The Rightful Place of Science

I'm swamped with grading for the next week, as I have been for the past week or so, and Harold must be similarly occupied with honest work, so posts have been less frequent these days.

Let me follow up again on the question the President raised concerning the place of science in government. We view science as the sovereign way of thinking. If you are not thinking scientifically, you are not really thinking. You are feeling, or imagining. (I am not saying that this is Mr. Obama's view.) But nobody lives that way. Indeed, nobody can live that way.

The conquest of nature through natural science that is oriented exclusively toward useful inventions--Francis Bacon's project which is modernity itself--requires viewing nature (i.e, the world and all that is in it) in a restricted way. It requires nature's "demystification," abstracting from all notions of moral value and aesthetic quality. As Lewis critically observes in The Abolition of Man, this view denies that the waterfall is sublime; it can only accept that it is so many metric tonnes of water passing over a precipice with predictable frothing and mist on and around the rocks below.

While this view of the world is terribly stunted and inadequate from the standpoint of understanding it fully as it is and of living life in the fullness of its image-bearing humanity, it is necessary from the standpoint of drawing out of the world the practical benefits that the world's Creator intended us to discover and enjoy.

"The Poo Song" from Scrubs nicely illustrates these two views of the world and how we can hold them both with appropriate attention to their separate settings. The song treats "poo" with utilitarian indifference to questions of dignity and disgust. At the same time, the humor presupposes our just recognition of those qualities in pooer and poo, respectively.



This view is good. It helpful to know whether what we're suffering is hemorrhoids or rectal cancer, and God in his creation has generously provided the means to discover this. It is nonetheless true, however, that poo is vile and pooing is undignified. Both views have their place in life for different purposes of life. What we call the scientific view on its own is insufficient for living a fully human life and for understanding the world in general. In fact, to live a consistently "rational" life by the standard of scientific reasoning would entail radical dehumanization, not only of oneself but also of others. Indeed, dehumanization is a two way street on which what goes one way inevitably goes the other as well.

Scientific observation is a limited way of observing the world for a specific end. The means are well suited to the end, but there's more to life than the conquest of nature.

One Hundred Days of Steady Erosion

Do you see your liberty eroding before your very eyes? Do sense the foundations of this noble republic crumbling and giving way under your feet?

Is this 3 minute 40 second video of a road going from wet to washed away a metaphor for President Obama's first 100 days?


Scarify a Road Surface - More free videos are here

We have been shortsighted as a people. We should heed what a great political theorist once wrote:

I compare her (fortune) to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defenses and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valor (virtue) has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defenses have not been raised to constrain her.

The weather is not fair. But can we save the house? Where are the men of understanding and eloquence in this great nation of 300 million?

"When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?" Psalm 11:3

"They are restoring the walls and repairing the foundations." Ezra 4:12

"By faith Abraham...went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God." Hebrews 11:8-10

Ecce Obama

You cannot avoid having to deal with Jesus. The Roman governor who condemned Jesus to death, asked the crowd what everyone must ask himself: "What shall I to do, then, with Jesus who is called Christ?" (Matthew 27:22). Islam attempted to become the world religion, but in the Koran there is a background contention with Jesus. Modern political philosophy is a response to, and an attempt to overcome, the claims of Christ and the working out of them in history. Francis Bacon, the founder of and chief apologist for modern science knew that he had to displace the Christian hope if people were fully to embrace science as the fount from which all blessings flow. The modern political monster, Marxism, is secularized Christian eschatology (insofar as it can conceivably be secularized). The other great bookend of political philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche, put his hope in the rise of an Ubermensch, a world recreating, heroic, suffering servant. Were there Christian themes in Nazism? I would be surprised to find there weren't. The North Korean ideology is a political gospel modeled on the Christian gospel, with Kim Jong Il in the role of the Son.

Now here are the most ardent Obama supporters casting their political hero explicitly in the form of Christ the Savior. As Jesus referred to himself as "the way, the truth and the life" (John 14:6 NIV), the artist entitles the painting, "The Truth." It is to be unveiled on President Obama's 100th Day in Office by Michael D'Antuono at Union Square in Manhattan.

For those who are totally illiterate biblically, let me point out that Obama has his arms extended with open palms in a way that mimics Jesus hanging on the cross, but with no expression of agony, suggesting that he is already dead. Perhaps D'Antuono is just not as good an artist as his benefactors think he is.

On his head sits a crown of thorns. Again, the Apostle Matthew tells us, "The the governor's soldiers took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole company of soldiers around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then they wove a crown of thorns and set it on his head" (Matthew 27:27-29).

When Jesus died on the cross after many hours of tortuous suffering, "At that moment, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom" (Matthew 27:51). God used this miracle (it tore from the top, not the bottom) to indicate that, by his atoning death on the cross, Jesus had purchased access for God's people into God's holy presence. The curtain that had separated worshippers from the Holy of Holies was no longer necessary for anyone who would approach God in faith with his sins cleansed by the blood of Christ (Heb. 4:14-16; 10:19-22). Clearly what Obama is depicted as doing in this painting is giving the American people access to presidential power.

The Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament directs the Christian believer's attention from what Jesus accomplished by the cross to "the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful" (Hebrew 10:23). The Apostle John tells us what he promised: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." Barack Obama promised us "hope." The hope that this artist sees the new President bringing us, however, is fleeting, illusory, and ambiguous at best by comparison. Obama also promised us change. But Jesus died and rose again so that people could "be changed" (1 Corinthians 15:51; Ezekiel 36:26). He came to raise the spiritually dead to life and recreate us, renewing our hearts in love.

The puzzle of the painting, as I see it, is in what the artist sees as the President's suffering and sacrifice. In what sense is he laying down his life for us? The press adores him and he appears to be having a really good time. His popular approval rating are still quite high. So where's the suffering servant? Does Michael D'Antuono anticipate an Lincolnian end for this President? That is a horrible thought, but not nearly as horrible as a painting that anticipates (one dreads to say "hopes for" in some perverse way) such a national tragedy.

I say once again that President Obama, especially if he is in any sense a Christian, needs to rebuke his followers for this sort of spiritual blasphemy and political lunacy. But I suspect that he won't because evidence of fanatical following supports him politically, and part of him may just believe the adulation. If these suspicions are correct, I fear that he is in for a terrible crash. I just pray that he does not bring the country down with him in the process.

****************
Update 4/29/2009:
D'Antuono has canceled the Union Square showing. You can read his statement here.

He told Culture Monster at the LA Times, "I canceled the showing out of respect for religion. It was not meant to offend so many people. I don't think it would be helpful to the cause of unity to show it."

So it seems he is no Andres Serrano. He's just confused. For example, he also told The LA Times, "It was supposed to provoke political dialogue. I wanted to start a discussion. Is Obama being crucified by the right? Do people think he's the next savior?"

Are we in any need of provocation for political dialogue on Barack Obama? If it is civil dialogue you want, you have to be fairly deeply embedded in the Obama-crazed arts "community" to think that a painting like this one would accomplish such dispassionate conversation. Also, what fair-minded person thinks that the right is "crucifying" the President? But I suppose they are, if ordinary political opposition counts.

Boys Must Be Boys, But a Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do

In "The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life," I question the worth of sports that don't point in any way to a productive life of some sort. "Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so." Here is the video that got me thinking about it.



But these amazing basketball shots are something else entirely. (The song is really good too, but I don't know what it is. Well chosen. Suitable to the spirit of young men.)



I share the joy of these boys. I'm happy for them. And I'm impressed. But they're just boys. When boys become men, they put aside childish things and apply what they've learned as boys to serious adult pursuits.

This Danny MacAskill fellow, for example, is amazingly good on a bicycle, but unless he can find a military application for this skill he needs to stop wasting his life and turn to philosophy or business or something else that's not just goofing around impressively.



We have given far too much praise in the last half century to people who have never grown up, to adults who act like children. What does that say about us?

Scientism and You

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared that his administration would "restore science to its rightful place." He then gave some very conventional practical applications of that intention, but, taken on its own, the statement raises the question of the relationship between science and government. How much of government decision-making can be relegated to men of science? If we were all simply scientific in our thinking, would we be more governable? Would our life together be harmonious?

Francis Bacon was not only the original exponent of modern science, he also gave careful thought to its political implications. He begins The New Organon, his explanation and defense of what we have come to call experimental science, with this little aphorism:

"Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of Nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything."

His project was to re-establish all human knowledge, even moral and political knowledge, on the foundation of the new scientific method. In other words, he proposed, "The total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations." When he says "all human knowledge," all means all.

This is what we may call not just science but "scientism," viz. the view that scientific reasoning is the only way of knowing.

According to these epistemological standards, judgments of moral right and wrong, the noble and the base, the beautiful and the ugly, become utterly subjective, i.e. mere expressions of personal sentiment. They do not correspond with any objective moral or aesthetic reality.

The moral world that this produces is insightfully summarized in Monty Python's "Merchant Banker Sketch."



Notice that he has no "inner life." Evidently, someone has accused him of this, perhaps his previous appointment, and so he is looking it up in a reference book, having no idea what it is. As a mere calculator of self-interest, and maximizer of material advantage, contemplating what is true and eternal has no role in his life. He doesn't even have a category for it in his thinking. Accordingly he has no idea of what a gift is, gratuitous giving out of love for another, out of recognition of another person's inherent worth, be it a friend or a stranger. "Tax dodge" is the closest he can come. He hasn't a friend in the world, and feels no need of one. Friendship as such has no rational basis in a scientisticly understood universe. If scientific reasoning is the only way of knowing and if what can be observed and measured by modern scientific methods is the only reality that we are justified in recognizing, then there is no human relationship that is not a form of economic exchange or domination of one person by another.

