Musings Of An Indie Writer| « | Woodpushers’ Corner |
»
|
|
Thursday, March 15, 2007
The American Ideon: Its Decay And Restoration
Fran here. The subject I'm about to attack has a Rumination-ish flavor to it, which is why I've ejected the Curmudgeon from the driver's seat for the nonce. But whatever you might think of my more religious / spiritual writings, allow me to assure you that this one has a temporal application as well.
Be prepared.
Anyone who's played the children's game called "telephone" is aware of how easily a message can be garbled in transmission. Unless stringent efforts are made to assure clarity, any message more complex than "Help!" is likely to undergo serious deterioration after it's passed through four or five hands. When the receivers, intermediate or final, are also capable of reinterpreting the message, the matter becomes all but insoluble.
The transmission process is most easily corrupted when the message is abstract, or depends upon abstract concepts. A message concerned solely with material elements has a decent chance of passing through the "wires" unaltered. Complete abstractions, such as philosophical arguments, rarely survive even two transmissions intact unless great care has been taken to pare all the ambiguity from them, a difficult task when engaged in philosophical development. The men who framed the Constitution of the United States did their level best to write explicitly, and in a fashion that would not permit their words to be perverted. Even a semicolon where a comma belonged was considered a major, unacceptable flaw. Yet what they would say about the current state of "Constitutional law" would probably not be printable at Eternity Road.
Among abstractions, those with a moral or ethical thrust -- i.e., those that specify what we may, must, and must not do -- are the most prone to mistransmission or deliberate reinterpretation at the receiving end. No one likes to be told what to do or not do. Few men are humble enough to believe that they really couldn't "work it all out for themselves." And of course, the reason for moral-ethical dictates is that there are attractive short-term gains to be had from discarding them...if one can get away with it.
Abstractions don't stand alone in the void, giving birth to reality. They must be founded on more concrete observations. "High" abstractions sit atop "lower" ones, and the "lower" ones atop the data provided by the objective world. When any of the "struts" that support an abstraction is compromised or disproved, the supported abstraction is undermined and, frequently, discredited.
The technical term for an abstraction that cannot survive the removal of any of its "struts" is an ideon. The notion is akin to the mathematical concept of disproof: if a theorem requires that some premise be true, then if the premise be false, the theorem cannot stand. Of course, this rule "descends" a pyramid of ideons with regularity: the "pinnacle" of the pyramid and everything beneath it will be undermined by the loss of even one element from the "base."
In the realm of moral and ethical reasoning, the "base" elements of any system will be postulates about right and wrong: moral absolutes. The "base" elements provide justification for what sits atop them. The farther up the pyramid one goes, the more one concerns oneself with implementation. This is a nice demonstration of the defining property of an ideon, for if a fundamental moral concept -- for example, the wrongness of seeking intoxication -- is somehow disproved, then how would a higher one partly based upon it -- the rightness of laws that forbid the sale of intoxicating products -- be able to stand?
Obviously, the persistence of an ideon through successive transmissions depends upon the clarity with which its "strut" concepts are relayed. The high peak cannot survive the crumbling of the low bedrock upon which it rests.
Politics and the definition of political systems are moral-ethical pursuits. As such, they must be premised upon some set of postulates about right, wrong, and State power. Thus, every specific political system is an ideon dependent upon the soundness of its moral and ethical axioms.
There are a number of political ideons "in play" at this time, but the one that concerns us today is that of the United States of America. What are the "strut" ideas that undergird this unique, and uniquely successful, political system?
- Rights to one's life, liberty, and property;
- Government subservient to the people, rather than superior to them;
- Law as superior to the whims of rulers;
- Equality of all persons before the law;
- Secular, uniform, and impartial justice.
And beneath those?
- The Lockean concept of individual rights that descend from God through Nature, rather than as grants from an unassailable temporal power;
- The Christian ethos of personal responsibility, general benevolence, and self-restraint;
- The rightness of defiance and resistance to arbitrary claims of authority.
Only about 10% of the colonial population supported the American Revolution actively, but that tenth was on fire with the ideas enumerated above. After the war, it managed to ignite a similar passion for them in the more passive majority, sufficient to win general assent to the Constitution based upon them. The American ideon had become an explicit, if succinct, political contract that conferred a small number of well-defined powers upon a government charged with the responsibility of defending its borders and its citizens' rights.
