea; Act I, Scene 2: The U.S. and the South condemn the North’s actions; Act I, Scene 3: China backs the North and condemns the condemnations; Act I, Scene 4: the North issues new threats. So far, there has been no Act II, in which either the Americans and South Koreans answer force with force or the North finally attacks the South in earnest. However, our ability to postpone a second act until the North implodes from its internal economic contradictions is increasingly in question. Moreover, every time the U.S. accepts violence from the North without reprisal, another blemish appears in American credibility as a deterrent power. While every day that war is avoided counts as a victory, the sum of such victories may very well be disaster. Making this case to a skeptical public is a particular difficulty for American leadership.

     The diplomatic approach by which the civilized world has attempted to contain North Korea without employing military force has, by some measures, gone fairly well. In the 57 years since the Korean War cease-fire, the peninsula has been largely stable. Certainly South Korea has been able to pursue political and economic liberty. In so doing, South Korea has written its own entry in the journal of prosperity. In the North, of course, there have been tyranny, famine, and death. Nonetheless, international pressure has contained these apocalyptic horsemen to one benighted region and one unfortunate people. Of course, to say this containment has come about without military force is incomplete, because only the presence of the United States Army in South Korea has kept the Communists from turning out the lights there as well. Nonetheless, the American military has not taken significant direct action against the North during the whole period of the cease-fire. How can any civilized person not endorse this diplomatic approach, which has avoided war?

     On the other hand, the diplomatic approach has not dislodged the North Korean regime. Nor has it prevented the North from obtaining nuclear weapons technology. In the hands of a rogue state like North Korea, nuclear weapons are a genuine nightmare. The calculus for the North Koreans was that once they obtained nuclear weapons they would be immune to American deterrence. Pyongyang would no longer need China to balance American military might. With their own nuclear weapons, they would be able to neutralize that might on their own. Now, with the attack this week and the sinking of a South Korean vessel last March, it is beginning to look as though that calculus was correct.

     International relations theory and world history both illuminate what happens in the absence of a hegemonic military power. Whether the focus is regional or global, the absence of a stable, militarily dominant nation invites violent competition among those states that would contend for the top spot. Because of their peculiar incentive structures, which are unusual in history, democracies tend not to enter such competitions. However, states like Kim Jong-il’s North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq, which are essentially the personal property of the ruler, are eager to try filling a power vacuum.

   In such states, the leadership is more or less insulated from the costs of going to war. Saddam himself, for instance, never paid a personal price for his invasion of Iran, unlike thousands of his soldiers—who did not get to vote on the matter. States of this type are quite likely to seek expansion of their own power through military action. Given the personal insulation of the decision-makers from the consequences of such action, such states are difficult to deter. Just as the leadership is protected from the worst consequences of war, so too are they protected from the worst consequences of diplomacy. International economic sanctions against North Korea have helped beggar the country, but, as the country’s dear leader, Kim Jong-il himself feels none of that pain.

   There have been only a few methods that have reliably worked in deterring rogue states. One involves engineering a way to make the rogue state leader personally experience the consequences of his extra-territorial aggression. This method is hard to bring off. In 1986, after Libya’s terrorist bombing of a Berlin discotheque, the U.S. launched Operation El Dorado Canyon. Libyan autocrat Muammar Gaddafi was nearly killed in the air strike. Even so, his prosecution of a terrorist war against the U.S. continued until the U.S. ousted Saddam from Iraq. Having felt American power himself was insufficient deterrence. Seeing his analog dictator actually overthrown induced Gaddafi to terminate Libya’s nuclear weapons program and contribute $1.5 billion to a settlement fund for victims of his erstwhile terror program. Libya today, though still full of bluster, is effectively deterred.

   Bluster and blather have always been the first resort of those without power. No matter how loudly shouted, words are worthless in deterring rogue nations. However, demonstrations of effective military power combined with the will to use it have time and again proven effective deterrents. The point is to make the dictator understand that there is no chance of victory—or even survival—if he does not comply with international norms. Refusing to employ military force from the start, as some Western nations have advocated, simply gives the dictator complete freedom from any concern that he will have to pay a personal price for his misconduct. Half-measures are almost as bad, because they provide a pretext for the dictator’s next act of aggression. Only overwhelming force, delivered without equivocation or apology, can persuade your average rogue state leader to toe the line of civilized conduct.

   Such efforts provide enormous benefits beyond curtailing the dictator in question. As noted already, the U.S. action against Saddam helped curtail Gaddafi. When a dominant state uses its power effectively against one rogue state, other dictators suddenly cease their war-mongering. They understand there is no power vacuum to fill. But as clear as the case for deterrence is, democratic nations often resist using it in any serious way. The very factors that make democracies comparatively pacific in international relations also make them unreliable policemen.

   Unlike a rogue state leader, the leader of every democracy must answer to his public for the success or failure of his policies. A nation in which the public is sovereign is a nation in which the ultimate decision-makers bear the costs of war directly. While this structure of incentives would make for a perpetual peace, if every nation in the world were democratic, in a world still full of aggressive dictators it can complicate deterrence. Insufficient force, or inconsistent will, sends mixed signals to rogue states. The best guarantee of peace (in the real world) is military strength coupled with the demonstrated resolve to use it. Ironically, this path is the least attractive for a typical democratic state, which is more likely to try appeasement.

   The record of irresolute democracies is nearly as long as the list of democracies. Switzerland and Israel excepted, most democracies have failed to confront dictatorial regimes until absolutely necessary. Had France and England intervened in Germany when Hitler first exceeded the Versailles limits on German military strength, there would have been no Wehrmacht to take the Sudetenland. Had they intervened when Germany took the Sudetenland, when Germany was still comparatively weak, there would have been no invasion of Poland. At the time, it seemed less costly to chastise Germany with words and tolerate each escalating outrage. Hating and fearing war as much as they did, they could not imagine how badly Hitler thirsted for it and the power it would bring him.

   This week, North Korea has presented the U.S. and South Korea with an escalation in outrage. The attack on Yeonpyeong Island is another test to see how far we will appease Kim Jong-il. Having refused to take military action before now, the U.S. and South Korea confront a nuclear-armed foe. As dangerous as military confrontation now would be, it is hardly credible that continuing irresolution—continuing appeasement—will lessen the danger. Even if North Korean ambitions subside under a new leader, presumably upon the imminent death of the ailing Kim, the cost of appeasing North Korea would go far beyond East Asia. Kim obtained nuclear weapons; Gaddafi abandoned them; every dictator in the world is watching to see whether Gaddafi was wiser than Kim. If we succumb to North Korean nuclear blackmail, we will start a nuclear arms race among ambitious rogue states. Iran would be just the first in a world of nuclear-armed terrorists and aggressive nuclear regimes.

   If we do not confront this challenge today, it will confront us tomorrow.

Thanks for the Sound, at Least

2010-11-25T15:09:00.001-05:00

The shelling by North Korea of a South Korean island on Tuesday has confirmed the intransigence of the North Korean regime, the irresolution of the United States and South Korea, and the realpolitik agenda of the People’s Republic of China. As reported in The New York Times, the response by the U.S. and South Korea has been words, not action: “‘North Korea’s artillery stronghold should have been destroyed three minutes after the attack,’ said one lawmaker, Song Kwang-ho. ‘South Korea’s air force sallied forth but did not attack. The gong sounded, and it’s too late now. Where were our resolute measures?’” While we can all be thankful on this Thanksgiving that our 1953 cease-fire remains in effect, at least on our side, the civilized world has little realistic hope that North Korea will respond to any argument not made with high explosives. And the failure of both South Korea and the U.S. to have made such an argument by now reveals the insignificance of the bluster coming from Seoul and the blather coming from Washington. They amount to sound without fury. They signify nothing, apart from weakness of will. They foretell nothing except the continuing appeasement of both North Korea and China. We can be thankful if this record of weakness does not encourage the Iranian regime and its ilk.

Not Your Father’s Poet Laureate

2010-11-21T09:37:00.001-05:00

With the engagement of Prince William to Kate (now Catherine) Middleton, Buckingham Palace has received no promise from British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy of a poem to commemorate the event. The Telegraph reports that according to the terms of her employment contract, Duffy is apparently within her rights to insist that family life in the House of Windsor is an insufficient muse. Mysteriously appointed by the Queen herself, though apparently on the advice of disloyal ministers, Duffy is reputedly an angry critic of U.K. society and traditions. Eighteen months after her appointment to the £5,000 per year gig, the angry poetess manifestly still resists coöptation by the Establishment. One wonders only why such a rebel scribbler would have accepted the job in the first place. One wonders even more why the Royal Family would have chosen her. Poets Laureate past were able to find the courtesy and inspiration to doodle an occasional piece for their employers. Duffy’s snub of the royal lovebirds is self-indulgent and juvenile. The modern monarchy having submitted to constitutional restraints that effectively make the institution powerless, Duffy is free to be rude to the personification of British values. It remains to be seen whether the sovereign British subjects will rise in defense of the institution to which they still seem attached.

The British Crown exercises a fascination over many American conservatives. On the one hand, conservatives who take liberty seriously are mindful of the attitude of our Founding Fathers. American patriots fought a long war against a king to seize freedom and bequeath it to us. We, none of us, should kneel or bow to any monarch anywhere. On the other hand, like the British themselves, American conservatives can’t help liking Queen Elizabeth. As a young girl she was an inspiration on radio to the British population during World War II. She has conducted herself without fault, being the exemplar of old fashioned values conservatives tend to appreciate. Those (and there are still a few) who cherish refinement in dress, speech, and manners remain fond of Her Majesty. It may be that the existence of a decorous, constitutionally restrained monarch has contributed to some of the subtle differences between the U.K. and the U.S. For instance, a television presenter in the U.K. will occasionally apologize for not knowing a word. In the U.S., anchorpersons are more likely to apologize for a large vocabulary than a small one.

It is likely that what Jacques Barzun calls demotic values will continue to erode refinement in both the U.K. and the U.S. Besides, the U.K. is one unpopular monarch away from dispensing with the institution altogether. Once they have lost enough power to be unobjectionable, kings and queens lack the authority to remain necessary. Or to command a short piece of doggerel from the national poetaster. For the sake of courtesy, if nothing else, one hopes the residual U.K. decency will show itself once more, perhaps in a showering of sonnets.

Junk Law

2010-11-17T22:22:00.002-05:00

With a maelstrom of stunning news today, it is hard to decide where to begin. The Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole or the near acquittal of Ahmed Ghailani? Both events are being well reported, but there may be a bit of synergy from considering them together. Regarding the TSA chief, we have a federal bureaucrat imposing a choice on millions of air travelers: Star in a peepshow or get groped. Regarding the court case of Ghailani, a judge appears to have abused the rules of evidence and nearly procured a full acquittal of a genuine terrorist. The events seem to be inspiring similar rage among the citizens of the republic. Apart from that thoroughly justified rage, the common element in these two travesties is hyperactive government. There could hardly be higher-octane fuel for the argument to curtail government power.

The more significant event from a legal perspective may be the precedent set in the Ghailani case. Facing over 200 charges, Ghailani eluded all but one. In 1998, a suicide bomb attack in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed dozens. Ghailani obtained the truck and the fuel tanks that exploded when the driver plowed into his target. It appears the judge at trial excluded vital evidence, including testimony of a prosecution witness who sold Ghailani the fuel tanks, because it was obtained by investigators using enhanced interrogation techniques. It is unlikely such techniques were any worse than water boarding, which does no permanent harm to the terrorist and can only be called “torture” by a radical re-interpretation of the original meaning of “cruel and unusual punishment.” Once again, we have a judge re-interpreting the Constitution based on his or her own moral principles, not the intent of the drafters. In their day, cruel punishment included cutting off hands or stoning. Given the continuing existence of such measures in some parts of the world, the original understanding remains relevant and contemporary. In any event, water boarding has been used on only three men, including the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. If Ghailani was not water boarded, then the judge excluded vital evidence of guilt on even flimsier grounds. It is to be hoped that the judge’s ruling does not become precedent in other cases.