He is indifferent to whether or not he has a name. He forgets it, but what is important to him is that he is definitely a merchant banker. See what Harvey Mansfield says is the importance of having names in how we see our personal importance or inherent human worth ("How To Understand Politics"). In general, he questions the sufficiency of the natural and social sciences for understanding the human beings the purport to explain.

Political science ignores the question of importance because it has the ambition to be scientific in the manner of natural science, which is real science. Scientific truth is objective and is no respecter of persons; it regards the concern for importance as a source of bias, the enemy of truth. Individuals in science can claim prizes, nations can take pride in them, but this sort of recognition is outside science, which is in principle and fact a collective, anonymous enterprise. And so political science, which by studying politics ought to be sensitive to importance, to the importance of importance, aims to abstract from individual data with names in order to arrive at universal propositions.

Yet human beings and their associations always have names; this is how they maintain their individuality. Names mark off the differences between individuals and societies or other groups, and they do so because the differences are important to us. You can think your way to an abstract individual or society without a name, but you cannot be one or live in one. Science is indifferent to proper names and confines itself to common nouns, but all human life takes place in an atmosphere of proper nouns. “To make a name for yourself,” as we say, is to become important. “To lose your good name,” to suffer a stain on your reputation, is to live thinking less well of yourself, or among others who think less well of you.

Anyway, I used the Python sketch as an illustration in class today of how a life guided simply by calculations of self-interest might look, and I wanted to post it on the blog.

Piety and Humanity

The Piety and Humanity Blog Photo (Westminster Assembly)

My productivity at Principalities and Powers has been low recently. (1) It's grading season. (2) What I have been posting has been over at my theological blog, Piety and Humanity.

Go there for a recent post on synchronized shepherding in Scotland, and see sheep dogs "paint" the Mona Lisa with illuminated sheep ("His Sheep Follow Him").

There is also a post in which I explore the marvels of creation that we (even you!) can access through high speed photography...everything from a hummingbird to a slapped face ("Slow Down and Behold the Glory of God").

Lastly, I risk heresy by questioning the moral legitimacy of many of our favorite sports ("The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life"). I only raise questions. But in doing do, I'm looking for answers. Feel free to offer one if you have one.

Tea Protestors 1, CNN 0

You've probably seen this segment CNN ran from the Chicago Tea Party, where the caustic CNN reporterette tried to make them all look like fools run by the eeeevil Fox News Network and unnamed Republican billionaires. What you have not seen is the turn around one lady pulled on her after they cut the segment. The Morristown rally that I attended had a much more triumphant and uplifting spirit than this one (we're almost certain to get a conservative Republican governor this year)--but then we didn't have an aggressive Driveby Babe trying to push people around either.

Remind Them Who They Work For

I'm going to Morristown NJ today to join the grass roots tax protest that Rick Santelli got started back in February with his on air rant about intrusive government. I hope all of you reading this will join us for tea somewhere in a village green near you. This could be the beginning of wresting back some modicum of control for the people of whom, by whom, and for whom our government theoretically exists. Theoretically I say; it is beginning to feel like a cruel joke to speak of a free, elective government, instituted and controlled by the people whose consent alone to be governed makes that governing legitimate. We have already had a revolution of sorts, a decades-long, slow-motion blanketing of our established rights and freedoms by the blob of big government bureaucracy and the machinations of petty tyrants on the make.

John Locke had a revolutionary thought: when the controversy between a government and the people erupts over infringement of right and law-abidingness, it is the legislative that is in rebellion, not the people.

"[W]hen they, who were set up for the protection, and preservation of the People, their liberties and Properties, shall by force invade, and endeavor to take them away; and so putting themselves into a state of war with those, who made them the Protectors and Guardians of their Peace, are properly, and with the greatest aggravation, Rebellantes, Rebels." (sec 227)

And if, he goes on to say, someone should think that a doctrine of resistance to such tyranny is not to be allowed, "they may as well say upon the same ground, that honest men may not oppose robbers and pirates, because this may occasion disorder or bloodshed. If any mischief come in such cases, it is not to be charged upon him, who defends his own right, but on him that invades his neighbors." (sec 228)

Do they really want to press this rebellion against us any longer?

Wealth Creation and Public Policy

One of the defining questions for thoughtful and morally serious human beings pertains to material prosperity: "How is wealth created?" How does a people lift itself out of poverty into widely enjoyed abundance? This question of not-mere-academic debate between American liberals and conservatives. Thus, we are asking how best to respond to this recession that is bordering on a depression. President Obama talks about the wealth creative capacity of the private sector, but he throws trillions of borrowed, government dollars into spending on just whatever Congressmen pull off their wish lists, as well as a some sensibly targeted investments in infrastructure, and the like.

Yesterday at The King's College, David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values hosted Cornell economist and New York Times contributor Robert H. Frank and Time magazine columnist Justin Fox in a discussion of the paradox of thrift. Prof. Frank defended the President's stimulus spending, saying that if we are going to borrow money in order to spend more to create demand for production, it makes more sense for the government to borrow at 3% than for private citizens to borrow at 22% on their credit cards--as though those were the only two alternatives. He also contrasted government spending on projects like bridges and tunnels that facilitate commerce and prevent death by bridge collapse which passes all sorts of costs on to the rest of us over against private spending on silly consumables. (He did mention comparable investments that individuals could make, but of course at a much higher rate of interest.)

