Recent Supreme Court Actions

While reading Plato's Laws in researching my recent post, I came across a phrase that seemed appropriate to the recent actions of our Supreme Court:

"No human being is competent to wield an irresponsible control over mankind without becoming swollen with pride and unrighteousness."  - Laws, Book IV

How Will History Treat the Gay Marriage Movement?

Via the Whirlpool's Rim, the class aspect of the gay marriage movement.

The Shocking as a Moral Measure

George Takei posted the following picture on his facebook page:

For those who don't know Takei played Sulu on the original Star Trek series. He's been making something of a pop culture comeback these days, appearing in commercials and cameos on various TV shows. Takei is gay and his cameos sometimes play off his homosexuality (e.g., in one commercial he gives advice to a boy making moves on a girl. When the boy asks "How would you know?", Takei replies "I read.") As might be expected, Takei is an advocate of so-called "marriage equality."

What occurred to me on seeing the picture was just what a poor standard "the shocking" is as a measure of morality. When we look to the past, we find that for any time and place, there were things that were found shocking that we don't find shocking now, and other things we find shocking that were not found shocking back then. In other words, at every time in the past there was some aspect of the shocking that did not line up with today's understanding of morality. In yet other words, at every time in the past, reliance on the shocking as an accurate measure of the moral would have been wrong in at least some respects according to current lights. Which leads to the question: What about now? Is the contemporary sense of the shocking the one time in history when that sense maps accurately to the moral? Or is it simply the case that we, like everyone in the past, tend to make the same mistake of making our subjective reaction of shock the measure of the moral?

Obviously I think the latter is the case. We should strive to be shocked by the truly shocking, and not shocked by what is truly not shocking, with the truly shocking measured by reason. An interracial kiss is not truly shocking, for it is normal throughout history and across the world, and only became shocking in the peculiar racial circumstances of America with its history of slavery and racial division. So the fact that we are no longer shocked by Kirk and Uhura kissing is a laudable instance of Americans conforming their sense of shock to the truly shocking. White men kissing black women is truly nothing to worry about.

On the other hand, while we are not shocked at Uhuru and Kirk, we are also not shocked at 1.2 million abortions per year or the fact that 70% of black births are now out of wedlock. (It's 40% for whites, which should be shocking as well, but is tame compared to the black rate). One or two hundred years from now, will people look back on us and wonder how blase we could be about such states of affairs? The fact that we are not shocked about such statistics should at least give us pause that our sense of the shocking is an infallible guide to the moral.


And, increasingly, we are not shocked by same-sex marriage. Although we still seem to be shocked by two men kissing, which - despite Brokeback Mountain - is rarely seen on the screen. Whether or not people tolerate or even "celebrate" it, it seems that most people would rather not see it, and this may be something that never changes.

In any case, the question is not whether we are shocked by same sex relations, but whether we should be shocked, for we should measure our shock by the moral, and not the moral by our shock.

The Pope and the President

The contrast between our new Pope and the current President is hard to miss. Francis is a man who eschewed the episcopal palace in Buenos Aires in favor of a small apartment, road the bus around town instead of a limousine, did his own cooking in his apartment, and frequently wore the simple cassock of an ordinary priest. Barack Obama, famous for the crease in his tailored pants, has given new meaning to the Imperial Presidency with his lavish lifestyle, hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities, and 40 car motorcades to go golfing with Tiger Woods. Not to mention his patent disdain for the common people ("bitter clingers") he supposedly champions.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of course, has embraced a specific religious calling that involves simplicity and sacrifice that Obama has not. Nonetheless, the office of the President of the United States was created in specific contrast to the prerogatives of the European royalty against which Americans originally rebelled. The Presidency was supposed to be a secular office of limited power and perquisites, elected to perform certain specific functions necessary to the maintenance of a free republic. It has now been transformed to the point that, as Mark Steyn notes, the yearly maintenance of the Presidency costs more than that of all European royal houses put together.

There is a reason the Catholic Church has endured for more than 2,000 years, and the secular democracies of Europe and, now, the United States, may be entering their twilight years after no more than 200. The broken nature of man, a consequence of original sin, is a fact for secular democracies as much as it is for the Church, even if the former do not acknowledge it; and the only cure for original sin is submission to the Divine Physician.

The great puzzle for secularists is why the Church hasn't disappeared after its many failures and scandals. The reason is that the Church is under no illusions about the fallen nature of man, and does not hope in itself in the manner of a political institution, but places its Hope in the Savior, who promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. So when yet another scandal occurs, as in the recent Vatileaks brouhaha, the Church does not lose hope, but finds that God has raised a simple priest from Argentina to reform it. In contrast, our nation seems unable to correct itself from the path of spending, debt and crushing government regulation that is driving us to ruin; at a time when we desperately need a man of virtue to restore simplicity, transparency and frugality to our government offices, we put in place a man who seems to think of himself as Good King Barack the First, and us his subjects who should be duly awed.

Debt and Empire

Does this sound familiar? From The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark:

"Even so, the wealth of the empire was largely illusory when account is taken of its truly staggering debts. It began with Ferdinand and Isabella, who never managed to balance their budgets, so that Charles V assumed their very substantial debts at his coronation. Charles expanded these debts on a properly imperial scale, starting with a sum of more than half a million gold guilders borrowed from Jakob Fugger to gain the Holy Roman emperorship. This too was but a drop in the bucket. During his reign Charles secured more than five hundred loans from European bankers, amounting to about 29 million ducats. Much of this amount still had not been repaid when his son Philip II ascended to the throne in 1556, and a year later Philip declared bankruptcy. Nevertheless, only four years later imperial debt was again so high that 1.4 million ducats, more than 25 percent of the total annual budget, was paid out as interest on current loans. Worse yet, by 1565 the imperial debt in the Low Countries alone stood at 5 million ducats, and interest payments plus fixed costs of governing produced an additional deficit of 250,000 ducats a year. The same pattern held for the empire as a whole - debt dominated everything. During the first half of the 1570s, Phillip II's revenues averaged about 5.5 million ducats a year, while his total expenditures often nearly doubled that amount, with interest on his debts alone exceeding 2 million ducats a year. No one was too surprised when again in 1575 Phillip disavowed all his debts, amounting to about 36 million ducats. By doing so, however, he left his regime in the Netherlands penniless."

Of course the Spanish monarchs were constrained by a monetary system based on precious metals, so they had no choice but to honestly declare bankruptcy when they were, well, bankrupt. We have another option: Print our way out of debt!

Moving Forward

Perhaps the most interesting, and shocking, statistic from Tuesday's election was the fact that Mitt Romney did not pull as many Republican votes as did John McCain. If he had, it is likely he would have defeated Barack Obama. This is both bad and good news for Republicans. The bad news is that Republicans lost what was apparently a very winnable election. They fumbled the ball on the most consequential elections of our lifetimes.

The good news is that the election may not have been the decisive affirmation of the social welfare state that some of us (me) initially supposed. I assumed that Republican turnout would be heavy, so the only way Obama could win is if the generalized vote had moved in his favor. The possibility that Obama's vote total would be way down from 2008, yet he would nonetheless squeak through because Republicans weren't interested enough to vote against him, wasn't something I ever considered. But the depressed vote totals for both Obama and his Republican opponent seem to indicate that voters, while not enamored of Obama, never came to really believe that Romney was an acceptable alternative. This combined with Republican retention of the House (including reelection of Tea Party members), would seem to point to the fact that Romney never overcame his deficiencies as a candidate.