It's difficult to grasp at our current remove, but the new nation was wildly enthusiastic about these things, to a degree we the living can hardly appreciate. Perhaps they lacked our current distractions. At any rate, no reports of eighteenth-century celebrities club-hopping without underwear have survived to this day.
However, the transmission of the American ideon from generation to generation would not be exempt from the "telephone effect." One generation after the Founding, the people writhed under the Alien and Sedition Acts. One generation more, and Washington had established a central bank with de facto power to inflate the currency. One more brought federal public works without Constitutional foundation. One more brought conscription, an executive suspension of habeas corpus, the issuance of irredeemable paper money, and the use of federal troops to evict a state legislature from its own chambers. Five generations after the Founding, it was considered right and proper for Congress to pass laws against "combinations in restraint of trade," a phrase of such matchless elasticity that no one, then or now, can be sure what it forbids.
The process accelerated at the turn of the Twentieth Century. Lincoln's extra-constitutional measures were justified by the "emergency" of the Civil War; progressive ideology borrowed from his "emergency" rhetoric. The rise of the "social gospelers" undermined Christian constraints on politics and government action; by 1913, "Freedom means more than being let alone" was official policy. FDR used the Great Depression and World War II as levers with which to pry off most of the remaining restraints on federal power. Today there are no inviolable individual rights remaining; all are subject to override for "emergency" or "compelling government interests."
Any intelligent reader of Eternity Road -- and surely there's no other kind -- will already be aware of the weak support for the American ideon in our time. If we're to understand our political malady and dispel it, we must comprehend the damage suffered by the ideon's struts.
First, the Lockean conception of inviolable individual rights has been shoved aside -- not disproved, as some of the more contentious forces on the Left would have it, but merely displaced in favor of other notions. Probably the most important of those other notions is the difference principle, first articulated by philosopher John Rawls and used as a key premise in his book A Theory Of Justice. This premise holds as a moral absolute that gains to persons better off than the worst-off in society should only be permitted if the worst-off gain even more. Thus, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates must be prevented from acquiring more wealth unless they can prove that the lowest economic stratum of society would gain even more. This demotes freedom -- equality of rights -- in favor of a Utopian variety of socialism -- equality of results.
Second, the Christian ethos has taken a terrible beating from the mass media and activist groups of the post-World War II world. "Moral relativism," an explicitly anti-moral proposition, attempts to enforce a ban against the criticism of persons or behavior at odds with Christian ethos. "Liberation theology," an explicitly anti-Christian conception, has been promoted as a replacement for the original teachings of the Redeemer. Most frequently under the crosshairs has been the Christian assertion of personal responsibility. The dominant counter-ethic has been one of social responsibility: the acceptance of responsibility for all ills, individual or aggregate, by "society," as represented by government. The consequence has been a flowering of license -- violence, sloth, intoxication, dissolution, a wide variety of deliberate adventures in depravity -- and a great weakening of the ethic of personal benevolence, all of which the law is now expected to accommodate.
Third, Americans' will to resist tyranny, whether in embryo or fully mature, has been sapped near to zero. UnConstitutional laws are routinely issued, and few do more than protest. Activist groups demand extraordinary concessions and subventions, and go unopposed by all but the strongest and clearest-eyed. Courts and executive agencies arrogate legislative powers and baldly ignore explicit Constitutional provisions. The most important barrier to tyranny of all, the right to keep and bear arms, has been so badly abraded and reduced by "laws" that defy the Second Amendment that it is now questionable whether Americans possess even the theoretical ability to depose their governments should the necessity arise.
In combination, these assaults on the struts of the American ideon have brought it near to collapse. They're the entering wedge for a philosophy of governance called transnational progressivism. This conception, stripped of programmatic specifics upon which its adherents might differ, is that individual rights and nation-states are obsolete; that the problems of contemporary societies are too complex to be trusted to social processes and private action; and that the sole remedy for the crises the world faces today is the investiture of a "wise elite" with kinglike, unbounded authority. Thus empowered to decide and act on our behalf, that elite will sweep away the obstructive archaisms of traditional religions, moral-ethical codes, and systems of law and government, and thus freed of all constraint will guide us through the shoals of the present and future.