The problem that some in attendance pointed out is that when given the go ahead to spend, government directs the spending largely in ways that are politically advantageous to officeholders, not economically advantageous to the country as a whole. Furthermore, once given the green light for a prudent burst of public spending, government just keeps going and going. A businessman in the audience suggested somehow arranging a 4% interest rate for mortgages so people could refinance their homes, and spend the resulting income that it would free up on whatever they see fit. Business would boom. Government revenues would rise. Et cetera.

This is why economists are not the most trusted profession. They are not the scientists they boast of being. On this point, read Harvey Mansfield's recent article, "A Question for the Economists" (Apr. 13, 2009, The Weekly Standard).

Mary Anastasia O'Grady recently entertained this question of wealth creation and general prosperity in relation to Latin America with foreign aid in mind "Aid Keep Latin America Poor," Wall Street Journal, Apr. 9, 2009). Among other sources of wisdom on the subject, including Lord Peter Bauer, she cites Alvaro Vargas Llosa's Lessons From the Poor: The Triumph of the Entrepreneurial Spirit (Independent Institute, 2008):

"The decisive element" in bringing a society out of poverty is "the development of the entrepreneurial reserves that exist in its men and women," Mr. Vargas Llosa writes. "The institutions that grant more freedom to their citizens and more security to their citizens' possessions are those that best facilitate the accumulation of wealth."

In an earlier post on development in Africa, I cited John Locke whom I will cite again. In his great Second Treatise on Civil Government (section 42), Locke appeals to the shrewdness of every ruler, saying:

This shews how much numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions; and that the increase of lands, and the right employing of them, is the great art of government: and that prince, who shall be so wise and godlike, as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of mankind, against the oppression of power and narrowness of party, will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.

The lessons concerning "established laws of liberty" and the encouragement of the "honest industry of mankind" is a lesson that is continually in need of review, whether you are President of these prosperous United States or a South American oligarch.

Cradle Robbing in China

Zhou Yuwei poster from the 1980s promoting China's one-child policy

Stefan R. Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Collection

The world is so full of suffering that, to a large extent, we have to blind ourselves to it just to function. One of the most heart rending tragedies is to lose a child, especially one's only child.

The Chinese government's economically stupid and morally horrific policy of allowing families only one child has played itself out in various predictable ways. Because of the Chinese preference for boys on account of issues related to dowries, inheritance, and old age security, not only have people been killing and abandoning their baby girls, they are now stealing other people's baby boys.

The New York Times reports this in "Chinese Hunger for Sons Fuels Boys' Abductions" (Apr. 4, 2009).

The government is no help in providing the basic service that it is ordained to provide (1 Peter 2:14). "In case after case, they said, the police insisted on waiting 24 hours before taking action, and then claimed that too much time had passed to mount an effective investigation."

Several parents, through their own guile and persistence, have tracked down surveillance video images that clearly show the kidnappings in progress. Yet even that can fail to move the police, they say. “They told me a face isn’t enough, that they need a name,” said Cai Xinqian, who obtained tape from a store camera that showed a woman leading his 4-year-old away. “If I had a name, I could find him myself.”

"[T]he police prefer not to even open a missing person’s inquiry because unsolved cases make them appear inefficient, reducing their annual bonuses." There's an interesting incentive system. Bonuses that actually discourage people from doing their jobs faithfully.

Meanwhile, the government expects people to love the state more than they love their own children. "Last September, about 40 families traveled to the capital to call attention to the plight of abducted children. They staged a brief protest at the headquarters of the national television broadcaster, but within minutes, dozens of police officers arrived to haul them away. “They dragged us by our hair and said, ‘How dare you question the government,’ ” said Peng Dongying, who lost her 4-year-old son."

“There is a hole in our hearts that will never heal,” said one father who could be any of these grieving parents.

Oddly enough, in this ostensibly communist country, there is no "real social safety net" that would obviate the need security that a son is supposed to provide.

With this tragedy in mind, it would be well for us to consider on this Good Friday and Resurrection Sunday that God "gave his one and only Son" (John 3:16) to save us from the self-absorption that leads people to do behave this way and--let's be honest--that is in all of us in one God-denying, neighbor-sacrificing form or another.

John 3:16-17: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."

1 John 4:9-10: "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

Reductio ad Absurdum

Here is General Motors', er, Government Motors', newest big idea, quickening Nancy Pelosi's pulse. Is this what the world's wealthiest and greatest industrial and manufacturing nation is to be reduced to? I'm sure this attempt will find no more acceptance than the earlier, ill-fated Segway "It" that got about 3 days of press attention before it sank ignominiously beneath the waves. But unlike Dean Kamen's outfit, Deka Research, GM now has Congress and Treasury Secretary and Master of the Universe Tim Geithner making production decisions, determined to channel our buying decisions into products of their choosing. Regardless of how serious they are here, or how far they get with this thing (for some reason called PUMA--Personal Urban Mobility and Accesibility), it is a harbinger and symbol of what the green, Gaia-worshipping capitalist and America hating left has in mind for us if they have their way.

