Musings Of An Indie WriterWednesday, May 4, 2011
The Chosen Few
There are a few people I owe my evolution into a better human being and Christian to, and one of them is Dr. Michael Bauman, professor of theology and culture at Hillsdale College.
When I teach I will teach like him.
He lectures on something of profound importance, pauses, and then asks the class what we think. He then tears us apart until our only answer is, “I don’t know.” We are then ordered to figure it out. Why is Jesus divine? Why bother getting a liberal arts education? Why get married and/or have children? What about evil? Human free will? God’s sovereignty? The creeds?
These are, quite literally, a very small sampling of the conversation topics from the classes I’ve taken with him - including [but not limited to] seminars on John Milton, C. S. Lewis, and Erasmus & Calvin.
Hillsdale College in general and Dr. Bauman in particular grind their students into powder for their own good. Yesterday was my final class at Hillsdale, and unsurprisingly it was with Bauman. As it was time to dismiss he paused, looked at the room of 14 students or so [I was the only girl who took this class, for what it’s worth], and gave us a pep talk. I was super confused, but in a happy way.
It went a little something like this [not verbatim, but definitely the sentiment]:
I graduate in a week and a half.
ready, set, go.
[On a completely unrelated note: I’ve been uploading some of my covers/compositions, including the infamous Polygamy Song here. Fun fact: I wrote “The Vicodin Song” in Fran’s basement over Christmas 2009/10! My latest contribution is a terrible/sarcastic rendition of Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.” FYI. You don’t have to listen/like it, but people tend to hound me re: music so thurr ya go.]
High And Low Part 1
Juxtaposition does more than enhance contrasts.
Among America's more persistent and troublesome foreign-policy problems is that we keep trying to make other countries -- most recently, Third World hellholes overrun by Muslims -- more like America. Whether we're there as the result of a successful war or because a recent disaster has triggered our desire to help the less fortunate, we always start from the assumption that these folks are just like us.
HOT FLASH TO THE GLACIALLY SLOW: No, they're not.
There are nations, and clusters of nations, whose populations are greatly similar in all the politically and economically important ways: assumptions about reality, willingness to work, understanding of property, susceptibility to envy, and propensity toward unjustifiable violence. There is no nation whose people are greatly similar in those aspects to the population of the United States. Despite the cosmetic similarities between Americans and Europeans, the moral and philosophical gulf between us is all but unbridgeable. The cosmetic similarities between Americans and South Americans are fewer still, and the gulf at least as wide. There are virtually no points of commonality between Americans and Middle Eastern Muslims.
Yet we've tried, for about nine years and against a mountain of experience, to persuade ourselves otherwise in the cases of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We've tried for about eight years to remake Iraq in America's image. Of course the government types in charge of these debacles would say otherwise -- "We respect the unique cultures of these peoples!" -- but it's all froth and gas.
And like all mistaken assumptions about moral and philosophical fundamentals, it has caused us a great deal of damage.
For the sake of simplicity, allow your Curmudgeon to introduce names for a few categories of human civilization:
- Hunter-Gatherer: Tribes incapable of producing their survival needs; they cannot make food, so they must find it -- a process that keeps them on the move.
- Agrarian: Capable of sustaining itself in place by its knowledge of agriculture; first-level technologists, albeit a bit lacking on the theoretical side.
- Mechanist: Second-level technologists, knowledgeable enough about the natural world to design, produce, and employ labor-saving devices.
- Informationist: Third-level technologists: adept at the assembly of coherent packages of data easily employed by large numbers, and devices, both physical and virtual, that can manipulate those packages to advantage.
There are transition states between those four states of society, but they're unimportant for the larger study.
The distinctions that separate those categories are far more than matters of technology. The dominant level of technology is merely the easiest way to recognize one for what it is. Beneath the gewgaws lies a view of reality from which the devices spring and on which the political structure of the society must be based.
The Hunter-Gatherer society has not advanced to the level of organized thought. The Hunter-Gatherer mind perceives without conceiving. It can recognize facts, but has not yet learned how to assemble them into configurations from which conclusions about natural law can be drawn. Thus, it relies on the discovery of fortuitous concentrations of food and happenstance shelter. Humans outside the tribe are inherently competitors for scarce food resources, and are treated as enemies.
The Agrarian society has either noticed or deduced some of the basic rules of living systems, specifically with regard to the production of food. Because agriculture is a static pursuit, this forces Agrarians to learn how to construct shelters as well. Though much of Agrarian activity is governed by rote, its life patterns are reproducible and stable. An advanced Agrarian society will have discovered trade, and the division of labor will allow its fortunes to increase beyond simple subsistence. The outsider is no longer automatically an enemy.
The Mechanist society has learned enough physics, chemistry, and engineering to create labor-saving machinery, and to broaden its trading radius by means of powered transportation. At this stage of development, direct human labor begins to wane in importance, which triggers the demographic transition: children cease to be regarded as economic assets, and reproduction-based population growth starts to tail off.