What are those deficiencies? I think it is helpful to compare him to John McCain. I don't have any numbers or poll results, so this is largely based on my own impressions, but here goes. McCain was not a great candidate, but virtually no Republican would have been able to win in 2008, given the fatigue with Bush and the financial crisis that occurred shortly before the election. Yet McCain outpolled Romney despite the fact that Romney faced an Obama after four years of unpopular policies like Obamacare and the stimulus, and McCain faced the still mythologized Hope and Change Obama. The only conclusion can be that McCain was a much more personally attractive candidate than was Romney. And the obvious personal difference between the two men is McCain's history as a Vietnam War hero and Romney's as a business/finance wizard.

I do not like to listen to political speeches and generally find them to be fingernails-on-the-chalkboard unpleasant, but McCain's acceptance of the 2008 Republican nomination was perhaps the most inspiring political speech I've ever heard. He recounted his experience as a prisoner of war, thinking he was tough enough to take whatever the Communists dealt out, and later slunk back to his cell in humiliation after being broken under torture. Asking the rhetorical question of whether he was bitter about his experience, McCain said that he was not bitter but grateful: "After I was broken under torture, my country saved me. My country saved me." Thinking about it still gives me chills and I was never more proud to be an American, a veteran of the Marine Corps, and a Republican.

The virtues are attractive, Aristotle tells us, and John McCain, while far from a perfect man and even farther from a perfect conservative, had virtues people find attractive in a time of crisis: The virtues of duty, sacrifice and service. People understand that sacrifice is necessary in a crisis, and they look for someone they can trust who can reassure them that their sacrifices are neither in vain nor a subtle form of exploitation. McCain was such a man, which is why he did as well as he did despite the favorable political winds for Obama.

Mitt Romney is by all accounts a good and decent man, responsible with respect to his family and personally generous with his money to charity, but he is not anything like an exemplar of the public virtues of duty and service that is John McCain (who could be?) He was never in the military nor do any of his five sons ever seem to have expressed an interest in military service. This is not the only way to express public virtue but it is the traditional one expected of social elites (e.g. HRH Prince Andrew flying in the Falklands War). Conservatives, as the "daddy party" of not only responsibility, self-restraint and self-reliance, but also of duty and sacrifice, must have candidates who can sell those virtues by displaying them. Romney was not that man.

It has been said that this election proves that Republicans have lost the culture. I was sympathetic to this view in the immediate aftermath of the election, but now I am not so sure. Much of the culture has no doubt been lost, but the counter-counter-culture did not really have a spokesman in this election, someone who could sell the sacrifice that is necessary to save the nation from imminent catastrophe. In the absence of such a leader, voters defaulted to the candidate who has promised that sacrifice isn't really necessary (except by "the rich", for whom it isn't really a sacrifice because they've got so much).

But the fact is that broad and deep sacrifice will be required by everyone if a catastrophe is to be avoided. The President is not prepared to demand these sacrifices, nor could he sell them anymore than could Mitt Romney if he tried, not to mention that his reelection was based on his insistence that sacrifice was not really necessary. This means a catastrophe is probably inevitable. Right now Republicans are insisting that no taxes by raised, not even on the wealthy, which will allow the Democrats to blame Republican intransigence when disaster happens - Republicans allowed the country to collapse merely for the sake of saving their rich friends a few dollars. The fact is the tax increases the President is talking about will barely move the needle on the debt and will kill jobs, but much bigger things are at stake. The entire social democratic project is at stake in the President's insistence that he just needs a little more time to make things right. If granted his pathetic tax increase, it will become undeniably obvious that the President must either come on board with substantial cuts in social welfare spending - cuts far beyond the measly cuts Paul Ryan proposed last year and for which he was denounced as a dangerous extremist - or a catastrophe will ensue. The President himself will find it necessary to tell us that what he sold in his reelection campaign was way out of touch with reality. Or he will lead us over the cliff and there will be no denying who was behind the wheel. Reality is about to vote on the social democratic program.

Republicans must be prepared to offer an alternative that involves more than the standard appeals to lower taxes, spending and regulation, but appeals to an alternative understanding of community and civic virtue, an understanding that hearkens back to Jack Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you..." For this conservative leaders must have the personal moral capital to sell the conservative vision of duty, self-restraint, and sacrifice for the the greater good which, in the end, is the only vision that can work because it is in accord with the natural truth. This doesn't mean conservative politicians must have a story like John McCain's, but it does mean that Newt Gingrich-type politicians (no military service or other visible signs of genuine sacrifice, plus multiple wives) should be unacceptable. Nor should the premier conservative voice in the national conversation be a 61 year old man with no children who trades in his trophy wife for a newer model every few years.

If conservatives cannot convincingly sell the virtuous life that is necessary to a free, republican people, then even in the event of the catastrophic failure of the social welfare state, the consequence will be a further descent into tyranny rather than a return to limited government.

Election Thoughts

There were many of us on the right that thought that this election was our last chance to stop America’s decline into social welfare statism. Last night proved that we were wrong - the hour was later than we thought, and our last chance to stop it had already passed. The tipping point had already been reached. Mitt Romney did not run a flawless campaign but it was about as good as could have been expected; in fact, if we remember what we thought of Romney before the general election began, he exceeded expectations as a candidate. The President got a nice gift from the heavens in the form of Hurricane Sandy that allowed him to look Presidential and bi-partisan (thank you Chris Christie) leading into the election. But that is all in the noise; if America were truly interested in remaining a unique bastion of liberty rather than sliding into the soft despotism of nanny-state paternalism, this election wouldn’t have been close.

Give Obama credit for this: He recognized the state of affairs better than conservatives did. Unlike Bill Clinton, he made no pivot to the center and neither did he hide behind a vague Hope and Change mythology as in his first campaign. He ran as a straightforward Big Government leftist intent on punishing the rich with taxes, expanding the size, scope and reach of government, and squeezing religious conscience into a publicly irrelevant private box. He bet that enough people were now getting government benefits in the form of checks or Obamaphones or crony capitalist bailouts that he had a coalition sufficient to explicitly move the leftist project forward, everyone else be damned. And he was right. Those who say he earned no mandate with his narrow victory miss the point; he is not a guy to ever let his ambitions be stopped by lack of a mandate (or even the rule of law), but he can fairly say that pushing forward the leftist project is exactly what he ran on: “Forward!”

The interesting thing about Romney’s much talked about “47%” comment is that critics said it was foolish and insulting... but I didn’t hear anyone say that it was false. In an unguarded moment Romney spoke the truth that we all know but don’t speak: There is a vast constituency of people receiving a government check of one form or another for whom elections come down to the single question - Will the government keep writing the check or not? Talk of trillion dollar deficits, fiscal cliffs, economic ruin through taxation and regulation - these things mean nothing in light of the single question. This is the current situation in Greece. As the Greek nation plunges ever further into ruin and chaos, riots break out and cars burn on any suggestion that the government might scale back the check writing. This is our future.