Everybody's got to sacrifice to, you know, save the planet.

Innes adds:
This vehicle appeals to Manhattan liberals and the wealthy leftist elite in general because they've never heard of CHILDREN!

Perhaps we should call it the American Leftist Automotive Decision Attrocity (American LADA).

Whether or not, you can read about the PUMA at CNN Money here.

I once knew a guy who believed that Congress should mandate a 35 mph speed limit and reserve all interstate highways for trucks. It would save thousands of lives. When the Democrats suggest this law, remember that you read it here first.

Bubble and Crash. The History of Now.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal gave four of the five columns of its opinion page to Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith for explaining housing bubbles, the present financial crisis, and the possibly repeatable Great Depression ("From Bubble to Depression?"). It is highly unusual for the Journal to devote that much of the opinion page to one essay, and I can see why they did. It is the most informative brief explanation (I only read brief ones) of the crisis I have read yet.

Gjerstad and Smith explain what brought about this housing bubble. "Monetary policy, mortgage finance, relaxed lending standards, and tax-free capital gains provided astonishing economic stimulus: Mortgage loan originations increased an average of 56% per year for three years -- from $1.05 trillion in 2000 to $3.95 trillion in 2003!"

Then they get to the good stuff. "The unraveling of the bubble is in many ways the most fascinating part of the story, and the most painful reality we are now experiencing." I didn't now that statistics could make for such a riveting tale.

He concludes this way:

It appears that both the Great Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consumer debt -- especially mortgage debt -- that was transmitted into the financial sector during a sharp downturn. What we've offered in our discussion of this crisis is the back story to Mr. Bernanke's [1983] analysis of the Depression. Why does one crash [the dot com bubble] cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution [DCI: thanks to the compassionate interventions of Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd], can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we're witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.

From the "What Tipped You Off?" Department

Perhaps this is just a lot of fun, or perhaps they are asking why, with all the spidery swastikas and other dark symbolism, more Germans in the 1930s didn't ask, "Are we the baddies?"



From That Mitchell and Webb Look, the BBC show starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb September 14, 2006.

In the comment below, a friend in Ottawa draws our attention to the cap badge of the Queen's Royal Lancers.


...yet, clearly the good guys. But the skull is clearly that of the soldier under the cap. The message is "Death or Glory." The one wearing this badge will settle for either one or the other, but nothing in between. It is something like the Spartan woman, reported in Plutarch, who sent her husband off to war, saying, "Come back with your shield or on it."

Too Cool For Rule

These annual economic meetings of international groups such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the G20 are now well established holidays for the world wide coalition of free lance protesters, thrashers for hire, soccer hooligans, the permanently unemployed, larking college students, Euro trash, and professional anarchists that have become a reliable part of the festivities. In prior centuries these same types would have been on pilgrimage to some holy site or on some crusade or other. True believers, in Eric Hoffer's taxonomy.

But actually, these people seem to be several intellectual and moral rungs lower than the people Hoffer analysed, or for that matter, most of the simple medieval souls hoping to cleanse themselves of guilt by trudging cross country to adore some relic or attempting to repulse the Turk. For what animates these latter day believers is actually anti-belief or nihilism. The activists among them, as opposed to those showing up mainly to show off on twitter, are self-acknowledged anarchists, who claim to deny all authority and structure of any kind. This is the very definition of "idiot", as its Greek root, idios, indicates. An idios is a person unable--to be unwilling would have been unthinkable to a Greek--to participate in the political order. Anarchy, as the alpha privitive, a, and arche, rule, indicate in the Greek, is "no rule."

For events limited in time, "anarchy" suits as a descriptor well enough. But masquerading as a political philosophy it is closer to a bad joke. Only for a pampered, self absorbed, narcissistic generation well enough off to travel the continent chasing these events could it pass for a political stance. These are people who have known very little of the suffering this world is capable of dispensing--they are naifs, despite their self image as sophisticates or cosmopolites.

Take for instance this example of a policy idea flowing from anarchism. Abolish money. I wonder how long the committee worked on that one. Oh, wait. There are no committees in anarchism--no structure or authority, remember? Must have been a lone wolf, working under his own authority. But the idea certainly caught on, as the crowd was heard chanting it as one of their main suggestions to the gathered dignitaries and functionaries of the world's top governments. (Bank of London employees were seen taunting them with 10 pound notes out the windows). It might be that the Pauline remonstrance on the love of money being the root of evil lingers on as a sort of race memory, the dying echo of a culturally Christian Europe; more likely it is what passes for thought among thoughtless people.