On the other hand, perhaps Ghailani received rough treatment in foreign hands before he arrived at Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps the judge decided rightly on the Eighth Amendment question. Perhaps. At the end of the day, the government evidently holds classified evidence against Ghailani that confirms his direct involvement with the attack. Such evidence cannot be introduced in civilian court without compromising U.S. intelligence sources and methods, thereby endangering even more people. If the judge did decide the evidence question correctly, doubtful though that seems, then the decision to take this case to trial in civilian court was all the more dubious. In that case, the hyperactivity of government would be located at a higher level than a mere trial judge.

Compared with the judicial (or prosecutorial) hyperactivity in the Ghailani case, the astounding decision of TSA chief John Pistole to impose new search procedures on airline passengers carries little legal heft. Two pilots have apparently already filed suit against TSA, but so far, the biggest effect has been the rhetorical detonations from Left and Right. The Pistole rule requires passengers to submit either to a full-body scan revealing them effectively nude or to a ridiculously euphemized “pat-down” that includes an actual, open-palmed genital grope. As one fully justified passenger remarked, “If you touch my junk I’ll have you arrested.”

There are many reasons to oppose the Pistole rule, and it won’t be long before loud voices call for him to be fired. This rule is, in itself, a victory for the terrorists ultimately more widespread than the Ghailani outcome. Part of what terrorist organizations want to do is to inhibit our liberty. Doing so is next best to killing us. By frightening us into giving away our dignity, they score points against millions of us whom they can never reach with direct harm. All the more rich material for their dark laughter is the probability that the scanners do not even detect the plastique and powdered explosives they have been using in recent attempts. We are, then, giving away our dignity for nothing.

When has there been a terrorist attempt foiled by a scanner? All the recent success against these attempts has come from good intelligence, the coöperation of foreign governments, or the swift action of airline passengers and crew. TSA’s efforts may be preventing many attempts on flights that originate in the U.S. Indeed, they probably are. On the other hand, no amount of security will ever make us completely safe. We are already, on the numbers, still safer in the air than on the highway. There is simply no reason to impose these new affronts to dignity and liberty, especially since they will ultimately prove ineffective. The current rule exempts children under 12 from the full-body search. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong used children as unwitting suicide bombers. What is to prevent al-Qaida from doing so today?

The worst piece of this Pistole rule is that Pistole’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, is actually considering some accommodation for Muslim women—and only Muslim women—who object to the pat-downs. Has the world gone mad? Rather than follow the effective example of the Israelis, who spend more effort looking for the terrorist rather than the device, our hyperactive government is on the verge of adopting reverse-profiling in selecting victims for indecent assault.

It was a day for junk law indeed.

Judicial Oligarchy Extends Grip

2010-11-13T08:51:00.001-05:00

Once again, a federal judge has set aside the will of a sovereign state. In this case, over 70% of Oklahoma voters approved an amendment to the state constitution prohibiting Oklahoma courts from importing Sharia law as a basis for deciding cases in court. Even such conservative luminaries as Michael Medved have endorsed the judge’s ruling. Whether or not it was advisable for the voters of Oklahoma to single out Islam for special treatment is not at issue. However, whether doing so comports with the U.S. Constitution must be resolved on the narrow grounds of legal analysis. So far, no compelling analysis against the amendment has appeared.

The amendment to Oklahoma’s constitution is State Question 755, which adds some provisions to Article VII, Section 1. That portion of the state constitution creates state courts and establishes their jurisdiction. The relevant text added to Article VII, Section 1, is as follows: “The courts shall not look to the legal precepts of other nations or cultures. Specifically, the courts shall not consider international or Sharia Law.”

Within days of the voters’ adopting the amendment, the executive director of the Council for American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma filed suit in federal court. Mr. Muneer Awad, the plaintiff, asked the federal judge to stop the Board of Elections from certifying the vote on State Question 755. Mr. Awad argued that the ban on importing Sharia into Oklahoma courts amounted to an establishment of Judeo-Christian faiths. In particular, he argued that the Oklahoma amendment violated the legal test of Lemon v. Kurtzman, which articulates a three-part analysis of government actions regarding religion. The analysis poses three questions: (1) Does the government action have a secular purpose? (2) Is its primary effect to either advance or inhibit religion? (3) Does it foster excessive government entanglement with religion? (If you are interested, the citation is 403 U.S. 602, 612-613 (1971).)

To begin with, the measure has an obviously secular purpose. How could a measure that bans formal religious law from court have anything other than a secular purpose? As for advancing or inhibiting religion, it does not inhibit Islam to any extent it is not already limited by existing laws. Muslims may go to their temples, may pray five times a day, may follow the teachings of their prophet. However, Muslim men in Oklahoma may not marry four wives. They may also not employ stoning or the other cruel and unusual punishments prescribed in the Koran for various religious crimes. In prohibiting such practices, Oklahoma is already refusing to base its law on Sharia. State Question 755 merely codifies the existing practice.

It is settled law that there is no universal exemption from the criminal code based on religious principles. For example, the shamanistic tradition of using peyote is nonetheless a violation of federal drug laws. On the other hand, Muslims in Oklahoma may practice their religion freely, as long as they do not violate existing law in doing so. In his brief, Mr. Awad states that Sharia provides guidance for him in conducting much of his personal business. He argues that the amendment denies him and his fellow Muslims the support of Sharia in business transactions. However, nothing prevents him and a business partner from following the principles of Sharia in concluding a transaction, so long as such principles also conform to the laws of Oklahoma. Enforcement of such business arrangements would be based on contract law, not Sharia per se. In denying Sharia enfranchisement in Oklahoma courts, the voters have simply drawn a bright line against any creeping accommodation of practices already disallowed.

What about advancing Judeo-Christian principles at the expense of Sharia? Does prohibiting Sharia alone as a legal precedent have the effect of privileging Christianity? Not at all. Here, it is important to distinguish between a formal religious code, such as Sharia, and the general traditions of a given faith. At some level, all secular law has its origin in religious traditions. Long before American states had laws against murder the Jews had prohibited it as part of the Ten Commandments. But the Jews were not alone. All the major religious traditions prohibit murder (and all allow exemptions and exceptions). To the extent Oklahoma’s law against murder may be said to derive from Judeo-Christian principles, it may also be said to derive from essentially universal moral principles. Look carefully at Oklahoma jurisprudence. There are no doubt cases in which judges have appealed generally to Christian principles of morality. However, it would be highly unusual—and, in your author’s view, a clear violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment—for an Oklahoma judge to base a court ruling on a specific principle of, for instance, Catholic Canon Law. In this context, the prohibition in State Question 755 is unnecessary.

It would have been better if Oklahoma had passed an amendment declaring that court decisions could not be based on any formal religious code, whether the Sharia of Islam or the Canon Law of the Catholic Church. As noted, such a measure would in effect simply restate the principles of the First Amendment. Consider the obverse of State Question 755: Oklahoma courts shall base their decisions on Sharia (or Canon Law, or the codified pronouncements of the Dalai Lama). Would such a measure be constitutional? Clearly not. Why then should a declaration against using religious law as a basis for court cases be considered to advance religion, under the Lemon test?

Still, the Oklahoma amendment does not ban all religious codes from court. It bans only Sharia. Or does it? The amendment also prevents basing Oklahoma decisions on international law, not just Islam. Because the Ten Commandments did not arise in the United States, some have already argued that the Oklahoma amendment may have the presumably unintended consequence of banning the Ten Commandments from court as well as Sharia. To the extent such analysis is correct, it serves to blunt the force of the argument about singling out Sharia among religious codes.

The final part of the Lemon test is whether the amendment entangles the state in religion. It should go without saying that a measure prohibiting the importation of religion into court can hardly be taken to entangle the courts in religion. Let us not take a thing for its opposite.

Banning the use of Sharia as a basis for court cases in effect just restates the First Amendment prohibition on establishing religion. At the same time, refusing to base court decisions on Sharia does not prohibit the exercise of Islam outside court to the limit of the secular law. Moreover, the fact that Oklahoma is silent on other religious formal law does not establish such formal law as the law of the state. Thus, given existing First Amendment jurisprudence, the Oklahoma amendment is unnecessary. It is also provocative. But it is certainly within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution. In light of this analysis, the judge’s decision to override the will of the people is more and more clearly an act of judicial overreaching. A pessimist would declare that we live under a judicial oligarchy.

Bigger than the 2010 Election

2010-11-09T22:54:00.001-05:00

Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

With all the excitement of last week’s Republican electoral triumph, which jaded experience suggests owed more to unemployment than to ideological conversion, it is worth noting that NASA has announced something much, much bigger than a 67-seat swing in the House of Representatives. While here in the United States very little can compare to the welcome political shift, above and below the center of our Milky Way galaxy astronomers have identified stupendously large twin globes of bubbling energy that simply dwarf our entire planet.

These energy globes redefine huge. Extending about 25,000 light years above and below the center of the Milky Way, they were completely unsuspected until their recent discovery. They appear to be composed of gamma ray radiation, the most energetic form of light we know. We don’t know what caused them, but plausible theories might include the consumption of whole stars by the galaxy’s central black hole. Black hole feeding is thought to be the cause of the quasars, the most energetic objects known to science. Perhaps the gamma bubbles are remnants of some messy eating as the black hole slurped down a few extra suns, like an afternoon snack. Science has no definitive answer—yet.

The best news? The bubbles are too far away to do us any harm, but near enough to be interesting. It’s a little like watching a volcanic eruption from a safe distance—riveting, but harmless. And once more, we must agree with Hamlet that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Of no immediate practical value, the discovery nonetheless will sharpen humanity’s knowledge of nature. Who knows where that will lead? In the meantime, the sheer immensity of the objects might serve to blunt the political hyperbole by reminding some of us just how tiny our little world is, with its ebb and flow of political fortune. At the same time, the immense globes of energy are also sterile features of a nearly lifeless universe. We here on Earth, with our petty politics and culture wars and fast-food toys (except in San Francisco), are the only (arguably) intelligent life known to us. For religious skeptics, then, this latest discovery should help create the perspective necessary for sound judgment of our affairs and remind us how important it is to get things right. Too bad there are not more religious skeptics in power.

Guest Post: Against the Lotos

2010-11-04T06:22:00.003-04:00

On the tenth day we made the land of the Lotos-eaters, men who browse on a food of flowers. We landed there to fill our water-butts, while my crews snatched a meal on the shore, beside their likely vessels. As soon as the first hunger for food and drink had passed, I chose out two fellows and added to them a third, as runner, that they might go inland to spy out and enquire what were the human beings there existing. Off they went at once and met a party of these Lotos-eaters, who had no notion of slaying my emissaries: instead they gave them a dish of their Lotos-flower. And so it was that as each tasted of this honey-sweet plant, the wish to bring news or return grew faint in him: rather he preferred to dwell for ever with the Lotos-eating men, feeding upon Lotos and letting fade from his mind all memory of home. I had to seek them and drag them back on board. They wept: yet into the ships we brought them perforce and chained them beneath the thwarts deep in the well, while I constrained the rest of my adherents to hurry aboard, lest perhaps more of them might eat Lotos and lose their longing for home.

—Homer, The Odyssey, Book IX (T. E. Lawrence translation)

   On Tuesday, Californians defeated Proposition 19, which had proposed the legalization of marijuana. The margin was 53.9% opposed, 46.1% in favor. Recently, your author noticed some interesting comments on the issue on another site. The consensus there, unlike in California, was in favor of legalization. These comments, used with permission of the commentator on condition of anonymity, were against.