One of the things that, paradoxically, has helped Obama is the long period of unprecedented prosperity this nation has enjoyed. People are used to seeing supermarkets with shelves fully stocked with a mind-boggling array of good, cheap food, fresh vegetables and fruit, steak for a few dollars a pound, and fresh baked bread. They are used to eating cheaply at places like the 99 or even Wendy’s that are unknown to the vast majority of the world’s population. They are used to having several flatscreen TVs, a refrigerator, washer and dryer, and several computers in their house. This has gone on for so long and so consistently that people cannot imagine it ever ending. They see no connection between the rare combination of relatively limited government, the rule of law, and free markets this nation has traditionally embraced and the prosperity they have enjoyed. They imagine that they can embrace the social welfare statism that has been tried and failed in so many parts of the world and those supermarket shelves will forever go on being stocked with fresh, cheap food. Even in our current recession, Americans live far better than almost anyone else in the world. But there is nothing inevitable about any of this; the goods on those supermarket shelves are the result of a complex, dynamic, and always evolving free market system that needs a specific environment in which to thrive. And we have embraced the man who has made it his mission to change that environment.

Years ago I spent time in England working as an engineer. What struck me about the country was that it was similar to home but everything was smaller, usually dingier, and much more expensive. They had supermarkets, but they didn’t have the quality or variety normal in American supermarkets, and what they did have cost more. When the English engineers would come to the states for a project, they would bring an empty suitcase that they would stuff with American bought jeans and other clothing, and sometimes even electronics (this was pre-9/11) which were far cheaper over here than in the UK. This too is our future. I wonder how long it will be before Americans are bringing empty suitcases to Australia or Hong Kong.

Besides the fact that this election revealed that the bell has already tolled for basic liberty in this country, it also revealed a moral complacency among those opposed to the militant secularism that is part of the Obama vision. I am thinking specifically here of the Catholic Church, which was vocal when the assault on religious liberty in Obamacare became clear with the HHS mandate that health insurance support contraception and abortion. The mandate was an expression of Obama’s contempt for the Church and the moral vision it represents: In an election year, he was willing to give the middle finger to the Church and dare her to oppose him. After some initial public opposition, the response of the Church faded and the bishops were silent about Obamacare in the closing months of the election. The only way to stop the mandate was to unseat Obama, and if the Church really cared about the threat to freedom of conscience it would have publicly and forcefully committed to making it an issue in the election. At least this is how I suspect Obama will interpret it, and the passivity of the Church in the face of Obama’s outrages will only increase his contempt for her. If he was happy to insult the Church in the runup to an election, we can expect him to mercilessly bring the full weight of the Federal bureaucracy, and its regulatory and legal apparatus, down on the Church now that he is safe for his final four years.

There is a Weimar feel to what is now happening, but perhaps I am just overreading things in my gloom. I don’t mean that Obama is leading us to a Hitler-like situation, because he’s not.  I’m referring to a lack of moral resolve in people in positions of power who should know better, but who either stay silent or offer half-hearted opposition until it is too late. In the latter camp I place the Catholic bishops. In the former are the university elites and particularly the mainstream media. Media bias is one thing; deliberately suppressing stories involving someone in the chain of command leaving four Americans to twist in the wind, allowing them to be killed by terrorists despite repeated calls for help over hours, is quite another. I am of course referring to Benghazi. Obama claims he gave orders from the beginning that every effort should be made to help the stranded men. If this is true, someone in the chain of command disobeyed his orders or there was a massive communication failure (over seven hours). Whatever the case, the family of those that died, not to mention the military and the country in general, deserves answers as to how those men were left to their fate. Yet no one in the mainstream media shows any interest in finding out, obviously for the sake of protecting Obama. Isn’t anyone’s conscience in the CBS/ABC/NBC/CNN/WashPost/NYTimes newsrooms troubled by the plaintive cries of the mothers and fathers of these slain men? They are not partisans; they simply want to know what happened to their children. But our media watchdogs are unmoved.

At times like these I ponder my parish Church, a stone building up the street built in the Romanesque style. The ancient architecture is appropriate for a Church, for it is a sign that the Church endures. Christ promised that the gates of hell would not prevail before the Church; he made no such promise for the United States or its Constitution. The United States is a purely human institution susceptible of no divine guarantees; as an online commenter noted today, 100 years is a pretty good run for a superpower. The most depressing aspect of this is that we did it to ourselves. The British spent 200 years as a global power and only relinquished the status after suffering through two devastating world wars. In 1990, with the fall of the Soviet Union, an enduring era of peace and prosperity seemed at hand. Barely twenty years later, and without suffering any calamity on the scale of a world war, the nation teeters on the brink of economic catastrophe, and has reelected a man who has no serious interest in addressing the problem.

A Tax on the Poor and the Stupid

One of my bugaboos is the lottery, recently in the news because its jackpot has reached more than a half billion dollars. I see in the morning news today that there were several winners in the most recent drawing.

Who plays the lottery? Not Donald Trump or Bill Gates. They've already got their millions. Nor people who are smart and have figured out that the state gives you much worse odds than you would get in Las Vegas or even from the local Mafia numbers game. The two kinds of people who play the lottery are the poor (or at least not rich) and the dumb. This makes it, in effect, a highly regressive tax on the poor and the stupid.

The lottery is deeply corrupting. Instead of promoting a work ethic that invites people to better their lives through hard work and education, the state invites people to hope for a quick shortcut to a life of leisure. It used to be that chasing after "get rich quick schemes" was the infallible mark of a loser. Forget about that, it was said; buckle down, work hard and you will find success. Now it is expected that everyone buys his ticket. Those who don't are dismissed as spoilsports. In our corrupt vision, we demonize as "one percenters" people who have had the vision, tenacity and persistence to create products and services that people voluntarily buy in numbers enough to make a man rich. Instead, we celebrate the occasional fool who, through luck rather than hard work and inspiration, happens to pick the right series of numbers. What wealth could be more undeserved than that?

The lottery is pure exploitation, and the defenses of it morally repellant. On Fox News this morning, the hosts praised the lottery because its revenues allegedly go towards "education and social services." Education? Why put all that effort into school when the state dangles a life of ease in front of you for the mere price of a lottery ticket? Anyone with an education should understand how and why the lottery is a scam and never play it again. The fact that allegedly educated people dump their money into the lottery shows the value of the "education" all that money is buying. Social Services? My father calculated that the amount spent on this recent lottery jackpot amounts to $5 for every man, woman and child in the country. Again, it's not Bill Gates who's buying all those tickets. Perhaps if all the lower and middle class people blowing their money on "investing" (Fox News's word) in lottery tickets, there wouldn't be quite such a need for social services? The lottery is classic Big Government exploitation. In the name of "helping the poor" through education and social services, the state encourages the poor to impoverish themselves by feeding Leviathan through the lottery, thereby exacerbating the problems the lottery was allegedly put in place to solve. But, of course, the lottery isn't really about helping the poor or anybody else, but is simply another instance of Leviathan expanding wherever and whenever it can.

It's A Wonderful Life and Conservatism

Generally I try to stay away from politics on this blog, but with events going the way they are, political philosophy is a lot on my mind these days. Blogging is a way for me to sort out my thoughts, as I've found trying to write them in a coherent form is a surefire way to expose holes and inconsistencies. I considered starting another blog to keep the political off here, but it became clear that the political and the philosophical isn't really separable for me (as, in retrospect, I never should have expected it to be.) So when I think I have something worthwhile on politics to offer, I'll post it here.

I've posted before on It's A Wonderful Life regarding George Bailey's relationship to Kiekegaard's stages of existence. Here I would like to discuss the film as a deeply conservative movie. (Not everything I write here is original; but the ideas have been in the back of my head for so long that I can't remember where they all came from).