The Informationist society is one in which further advance depends ultimately on packaged information, and on the power of the processing tools that work with it. Such a society will of course have a large Mechanist component -- you can't eat 1s and 0s, or drive them to work -- but its cutting-edge technologies will arise from the information-handling sciences.
It should go without saying, though it hardly ever does, that the direction of advancement is clear, and that a "lower" society in armed conflict with a "higher" one is in for a very hard time. The historical examples are numerous. But what's even less often acknowledged is that a "higher" society that attempts to drag a "lower" one up to its level faces nearly certain disappointment. The historical examples of that are equally numerous.
You can feed a Hunter-Gatherer produce from an Agrarian farm, but that doesn't equip him to understand the laws that govern crop growth or animal husbandry.
You can give a drill press to a Hunter-Gatherer or an Agrarian, but that doesn't equip him with the understanding of physics and mechanics that would allow him to produce one, or maintain the one you've given him.
You can give a laptop computer to a Hunter-Gatherer, an Agrarian, or a Mechanist, but that doesn't equip him with the understanding of information theory required to produce his own bundles of data or programs that can extract usable information from it.
But we try, and try, and try...
There have been two and only two successful "nation-building" experiences in human history: Post World-War-II Germany and Japan. They succeeded because a Mechanist society of great wealth and energy undertook to restore those Mechanist nations from the devastation of war, and in the process was able to purge them of the lunacies that had precipitated the war. Even so, there were fits and starts in the process, and the United States maintained a far lighter touch than we've exhibited in our "nation-building" undertakings since then.
There are other implications of even greater importance. While the questions fly about Pakistani involvement in the sheltering of Osama bin Laden, we should be asking others as well, most particularly this one: What did we expect?
- Pakistan's dominant social structure is the tribe;
- It is dominated by the totalitarian pseudo-religion of Islam;
- Its people do not accept the ethic of private property sufficiently to have risen above inter-familial vendettas and inter-tribal warfare;
- Pakistanis in the main do not view America as a model toward which to strive but as an object of malevolent envy, to be hated, combated, and destroyed.
Those are also the reasons Pakistan is an Agrarian society slowly transitioning to Mechanist status (largely through the agency of workers sent to more advanced societies for their educations). Of course, still worse conditions pertain in Afghanistan, where we've had a greater and more active presence. Neither will advance economically until their people grow up morally and philosophically. Unfortunately, that will require them to renounce and abjure Islam.
Islam is a special problem precisely because it claims Divine authority for its pronouncements, and Divine sanction for its barbarities. A relatively small militant fraction of Muslims can cow the rest of an Islamic nation into terrified, silent submission. Church and State collaborate on the enthronement of those most willing to use violence and terror to enforce God's will. Worse, the militant fraction can be replenished from other lands, as Islam is the strongest of all the cultural factors in such a nation: believers from other countries are readily assimilated rather than turned away.
In short, there is no hope of "Americanizing" a nation dominated by Islam.
In summation: We can create superstitious beliefs about the products of our advanced Informationist economy. We can inflame regional envy and resentment of our great strength and wealth. We can lead savage peoples to see us as "the weak horse" because we restrain ourselves in warfare. But we cannot lift a "low" society willy-nilly to our level; such a nation has much to unlearn before it can benefit from American benevolence.
More anon.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
A May Day “Surprise”?
The “wetwork” executed this past weekend by Dick Cheney’s “hit squad” had this writer scratching his head, especially in view of the fact that we now know that Sheik Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad had been under surveillance by US intelligence assets since 2007.
Our current administration is known for NEVER undertaking any potentially major project without considering the probable impact on its political objectives i.e. getting the leftist collectivists re elected in 2012. For that reason; why not wait until October of next year to take out the most wanted fugitive on the planet? That would be a major “October Surprise”.
A report by Neil Sears in the UK Daily Mail states:
For although the CIA has thought since September that he [bin Laden] was in hiding in Abbottabad, special forces stormed his fortress only days after the website [Wikileaks] published new secret documents.These made reference to named ‘couriers’ carrying Bin Laden’s message to his followers, and also to Abbottabad as a possible Al Qaeda bolthole. America has already revealed that it was led to Bin Laden by tracking a man identified as his key courier.
We may have differing viewpoints as to the degree we support or condemn Mr. Assange’s publication of documents embarrassing to our rulers, but the possibility his actions may have been instrumental in forcing the US government’s hand at this early date prior to the 2012 elections could be seen as a “goodness thing”, at least by conservatives.
I should remind readers that with the passage of a similar period of time between George H.W. Bush leading the “liberation” of Kuwait (March 1991 94% approval rating) and his defeat at the polls in 1992, the parallel to 2012 cannot be lost on Democrat operatives. This is especially true when the Repubs will likely be taking a page from Mr. Carvill’s playbook: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
h/t Thomas Lifson
Monday, May 2, 2011
Aftermath
If there remains anyone in the United States who's unaware of the reports that Osama bin Laden was killed yesterday, your Curmudgeon doubts that he reads Eternity Road. So let's proceed at once to the "what now / what else?" part of the discussion.