   “What most of us want is a society of peaceful people most of whom will not commit crimes, who go to their work everyday although in most cases the work is not very interesting, who will not want to attack their neighbors for reasons of class or ethnicity or religion, and who will be able to cooperate with each other to build a library or park. We want people who on voting day will not machine gun the voters or bomb the polls. To get to all this is not easy. It sounds like nothing, but a lot of cultures can’t do it. A lot of hard work must be done in terms of instilling values and attitudes that create all this. Sobriety is a large part of it. So is a certain amount of sexual repression. It matters that a child has a father and a father can claim his child for instance.

   “For people to live together as a community or nation, there must be an underlying philosophy which nearly everyone shares. People have to agree on most things. We talk about freedom a lot, so we don’t always realize that. But when the agreement stops and we can’t get along with our neighbors or fellow citizens, when we can’t agree what text books should teach our children or what language we should all speak, then we notice that something has changed.

   “Libertarians want a society that creates prosperity and that is tolerant. For this to happen, the people in the society have to share certain values. The Libertarian thinking is that people can share the values that create wealth and not other values. But that is ultimately not possible. The wealth creation itself is linked to other things, including the ability to trust others, which has a lot to do with how similar people are. In theory, a group of monogamists should be able to deal economically with a group of polygamists. But in reality it does not work. For one thing the different groups don’t act the same. And that not acting the same is manifested in economic conduct as well as other spheres. There are profound differences between monogamous and polygamous cultures. The kind of culture where one man can get lots of young women and other men have a hard time getting any is generally poor and undemocratic and has all sorts of ills we prefer not to have here.

   “Work hard, study, be on time, pay your bills, honor your contracts, if you lose take it in stride and don’t go burn down someone’s house, all the result of other qualities that most of us cannot even begin to identify.

   “Libertarians imagine that the underlying philosophy can stop at Be Tolerant. That is not enough. Even the tolerance aspect comes out of something else. For one thing, tolerance itself requires that everyone agree tolerance is good. Furthermore, everything can’t be tolerated. Most people, no matter how liberal/libertarian, would chose not to live next door to a brothel, no matter how well regulated. Most of us don’t want that our neighbor, no matter how nice he is, borrow our lawn mower without asking. No one wants to live in a dirty neighborhood. Even the people who are littering want to live in a clean one. But they don’t want to do the acts that would make theirs clean. And what makes some people but not others agree (and it is an agreement though not on paper) that they won’t litter and that their area will be clean? What is the underlying ethos that leads to such agreements?

   “The Libertarian viewpoint seems to be some will litter and some won’t and all will be happy. But the non-littering part of the populace won’t be happy. They will have to move if they can afford to.

   “Some divergence has to be tolerated. But even in a free society, tolerance is limited. We expect that most won’t take advantage of the freedom to indulge in anti-social actions. I can do everything, but I won’t is the mantra of the free. Libertarians, like liberals, are always messing with the ‘I won’t’ part. Libertarians think drugs should not be banned by the government. Okay. But Libertarians also want to interfere with private morals by forcing everyone to accept what they want to do. Libertarians should stick to the ‘it’s none of Uncle Sam’s business’ aspect and not preach that society needs to accept this or that.

   “About a year ago, on John Stossel’s show, the host argued, as he always does, that the government has no business telling people what drugs they can or can’t take and no business telling them what sex they can have. So one guest argued that drugs were good. A woman said that she used to be a prostitute and that it was a fine profession. This example shows everything that is wrong with Libertarianism and why people don’t distinguish between them and leftwingers who believe that so much of the rules and morality of western culture are oppressive. The government should not have laws telling people they can’t sell themselves is one argument. Advocating that becoming a prostitute is just another job option, like becoming a doctor or teacher, well that is something entirely different.

   “If prostitution was made illegal, would a brothel owner be able to open one next to my house or my kids’ school or in the local strip mall where the drugstore and coffee shop and ice cream store are? A Libertarian should be able to say, the brothel can operate but not in this place or that, because of morality and decorum and decency. Libertarians fight against a common inclination of humans to have their morality inscribed in the law. If Libertarians confined their arguments to small government, they might have more success. Instead, Libertarians say morality is stupid, or that morality is entirely private. But it is not possible for morality to be entirely private.

   “The more a society demands of its people in terms of discipline and restraint the less it can afford to have them high. It is not good to be high. That is why neighborhoods where a lot of people are high a lot of the time don’t like drug usage. There is nothing liberating about a woman who is on crack who neglects her children or a man who can’t work because of drugs. There is nothing liberating about the messiness and lack of self control and the stupidity of drug users. To those who witness it, it is horrible and disgusting. The Libertarian can say, regardless of all that, it is none of the government’s business. But Libertarians go further and try to argue that drug taking is not that bad or that it even has some benefits or that it should not be strongly discouraged. The reason that so many are opposed to Libertarianism is that they associate it with license.

   “There are some places, as in East Africa, where people are high a lot. People, mostly men, chew chat pretty consistently. It relaxes them. Yet, the people themselves will tell you that chat interferes with work and what they think is good conduct and it is the reason the place is so ‘backward.’

   “Libertarians always make a big deal out of the alcohol comparison. Yes, it is inconsistent. Society long ago made a compromise with alcohol. So Libertarians look at this compromise and seem to argue, if at Thanksgiving dinner the family has a toast of wine, perhaps the family should also have a toast of cocaine. Supposedly it is all the same, but this is not true. In any case, society must have limits. We limit drugs to alcohol. We draw the line at other drugs. All drugs need not be treated the same.

   “So we tolerate alcohol. We discourage drunkenness with various degrees of success. We don’t need to start tolerating other drugs in the same way.”

Skeptical Conservatives

2010-10-29T17:26:00.005-04:00

Click the image below to see a new, four-and-a-half minute video on Skeptical Conservatives.

Triple Disaster Hits Indonesia

2010-10-28T00:10:00.002-04:00

Our friend Tikno lives in Indonesia, which has suffered a 7.7 magnitude seaquake, tsunami, and volcano eruption in the space of a few hours. Two of the many articles about the events there are in The New York Times and The Straits Times of Singapore. We wish Tikno and his countrymen all the best.

Proof of Capitalist Compassion

2010-10-24T08:42:00.001-04:00

Some of us skeptical conservatives have noted the religious impulse among people who are nominally unchurched. Often enough, these folks adhere to a system of faith that is nearly as robust as that of any major religion. Think of dowsers, aura-surgeons, and other New Agers. An absolutely delightful cartoon from a web comic called XKCD (linked from Young, Hip and Conservative: a skeptical blog) puts some of these notions in proper light.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License

The Deadly Principles of WikiLeaks

2010-10-23T01:54:00.002-04:00

On the front page of today’s New York Times web site, there are prominent links to the most recent archive of classified documents released by the web site WikiLeaks. The nature of the documents has been known for some time, but having them made public at last confirms much about Operation Iraqi Freedom that many have feared. One good piece of information is that despite numerous headline writers’ best efforts, the U.S. military did not perpetrate the worst human rights violations in Iraq. That dishonor belongs to the Iraqis themselves, whose treatment of one another has been nothing short of barbarous. Indeed, dampening the free play of sectarian hatred and factional rivalry among Iraqis appears to have been the main object of the Department of Defense in classifying the documents. In revealing the names and particulars of these horrors, Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who leaked the documents to begin with, has endangered the lives of many Iraqis. The people of Iraq now have much less hope of cutting short the bitter cycle of vengeance.

Manning is facing court-martial charges, which include several military and civilian offenses, but which do not include treason. Under Article III of the Constitution, someone commits treason by levying war against the United States or by aiding the enemies of the United States. Pfc. Manning has not levied war. However, he has arguably aided the enemies of the United States, by promoting chaos and inter-faith bloodletting that could undo all the good of the American liberation of Iraq from Saddam. With this in mind, could the Justice Department charge the editors of WikiLeaks with misprision of treason, under Title 18, Section 2382, of the United States Code?

Misprision of treason is just the crime of covering up someone else’s treason. The law reads as follows: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States and having knowledge of the commission of any treason against them, conceals and does not, as soon as may be, disclose and make known the same to the President or to some judge of the United States, or to the governor or to some judge or justice of a particular State, is guilty of misprision of treason and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than seven years, or both.” Prosecutors always have to evaluate the evidence in a case, to which members of the public usually do not have access, in deciding how to charge criminal conduct. In the WikiLeaks case, federal prosecutors may not have the evidence to support a charge of misprision of treason, especially since Manning himself is not facing treason charges. There is also the fact that although WikiLeaks apparently had planned to release the documents without disclosing the identity of the leaker—and thus failing to disclose his treason—a confidant of Manning’s had already turned him in to the authorities before WikiLeaks published its first set of documents. Therefore, if only by accident, WikiLeaks is probably insulated from prosecution on misprision charges. Prosecutors may eventually charge WikiLeaks on other grounds, such as encouraging Manning to commit his offenses.

Whatever the legal outcome, it is obvious the editors ultimately decided that any damage they would do by publishing the documents was not enough for them to keep quiet. The case of WikiLeaks presents a clear illustration of competing values. On the one hand, the Constitution does enshrine freedom of the press. On the other hand, irrespective of lawful duty, every American ought to feel a moral allegiance to the United States. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Socrates lived and died by a personal code of honor that placed his allegiance to Athens over his own life. Certainly, Manning’s fellow soldiers have adopted a like code.

It must be granted that some of the WikiLeaks material does implicate some Americans in war crimes, and clearly not all soldiers are saints—as Manning himself proves. But such soldiers are a sliver of the total Army. Thinking of the sacrifices of the thousands who have endured family separation, primitive conditions, daily combat, the threat of injury and death—not to mention injury and death themselves—the politically correct pieties of the WikiLeaks editors seem no more than an orthodox pose. Whatever value there may have been in publishing Pfc. Manning’s files, WikiLeaks has harmed Iraq and endangered the lives of real people. In their own defense, the WikiLeaks editors would no doubt cite journalistic integrity. However, one test of the value of an abstract principle like journalistic integrity is its effect on real people. We can only hope that WikiLeaks’ “integrity” will not impose too high a body count.

British Also Demonstrate Over Budget Cuts

2010-10-20T21:53:00.001-04:00

As a bit of an update to the theme from the last post, it seems budget cuts in the UK are also causing protests. Some of the signage is worthy of the most histrionic of the American Left, calling even the Lib Dem Business Secretary a “Nazi” and “666.” See it at the Guardian.

So, that’s one more example. Civic virtue demands self-reliance and shared sacrifice. Three generations of public assistance are quite enough to create the sense of entitlement and to kill any expectation that one can pull one’s own weight, much less that one should. The old saying went like this: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” By shielding everyone from necessity, the socialist welfare state kills invention.

The American tradition of pioneer spirit and immigrant toughness is precious. If the United States really is an exceptional country, it is largely because of that tradition. For a long time now, however, Americans have been told “it’s not your fault” and “you’re entitled” and “the government should do something.” Name a recent disaster when there was not a call for government aid. This is not to say such aid is unwarranted. But when people expect help as a matter of course, when they demand it, when they fire all the artillery of guilt and entitlement, we know at least that they are different from their grandparents. The grasping and the demanding will never overcome their limitations. They will never know achievement. They will never be free.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone? To Paris

2010-10-17T10:30:00.001-04:00

Yesterday was the fifth day of demonstrations in France against cost-saving measures under consideration by the government. According to the BBC, the French Senate has endorsed the major provisions of the plan, which would raise the retirement age from 60 to 62 and the full state pension age from 65 to 67. The demonstrations have involved masses of people marching in protest. The police estimate for yesterday’s activity was 825,000, while the unions put the figure as high as three million. The union estimates are revealing, given the role of the unions in calling for public- and private-sector union members to march. They have also ordered widespread strikes, which have partially immobilized petroleum refineries and caused fuel shortages. Nor have these protests all been orderly, with some so-called anarchists breaking café windows and setting fires. So, it appears even the gentle, epicurean French are still capable of vigorous action. What does it take to stir them? A threat to their entitlements. Americans should view these events as a cautionary tale for our own looming iceberg awaiting our own Titanic entitlement programs.