Not all is darkness, despair, and the Red Death. There have been several bright spots in recent years, glowing coals which might possibly reignite the libertarian fire that once fueled our Founding Era-progenitors.
The 2006 Congressional elections, which struck many Republican partisans as major defeats, are actually cause for hope. First and most important, they made plain the public's disaffection for persons who claim to stand for limited Constitutional government but who spend like drunken sailors and kowtow to the statists at every opportunity. Second, they placed responsibility for better behavior on the new Democrat majorities, and responsibility for monitoring them on the surviving Republicans. If history is a guide, the Democrats will live up to the very worst of their tax-and-spend / regulate-everything / pander-to-every-interest-group traditions. It may be hoped that the lesson will not be lost on Republicans who stand for election in 2008 and beyond.
There's been some heightened awareness of the erosion of Constitutionally guaranteed rights; an increasing number of persons are demanding to know how a "right" differs from a "permission." Federal welfare reform, effectuated in 1995, has proved to be a tremendous success, and is spurring state governments to restructure their own assistance programs compatibly. After the infamous Kelo decision, more than half the state legislatures passed laws forbidding condemnation courts to exploit the new permissiveness. Outrage at the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act has animated quite a bit of the Internet news media and Blogosphere, which remain unaffected by its constraints. Driven in part by the tyrannies being inflicted upon Britons and Australians, the resurgence of insistence upon the right to keep and bear arms has touched all but the "bluest" of the "blue states." Two staunch originalists have reached the Supreme Court, and it is possible that two more might join them before the 2008 elections. Perhaps most significant, the public has been reawakened to the critical importance of national defense and the control of the nation's borders; it's possible that that issue alone cost the GOP its Congressional majorities.
Whether the American people will build upon these victories to beat back the transnationalist progressives, or whether the progressives will marshal a counterattack capable of reversing these topical gains and consolidating their foothold in our public institutions, remains to be seen.
Battle hasn't quite been joined. Too many people want things they can't stir themselves to work for. One of those things is the restoration of the Constitutional ideon, fully observed and scrupulously enforced.
Many forces persist in their assaults on the struts of the ideon. Most particularly assailed is the Christian ethos, which stands athwart the ambitions of the Left's most favored interest groups. The tide might be turning in this regard, as the Internet has allowed serious Christians to find one another, refresh one another's convictions, and band together for mutual support as never before. (The same might be said of political conservatives, but the effects here are uncertain; whether there's been any substantial degree of improvement is highly disputable.) In so doing, they've discovered that the teachings of the Redeemer are as solid as ever and perpetually "new." They apply without distortion to virtually every "problem" the moral relativists have claimed to be too "complex" for our archaic tradition to cope with.
An exceptional array of forces has assaulted the notion of national sovereignty. The rationales are many: "gun violence," "racism," "inequality of economic opportunity," "displaced peoples," "women's rights," "global warming," "world hunger," "AIDS." These supposed "crises" are beyond any single government's power to solve; they simply demand the transfer of all authority to a United Nations-like body that will rule for the good of all men. In a sense, those forces are against all nations, not merely ours. However, their greatest animus is reserved for America, for two centuries the main bastion against socialism and tyranny, which must be destroyed if the transnationalist progressives are to have their way. They may seem at times to be focused on Israel, Britain, or Australia, but the target they must pierce to have enduring success is the United States, the "world policeman" responsible for nearly every exertion of national force in support of universal norms of justice.
It's the ultimate giveaway that all the forces that assail the struts of the Constitutional ideon are absolutely agreed that private persons must not have access to weapons; all firearms must be securely in the hands of the "wise elite." The transnationalists want to pre-discourage any current of resistance to the Global State, which must expect to be spread pretty thin at the outset. Weapons in private hands would potentiate such currents. As with national sovereignty, America's "gun culture" is the primary target, for reasons too obvious to require elaboration.