It's A Wonderful Life is conservative, of course, in the obvious sense that it celebrates the centrality of family and religion in life (or, at least, prayer). It is God who ultimately saves George Bailey, working through Clarence the angel and in answer to the prayers of George's family. But my primary reason for thinking the film conservative does not involve family and religion, or any particular set of "values", but the character of the dramatic battle between George and villain Henry F. Potter.

Potter is the richest man in town, the owner of the largest bank as well as much of the property in town. He is a real estate developer who enjoys sticking it to the little guy; he leverages his near monopoly in finance to drive hard bargains with lower middle class folks trying to find a place to live. Potter is the archetypical villainous "one percenter" imagined by the contemporary Occupy movement. The one institution standing in Potter's way of total domination of the town is the Bailey Building and Loan, started by George Bailey's father and taken over reluctantly by George on his father's passing. George, about to leave town to seek his fortune, is pressed into service by the Building and Loan's Board of Directors as the only man capable of running it and withstanding Potter's plan to crush it, and with it any hope ordinary folks have of escaping Potter's financial domination.

What makes the drama of the conflict conservative is that George opposes Potter's villainy not by appealing to government, but by opposing him with a competing private institution. He uses the opportunities liberty provides him to provide an alternative to Potter for the "little guy." This makes all the difference in the world as far as the conservative is concerned. George's relationship to the little guy is different from that of both Potter and what it would have been had George tried to help the little guy through expansive government. Potter has no respect for the ordinary man, whom he dismisses as "garlic eaters"; in perhaps the most stirring scene of the movie, George dresses him down for this attitude:

George wants the Building and Loan to continue so that "people will have some place to come without having to crawl to Potter." Notice he doesn't say people should be prevented from going to Potter, or that Potter should be forced by law to change his practices (although Potter has no problem acting unethically to secure his position - e.g. by not returning $5000 that Uncle Billy inadvertently left in his office - there is no indication in the film that he acts unlawfully.) George isn't about dictating to the ordinary man what is good for him, or dictating to Potter how he must change, notwithstanding George giving Potter a piece of his mind. George's respect for the ordinary man is shown by his desire to give the ordinary man a choice, and his faith that the ordinary man can take care of himself if only given the opportunity to do so. George then proves himself a conservative hero by not only advocating for the Building and Loan, but putting his own personal plans on hold when the Board dragoons him into running the institution.

Were George to go the liberal-big-government route (i.e. by running for office and advocating increasing banking regulation, an accompanying bureaucracy, and taxes to pay for it), his relationship with the ordinary man would end up being essentially no different than that of Potter. He would end up dictating what the ordinary man will do rather than empowering the ordinary man to pursue his own betterment as he sees fit. The problem with Potter was that there was no escape from him; the same problem would exist with the hypothetical Banking Bureau with George Bailey at the top.

Why should this be a problem with someone like George Bailey running it? After all, George is genuinely "for" the little guy. For one thing, it isn't clear in the film that everyone in town supports George Bailey. Potter stays in business, after all, so there must be people getting mortgages from him. And there is a crucial moment in the film, during the Crash of 1929, when a run on the Building and Loan seems about to get started. George, in typical fashion, puts his personal plans on hold (in this case, his honeymoon) to deal with the situation. He pleads with the depositors gathered in the building to only withdraw a limited amount sufficient to tide them over for awhile. The first man at the window refuses and withdraws his entire balance despite George's exhortations. Now we might think this man is selfish, but do we really know his circumstances? He might have very good reasons for needing the entire balance; and in the end, it is his money to do with what he will. George's frustration is palpable, but he gives the man his money and, fortunately, the people later in the line listen to his counsel and only withdraw a small amount. Were George not the man he is, he might dream of being the head of the Banking Bureau, when he could simply order everyone's accounts frozen. But George has far more respect for ordinary people than this; he understands that individual circumstances are different and that there is no "right answer" for everyone that can be dictated from on high. A bureaucracy inevitably treats people "like cattle" just as much as Potter does.

There is also the possibility that George Bailey doesn't remain George Bailey. He could be corrupted; in the film, he nearly is. Potter offers him a job with a huge salary increase that George finds tempting. As I pointed out in my earlier post, Potter has keen psychological insight and plays on the knowledge that both he and George have that, in many ways, George is a better man than are the people for whom he is sacrificing his future. He tempts George to adopt the same contempt for the ordinary man that he has. George barely but successfully avoids the temptation; my point here is, suppose George were successfully corrupted. In that case, it would be bad enough were he the head of the Building and Loan. It would be far worse were he the head of the Banking Bureau. The conservative insight here is that there are no "right people." There is no one with the wisdom and virtue to be trusted with centralized power. And even if there were such a person, once the power is centralized, it won't be long before someone less altruistic grabs it; and once he's got it, there is no getting it away from him short of a revolution. George Washington understood this in refusing to become the King of America.

And that is the eventuality that will likely occur. Henry Potter is the most powerful man in Bedford Falls. Were a Banking Bureau established, should we doubt that he would use all his power in a campaign to capture it? And once he's got control of the Banking Bureau, then the people of Bedford Falls are truly doomed, for Potter could use its power through audits, regulations and general bureaucratic fog, to prevent any rivals like the Bailey Building and Loan from even getting started. Any legal space that was previously available to free citizens would be squeezed out. This is the reason, contrary to liberal mythology, that big business actually favors government regulation rather than opposes it. Big corporations have the money and muscle to influence government bureaucracies in their favor; the increased regulations are just overhead for them but represent barriers for any potential rivals. It isn't big business vs government, but big business and big government versus the rest of us. And the only answer is conservative heroes like George Bailey.

Interestingly, the comments on the YouTube clip I linked to above seem to miss the point about George Bailey. Some of the commenters see him as a kind of forerunner to the Occupy movement since he takes on a banker. But George shows in contrast just what conservatives find lacking in the Occupy movement. The Occupiers literally sit around in a park demanding that someone else (specifically government) make their lives better. George Bailey doesn't sit around and complain, but overcomes the evil banker by becoming a banker himself.

Ironically, it seems to me a modern George Bailey-type conservative hero is Joe Kennedy, RFK's son. He's not a hero with respect to his years in Congress, where he was standard issue Democrat, but in his starting and continuing to run the private non-profit company Citizen's Energy, dedicated to providing low-cost energy to the poor. One often hears complaints of price-gouging by oil companies. If that is so, why not start your own oil company and sell at a cheaper price? You should be able to drive them out of business. That is the conservative answer and I admire Kennedy for his efforts in this regard. Instead of complaining about oilmen from Washington, he became an oilman to do it right. (One of the recurrent complaints against Kennedy is that he has a deal with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela for cheap oil, so his cheap oil comes at the price of supporting a ruthless tyranny. That may be so, and I make no argument for or against Citizen's Energy, but one mark of a conservative hero is that he is willing to make the difficult tradeoffs that real solutions demand. A politician ducks these choices and the responsibility they entail - when has Obama ever accepted responsibility for anything? - but the conservative hero is willing to take these decisions on board and face the consequences.)

Massachusetts About to Do It Again

With all the universities in this state (sorry, "Commonwealth"), it's amazing how many folks can't fathom simple logic.

Massachusetts is about to enact a law such that it must cast its Presidential Electoral Votes for the national popular vote winner. Now there are four possibilities concerning the popular vote:

1) The Massachusetts popular vote goes for the Democrat, and the national vote goes for the Democrat.