I will grant them this however: the notion of no money is consistent with anarchism. What these lunatics are actually demanding without knowing it is a return to the state of nature, that pre-political state of affairs where each man fends for himself because there is no organized political order. Thoughtful people, when they speculate about such a time, realize with Locke that there could have been no considerable amount time spent that way because of the danger from men unrestrained by law or force. Hobbes' famous description captures it best--the life of man in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Every man realizes that alone he is at his most vulnerable; association and cooperation is the only way to survive. Locke has the invention of money coming just prior to the invention of government in his rational reconstruction of pre-history because he knew the invention of money was a social necessity, and does not need government planning to implement. So, even if a non-political or apolitical state of affairs could be imagined, money in some form would still be necessary in order to prevent the solitary and poor scenario. Most of what is necessary to bare existence is of short duration and, unless you live on a tropical island paradise, is difficult to obtain. The idea of exchange, the division of labor, and some medium to facilitate exchange are the first ideas to raise men from the Hobbesian nightmare of the bellum omnium contra omnes--the war of all against all--and into primitive pre-political cooperatives of the sort these Euro slackers seem to have in mind. But even the Stonehenge builders, whom many of these revelers surely worship, knew anarchism of the sort contemplated here was out of the question, and most certainly had some concept of money equal to their astronomy and engineering prowess.

Maybe the lingering race memory guiding our little tantrum-throwers is not of St Paul but of St Marx, he of the withering away of the state, and of changed human nature that makes it possible

"to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming a hunter, a fisherman, shepherd, or critic." (from The German Ideology.)

Or without ever growing up either. This is the fantasy world where everyone produces according to his ability, and consumes according to his need. And all of it done without the greed and inhumanity of capitalists or money. John Maynard Keynes was right; every age is ruled by some long dead economist or philosopher.

Why couldn't ours be Adam Smith instead of Karl Marx?

The Socialist Global Moment

Hobbes's Leviathan

With economies collapsing worldwide (or seeming to), people are panicking. They are pointing to capitalism--the system of economic liberty that supports the system of political liberty--as the culprit. The New York Times recently reported, in connection with this week's G-20 gathering in London, "The American banking collapse, which precipitated the global meltdown, has led to a fundamental rethinking of the American way as a model for the rest of the world." Freedom means personal vulnerability, mutual destruction, and widespread misery, or so they say. When the cost of freedom outweighs the benefits, people willingly exchange their freedom for relative safety under the protection of a strongman of some sort, whether it is a warlord, a pimp, or the progressive state.

Seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings are by nature radically individual and free to order their actions however they choose. We are thus not naturally political, but naturally free and fundamentally selfish. Alas, in what he called a "state of nature" in which everyone is simply free, unrestrained by any government or civil society of any sort, life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Freedom being an intolerable condition, people flee it for the security of life together under a political sovereign.

This same logic was the leftist gospel in the 1980s. The claim on the left was that the nuclear standoff between NATO and the Soviet Bloc, threatening as it did the destruction of "the planet," made one world government the only rational option. It is better to be red (communist) than dead. But the logic of achieving security through the threat of mutually assured destruction was founded on better premises, and thankfully prevailed in the minds of most free citizens. Nation states survived, as did political and economic liberty, and the world socialist movement seemed to slip irrecoverably into the history of foolish ideas.

Once again, however, we are being tempted to flee into the arms of Leviathan, and The Wall Street Journal has given the president of the Party of European Socialists and former Danish prime minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, space on their opinion page to make his case for "The Socialist Solution to the Crisis" (April 2, 2009), namely, global socialist government.

He begins his manifesto with this "blood of the oppressed drips from your fingers" declaration: "The job losses, repossessions, uncertainty, fear and misery faced by the people of Europe, the United States and Japan are a terrible stain on the consciences of those bankers and politicians whose doctrine of neo-liberal markets plunged us all into this crash." For the poor in the developing nations (which, interestingly, he still calls "the Third World"), this has meant "hunger, disease, and death." His socialist analysis calls forth a socialist solution. He sees this crisis as "a unique opportunity to develop a new approach," viz. "a Global New Deal."

His most troubling expression of glee comes when he describes the Global Progressive Forum (GPF) which will meet soon meet in Brussels.

This is the world conference of the Global Progressive Forum (GPF), which will bring together speakers from five continents to develop a new vision of a globalized world which benefits all. The GPF will take place in the European Parliament and will be opened by Bill Clinton. It will feature debates and discussions on the issues of global governance, trade, financial markets, decent work, migration and climate change, all aimed at coordinating global answers to what are global crises. It shows that the world's progressives are serious about making a solidaristic social model a reality for all.

Sadly, we have no Reagan at the helm to fight against this latest totalitarian thrust against the dignity of liberty. But the defense of liberty always depends on the education for liberty among free citizens. Thankfully, at least for now, we still have the freedom to discuss these ideas.