It is an open secret that the American entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, will eventually wreck the ship of state. As the Baby Boom generation swells the numbers who are entitled to draw from the national treasury, the national treasury is not swelling enough to keep ahead of the bow wave. Since the Boomers have not kept up with their parents in having children, the succeeding generational cohorts will provide too little tax base to support the geriatric flower children. This is a fact of demography and economics. It also reminds us of a universal moral failing. For once implemented, entitlement programs become perverse incentives, government-sanctioned hazards to self-reliance and liberty.

The news from France, and news of similar demonstrations in Greece and Spain in the face of similar austerity measures, shows what people anywhere will do when they are threatened with even a slight diminution in government support. The attitude is stark in its selfish simplicity: “I am entitled to x, and someone must provide it no matter what.” But for all its unlovely selfishness, the attitude of those who cling to their benefits regardless of the cost to others takes some time to crystallize. What the first generation receives with gratitude, the second generation will receive as a matter of fact. After three generations of government payments, the beneficiaries will generally react with sacred indignation to any proposal to disturb their entitlement. In Europe, there has been plenty of time for the expectation of generous pension support to become crystallized. The same may be true in the U.S. regarding the legacy entitlement programs, but the new entitlements instituted during the past two years have not yet had a chance to become fixed in the national psyche. There is some hope that the country can be spared these latest moral hazards.

The classic moral hazard occurs when one person shifts the risks of his own behavior onto someone else. Another form of the phenomenon arises when one person receives a guaranteed benefit to be paid for by another. Since the beneficiary need not pay for the benefit, there is no natural constraint on the beneficiary’s demand for the benefit in question. For benefits that have been around long enough for a sense of entitlement to coalesce among beneficiaries, the natural lack of constraint on demand combines with the feeling of entitlement to create a fiscal implosion. Such demand cannot be satisfied indefinitely, not by France or Greece or Spain. Nor can it be satisfied by the United States, where unions are already preparing their own opposition to any adjustment in entitlement spending.

Last February, the president commissioned a bipartisan panel to study the deficit problem and recommend solutions. The panel obviously has had to consider what to do about the major American entitlement programs. Predictably, when some panel members floated the possibility of curtailing Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age, American unions instantly protested the very idea. In doing so, they have taken a page from the script of their French counterparts and proven that the problems of France are universal. It remains to be seen whether the French government will stand up to the unions after all. In this country, the more likely course is what has been done in the past: eyewash reform that will allow another decade or so of pretending there is no problem.

Dodging the non-Draft

2010-10-13T19:00:00.001-04:00

There was news yesterday that yet another judge has found yet another right in the Constitution. U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips of the Central District of California proclaimed that the 219-year-old language of equal protection found in the Fifth Amendment actually means there is a right for homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. military. Well, it was bound to happen. The creativity of the activist judiciary is apparently without limit. Besides the old story of David Copperfield judges pulling rabbit opinions out of Constitutional hats, two points remain to be made. First, there is no draft. Second, heterosexual service members apparently have no claim to equal protection.

One comment heard often in the debate on gays in the military is that forbidding homosexuals from serving openly “forces” them to live a lie. But of course no one, not anyone, anywhere, can be compelled to serve in the U.S. military. We have an all-volunteer force. No one has been drafted into military service since 1973. What’s more, could anyone have been in doubt about the military policy on homosexuals? Did the services keep it a secret? Did Congress hide the ball? Isn’t it true that every single homosexual who joined the service did so knowing he or she would not be able to live an openly homosexual lifestyle? If they wanted to live openly gay, why did they sign up?

     The other point is this: Imagine that a group of heterosexual male employees at a Fortune 500 company filed a petition demanding the “right” to shower with women employees in the company locker room. If they somehow got the company to accede to their demand, the women would immediately file a sexual harassment lawsuit…and win. No court in the land would condone forcing women to accept straight guys in their showers; any court in the land would fine the company for allowing such harassment. But how is that different from making straight soldiers and sailors accept gays aboard ship or in the barracks? Aren’t there showers there, too? What is the distinction in logic between the legitimate sexual harassment suit of a woman forced to shower with a straight man, and a complaint by a straight soldier who is forced to shower with a homosexual?

   Opposition to open service by homosexuals remains strong among military personnel. These are the people who have volunteered to defend the rest of us. More than any other group, they deserve a certain deference. Now, a judge who has never served under arms is trying to force her own moral values on those who do. (So much for claims that only Conservatives attempt to impose their values on others.)

   Under a neutral reading of the Constitution, there is no right of homosexuals to serve in the military. In fact, no one has a right to serve in the military. The military does not exist to provide opportunities for personal fulfillment to everyone who wishes to join. The armed forces exist for one purpose: national defense. Some few among us are willing to answer the call of national defense, and they serve, often, in conditions the civilian population cannot imagine and would not accept. The majority of these stoic patriots remains understandably ill at ease in intimately close quarters with people who bring with them an inevitable sexual tension. Over time, that opposition has begun to decline. If it ever disappears, well, then the services could reasonably allow gays to serve openly. But until such time, forcing the bravest among us to conform to the moral views of activist judges ought to be unthinkable.

   Judge Phillips could have waited a few months and let the lame duck Congress do her work for her. At least Congress represents the will of the majority. Even so, would any on the Left have leaped to defend the minority rights of those in service? Men and women actually serving in the armed forces are a tiny minority of the population. They are an example of a minority by choice, by conscience. We recognize the rights of religious minorities, although religion, too, is ultimately a matter of choice and conscience. How curious that the wishes of service members are immaterial. How curious that they are undeserving of equal protection.

De Tocqueville to the Rescue

2010-10-12T19:41:00.001-04:00

      Over on The Atheist Conservative, the staff have taken to task Dennis Prager for a piece he published recently on Townhall. The piece on TAC, one of our fellow Skeptical Conservative sites, is (as usual) superb. The full post is worth reading, but the gist of it was that Prager claims it’s no accident Americans are the freest and most religious people in the West. TAC cried rubbish. Here follows your author’s commentary:

      “My beloved Dennis Prager. Dispenses advice on male-female relationships from the vantage point of a third marriage. Still, I’m somewhat nonplussed to agree with most of what he says about that and other issues.

      “On religion, I’ve become a kind of ally of his even though I’m technically a-theistic. The thing is, I don’t blame him for his faith. Most people believe in their gods because they can’t help it. The details of religion are down to culture, but (I think) the propensity for belief per se is hard-wired. Clearly progress can be made, since even in the U.S. the fastest growing religious category is ‘none.’ On the other hand, the people in the ‘none’ category probably believe in crystal power or magnetic bracelets or some other hocus-pocus. Only something very, very strong could explain the persistence of faith (exact form immaterial) among 21st century westerners. Since I don’t believe in God, I’m prepared to entertain the hypothesis that it might be a genetic propensity.

      “Whatever the reason, I think we’ll have religion with us for a long time. Even in godless Europe the trend is more away from the demands of church attendance rather than toward hard atheism. What people seem to want is a big, avuncular, undemanding person in the sky to take care of them even when they flout his rules. To the extent Europeans (or American Leftists) adhere to a faith, it tends to be Leftism itself (i.e., political correctness and socialism and environmentalism).

      “But what about freedom? De Tocqueville pointed out that for democracy to work people have to control themselves. Without self-limiting norms, a citizen population requires ever more explicit laws prohibiting ever more creative ways of plundering each other or the state. There’s a natural creep toward multiplication of statutory prohibitions and commandments, as we are seeing even in the land of the faithful. The one thing religion can do is remove some of the need for such regulations. When there was more fear of Hell, for instance, there were fewer bastard births. Now we have ‘single-parent families’ drawing government aid and relying on child support laws to force deadbeats to do what they used to do on grounds of religion. I think I’d rather have them more scared of Hellfire. (What’s that? We should just expect people to give up their faith and behave rationally? Uh...how to put it?...that’ll happen the day after Hell freezes over.)

      “Now, it very much matters what religion we’re talking about. Medieval Catholicism was totalitarian, as you point out (think of autos da fé and Galileo under house arrest). Islam today appears to be drifting back toward an even less tolerant version of itself than usual (though it’s worth remembering that Saladin was far more tolerant than his Christian antagonists).

      “So, in my view, Prager apparently goes much too far in his piece if he argues that ‘religion’ per se makes people free. Whether or not freedom and religion have been associated throughout history is an empirical question; if they appear to be today, well, that could be a sampling error. Still, it’s not crazy to see some connection between moderate religion and freedom, at least under the Tocquevillian model.”

National Health Service Sinks Royal Navy

2010-10-08T19:31:00.001-04:00

In news that made hardly a splash at this end of the pond, Britain’s Royal Navy has offered to scrap half the fleet in order to spare its two aircraft carriers from the budget bludgeon. With a force reduced to only 25 vessels, the senior service of Great Britain, which was for perhaps 200 years the most powerful navy in the world, will shrink to its smallest size since the reign of Henry VIII. It will be about the size of the Italian navy, and half that of the French. According to the Telegraph, even if the carriers are preserved, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) may not be able to afford aircraft for them, leaving MOD to borrow aircraft from allies. At the same time, the budget for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has risen to over £100 billion, more than double the amount for MOD. There could hardly be a clearer illustration of the old economics problem of guns versus butter. That the British, like the rest of Europe, are able to choose butter over guns is due to one major enabler: the United States of America.

American military power has guaranteed the peace and security of Western Europe since the end of World War II. Increasingly since the fall of the Soviet Union, our European allies have been able to rely on the Pax Americana. With American security guarantees, Europe has been free to pursue socialist ideals like universal health care. But even without a heavy defense funding burden, Europe is beginning to experience the fundamental problem inherent in treating a market commodity like health care as if it were a citizen right. That problem, of course, is cost.

Governments guarantee their citizens various individual rights. In the U.K., these rights interestingly do not include U.S.-style freedom of speech. But among the guarantees the government has made to the subjects of Her Majesty is health care. Every Briton has the right to walk into an NHS surgery (doctor’s office, for us Yanks) and see a physician. Some patients pay a small contribution to the costs of prescription drugs, for instance, but otherwise the visit is essentially free—if you ignore the patient’s tax burden, that is. The demand from the consumer for anything that is (or is perceived to be) free will never be constrained by price. As long as the costs are hidden, people will continue to use a “free” resource beyond the limit of real need. Health care is already high on the list of precious resources. In an environment where patients pay for their own care, demand is already nearly inelastic. When you add a pricing scheme that conceals the real costs to each patient, it should be no surprise that you find demand rising without limit. The British are not peculiar in this matter; people anywhere could be expected to behave the same with similar incentives.

When price does not constrain demand for a resource, what can? Essentially, rationing by delay. As noted above, Britons have the right to walk into a surgery and see a doctor. Of course, what actually happens in doctors’ surgeries is that the patient has the right to join the queue of people waiting to see an NHS doctor. How long are these waits? In a nod to reality, Britain’s coalition government has abandoned the goals of the previous leadership. Under the recently ousted Labour government, the goal for getting in to see a general practitioner (GP) was 48 hours, while the goal for seeing a specialist after referral from the GP was 18 weeks. Some have reported that the actual waiting time for follow-on care was 26 weeks, which no doubt played in the new government’s decision to abandon the 18-week goal.

The solution is painful but obvious: Stop pretending health care is a right. Over the long term, no government can guarantee an unconstrained market commodity to its citizens as if it were a political right. Speech and religion are cheap. Even the right to counsel is constrained by a limited demand pool (indigent criminals). But health care is very important to every one alive, or will be at some point, making the demand pool approximately equal to a nation’s population. Since not all of a country’s population pays taxes, the demand pool for health care is larger than the tax base that could support it.