2) The Massachusetts popular vote goes for the Republican, and the national vote goes for the Republican.

3) The Massachusetts popular vote goes for the Democrat, and the national vote goes for the Republican.

4) The Massachusetts popular vote goes for the Republican, and the national vote goes for the Democrat.

The proposed law makes no difference with respect to possibilities 1 and 2. Possibility 4 is a practical impossibility. So the only practical opportunity for the law to take effect is possibility 3. In other words, the effect this law will have will be to elect a Republican in the peculiar case that the Republican wins the popular vote but would lose the electoral vote. Massachusetts to the rescue! As Jeff Jacoby has pointed out, this law would have forced Massachusetts to vote for Richard Nixon rather than George McGovern in 1972.

When Scott Brown was elected to the Senate after Massachusetts changed its laws in 2004 to prevent Mitt Romney from appointing a Republican to fill the vacant seat of "President" John Kerry, I thought there might be a God. If Massachusetts manages to put Romney (or even more delicious, Sarah Palin) into the White House in 2012, despite losing the MA popular vote, I'll know there is a God.

Dirk Pitt is Fictional, and so are Grand Conspiracies

If there is one thing that the oil disaster in Gulf has demonstrated, it's that there is no real life character corresponding to Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt. If you don't know, Dirk Pitt is Cussler's recurring hero, a sort of combination of James Bond and Jacques Cousteau. Pitt works for the fictional NUMA (National Underwater and Marine Agency) of the Federal Government, and regularly finds himself involved whenever any underwater derring-do is called for. Well, the Gulf disaster is just the sort of crisis Pitt and his trusty sidekick Al Giordino would solve in thrilling fashion, just barely escaping with their lives and Pitt (never Al) landing the requisite hot babe. Unfortunately for us and the Gulf coast, this disaster has shown there is no one like Pitt on the vast Government reservation.

It also shows the silliness of conspiracy theories like the 9/11 "truth" movement - the idea that G.W. Bush somehow orchestrated the 9/11 attacks without leaving a trace of evidence. If the government can't stop an oil leak in a couple of months, how could it possibly pull off a massive conspiracy like 9/11? They just aren't that good.

Conservatism in a Nutshell

From the Front Porch Republic:

To “conserve,” however, is a fairly simple thing. While “liberals” and “progressives” keep changing what lovely things they see in the future, “conserving” means knowing what’s important and trying to save it.

.

Included in that definition is the reason why philosophy as classically conceived is necessary to conservatism (as opposed to the sort of scientistic materialism/determinism that is popular at the Secular Right.) Conservatism is only possible if we know what is important, but the secularist typically denies that such transcendent knowledge is possible. The classical conservative fights to preserve his family, his nation, his system of justice and the rule of law because he knows such things are worth preserving, not merely because he is subject to certain genetically determined "affinities" with respect to them.

What the secularist denies is the possibility of the education of the sentiments. Yes, we have tender feelings towards those we know and are like us, and we may feel nothing at all towards strangers. But, through reason and revelation, we may know the truth about justice and judge our sentiments according to it. We may cross to the other side of the road when we see the man lying in a ditch, but cannot we learn something from the Samaritan who stops to assist him? And is what we learn from him worth preserving, and worth establishing in a basis of education for future generations? Even if we feel nothing for the man in the ditch now, we may educate our sentiments to feel shame when we ignore him. And we may educate our children to the same. This is the essence of conservatism.

The secularist, denying the possibility of the transcendent knowledge of justice, denies the possibility of this sort of education. And without such education, we are left following whatever "affinities" nature, or nature's manipulators, happens to endow us with. This is not the freedom the secularist hoped for when he abandoned classical philosophy and religion, but slavery.

Mark Steyn misses the boat

It's not like the great Mark Steyn to miss the obvious. But he does just that in his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. On page 143, he discusses the famous "Christmas Truce" that spontaneously occurred on the Western Front in 1914:

One of the most enduring vignettes of the Great War comes from its first Christmas: December 1914. The Germans and British, separated by a few yards of mud on the western front, put up banners to wish each other season's greetings, sang "Silent Night" in the dark in both languages, and eventually scrambled up from their opposing trenches to play a Christmas Day football match in No Man's Land and share some German beer and English plum jam. After this Yuletide interlude, they went back to killing each other.

The many films, books, and plays inspired by that No Man's Land truce all take for granted the story's central truth: that our common humanity transcends the temporary hell of war. When the politicians and generals have done with us, those who are left will live in peace, playing footie (i.e. soccer), singing songs, as they did for a moment in the midst of carnage.

Steyn mentions the carols and the day, but misses their obvious significance. The truce didn't happen because of common humanity, but common religion. If the truce happened merely because of common humanity, then it might have occurred on any day... but it happened on Christmas Day. And they might have sung any old songs, but they sung Christmas carols.

If "common humanity" had anything to do with fostering peace, then men would not make war in the first place. Common humanity, in fact, is the primary cause - maybe the only true cause - of war, c.f. Cain and Abel.

God, Faith and Limited Government

Faith is necessary to believe in limited government. For limited government means that, for significant elements of our common life together, no one is in charge. How do we know that disaster will not ensue? This is where faith comes in.

One of the traditional notions we have lost is the doctrine of Providence. Belief in Providence is the belief that, even though it appears that no one is in charge, Someone really is. Disaster will not ensue. Since we are assured through our faith in God that disaster will not ensue, or, at least, that disaster will never be quite so bad as it appears, we may safely create zones of freedom in which no one is (apparently) in charge.

When the common belief in Providence is lost the world becomes a much scarier place. Now potential catastrophes reveal themselves as possible and even probable eventualities - from global warming to collisions with asteroids. Freedom that was once the expression of a mysterious Providence working itself out through history becomes a blind stumbling in the dark that will encounter catastrophe eventually - "if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit."

It's not just the fear of catastrophic anomalies like a killer asteroid that reflects the loss of belief in Providence. It is also the belief in slow, creeping doom of the kind expressed in John Derbyshire's We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. Derbyshire is both a (secular) conservative believer in limited government and convinced, for a variety of reasons, that our present civilization is doomed. His response is essentially Epicurean: He advises seeking "private contentment in the present as the earth-pile rises." In other words, accept your fate and enjoy yourself while you can.

It is only scholarly, detached types like Derbyshire who will be satisfied with such a counsel of despair. People will look for hope. There are two alternatives: One is to recognize that the problems Derbyshire details in his book are not all intractable. In fact, many of them, like our failure to control our southern border, are susceptible to straightforward solution. An authoritarian government could solve the problem directly. But our republican system has not yet developed the will to act decisively with respect to immigration; and it may not do so before it is too late. An obvious alternative is to sacrifice certain republican principles to do what it takes to forestall our doom. In fact, we are not doomed; we are only doomed if we maintain the commitment to limited government even in the face of predictable, but avoidable, catastrophe. We can put someone in charge to deal with the problems before it is too late. Thus Derbyshire's conservative doom is, in the end, not really different from left-wing scaremongering of the type seen in global-warming hysteria. The difference is that the left-wingers take the obvious next step that Derbyshire doesn't: If society in its freedom cannot avoid putting so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it puts civilization in danger (the left-wing case), or cannot deal with immigration or the terrorist threat (the right-wing doom case), then freedom must be curtailed to the extent necessary to ensure the survival of civilization (the left-wing solution that is nonetheless implicit in Derbyshire's right-wing doom.)