Beware of Governments Handing Out Security Blankets

We are wearied already with comparisons of the One with FDR, with our New New Deal, and this being the worst emergency since the Great Depression, which FDR presided over and rode for a decade, yet again the parallel thrusts itself before us. FDR introduced us to his "Four Freedoms", which he put forward as government's obligation to provide. (Freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear.) It seems Obama wants to revise and extend the list. Matt Drudge has this banner headline up:

GOVERNMENT WEBSITE TO WARN OF SADNESS/CRYING OVER ECONOMY

It appears that now the government is in the business of providing freedom from sadness and crying as well..

"The feds will warn of depression, suicidal thinking and other serious mental illnesses. It will raise warning flags for: Persistent sadness/crying; Excessive anxiety; Lack of sleep/constant fatigue; Excessive irritability/anger."

Or, perhaps as we navigate our way through the Orwellian ObamaSpeak we are forced to decode each day, this might be a warning along the lines of the Tom Hanks character in the movie "A League of Their Own": There's no crying in socialism!

Perhaps it's a psychological ploy to create even more desperation through the power of suggestion: "you're looking awfully worried today--is everything alright?"

Either way, Americans are being fitted out with training wheels, rubber bumpers on all sharp corners, life lessons, bedtime stories, and soothing comfort for all their boo-boos by their warm and always hovering nanny government. Wouldn't it be nice to just settle back and let the government take the weight of the world off your shoulders? How about a nice peanut butter sandwich and a glass of juice, while we take over your pension plan, your medical care, your education, your energy use, your workplace, your mortgage, your standard of living, the products you buy,...

Grappling With Equality

This is another step in the domestication of the American man, and the de-naturing of us all. Sadly, girls' wrestling is nothing new, and neither is the participation of girls on boys' wrestling teams. But in Minnesota, people are cheering what they call a history making moment because someone has become "the first female to compete at the state high school wrestling tournament" ("Girl Wrestler is Winning Points, Making History," Star Tribune, March 5, 2009).

This caught the attention of Minneapolis pastor, John Piper, at Bethlehem Baptist Church and Desiring God Ministries ("Over My Dead Body, Son"). One of his concerns is broadly cultural, and the other is more narrowly moral, though they are both concerns for men's moral character.

For all those who are concerned about the way men in general treat women in general in our society, he says, "Manly gentleness is not an epidemic in our culture. Rap videos, brutal movies, fatherless homes, and military madness have already made thousands of women the victim of man’s abuse. Now we would make the high school version of feministic nature-denial a partner in this undermining of masculine gentleness."

To fathers who are concerned to raise their sons into masculine maturity, he says, "Give your sons a bigger nobler vision of what it is to be a man. Men don’t fight against women. They fight for women."

Someone offered this comment following the Twin Cities Star Tribune article:

First double standard, where boys are strong than girls post-puberty, the girls are allowed to play on boys' teams in middle school when the girls are bigger. If they get to beat up on the boys in middle school, you can't whine when boys return the favor in high school. Second, in wrestling, this girl has an unfair advantage because she can maintain lower weight classes later in life, thus giving her more experience. Any wrestler worth his or her salt will tell you experience will trump gender anytime. She often ends up wrestling freshman. Not only that, since girls have a lower center of gravity, it's harder to throw her. Third, what about the sexual harassment? Boys are uncomfortable wrestling her and she doesn't care. I wonder how she would feel if a bunch of boys decided to come shower with her. You know, nothing sexual - just a shower. If the coach explains it's just a shower I'm sure she'll be ok with it. God knows the boys can't complain because her right to participate overrides their right not to be harassed.

A Minnesota state senator has introduced a bill to ban girls from boys' wrestling ("Will Wrestling Bill Pin Local Girl?"). Law not only restrains. It also instructs. One way or another, it teaches moral lessons.

As a wrestler myself (you never lose it), I can tell you that I would have to cede any bout in which I was matched against a woman. In general, it is wrong for men to handle women in that way unless the men are wearing badges and the women are resisting arrest. The blindly ideological insistence that boys and girls, men and women wrestle each other in athletic competition abstracts from human sexuality and its significance. This is true in all that a grappler does with his opponant, but it becomes especially clear in a particular pinning maneuver called the "Saturday Night" in which, face to face and chest to chest with your opponent, you hook his arms with your arms and his legs with your legs, and then arch your back, pinning his shoulders to the mat. You get the point.

In Plato's Republic, in the "city in speech" that he constructs to illustrate the requirements of justice in a political community, he has men and women wrestling naked together for the sake of the radical egalitarianism necessary for political unity in the just city (455d-458d). Of course, he understood that this is absurd. His point is that if you press the political relationship to point of trying to perfect it, including the unity and selfless devotion from the citizens that it requires, you end up with absurdity and monstrosity.

In Allan Bloom's interpretive essay that he published with his translation of the dialogue, he says that Book V, with its radical egalitarianism and its communism of women and children, is a comedy. If that is so, our ideologically blinded, egalitarian feminists are pushing our society ever further in this tragically comic direction.