For better or for worse, the sun has long ago set on the British Empire. It may be just as well that the once unchallenged monarch of the seas now will diminish even further in might. After all, might does not make right. On the other hand, power vacuums on the high seas invite piracy and give unscrupulous regimes the idea that they could step in where the more benevolent hegemon has stepped out. Overwhelming military strength is the only guarantee of peace and stability. Fortunately for Mother Britannia, her American child has been willing to step up as bobby for the world. The question for Americans now, though, should be all the clearer given the Royal Navy’s order to scuttle the ships: If the U.S. chooses butter over guns, who will take our place?

Unions Hobble Hobbit

2010-10-05T19:51:00.001-04:00

Last week, the filmmaker Peter Jackson returned fire in a skirmish over his planned prequel to the award-winning trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. The movie in development, to be titled The Hobbit, has already had more than its share of trouble. The latest barrier to progress, however, has come from a coalition of actors’ unions that opposes making the film in New Zealand. Jackson suggests a desire to boost membership and influence, by holding a top-profile production hostage, has motivated the union opposition. According to union allegations, The Hobbit is a “non-union” film. Not so, says Jackson, who has already committed to providing actors many benefits beyond his legal duty. One example is creating a second residuals arrangement for actors who are not members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and therefore not eligible for the SAG residuals contract. To hear the unions tell it, Jackson is refusing to employ union performers at all. In fact, he is employing both union and non-union performers, while taking the lead in matching union benefits for the performers he hires who do not happen to be members of SAG.

For many people, this latest imbroglio will evoke another sigh of frustration. Jackson’s Ring movies are some of the most successful films ever made. In their time, the books from which he derived the films were equally successful. Written by Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, the novels have pleased the reading public despite critical disdain. In 2004, The Lord of the Rings topped a retrospective BBC poll as the “best book of the [20^th] century.” Nonetheless, serious literary scholars have found the work sophomoric, lacking depth of character, and suffering from a simplistic morality. Ironically, it is the moral structure of Tolkien’s imaginary world that captivates and reassures many a lay reader.

Tolkien was a devout Catholic. For him, there was a moral order in the real universe, in God’s creation, and so it was perfectly natural to write about an imaginary world in which there was an inherent moral order as well. He considered such writing “sub-creation,” a species of religious devotion. It turns out that many of his college-campus fans of the late 1960s were themselves fairly secular. It is high irony that Tolkien, a royalist (like T.S. Eliot) who gently distrusted democracy, should have had such a large following among counter-culture types. For many of his irreligious fans, Tolkien presented the closest thing they had ever known to a world in which moral and aesthetic principles were woven into the structure of reality.

Religious skeptics—among whom your author counts himself—are usually accustomed to taking morality as ultimately provisional, a matter of consensus and culture. Conservative religious skeptics may even be nimble enough to distinguish between their provisional morality and the full-blown moral relativism of the Left. But there are also, always, moments when the imagination tries to conjure how it might feel to live in a moral universe with a benevolent Creator. For such imaginative skeptics, the works of Tolkien may still give a hint of that feeling without the overt iconography of any extant religion. Perhaps, if Big Labor relaxes its grip, Mr. Jackson will be able to bring us one more pearl on that strand.

Standing the Consequences

2010-10-01T15:30:00.001-04:00

Two weeks ago, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration released its report on American drug abuse in 2009. The study, titled Results from the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, reports significant increases in illicit drug use. For example, the study found 16.7 million people age 12 and over used marijuana within the month preceding the survey (the so-called “past month” figure). That is the highest level of use reported by the National Survey since at least 2002. The level remains significantly lower than rates reported in the 1970s, before the dramatic declines that resulted from the 1980s War on Drugs. With marijuana legalization on the ballot this fall in California, the usual background noise about a purported individual right to abuse drugs is turning into a clamor. Such measures may be defeated by heroic advocacy highlighting the medical and social costs of drug abuse. However, the arguments from those in favor of legalization could easily prevail because of the special susceptibility of western democracies to an abuse of enlightenment ideals: the doctrine of radical individualism.

Fundamentally, Americans have trouble defending against claims of individual right. Those who favor legalization of marijuana, like those who favor legalization of prostitution and other so-called “private vices,” argue from a position that at first appears impeccable to American eyes. Almost all people in this country will easily take the first several steps down the road toward radical individualism. The typical cross-examination might go like this:

“Isn’t it true that our Constitution guarantees the right to live your life the way you see fit, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else?”

“Of course.”

“In fact, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, you can do your own thing, right?”

“Sure.”

“And isn’t it true that you can do your own thing even if some other people don’t approve?”

“Absolutely.”

“As long as you are an adult, you can also do your own thing even if it’s bad for you, correct?”

“Correct.”

From here, it is a short step to the end of the trail, because once we’ve accepted in the abstract that the Constitution guarantees every adult the right to be unhealthy and self-destructive it’s almost impossible to argue against legalizing marijuana. All the data on health effects are already put outside the discussion since we’ve established that you have a right to be unhealthy if you want to. Even a first-year law student could close the logic loop (and the rhetorical noose):

“So, isn’t it true that nobody should be able to say you can’t smoke marijuana in the privacy of your own home?”

“I guess that’s right.”

It is instructive to note how many people seem to fall for this line of advocacy. Different polls give different results, but Reuters reported in its article on the California marijuana law (linked above) that forty-four percent of Americans favor legalization. Hedonism has conquered much of the national psyche, but it is hardly likely that forty-four percent of Americans favor legalization out of a desire themselves to partake of cannabis. Even today, it is still more likely that most of those who favor legalization have been convinced by something like the line of questions above. Given our history, perhaps that should not be surprising.

The American experiment derived a great deal from Enlightenment philosophy. If the traditional rights of Englishmen provided the context for articulating the offenses of George III against the colonists, the language of the Declaration owed much to the Enlightenment philosophers. “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.” Earlier phrasings of this assertion had included property as a right, and the American Constitution eventually guaranteed, in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, that government could not deprive citizens of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Still, the pursuit of happiness is part of the American political catechism. While the Founding Fathers did not mean to safeguard private vice, it is easy to see how modern advocates have borrowed the illustrious tricolon to defend the most self-indulgent conduct.

Along the way from Philadelphia in 1776 to California in 2010, the notion that private vice should be considered a right received some invaluable support from John Stuart Mill. The English philosopher is justly revered. His work was crucial to defining the old, classical “liberal” who was in favor of limited government and free markets. Still, some of his work is particularly liable to abuse, as for instance thoughts like the following: “[W]hen a person’s conduct affects the interests of no persons besides himself…there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.” Mill did not mean this to be taken as license for people to act irresponsibly, but, taken out of context, it is perfect fuel for radical individualists. What’s worse, when Mill wrote On Liberty, there was nothing in England like the current spread of generous public supports to private life. Even in this country, we now have social protections far more generous than anything Mill would have had in mind in 1859. This expansion of government aid carries with it a fundamental change of condition sufficient to alter the force of Mill’s central point about consequences.

For today, we don’t so much stand the consequences of our bad decisions. We are protected from our own foolishness by repeated extensions of unemployment benefits, aid to unwed mothers, social security, and the rest of society’s guarantees. Of course, these protections are sadly imperfect, and inevitably some people still slip through the safety nets. But for more and more Americans, there is pretty good insulation between the actions we take (or omit) and the consequences of those actions. Everyone wants such insulation, of course. But when people are protected from the consequences of their bad decisions, they naturally take less care in making decisions. The resulting moral hazard creates a financial interest on the part of society in guiding private conduct.

Our courts have sorted all this out in a series of cases that purport to balance the interests of society against the freedom of the individual citizen to do as he pleases. There have been cases exploring economic rights, such as the right of a farmer to grow and consume his own wheat on his own farm. The Supreme Court held at the time that his right to do so was subordinate to the federal government’s interest in overseeing interstate commerce. (If you’re interested, the case was Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942).) There have also been cases with different analyses in reproductive rights, free speech, and religion. So far, no one has found in the Constitution a right to smoke marijuana, but who can say how long the judges will restrain themselves. One way to bolster judicial restraint might be to articulate how the new entitlement paradigm changes the old calculus of liberty.

In the modern welfare state, individual rights are not just costless guarantees of government. In the old days, for instance, the government could easily guarantee freedom of worship at little or no financial cost. Whether citizens believe one way or another is, on its face, fiscally neutral. Thus, the only costs associated with the free exercise of religion were limited to rare and essentially trivial compliance costs (like policing unpopular religious demonstrations). On the other hand, when individual rights become essentially market commodities (like, say, health care), the government is on the hook to protect the right by providing the commodity itself. The “right” becomes a call on the resources of society; it becomes an entitlement. Because they are entitlements, modern welfare rights instantly impose costs on government that dwarf all the expense of guaranteeing traditional political rights.

In this environment, the choice of a citizen to forego a productive life and waste his days and nights with drug abuse will cost the taxpayers money. Fair enough, not every pot smoker is an economic parasite, but legalization would make sure that no potential drone would be denied his or her fix. Honest assessment cannot predict that we will have a more dutiful, more self-reliant population on the whole if marijuana is legalized. And to the extent the perpetually high are less likely to support themselves, the state has a legitimate interest in discouraging their indulgence. We simply cannot afford radical individualism.

Interestingly, many people who approve of legalizing marijuana don’t want to legalize “the hard drugs.” Why not? To be intellectually honest and consistent with the reductio ad absurdum argument from radical individualism, we should all be free to wreck our lives if we want to. But the population still retains an instinct about the degree of harm we may cause ourselves before we become a burden on society. The danger is that either judicial activism or the rapid erosion of moral standards will overcome this healthy instinct.

While we Americans have been transfixed by our rights for at least two generations now, we would do better to turn our attention toward our obligations. Moral standards properly describe duties to our fellows and ourselves. All societies impose duties on their members, the first of which is generally to do no harm to others. The first duty that is unique to free societies is self-sufficiency. The more a man takes care of himself the less his neighbors have to care for him. When the burden of that care includes high costs like lifetime welfare, the importance of self-reliance is heightened. The state may—indeed, must—take action to discourage self-destructive behavior despite the overall paradigm of liberty. After all, a government-subsidized parasitism is not liberty. It is merely license.

The Continuing Appeasement of China

2010-09-29T07:38:00.002-04:00

A piece by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post makes some excellent points about the foreign policy of China. Pat Buchanan takes a similar but harder line at Chronicles. Both have drawn a trend line through actual Chinese conduct, such as the recent trawler incident with Japan, and come to sobering conclusions. Not surprisingly, Buchanan even takes on the free traders, and he may be perfectly right to do so.

Whatever the ultimate aims of the PRC, the rest of the world would do well to prepare for the worst (even as we hope for the best). Some people are so afraid of conflict that they refuse to look at evidence tending to prove an unpleasant claim. On the other hand, many are misled by inexperience into projecting their own harmlessness onto other people. This is a charming naïveté when it happens in college, but a serious danger when policy-makers (whether pacifists on the Left or free traders on the Right) make the same mistake with manifestly aggressive regimes. Appeasement is the name.

Cyber Worm Cripples Iranian Nuclear Computers

2010-09-26T12:59:00.001-04:00

If you’ve not seen this item from The Atheist Conservative, take a look. The story has now also appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Iranian computer systems are under silent attack from an unknown nation waging cyber war with a virus called Stuxnet. The smart money appears to be on Israel and perhaps the U.S. as the virtual aggressors. Whoever is responsible, the attack has crippled Iran’s drive to develop nuclear weapons.

On Public Order

2010-09-25T14:18:00.001-04:00

Over on The Politics of Well-Being, Mr. Jules Evans has raised a question about a comment from your author. His question deserves a longer reply than the ususal comment form allows, so it seems appropriate to answer him here.

The discussion had been about what Mr. Evans described as “classical virtues.” His point elicited this reply: “…it’s somewhat syllogistic: (1) Public order comes from either government coercion or private virtue. (2) Government coercion is inconsistent with liberty. (3) Ergo, liberty requires private virtue. Naturally, the reality is not so purely exclusive. That is, public order always derives from a mixture of police action and private good conduct. But … the more we restrain ourselves the less government we need (the case of liberty), so naturally the less we restrain ourselves, the more we need government (the case of tyranny, whether hard or soft).”