The other alternative is to recover the traditional doctrine of Providence; and find hope in the faith that Someone is already in charge, and even if things don't look rosy, as long as we remain confident in faith no disaster that we cannot survive will occur. We can support freedom because we are not "doomed"; we are only doomed in the eyes of a blinkered, worldly viewpoint that cannot live in the mystery of a Will greater than its own.

It is the doctrine of Providence that is necessary to limited government.

The Tipping Point

I generally don't write about politics on this blog, but last night's events are too much to ignore. John Derbyshire is at his best writing about moments like these.

I tend to share Derbyshire's political pessimism, but not his general pessimism, since I believe the world is in the hand of a God Who has already saved it. God has promised that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against His Church, which is the only reason it is still around after two thousand years, but He has made no such promises regarding any particular political arrangements, including the arrangements detailed in the U.S. Constitution. They will come and go like any other political arrangements and, as Derbyshire points out, the normal political situation for humanity is rule by imperial despotism. We are slowly but surely headed back to this natural state of affairs. Conservatives will continue to manage some tactical victories, as the Wehrmacht continued to do against the Red Army after the Stalingrad debacle, but the strategic war has been lost.

The reason our constitutional arrangements are doomed is that they take for granted that the focus of citizen's lives will be something other than government. Government is an evil, albeit a necessary one, that establishes the framework within which individuals may pursue the true meaning of their lives, a way discovered by themselves and left unspecified by government. The main purpose of government is to protect the freedom within which the individual pursuit of meaning may occur. Conservatives tend to live according to this model, and do not like spending their time or energy thinking about government, since the focus of their lives is somewhere else (e.g. their family, their Church, their business..) I count myself in this group.

But there are always people for whom the improvement of the world through government action provides the primary meaning of their lives. Government, for them, is not a secondary thing to which we must devote some time before getting on with the primary things, but the primary thing itself. These people never get tired of trying to expand the size and scope of government, no matter how many defeats they may suffer, since the battle itself is primarily meaningful for them. Not so for their conservative opponents. The conservative congratulates himself on a tactical victory in holding back the incipient forces of government despotism, then returns to his Church, his family, and/or his business. Soon the "progressive" forces are back, with a new and even bolder plan to expand the government, based on the lessons learned from their prior defeat. Meanwhile, the conservative has not been planning how to defeat the next progressive assault on liberty, since he does not see the point of his life in battling progressives, but in getting on with his personal adventure in family, Church or business. This time the conservative loses the battle, and government expands accordingly. The conservative goes back to his life, and soon the progressives are back with yet another attempt at the expansion of government at the expense of liberty, and on and on...

This is why conservatives occasionally slow down the progressive destruction of liberty, but never roll it back. To roll it back would require a dedication to government on the order of a progressive, a lifetime commitment to actively counterattack the progressive Leviathan that matches the progressive dedication to feed the Leviathan. But the conservative is just the man who finds the meaning of his life in something other than the government and its workings. The conservative will never match the progressive passion when it comes to government, and when he tries, he finds himself becoming what he hates, as the Republicans became increasingly indistinguishable from Democrats the longer they stayed in power in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I believe the Obama progressives know this, and understand that ObamaCare will never be rolled back by conservatives, because conservatives will never match the lifelong passionate commitment of progressives to sustain it. There will be a backlash against Obamacare in the 2010 elections, for sure, but soon after that, when it becomes clear that Obamacare is something that will take a long time of dedicated commitment to reverse, people will learn to live with it. It doesn't really matter what its costs or benefits are. The question is whether you will change the focus of your life away from your family and Church to the mission of rolling back Obamacare. The answer of most conservatives will be: No. Government and its workings is not the point of my life, and I will not make it the focus of my life, for then I will have lost in an even more fundamental sense.

This is the fatal paradox for conservatives, which is that preserving a political regime based on freedom requires a distinctly unconservative commitment to politics. It's why the natural political state of man is despotic rule.

Lear and Aristotle on Courage and Radical Hope

I recently finished reading Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Lear is also the author of the wonderful Aristotle, the Desire to Understand. I would like to discuss Lear's use of Aristotle in the former book, but to do so I must give a preliminary account of Lear's project in that work, so I ask the reader's patience.

Radical Hope is a meditation on the meaning of the virtues, and specifically courage, in a time of cultural collapse. Lear bases his investigation on the life of Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Nation. Plenty Coups's life spanned from the 1850's, when the Crow were still a vibrant Indian tribe, through to the 1930's, by which time they had been relegated to a reservation for many years. Lear credits Plenty Coups with guiding the Crow through this transition in a way significantly more successful than most other Indian tribes. 

What happened to the Crow was something far more significant than merely a military defeat or occupation. Their traditional way of understanding themselves became unintelligible. Lear calls this event a loss of concepts. When Plenty Coups was raised, the traditional Crow life was still tenable. His moral character and imagination was developed in its terms. For example courage, for the Crow, centered on the feat of "counting coups." Counting coups was paradigmatically some sort of  bold exploit with respect to the enemy. Lear quotes the following account of counting coups from Plenty Coups:

To count coup a warrior had to strike an armed and fighting enemy with his coup-stick, quirt, or bow before otherwise harming him, or take his weapons while he was yet alive, or strike the first enemy falling in battle, no matter who killed him, or strike the enemy's breastworks while under file, or steal a horse tied to a lodge in an enemy's camp, etc. The first named was the most honorable, and to strike such a coup a warrior would often display great bravery.

The crow-stick was also used as a "line in the sand" in battle. If a warrior planted his coup-stick, he was obliged to hold the ground in which it was planted or lose his life attempting to defend it. As Lear describes it:

The planting of the coup-stick was symbolic of the planting of a tree that could not be felled. In effect it marked a boundary across which a non-Crow enemy must not pass. This was a paradigm of courage. A warrior culture will accord highest honor to the brave warriors - and the wise old chiefs who once were brave warriors.

Now what happens when a tribe such as the Crow is moved onto a reservation? Prior to the reservation, the Crow had a certain understanding of life's possibilities. Life is about hunting buffalo and beaver and fighting the Sioux and Blackfeet. The tragic possibilities of life seem accounted for. The worst thing that can happen is military defeat by their enemies. Lear's point is not that the Crow thought they would always be victorious, but that they had a conception of the range of life's tragic possibilities. "Either our warriors will be able to plant their coup-sticks or they will fail." 

But after the move to the reservation, what meaning does "planting the coup-stick" have? The Crow no longer fight the Blackfeet or the Sioux; inter-tribal warfare is forbidden by the U.S. Government. What has happened is something the Crow couldn't even imagine prior to their move to the reservation. Worse than failing to plant their coup-sticks, the entire concept of "planting coup-sticks" has lost intelligibility. How is a warrior raised in the Crow warrior tradition, where life revolved around counting coups, to understand himself on the reservation where planting the coup-stick would be a ridiculous act?

This is what Lear means by "ethics in the face of cultural devastation." He doesn't mean merely that your nation has been defeated and occupied; he means that your nation's entire way of life and means of understanding itself has lost intelligibility. You have suffered a loss of concepts.