We who love freedom must:
- Reconquer our educational institutions, so that young Americans will once more be introduced to the seminal ideas that gave birth to freedom on this continent, and taught how they produced the magnificence that is America;
- Solidify our beachheads along the channels of communication, most particularly the Internet, so that we cannot be reduced once again to isolated individuals and pockets of like-minded unable to join with their fellows;
- Preserve at all costs our character as a heavily-armed society, for every other right is conditional on the right to defend oneself;
- Counterattack the multiculturalists, the moral relativists, and the aspiring tyrants at every opportunity, with courage and forthrightness, despite our inclination to avoid "unnecessary confrontations."
I think it highly unlikely that the above can be accomplished in an entirely secular fashion. The logical conclusion of the purely secular mindset is "eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." The assumption that we have no immortal souls leads inescapably to the sort of hedonistic disengagement from matters of principle that produced the current state of affairs. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of honorable, public-spirited atheists and agnostics; I've said that before and I'll continue to say it until I die. But to cleave passionately to absolute moral principles without the buttress of Divine authority is possible only to very intelligent men with long-range vision, who can see how moral absolutes reinforce themselves and renormalize their societies over time. Intellectuals cannot propel a mass movement; they simply don't have the mass.
Christianity is not an ideon. It is a primary decree of Law by the Ruler of All Things; there are no postulates beneath it that our enemies can gnaw away. That's why it's survived some two thousand years unchanged, despite all the shafts that have been aimed at it and all the weaknesses evinced by its prelates. A resurgence of sincere Christian belief would make the re-energization of the Constitutional ideon odds-on to succeed. Without it, the portents would be grim.
It's been the pattern of history since the seventeenth century that the English-speaking peoples have been the guardians of freedom. We're at something of a low point today, mostly because the gradualist tactics of our enemies have synergized so neatly with our natural inclination to tend to our own affairs and let others solve their problems for themselves. But the enemy has reached our gates. Further deterioration of the American ideon, either in theory or in practice, will very likely render the edifice unmaintainable. It will be unmaintainable because we will be unable to speak non-ludicrously of it to the generations to come. By tolerating any further decay in the ideon, we will have endorsed our irremediable decline. The rebirth of freedom will be deferred to some unimagined future...if it's ever reborn at all.
The time to act is now.
More anon.
Comments
It would be a good idea for religiously-minded folk to tolerate non-religiously-minded folk, and vice versa, for the sake of an alliance forged in libertarian principles. Sadly, history shows that it is all too easy to shut out potential allies because they do not exactly share all one’s beliefs. But perhaps one of the benefits of roaming the wilderness of political impotence for a time is the development of a certain level of pragmatism, and the ability to focus on issues bigger than whether or not the other fellow peels his eggs the way you do.
I suspect that there is something inherent in the human condition that demands tyranny; every so often those who do not wish to live that way must pick up stakes and start a new society with like-minded people. But in our modern world there is no frontier any more… except for the high frontier, that is. If my fears are correct then America will inevitably slide into tyranny sooner or later. But hopefully there will be an escape hatch, a safety valve, that lets the seeds of liberty (and its flip-side, personal responsibility) escape to build again elsewhere. Naturally, that too will eventually backslide, but if the re-seeding process continues then our species stands a chance of outgrowing our desire for comfort and security at the cost of freedom.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/15/2007 at 06:43 PMAlex makes some good points about our sad, modern world. Indeed, our problem is serious, maybe even fatal, but not new. Amazingly (to me), George Washington spoke to these issues in his farewell address only 15 years after victory over the British and only 8 years into the ratified life of the Constitution:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”
Oh my. Is George questioning the patriotism of the ACLU here? He continues:
“... And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
Within three years of Washington’s speech, France began demonstrating for the world exactly what happens when men try to establish liberty without faith in God.
The good news is, while we may (or may not) be outnumbered by the secular progressive tyrants, it’s a cinch we’re not outgunned.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/16/2007 at 06:55 AMWhere do we sign up for this team of independents? Seriously, we really should start organizing about now.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/23/2007 at 06:04 PMAn article at Defense and the National Interest also discussed this.
Forecast: the Death of the American Constitution
February 22, 2007URL:
http://www.defense-and-society.org/fcs/fabius_change_blindness.htmPosted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 04/01/2007 at 07:03 PM
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