One virtue of the Internet is the ability to test ideas. Another is the ability to test how those ideas are expressed. In this case, there was apparently a defect in expression because while the point on public order should not be controversial, it nonetheless attracted the main disagreement. Here is the reply in full:

“Some points on your point 1: Is public order alone the goal? Are we looking just for order, or something greater than that - community, creativity, a flourishing society?

“And whatever the ‘good society’ is, it doesn’t come just from public coercion or private virtue.

“That is implying everything involving the state or public politics is coercive, and its impossible for there to be public virtue, or public agreement.

“Thats an anarchist position, very much against the Greco-Roman idea of the importance of serving your country.

“Thinkers like Aristotle or Cicero would say that politics involves engaging in the issues of your society, it involves opening up to broader concerns, and it involves finding compromises and engaging in civic and civil debate. It also involves courage, temperance and wisdom. So taking part in politics is, they would say, an important part of what makes up an individual ‘good life’.

“Also, surely the state has some role to play in the creation of private virtue, at the very least through schools? And, arguably, through prisons - if you hope prisons are more than lock ups.

“Thats what the Greeks thought, anyway - that the state should produce good citizens, through an education programme.”

Public order is obviously not the only goal for society, but all the other goals of society depend on public order. It is necessary, of course, but not sufficient (of course). “Creativity,” “community,” and “flourishing” are impossible when criminal gangs rob, intimidate, and murder the population. Likewise, of course the good society “doesn’t come just from public coercion,” but who would call an Ethiopian village plagued by rape squads a “good society”? Even our modern terminology of international relations acknowledges that fact: Ethiopia is a “failed state” precisely because there is no public order.

Now consider Mr. Evans’s point more fully: “And whatever the ‘good society’ is, it doesn’t come just from public coercion or private virtue. That is implying everything involving the state or public politics is coercive, and its impossible for there to be public virtue, or public agreement.” Actually, public virtue and public agreement are clearly possible, but in their best forms they require private virtue. There can be public agreement under tyranny, of course, as when we see unanimity of opinion among North Koreans on the value of their Dear Leader. But the best kinds of public agreement are not motivated by fear, and clearly Mr. Evans means the best kinds. This kind of public virtue positively requires private virtue as a necessary pre-condition.

When citizens accept the importance of serving their country, as Mr. Evans puts it, they are displaying private virtue. They do not have to be drafted into military service (a coercive example) because they volunteer. They do not have to be taxed to support welfare programs because they contribute willingly to aid the poor. They give their time and abilities to the local fire department, or blood bank, or the animal shelter. The more people serve the community in these ways, motivated by their own private virtue, the less the government has to step in and take over these functions. These are all positive examples, but the negative ones are even more fundamental. They involve restraint. People must either refrain from mutual injury, through an exercise of private virtue, private good conduct, or they must be restrained.

Mr. Evans is right when he says that Cicero and Aristotle considered taking part in politics part of the good life. However, again, such activity requires that individual citizens govern themselves. The free political life that Cicero enjoyed after Sulla’s death did not survive the First Triumvirate. The degeneration of private virtue was a commonplace of Roman moralists, including Cicero, but a more empirical measure can be taken by the rise of the proxy gangs in the fifties BC. Milo and Clodius turned the streets of Rome into a battleground because they sought personal advancement at the expense of the public good—the res publica, to use a favorite term. Their commitment to restrain their own conduct had degenerated. They, and others in the City, abandoned private virtue and with it the benevolent public order that comes from mutual restraint and respect for community. In the end, when hardly anyone was left who was capable of private virtue, the legions of Augustus imposed tyrannical public order—and the Republic died.

Regarding the role of the state in public education, Mr. Evans’s description is more a feature of Plato’s philosophy than of any real city. At Athens, the law required citizens to provide education to their sons, but the city did not pay for that education. At Sparta there was universal state education, which even included girls, but it would hardly be a model for any modern nation. By contrast, there was little or no state-funded education during the entire period of the Roman Repubic. Rome was the freest state of antiquity and she preserved her freedom longer than any other. While the nature of Roman education may or may not have contributed to her long history of liberty, state-funded education was clearly not necessary for that liberty.

The diffidence with which Conservatives approach state control over education arises from the historical examples that show how dangerous such control can be. Once a state funds education it will soon control education. Once a state controls education, there is a danger that it will begin to enforce one or another essentially political viewpoint. Today, in American schools, that view is the received agenda of the political Left, which is why homeschooling is such a valuable counterweight. No one here is advocating that all the public schools be closed. But it is useful, healthy, to have lawful alternatives to those schools.

The example of education is just one of many reasons for seeking public order through private rather than governmental effort. Perhaps the most urgent reason, though, is that political entities absolutely abhor chaos and will give up liberty to obtain order. Aristotle made this observation when he outlined the typical procession of constitutions from democracy to mob rule to tyranny. In the final analysis, people prefer security and stability to liberty. If limited government fails, as it did at Rome, people eventually will accept an Augustus who brings peace. To cite modern examples, consider the shift toward authoritarianism in Russia after the disorderly 1990s, or the far more dangerous shift in Germany toward National Socialism after the chaos of the 1920s. This tendency is natural in the human species, and it has profound implications for policy.

We must rule ourselves, or we will surely be ruled.

An Intelligent Blog from the Left

2010-09-21T19:32:00.001-04:00

Here is The Politics of Well-Being, a blog worth noting for those who were interested in the discussion about the soul or self (Reports of my Death are Greatly Exaggerated). The author, Jules Evans, has a serious interest in Stoic philosophy. He also has come to some very un-Conservative conclusions, which he explains thoughtfully. If you are interested in unconventional but rational ideas from the other side of the aisle, his blog is worth sampling.

Quintessence of Dust

2010-09-19T13:14:00.001-04:00

Australopithecus afarensis (reconstruction).
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Last month in Nature, a team of scientists published findings on the use of stone tools securely dated to 3.4 million years ago. The evidence is indirect, in the form of cut marks on bones that could only have been made by stone tools. Apart from the age of the findings, which are the oldest known showing tool use, the other point of interest is that whatever tools made the marks were not held by human beings. They were made and used by Australopithecus afarensis, a pre-human ancestor species.

Australopithecus is a genus of primates that comprises several species. While there is not yet consensus on which species of Australopithecus ultimately evolved into modern humans, afarensis appears to be the last common ancestor of all the hominids. Until the discovery last month, we could not say for sure that they made tools. We already knew they walked on two feet (see the famous Laetoli footprints), but tool use was unproven. However, we know that chimpanzees today make tools from plant stems, and the autralopithecines already had slightly larger brains than chimps. Brain size is a crude measure, but it is interesting that while the chimpanzee brain is about 300 cubic centimeters the afarensis brain was about 400 cubic centimeters. For comparison, modern humans have brains of about 1350 cubic centimeters, but we are significantly larger than afarensis. In any case, Australopithecus afarensis may have been the first species on Earth to make stone tools.

It is irresistible to wonder whether they realized they were the most advanced creatures on Earth at that time. Lawyers object to speculation in court, but this is not court. How much did they think? How much did they reason? Would they have had their own poets? Their own Shakespeare? Their own Hamlet? “What a piece of work is [afarensis]! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! … And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” Perhaps not exactly like that. Still, we should encounter our ancestors with a mixture of wonder at their technology, which was supreme at the time, and humility for our own advances. After all, are we not merely human?

Man Up, Already

2010-09-16T07:20:00.003-04:00

Last month in Northern Afghanistan, the Taliban stoned an adulterous couple to death. It was the first stoning in Afghanistan since the U.S. occupation. Certainly the brutality of the act was part of the reason many people in the United States and Europe have such a problem with Islam. Another part is the difference between Western and Islamic views of the sexes. Majority opinion in Islam and the West diverges on this issue, but both cultures tend to be defined by their extremes—and the extremes are true opposites. There could not be more difference between the sexual orthodoxy of the Taliban or al-Shebab, who occupy one extreme, and Western radical feminists, who occupy the other. Radical feminists assert that all sexual intercourse is rape, while al-Shebab stone rape victims for committing adultery. The challenge to the West is to reject both extremes and allow natural masculinity and femininity to flourish.

As with many other segments of the progressive agenda, feminism has outlived the conditions that originally made it necessary in America. Originally, the great-grandmothers of the feminists campaigned for the right to vote. Now, the big causes are equal funding for women’s sports and the unfair advantages enjoyed by attractive women (“lookism”). Even the most zealous feminists would surely agree that voting rights were more important than sports and beauty. The tendency among movements is toward self-perpetuation. When a movement has succeeded as utterly as feminism, it can only justify its continuing existence by manufacturing new crises to overcome. Since genuine crises are not in unlimited supply, this technique inevitably cheapens the moral force of the original cause. It is wholly right to say that women are not the property of men or that women must be allowed to vote. Any other position is morally bankrupt. However, sometimes feminists launch indignation appropriate for such moral bankrupts against people who do not agree that women’s sports and men’s sports must be funded the same at public colleges. Never mind that the markets for the two are vastly different in size, the point is to retain the moral high ground by remaining in high dudgeon. Ironically, the effect is to sacrifice the moral high ground by sacrificing credibility. Like a witness in court who protests too much, the feminist who takes such positions is hardly compelling.

Or would be, but for Title IX. Written without mentioning athletics, the 1972 law prohibited the preclusion, based on sex, of any person from participating in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance….” In the years since, multiple presidential executive orders and court opinions have wrangled over the meaning of the law. A new round of such wrangling began last April, and the matter remains undecided. The fact that our country remains in debate over the worthiness of this notion—essentially, that the law should enforce absolute equality between the sexes—is strong evidence of how far we have come from female servitude like that of the Taliban. While there is comfort in knowing how far removed we are from that group, nonetheless we ought to be able to see that there is danger in pursuing absolute sexual equality throughout society.

The danger of radical feminism arises because it is unnatural. Nothing could be plainer than the anatomical differences between men and women. The physical differences range from average upper body strength to the presence of the womb in only one of the two sexes. Radical feminists tend to discount such differences, sometimes arguing that the advent of a fully mechanized economy made the superior strength of males irrelevant. There is some truth in that claim. Consider that although arguments for sexual equality go back to the Greek Stoics, female emancipation did not occur in history until after the industrial revolution. On the other hand, there is no evidence to suggest that men and women have fundamentally changed since pre-history. If they have not done so physically, why should we expect they have done so psychologically?

For the psychological differences between men and women are real and important. Moreover, these differences are hard to suppress, despite the effort to establish radical feminist claims of absolute equality as the compelling norm in the West. In 1992, just at the point when the feminist project seemed to have rooted out all contrary opinion, the relationship coach John Gray published a best-selling book on the differences between the sexes. Astoundingly popular among women, the book and its successors proceeded from the premise that acknowledging the psychological differences between men and women leads to better communication within a relationship. Perhaps because Gray’s mission was essentially to improve romance, the idea that some psychological differences do exist between the sexes has returned to the public consciousness without too much opposition. On the other hand, the radical feminist agenda is still active, as we see from the decision last spring by the Department of Defense to allow women to serve on submarines.

The problems of women in the military will be for a later post, but the point today is that despite the well-accepted differences between the sexes, the radical feminist agenda is still trying to crush all official acknowledgement of such differences. Given the evidence, it is apparent that radical feminism is promoting a lie. The costs of that lie have been serious, and among the most serious casualties have been traditional masculinity and femininity.

Feminist orthodoxy calls the traditional roles oppressive. The idea is that forcing women to stay home and raise children, rather than allowing them to go out in the world and compete in the job market, is unjust. The problem for the feminists is that far too many women remain more interested in hearth and home than in a career. They are happy to work, but many of them find less satisfaction in work than men. To their credit, women often need more than just a job in their lives. For instance, single women are far more likely than single men to be custodial parents, either after divorce or having never married. Indeed, single women are significantly more likely than single men to adopt children. Nothing about these trends should surprise anyone who understands natural male and female psychology, but it is explicable to feminists only as an artifact of patriarchal oppression. Of course, insisting on this orthodoxy leads some radical feminists to deny women the choice they most want.