Plenty Coups is interesting because he responded to the devastation of the Crow way of life in a novel and flexible way. He didn't "go down fighting" by planting his coup-stick in a doomed defense against the U.S. Army. Plenty Coups, in his youth, had several dreams that prophesied the destruction of the Crow way of life. They also gave a clue concerning a way he could deal with it, "the virtue of the Chickadee" :

Young Plenty Coups's dream calls on him, and it gives him ethical advice - advice that seems designed to help him survive the cataclysmic rupture that is about to occur: become a chickadee! "He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The Chickadee-person is a good listener. Nothing escapes his ears, which he has sharpened by constant use. Whenever others are talking together of their successes and failures, there you will find the Chickadee-person listening to their words." Becoming a chickadee, then, is a virtue - a form of human excellence... Chickadee virtue called for a new form of courage, yet it drew on the traditional resources of Crow culture to do so. "The Chickadee is big medicine," Pretty Shield told her interviewer.

Lear makes the argument that, using the virtue of the Chickadee, Plenty Coups was able to transcend the culturally specific form of courage into which he was raised and discover a way the Crow could weather the storm of the White Man. This is what Lear means by radical hope; a hope that transcends the concepts with which one may understand it. The courage that Plenty Coups demonstrated in following the virtue of the Chickadee was outside the parameters of courage as it had been taught him in his Crow youth.

It is by way of analyzing courage and what it might have meant to Plenty Coups that Lear brings in Aristotle. He uses Aristotle's analysis of courage to analyze the courage of Plenty Coups. Lear then writes this:

In a period of cultural devastation such as Plenty Coups and the Crow had to endure, there would have to be a radical transformation in the risks associated with courage. At such a historical moment, traditional examples of risk - counting coups - have become weirdly irrelevant. And the risks that do arise are of a different order: the risks of facing a future that one as yet lacks the concepts to understand. Are there courageous ways of facing a future for which the traditional concept of courage has become inapplicable? This is not a question that Aristotle ever asked; and one can see that it has distinctive challenges.

Lear does not explore why Aristotle never asked this question; the impression he gives is that it is a simple lack in Aristotle. But there is a good reason that Aristotle never addressed it: His understanding of courage is not one that might become inapplicable through cultural devastation. In fact, this is the very reason that Aristotle's twenty-five hundred year old analysis of courage is still useful to Lear in his contemporary analysis of Plenty Coups.

The difference between Aristotle and Plenty Coups is that Aristotle was a philosopher and Plenty Coups, as brave and flexible as he was, was not. All of Aristotle's thought is based on the fundamental philosophical distinction between nature and convention. Aristotle analyzes courage in terms of nature; that is, in terms of the enduring characteristics of human being that are the same everywhere and for all time, and that transcend culture. Non-philosophical cultures, like that of the Crow, do not possess this distinction. For them, the conventional form of courage found in their culture - e.g. counting coups - is courage pure and simple. When circumstances change in a way that makes counting coups no longer intelligible as an act of courage, then courage itself ceases to be a meaningful concept. This is how the Crow can lose the concept of courage. Aristotle can lose his concept of courage only if human nature itself is transformed.

Lear introduces Aristotle's analysis of virtue this way:

For Aristotle, the virtues are states of character the exercise of which contributes to living an excellent life. He did not confront the problem that different historical epochs might impose different requirements on what states of the soul could count as courage. And thus the conception of courage I shall explore extends beyond the virtue that Aristotle explicitly considered.

Everything hangs on what is meant by an "excellent life." Does it refer to a culturally specific form of life, such as the nomadic warrior/hunter life of the Crow with its focus on counting coups, or the ancient Greek life specific to Athens? The original philosopher, Socrates, was executed for challenging the conventional forms of religious piety in Athens. For Socrates the "excellent life" could only be a life lived according to a reason informed by nature - "the unreflected life is not worth living." Aristotle followed Socrates by dividing the virtues into intellectual and moral virtues. The intellectual virtues are the virtues by which we know the truth about nature and man; the moral virtues are those that allow us to live according to the truth discovered by the intellectual virtues. The intellectual virtues inform the moral virtues. What makes "courage" truly count as courage is not its conformity to a culturally specific mode of life, but whether it reflects the truth about the nature of man; just as Socrates argued against Euthyphro that "piety" is only truly piety if it is based on the truth about the gods and not merely the conventional way of interacting with the gods.

Aristotle famously begins the Nicomachean Ethics by saying that "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim." He then proceeds to draw a distinction between instrumental goods and goods that are ends in themselves, the former of which are pursued for the sake of the latter. Aristotle uses the example of the military arts, which are all subordinate to the end of victory. The end of victory itself falls under the science of politics, or the master art, which is directed to the end of man as such. When an instrumental good is no longer able to serve the end to which it is subordinate, it loses its status as a good. This is implicit in Aristotle's analysis. Counting-coups was an instrumental good conducing to the successful defense of the nomadic warrior/hunter Crow tribe against other Indian tribes. For Aristotle, when counting-coups no longer made sense in terms of the success of the Crow tribe, it would cease to be a virtue. This would not have been a world-shattering event for Aristotle; it was world-shattering for the Crow because they did not possess Aristotle's philosophical understanding of the distinction between instrumental and final goods. Here is more from Lear on what happened to the Crow:

The Crow had a conception of happiness, a conception of what life was worth living for. They lived in relation to a spiritual world in which they believed God had chosen them to live a certain kind of life. Happiness consisted in living that life to the full. This was an active and unfettered pursuit of a nomadic hunting life in which their family life and social rituals could prosper... With the destruction of this way of life came the destruction of the end or goal - the telos - of that life. Their problem, then, was not simply that they could not pursue happiness in the traditional ways. Rather, their conception of what happiness is could no longer be lived. The characteristic activities that used to constitute the good life ceased to be intelligible acts. A crucial blow to their happiness was a loss of the concepts with which their happiness had been understood.

I believe that Lear is in danger of reading into the Crow a philosophical attitude they did not possess. Nothing Lear quotes from the Crow indicates that they had a concept of "happiness." They had a way of life, the nomadic warrior/hunter life, that constituted their life as Crow. They weren't living their lives "for" anything; they were just living them. Hunting buffalo and counting coups are what Crow did, and there is no reason to think they did it self-consciously in terms of a concept of what life was about. This lack of self-consciousness, or philosophical innocence, in fact, seems to be what attracted Rousseau to "savage" people and led him to develop the notion of the "noble savage." The noble savage lives directly and immediately, without the philosophical reflection that leads him to develop a science and politics that ultimately enslaves him (or so Rousseau thought.)

Whether or not we are attracted to the philosophical innocence of aboriginal life, it is a life that is in danger of becoming unintelligible if its specific mode of living becomes untenable. In such circumstances the only possibility open to it is a "radical hope", or a leap into (and hopefully across) the abyss. What is on the other side of the abyss (i.e. what the Crow will be like after the encounter with the white man) is something the "noble savage" can't possibly conceive.

A culture that is philosophically based, on the other hand, as Western culture was from the time of the ancient Greeks forward, has the resources to persevere through civilizational collapse, as trying as those times might be. The premier case of this is, of course, the collapse of the Roman Empire. St. Augustine, in his City of God, drew on all the philosophical (and religious) resources of the West to teach us that what mattered about Rome was not anything that could disappear with the sack of Rome; it would endure as God and the nature of man endures.

The Stimulus Drug

"Money has proved the most dangerous of modern man's hallucinogens."

I just read this in Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine, and it seems particularly apt with respect to the ever-increasing fiscal lunacy of the Federal Government.