Capitalism and Its Fruits, Part II

Katherine Gammon over at Wired magazine has a short piece up titled "Stock-Boy Bots are Stealing American Jobs".

Robots are stealing American jobs. In a 76,000-square-foot zone of the 832,000-square-foot Zappos warehouse in Shepherdsville, Kentucky, 72 robotic "drive units" organize and deliver shelves of goods—from argyle socks to handbags. People remain in charge (for now), because it takes human dexterity to pack items into a box for shipping. But the bots still have plenty to do, picking up the slack on boring tasks like shifting inventory.
The droids roll at 3 miles an hour, navigating via barcodes stuck to the floor and commands from a central server. And they're buff, able to lift half a ton.

Adding a dark-future, sci-fi dimension ("Skynet" and "The Rise of the Machines!") , an Artificial Intelligence dimension that is worrisome but which I leave for another day, the concern is an old one, one which the Luddites have given their name to. The original concern, ie., what is to become of skilled, artisanal labor when machinery allows unskilled workers to produce large volumes of cheap goods in place of quality craftsmanship? has been resoundingly set aside as a concern by the enormous productivity, and thus wealth, that industrialization has made possible. By creating such widespread wealth, craftsmen and artists of every possible description have a larger upscale market for their wares than any previous generation, and the lower and middles classes share in a bounty undreamed of by prior centuries. Obviously, the market for an exquisitely made anything is limited, even in the best of times; but the cost-lowering dynamic of mass production is what has made the modern Western world, for better and worse, what it is. The line marking the difference between a luxury and a necessity has been drastically shifted downward. Imagine if you will, if the only method available for making a cell phone, a laptop computer, a GPS navigation device, or an Ipod, were the cottage manufacturing model of the Luddite era. ("Manufacture", from the Latin, is literally "hand made"). Who would have these devices? Any possibility of standardization? And what would they cost?

Yet, a question remains. Industrial robots are here to stay, spreading even into areas, like agriculture, not previously thought possible. Repetitive, dangerous, and menial tasks are being systematically taken over by ever more cleverly designed machines. How important is it to preserve entry level and unskilled manual labor jobs in our increasingly complex, automated, and information-driven economy? No matter how successful our education system could be imagined to become (we have to imagine it because we are very nearly at the point where it could not be worse), there will always be the less intelligent and less able tier of society. What are these people to do if the only jobs that exist are for the skilled or educated?

Here we are met once again with the horns of the dilemma. Progress, innovation, creativity, and efficiency all point to an increasing role for machines, with the cost being borne by the lowest on the totem pole and least capable, who will find fewer and fewer jobs they can do. The socialist answer is to just fund them in their idleness, discard them as productive human beings, and care for them like one might a stray animal.

Are we in a fundamentally different era now? For example, the early industrial era still rested on the same workforce that had been employed on the farms. It was a huge dislocation, but the jobs for the masses were still there, just different ones. But now as auto plants close down, it is ridiculous to think many UAW workers are going to become certified Microsoft technicians. And if even warehouse jobs vanish, where do the young and unskilled go? If the direction is relentlessly toward information and data, creativity and abstraction, are we establishing once again the basis for peasant/nobility dichotomy, with little in between?

Consider the nightmarish vision of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, realized on celluloid in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, with the off-planet upper world of the glitterati and decadent rich occasionally larking down in the squalor of the degenerate world they have escaped. Untold luxury for the educated, misery and hopelessness for everyone else. Is this what unbridled science and markets portend?

Help Them Somebody!

David Byrne and Brian Eno in 1977

I just heard the recent David Byrne and Brian Eno album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, on their website, everythingthathappens.com. With My Life in the Bush of Ghosts in mind, I hoped for something rhythmic and tastefully odd. It's not there.



I'm amazed that these guys make enough to cover their food and rent. There is nothing here that compares in any way to "Born Under Punches," "Somber Reptiles," or "Maria Lando," or from Eno alone, "I'll Come Running To Tie Your Shoe." "Strange Overtones" is the closest they come.

I hope that the new U2 album is better. I expect it will be.

But I don't pretend to be a music critic. If you have any fondness for these guys, you can listen to the entire album by using that embedded thing above. Click playlist.

To read about the album and how they collaborated to make it, read "Together Again in Different Time Zones" (New York Times, August 15, 2008).

Hear, Hear!

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative Member of Parliament, representing the South East of Britain. I don't know where this man has been hiding, but his articulation of what is wanting in the leftist mode of being in the world is devastating, and will surely catapult him into the Prime Minister's chair before is career is over. Would that we had such a conservative spokesman somewhere in what is left of our Republic! In the course of a speech to the European Parliament, Hannan goes after the idiotic policies of the Gordon Brown government--exactly the ones Omama and his minions are seeking to jam down the throats of Americans. On the off chance that you have not heard this riff, I have copied the YouTube video of his takedown of the hapless Gordon Brown. Be inspired, and note the many memorable lines in this passionate example of English rhetoric at its finest.

Somewhere Winston Churchill is smiling.