Ironic though it is, this denial of choice is not the worst artifact of feminist orthodoxy. Feminist rhetoric has not been able to suppress the natural interest of many women in family over career. However, feminist rhetoric has succeeded in destroying the traditional sexual roles, such that men are no longer expected to support their families. In many other ways, feminism has destroyed the obligations of each sex toward the other, to the detriment of both.

Since women are to be the equals of men in the workplace, what intellectual justification exists for them to receive financial support from men? Isn’t such support demeaning? Isn’t it actually oppressive? The purist has to say that it is, and men have been selfishly good at reading the logic of that proposition. Why should they marry and support the women with whom they have sexual relations? Any children that may result are her problem, and the new sexual equality means that he need not even be ashamed. This loss of masculine shame has been the worst effect of radical feminism on American society.

When men are free to have all the sexual intercourse they want without making any commitment to their partners, too many of them naturally choose that irresponsible course. In taking away the traditional obligations of manhood, feminism has removed much of the social pressure on males to become men. In effect, we are left with large, self-indulgent adolescents who have no particular reason to mature. Why should they, since women now give them everything they want before marriage? Feminist orthodoxy protects them from having to support a wife, but in doing so it also removes one of the main ways by which young males have traditionally become responsible men.

When there is no accepted moral content in the term “man,” males are free to define the term however they want. Indeed, this point is part of another Leftist agenda item, radical individualism. Who are you to tell me how to live my life? But the whole point of social norms is to protect the community from selfish indulgence. The male who rejects the traditional obligations of manhood is able to avoid the burden of supporting an unlimited string of illegitimate children. He effectively preys on the women who raise his bastards and on the society that provides such women the welfare they require. Moreover, society will pay again when the boys he has abandoned grow up and imprint on the nearest example of a dominant male figure available. If boys do not have responsible fathers, they will find a role model wherever they can, even if that role model is the criminal gang leader down the street.

All this used to be common sense. Radical feminism has destroyed this consensus, with the connivance of both sexes. Each seems to have gotten something from the feminist revolution, but each has also lost a great deal. It is not discrimination or oppression to expect both sexes to live up to certain norms, certain traditional sets of obligations toward one another. We can start by allowing the natural sexual differences to reassert themselves despite feminist doctrine, for instance by not demanding exactly equal funding for men’s and women’s sports at college. However, society also requires positive norms for sexual roles. These roles must be sufficiently well accepted that males will experience some quantum of shame when they fail to act like men. In effect, we need an entire generation to man up.

Facing the Obvious

2010-09-11T09:50:00.001-04:00

     If he does not burn a Koran today, Pastor Terry Jones will have proven himself more reasonable, in the end, than the Muslim extremists he reviles. Of course, it took pressure from the entire civilized world to dissuade him, including (reportedly) a personal phone call from the Secretary of Defense. No doubt he also very much believed the assurances he claims to have received, (via an intermediary) from Imam Rauf in New York, that the Park51 Islamic center (“Ground Zero Mosque”) would be moved. Now that it appears those assurances were either lies or wishful thinking, Pastor Jones has still said the Koran burning is “suspended,” despite the threats, violence, and flag-burning by Muslim radicals across the Islamic world. What could be a clearer illustration of the differences between the two faiths? In confronting this challenge, Americans must acknowledge that difference or our plans will be grounded in fantasy. We must answer violence with overwhelming force, and simultaneously use soft power to detach moderate Muslims from their brutal brethren.

     The nature of the Islamic reaction to the pointless provocation by Pastor Jones has been instructive. If nothing else, he has smoked out the essence of radical Islam for anyone who may have missed it so far. Every religion has its hot-heads, but where Christians have united in loud opposition to Pastor Jones, any Muslim opposition to Islamic provocateurs—such as Imam Rauf—has been disturbingly quiet. Moreover, the violence of the Islamic response to Pastor Jones, who after all did not plan to hurt anyone physically, is grotesquely disproportionate to the provocation. It is also widespread, from Afghanistan to Indonesia. In the study of logic, there is a fallacy called hasty generalization. In the study of national security, there ought to be a balancing rule against refusing to face the obvious.

     Historically, all religions have been more or less dangerous, more or less tolerant, depending on the era. In the fourteen hundred year conflict between Islam and Christianity, each side has accumulated its own record of atrocity. At this point in the conflict, however, Islam is the more blameworthy. The central tenets of the faith are barbaric, including as they do the subjugation of women and the suppression of free inquiry. Of course, the Bible contains its own examples of barbarity, including death by stoning for taking the Lord’s name in vain and for working on Sunday. There are no modern Christians (or Jews, for that matter) who follow such rules literally. The civilized conduct of the faithful repudiates the barbarity of the law. By contrast, while the majority of Muslims also repudiates the most barbaric laws in the Koran, an enormous minority actually carries them out. In some Islamic countries, stonings for such religious “crimes” as adultery, marriage without parental permission, and homosexuality remain common. Of course, the real crime is the barbaric infliction of pain and death for religious reasons, and the real name for the people who do so is “barbarian.”

     When dealing with barbarians, civilized nations have historically had some advantages. Technology has usually been on the side of civilization, and it is so today (for now). On the other hand, civilized people have also suffered from some disadvantages, among which has been, frankly, an enervating hedonism. When the chief concern of a people is obtaining more leisure at government expense, like those Europeans who are demonstrating against a rise in the retirement age, we should immediately question whether that people possesses the wherewithal to confront the energy of barbarism. Hedonism breeds a lethargic, willful blindness to unpleasant facts. How much easier to hope that pacifism and tolerance will show the barbarians we mean them no harm. In fact, barbarians have historically found such responses to be proof of weakness, and weakness has always invited pillage. We must acknowledge the barbarity in much of the Muslim world and give the barbarians no reason to doubt our resolve.

     At the same time, the vast majority of Muslims in their daily lives are no more violent or barbaric than anyone else. They are behaviorally moderate, whatever is in their hearts, and we must do what we can to encourage them. The math is simple: We have to live with Muslims in the world. This conclusion, in turn, makes it obvious that we must be active in distinguishing between radical and moderate Muslims. We cannot yield to the radicals, but we cannot ignore the moderates. Only a moderate imam is likely to talk a radical out of suicide bombing or the like. Moderates must carry our messages of reconciliation to the radicals.

   The worst approach, however, would be to combine military irresolution (see this post) with pointless provocation. Unfortunately, that is very close to what we are doing at present.

Burn a Koran Day

2010-09-07T18:57:00.002-04:00

     Pastor Terry Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, plans to hold a provocative event on Saturday, September 11, 2010. Pastor Jones plans to burn one or more copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, in remembrance of the attacks by Muslim terrorists on America nine years ago. His decision to do so has been rightly deplored by nearly everyone, including General David Petraeus, Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. General Petraeus has pointed out that going through with the plan will likely make things more difficult for American troops, who could face a population enraged by images of the burning. Even the State Department has weighed in: “While it may well be within someone’s rights to take this action, we hope cooler heads will prevail,” said P.J. Crowley, State Department spokesman. This is exactly the position most Conservatives have taken on another planned provocation, the building of a victory mosque within two blocks of Ground Zero. How ironic that the Left is condemning Pastor Jones while defending the imam who is organizing the building of the mosque.

     Another irony is the difference in reaction by the groups with the most right to take offense to the two events. Muslim organizations around the world have condemned the proposed Koran burning, which is fine. On the other hand, many groups have gone further and threatened violence if Pastor Jones exercises his free-speech rights and goes through with the burning. Indeed, the Huffington Post reports that he has received over 100 death threats.

     What a contrast with the reaction of the 9/11 families to Imam Rauf’s proposed victory mosque. The level of provocation is arguably worse with the victory mosque, which would be the most recent example of an old Islamic tradition: the building of Islamic temples on sites of victory or conquest (see this post for more on the victory mosque). In any case, the worst that the 9/11 families did was to contribute to respectful messages in the media urging that the mosque not be built. Their response is exactly what was required of a civilized people making a rational case for respecting their sensibilities. It is also the response of the majority of Americans. Indeed, the words of the State Department against the Koran burning could—and should—have been applied equally to the Ground Zero Mosque. But for some on the Left, there is no moral equivalence between their favored groups and, well, any others.

Leaving Iraq

2010-09-07T02:05:00.003-04:00

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

—John Stuart Mill

   A week ago Sunday, five days after the official “end of combat operations” in Iraq, insurgent gunmen and suicide bombers attacked the Iraqi Army’s headquarters in Eastern Baghdad. Eighteen Iraqis died, and thirty-nine were injured in the midday fighting, in which, the Los Angeles Times reported, elements of the 50,000 U.S. “non-combat” troops remaining in Iraq, took part. No Americans died in the urban battle, but the idea that the U.S. has finished with Iraq perished, along with rational hope for a resolution that will not squander the success bought with lives already given. The astonishment of some on the Left at this development, which was an easy prediction for most of us, is itself astonishing. There is apparently no limit to the power of wishful thinking.

   Who could really have thought the departure of the bulk of American troops, which have been the only guarantors of security in Iraq, would not unleash new conflict? Such a view bespeaks an ignorance of history that is shameful in any who would make policy. Either that, or a criminal indifference to the people of Iraq, whose fate now seems confirmed. Setting aside the propriety of the original invasion, which CONSVLTVS thought was unjustified at the time, we must now take the facts as they are. In the most volatile region of the world, America has toppled a tyrant, freed a people, and planted a slim sapling of democracy. If all the countries of the world were democracies, warfare would become blessedly rare. But democracy is difficult to nurture in the dry sand of nations that have never known any government apart from tyranny.

   Such nations lack experience with the rule of law. Under tyranny, people submit to the power of the dictator out of fear. At every level the government is rich with corruption. Nothing gets done except by graft, influence, or intimidation. Once the dictator is overthrown, the lid is off, and all the subordinate thugs battle to succeed the dead strongman. The ensuing period of violence can only end when a new dictator finally overcomes his rivals and renews the tyranny. In Iraq, however, the American army interrupted this natural process. The presence of overwhelming force, after the 2007 surge, suppressed the internal power struggle. Now, with the American drawdown and the promise of total withdrawal next year, the violence will inevitably return until the power vacuum is filled. Who could have seriously thought that democracy could take root in such a place?

   Had our troops remained, year after year, there was a chance that a generation of stability would have fostered a viable democracy. We only needed to remain, as we did in Germany and Japan, to give the Iraqi people the chance to learn the rule of law and the habits of representative government. Now, they will never get that chance. Even with 50,000 Americans left in country, the violence has re-ignited a mere five days after the departure of the main body of our army. The attack last Sunday confirmed that Iraq is not sufficiently different from other countries to escape the precedents of history. Likewise, our Republic follows its own precedents, to the ruin of Iraq. For we depart with the job undone because public opinion requires it.

   Modern democratic states yearn for quick success in war. In Vietnam, the U.S. began a record of irresolution. Whatever the wisdom of our entering that conflict, our exit left our allies, the people of South Vietnam, victims of the Communists. After the fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese murdered them by thousands. Thousands more died as refugees on the sea. With our departure, the Communists in Vietnam were free to march into Laos and Cambodia, where eventually Pol Pot accomplished the death of millions. Had we not gone to Vietnam in the first place, some of these atrocities might have happened anyway—but we would not have been involved. Instead, our involvement blurs the moral picture, leaving our complicity at issue. When the deluge comes in Iraq, however, we will bear more dishonor as the ones who started the fight.

   As always, history puts us in perspective. We are certainly not the first democratic state to falter in the face of military challenge. We are not the first to wish away trouble. The appeasement of Germany in the 1930s by England and France is part of the same syndrome of democratic irresolution and wishful thinking. In fact, apart from Vietnam, we have had a better record than many democratic nations in this regard. But if we abandon both Iraq and Afghanistan, we will confirm the record of shameful irresolution begun in Vietnam.