Aristotle on Obama

Here is Aristotle, from Ch. 5 Book V of the Politics, on how democracies fail. Does Obama fit the description of Aristotle's popular leader of unprincipled character? One thing seems sure: Obama's plan of expropriating the wealth of notable citizens and spreading it around has had predictably bad results for at least 2500 years:

"In democracies the most potent cause of revolution is the unprincipled character of popular leaders. Sometimes they bring malicious prosecutions against the property-owners one by one, and so cause them to join forces; common fear makes the bitterest of foes cooperate. At other times they openly egg on the multitude against them. There are many instances of the kind of thing I mean. At Cos the democracy fell when the popular leaders deteriorated, the more notable citizens combining against them. Similarly at Rhodes, when the democratic politicians provided pay for naval ratings and tried to stop refunding to naval commanders the expenses which they had incurred. These, therefore, weary of incessant law-suits, were obliged to form an association and put down the democracy. At Heraclea too the democratic party was brought low just after the foundation of the colony - and all because of their own leaders, whose unjust treatment of the upper-class citizens caused these to leave the city one after another; finally the exiles gathered forces, returned, and put down the democracy.  The democracy at Megara was dissolved in a similar way: here the popular politicians, in order to have money for doling out to the people, banished many of the notable citizens; this went on until the number of those thus exiled became so large that they returned, won a battle against the people, and established an oligarchy. Sometimes, in order to win the favour of the multitude, they oppress the leading citizens and cause them to unite; methods of oppression include forced capital-levy, as well as a levy on income for public services; another method is to bring slanderous accusations against the rich with a view to getting their money transferred to the public purse."

Obama as the Incarnation of History

It's been almost a month since I've blogged... but then I try not to blog for the sake of blogging, and only write when I think I have something to contribute that is not already being said by others. My thoughts on the recent election have mostly been stated by others (Peter Hitchens, for example) better than I could have stated them myself. 

One thing about Barack Obama I think people are missing concerns the idea that he thinks of himself as some sort of Messiah. This doesn't really get it. A Messiah, including the Messiah, is a man on a mission under orders from a higher power. "For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me." The Messiah is not an independent operator; his power and authority are defined by the mission on which the Higher Power has sent him. He lives in a world of metaphysical absolutes that define his world.

History (since the birth of Christ) is the record of the response of men to the Messiah. The Messiah grounds the meaning of history, but He is not history itself. The distinction between the Messiah and history creates the space in which the freedom of men can exist, and in which men become free co-creators of history with the Messiah. Christ allows men to crucify Him, if they so chose, so that the distinction between Himself and history will endure; history goes on, its meaning secure, even when the Savior is killed and is buried.

Barack Obama, in contrast to Christ, deliberately collapses the distinction between himself and history. Uniquely among American politicians, he does not really sell ideas or policies. His ideas are stale socialist drivel from the 1930's, ideas that would get a politician laughed off the platform were they stated by anyone other than Obama. But no one cares about the ideas, because what Obama is really selling is himself as the incarnation of history. To support Obama is to be swimming with the tide of history; to oppose him is to be worse than wrong, it is to be ahistorical. Christ heralded the advent of the Kingdom of God; Obama heralds the advent of the City of Man. 

What defines the City of Man is that history replaces metaphysics as the foundation of the world. It doesn't matter that Obama can't explain his abortion absolutism, his terrorist friends, or his crazy pastor, or even offer a coherent account of what he would do as President. Things will be different once he is elected, are different now that he is the President-elect. Philosophical debates about the beginning of life or the morality of revolutionary terrorism belong to the old world, the world of metaphysical absolutes like God and human nature. Obama never claimed to transcend these debates; what he claimed to do is "move beyond them," and the temporal nature of his assertion is exactly right. 

John McCain was the perfect representative of an old world of absolutes - of honor, duty, and country - too weak to defend itself against the magic spell of Obama's historicism. The election post-mortem revealed that McCain himself sensed the "historic destiny" of the Obama campaign and wondered if it was right for him to stand in the way. His doubt caused him to pull his punches and leave the obvious arguments against Obama (e.g., that his politics are reheated garbage from 1933) off the table. If McCain really understood the old world, then he would have understood that metaphysical absolutes judge history, not the other way around. Something is truly "historic" only to the extent that it has a foundation in the true, the good and the beautiful; that is, ultimately in God. The true and the good do not stand aside as history marches on.

What will become of our freedom in the new historical epoch allegedly opened by Obama? There is no space for freedom in our new world, since Obama's destiny and history are one and the same. This is the reason that Obama so casually tosses aside old friends and even family members ("typical white person") and no one seems to care. To be in Obama's way is to be in history's way, and no one has standing before history, not even John McCain. 

The Constitution, once revered as the law of the land, has served its purpose in bringing us to this historical moment, the advent of Obama. It is now a relic of a bygone age, one that will retain some hold over the current generation but little over the succeeding ones. Certainly Obama will not feel constrained by it.

We religious folk will be tolerated, but only so long as we do not stand in the way of history by proclaiming our metaphysical absolutes. Obama-world does not have space for philosophical or religious arguments. These arguments will not be answered because they won't be seen to even rise to the dignity of being wrong; they will be denounced as unfortunate efforts to take us back to the "old debates of the past", efforts that must be resisted rather than answered.

I don't think it will go well for us.

  

More on nature/nurture

In this post I discussed John Derbyshire and the state of the nature/nurture debate.

There are two points about the nature/nurture debate that have always struck me. The first is the manner in which, and this is typical of modern philosophy, the most important points are simply assumed and all the energy is spent debating points of secondary significance. The "human sciences", for example, take it for granted that man can be explained entirely in terms of nature or nurture or some combination of the two, as though these two alternatives self-evidently exhaust the possibilities. Barack Obama, for example, is explained by John Derbyshire entirely in terms of nurture (his mind was "set that way" by cultural Marxism, says Derbyshire.) My point in the prior post was that Derbyshire's explanation of Obama contradicts his own thesis, which is that genetics explains at least half of personal differences.

But why must Obama's political views necessarily be a product of either his genes or his environment? Might not his political views be a product of rational thought, a process that transcends both genes and environment? What is self-evident, surely, is that man cannot be explained entirely in terms of nature and/or nurture. Why does Barack Obama believe in the Pythagorean Theorem? Not even John Derbyshire, I think, would say that it is due to his genes or his environment, as though Obama were raised in "cultural geometry" the way he was allegedly raised in "cultural Marxism." We recognize that geometry transcends culture, and genes, and that the rational process by which we understand geometry is not reducible to either genes or environment. Is it not at least possible that political thought can also transcend genes and environment?

This brings me to my second point, which is that if we accept that man is entirely a causal product of his genes and/or his environment, then the nature/nurture argument is pointless in any event. For then man is a slave one way or the other; a slave to his genes or a slave to his environment. And it's not only Barack Obama's political thought that is enslaved, but also John Derbyshire's thought about Barack Obama's thought, and my thought about both Obama and Derbyshire. There is no escape from this slavery, and in the end the identity of the master, whether it be nature or nurture or Descartes' Evil Demon or a space alien or something else, must be a matter of impenetrable mystery to us. For our thought about the identity of the master is itself enslaved to the master, and therefore subject to his (its?) manipulation. My genes may determine my thinking, but there is no a priori guarantee that my genes will let me in on the fact.