   The hallmark of naïveté in foreign policy is the belief that peace will come from pacifism. Only strength and resolve can possibly confront the manifest challenges of the world with success. When a nation possesses strength without resolve, it will make a poor ally—as the Iraqis have begun to see. And knowing this about ourselves, we would have done better to stay home.

Life on Mars?

2010-09-04T20:41:00.001-04:00

Viking lander in 1976. Credit: NASA

In the summer of 1976, the American Bicentennial celebration gave a red, white, and blue tincture to many other events. When NASA’s two Viking landers touched down on Mars, the event seemed proof of American exceptionalism and the triumph of science. The landers, for those who do not remember, carried robot laboratories that conducted experiments to find evidence of life on Mars. Word soon came, however, that the robots found no such evidence. Today, NASA has announced that the original results may have been a false negative. There may indeed be life on Mars, or at least there may be the organic molecules from which life is assembled. Once more we contemplate a universe in which the uniquely reassuring message of religion may have to account for evidence inconsistent with sacred tradition.

Assume for the moment that this latest palm slap to NASA’s brow means we eventually will find life on Mars. If science confirms life anywhere but Earth, religion will face the problem of assimilating the new evidence into an already rich, complete theology. It is not the first time science has brought such a challenge to the faithful. Galileo, whom the Catholic Church placed under house arrest in 1633 for his support of the Copernican system, eventually found his way back to respectability in 1992 when Pope John Paul II declared the affair a tragic mistake. Copernicus had theorized—and Galileo had proven with his telescope—that the Sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the solar system. While this demotion of humanity’s home from the center of everything to just one planet among many is thoroughly accepted among the faithful today, it is unclear what effect the discovery of extraterrestrial life would have on belief.

For the advances of scientific understanding often require concessions from religion. To the extent religious people have accepted such concessions, they have also accepted changes in their creed. Sometimes religious organizations have modified their dogma, sometimes just the accompanying theory. In the Galileo affair, for instance, the theory that the Sun and the planets moved around the Earth was not part of Church dogma per se, but it was part of the Aristotelian model of the Cosmos accepted by the Church at that time. This point may explain why Galileo was never excommunicated, despite popular belief to the contrary. Of course, Galileo formally recanted his opinions, and his recantation may fully explain Church leniency in his case. In any event, the Church eventually abandoned Aristotle’s cosmology, and in doing so assimilated new evidence into its traditions.

Inevitably, every such step involves a greater or lesser shift in how we understand religious texts. The Bible, for example, is fairly clear on the idea that the Sun goes around the Earth. Joshua X, 12-13, takes it as given that the Sun and Moon are in motion around the stationary Earth: “12: Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. 13: And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.” These days, such passages are taken as metaphorical. CONSVLTVS is no scholar of the Bible, but he suspects that long ago they were not. Why? In part because there is still a residue of unaltered geocentrism even in the Internet age.

To return to the latest news from NASA, today’s story falls far short of announcing life on Mars. It is only that a few experiments years ago, which seemed to rule out organics in Martian soil, may very well have destroyed the substances for which they were looking. So, Mars may contain organic compounds after all. If we eventually do discover life there, then we will have to confront seriously the idea that life is common in the universe. Given the immensity of the universe, we may someday have to accept that Earth’s living species are an insignificant fraction of perhaps googols of created beings. In such a universe, how can we interpret stories like Noah and the Ark?

In the face of such supra-Biblical enormities, religion remains vigorous. Some adherents simply deny the findings of science, such as those linked above who insist the Sun goes around the Earth. While this approach has the advantages of clarity and energy, those who take it are fewer than those who expand the number of verses in the Bible they are prepared to take as metaphor. Besides, doctrinal consistency is not the hallmark of many people who attend church. We all know divorced Catholics, to pick one example out of legions offered by all denominations, who take their theology as if it were served on a buffet. So, in the end, extraterrestrial life might be accommodated without much fuss.

Still, it would ever so slightly weaken the force behind religious prohibitions. The more provisionally we take religious texts, the less emphatically we are likely to follow their commandments. We see this effect clearly today, when growing pluralities of the American population are behaving in ways absolutely (and effectively) forbidden in the very same Republic two generations ago. Apologists for moral decline insist that the apparent rise in conduct that was once considered sinful is an artifact of the new openness. That is, people misbehaved just as much in the past, it’s only that back then they hid it better. Such claims are interesting when applied to previously closeted behavior, such as adultery, but utterly fatuous when applied to conduct we can quantify. For example, however much hidden adultery there may have been in 1955, it could hardly approach the free-love behavior of 1975 and after. Still, the nature of old fashioned adultery does make it hard to measure. For illegitimacy, on the other hand, birth and marriage records tell an empirical account. We can compare the number of babies born to unmarried mothers in 1955 and today, and the results are astonishing. As reported in the New York Times, even as late as the 1980s the overall illegitimacy rate was around 11%; by 2007, it had climbed to 40%. During the same period, there was certainly not a fourfold decline in religious belief, so we can at least conclude that religious prohibitions are functioning with less force than heretofore.

These facts present a true conundrum. On the one hand, science has beneficially stripped away many old beliefs and traditions. On the other hand, we do not know how to live without them. The more religion assimilates new evidence, the less force it retains with which to bolster our better impulses and contain our worser selves. Internet geocentrists excepted, almost anyone reading these words on an electronic device would surely reject the rejection of science. At the same time, where human conduct is not governed by moral force it will be governed by political force. The most obvious example of this priniciple is to be found in our prisons. As the nuclear family died in Black America, the crime rate soared. (All serious evidence supports the immediate intuition that these facts are causally related—more on that another time.) The rest of the population responded with mandatory sentencing rules, some of them crystallized in such laws as the California “three-strikes” legislation. Today, there is good news about the crime rate, which is in decline, but shameful news about our overcrowded prisons.

Whether we control our own conduct through our own religious and moral precepts, or whether the state intervenes to enforce the lowest common denominator of socially acceptable behavior, we cannot live under anarchy. Order is essential to civilization. For most of history, this order has come from external forces like police and kings. In a few cases a few people have maintained their freedom through liberty under law. This ordered liberty has only existed where religious principles restrained the natural barbarity of Man. Such priniciples need not be Christian to be socially effective, but their content must approximate the Ten Commandments. Moreover, they must be held with fervor by the majority of citizens. Otherwise, history teaches us that we are unlikely to remain free.

James Lee, Antihumanist

2010-09-03T00:10:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, James Lee strapped bombs to himself, entered the headquarters of the Discovery Channel, took hostages, and was finally felled by excellent police marksmanship. Lee was an environmental terrorist, a self-conceived martyr who told police he was “ready to die” for his cause. That cause was the elimination, or at least serious diminution, of humanity. Lee published a manifesto on the Internet, as part of which he said, “[a]ll programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and…programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed.” Sentiments like these seem to arise from a pathological loathing of the very species to which Lee belonged. Literally suicidal, such views are a triple-distillation of so-called mainstream environmentalism. They represent the torture and abuse of a philosophy that was one of the loveliest flowers of the Renaissance, the creation of cultivated, principled Christians like Erasmus of Rotterdam and St. Thomas More: humanism.

Renaissance humanism was starkly different from its modern, capitalized namesake. Unlike the 20th century Humanists, in Renaissance Europe the humanists were sincere Christians. More, who was Chancellor of England under Henry VIII, even died for his faith. Unwilling to belie his Roman Catholicism, More stoically submitted to execution rather than sign an oath supporting Henry’s divorce of his first wife, Catherine. In his genuine martyrdom, More stands today in nonviolent relief against the montage of Islamic killer-suicides, and now also as a silent rebuke to James Lee. More and Erasmus and their colleagues also remind us how far the humanistic stream has traveled from its wellspring.

In 1453, Moslem Turks finally sacked the ancient city of Constantinople. Originally founded by the first Christian emperor of Rome, the city had withstood over a thousand years of attacks and invasions. During that time, the territory ruled by the Christian emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire dwindled to little more than the environs of the walled city itself. However, behind those walls, Christian scholars preserved the ancient wisdom of pagan Greece and Rome. When the Turks finally conquered the city, or more likely just before, refugee librarians escaped with precious scrolls containing Plato, Homer, and the rest of the classical canon. These refugees traveled to Italy, where knowledge of pagan literature, history, and philosophy had vanished in the European Dark Ages. In about 50 years after the fall of Constantinople, all Europe would blossom in a rebirth of scholarship and confidence in the human ability to prevail in this world.

Among the early champions of the new-old wisdom were the humanists. Learning the old languages and reading the classics in the original Greek or Latin, the humanists believed that human institutions should be tested by reason. Originally, the idea was an electrifying challenge to the medieval orthodoxy. After centuries of unlettered faith, Europe entered a period of learned speculation on all matters under Heaven. Animated by a spirit of reverence for humanity itself, though often balanced by a wise understanding of how far most humans fall short of the ideal, these educated, humane men advanced the moral culture of Western Civilization by maintaining a creative balance between tradition and reason.

Modern secular Humanists could not be more different from the sainted Thomas More. In the 20th century, the Humanist movement discarded some crucial elements of its Renaissance ancestor. Chief among those elements was, of course, belief in God. A skeptic about religion himself, CONSVLTVS would have to be blind not to see the utility of religious faith. As a case in point, in abandoning religious faith Humanism also abandoned traditional morality. However, as we should know by now, human beings positively demand a moral order by which to structure their lives. In the absence of traditional morality, Humanism has simply taken on the orthodoxy of the Left, including feminism, Marxism, and—significantly for James Lee—environmentalism.

He was not the first environmentalist radical. That movement has often straddled the line between civil disobedience and vandalism. Still, comparatively few environmentalists have taken direct action like Greenpeace. Thankfully, and unlike radical Islamists, violent environmentalists are extremely rare. The Unabomber was one such, and James Lee was another. Whatever we may think of the movement as a whole, it is likely that we will hear in the near future denunciations of Lee’s crimes from the high priests of the Green faith. Conservatives should welcome these denunciations and refuse to impute Lee’s violent impulses to the rest of the Greens. However, Conservatives should also confront the anti-human philosophy of Lee and identify it for what it is: the ultimate fruit of abandoning tradition in favor of uncorrected reason.

Though a wonderful tonic in 1500 A.D., reason is easily abused. When not corrected by an understanding of history and tradition, reason can produce abhorrent conclusions such as those of James Lee. Like his Islamist counterparts, Lee had no reverence for humanity. The ancient Greeks expressed through their art a reverence for the human form. The physical perfection of their bronze and marble statuary was an assertion of spiritual beauty as well. This celebration of the best in humanity, conveyed to Europe through the manuscripts rescued from Constantinople and the heroic art left in ruins all over the Mediterranean, was for centuries a hallmark of Western Civilization. Now, James Lee has struck against that tradition, having lost his way in the labyrinth of reason uncorrected by the empirical lessons of history. His legacy, thus, is yet another cautionary tale, another warning against the rejection of tradition.

This is not to say that the medicine for our ailing body politic is a return to unlettered, medieval faith, or to inflexible social norms. We cannot return to the past, and any attempt to worship it will yield the kind of stasis that eventually gripped Constantinople. Just as it is a mistake to reject tradition in favor of radical innovation, at the promptings of uncorrected reason, it is likewise a mistake to abandon reason altogether. We require a balance between reason and faith, between custom and innovation. This balance has persisted throughout most of the past five centuries in Europe, as well as the majority of our own Republic’s history. However, for the past five decades, we have accelerated the pace at which we are discarding traditions. Today, to return to the creative equilibrium that has characterized Western Civilization, we must reawaken the Conservative instinct and renew those traditions that represent the experience of our people. If James Lee in some way helps to startle a few on the Left into questioning their fundamental assumptions, we may find some meaning in his death.