1. Operational strangenesses.
The scene of the event was Abbottabad, Pakistan: a small city about 30 miles from Islamabad. Bin Laden was sheltering in a "palatial mansion" which some sources reported as "obviously built to hide someone of importance." A large detachment of Navy SEALs discovered the terrorist financier there with three adult companions, one of whom has been tentatively identified as his son. All were killed, though whether their deaths occurred in combat or afterward has not been reported.
Supposedly, there was a "large shootout." How many persons (other than the SEALs) were involved in the exchange of fire has not been reported. A crashed Navy helicopter was destroyed immediately afterward, and bin Laden's corpse then flown away to the dispatching warship. The identity of that warship has not been released. Total elapsed time of the raid: 40 minutes. That's time enough for a lot of things to happen and a lot of lead to fly, but apparently there was no involvement, and certainly no intervention, by the Pakistani brigade garrisoned in Abbottabad.
Bin Laden's corpse, which senior NBC newstwit David Gregory originally reported "is being prepared for burial in accordance with Islamic customs," was almost immediately dumped into the sea. Without information about the warship from which it was dumped, and what course it followed after taking custody of the corpse, that item can no longer be recovered, permanently defeating any attempt at verification of the story. So at this point, private citizens must choose whether or not to trust the Obama Administration's announcement; we have no other recourse.
2. Justice?
The Obama Administration has stated repeatedly that it regards our anti-terror measures as proceedings of the justice system, rather than warfare. Indeed, the attempts to arrange trials before American criminal courts for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other prisoners at Camp X-Ray were founded on the classification of their deeds as criminal acts rather than acts of war. Yet American forces raided the Abbottabad compound apparently without the express permission of the government of Pakistan: a country we nominally count as an ally.
Number One among all acknowledged causes of war is the dispatch of armed men into another country without the permission of that country's government. It's been so since the Westphalia treaties formalized the modern system of nation-states. The United States has therefore committed an act of war against Pakistan, whether or not further warlike events should follow from it.
But if Pakistan was as complicit in hiding and succoring bin Laden as his "palatial mansion" and its position deep in Pakistan and near to a Pakistani Army garrison suggest, then perhaps we are at war with Pakistan. In which case, will the many millions of dollars per year in foreign aid that nation receives from us -- quite a bit of it supposedly for anti-terrorism efforts -- continue or cease?
How does all the above match up with Obama Administration rhetoric and its overall conduct of foreign policy toward the Muslim Middle East? And how long will it take for our jubilation over the reported death of bin Laden to subside enough that we begin to ask such obvious questions?
3. The worldwide jihad.
Assuming that bin Laden really is dead, what will the practical consequences be?
- He never killed anyone with his own hand, as far as your Curmudgeon is aware;
- His original significance to the worldwide jihad was as an organizer and financier;
- That jihad was always founded on the aggressively imperialist doctrines of Wahhabist / Salafist Islam, rather than for the pursuit of any delimited secular objective;
- Each operation carried out by al-Qaeda had planners and leaders other than bin Laden;
- Inasmuch as bin Laden was dialysis-dependent, it seems certain that he had made arrangements for his fortune to remain available to al-Qaeda and its affiliates in the event of his death.
These considerations suggest that post-bin-Laden changes, if any, are unlikely to be positive. Indeed, it's quite possible that bin Laden's "martyrdom" at the hands of the hated Americans will galvanize militant Muslims to further anti-American and anti-Western violence. We're aware of several other powers within al-Qaeda; Ayman al-Zawahiri is the one expected to assume bin Laden's mantle as top boss. That would certainly be consistent with the warnings coming out of the State Department at this time.
So how about it, Gentle Reader? Do you feel safer?
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Doubt And Ecumenism: A Sunday Rumination
For Catholics, the Sunday immediately following Easter Sunday is Doubting Thomas's Day:
On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the disciples had gathered together and locked the doors of the place for fear of the Jewish authorities. Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. So Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. Just as the Father has sent me, I also send you." And after he said this, he breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone's sins, they are forgiven; if you retain anyone's sins, they are retained."Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord!" But he replied, "Unless I see the wounds from the nails in his hands, and put my finger into the wounds from the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will never believe it!"
Eight days later the disciples were again together in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you!" Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and examine my hands. Extend your hand and put it into my side. Do not continue in your unbelief, but believe." Thomas replied to him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are the people who have not seen and yet have believed." [John 20:19-29]
The theme of this Gospel reading, traditional for the second Sunday of the Easter season, echoes an earlier passage from John:
3:16 For this is the way God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son that everyone who believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 3:17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be saved through him. 3:18 The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. 3:19 Now this is the basis for judging: that the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil. 3:20 For everyone who does evil deeds hates the light and does not come to the light, so that their deeds will not be exposed. 3:21 But the one who practices the truth comes to the light, so that it may be plainly evident that his deeds have been done in God. [John 3:16-21]
The Protestant Christian denominations interpret the above two passages as emphasizing that faith plus the observance of the Ten Commandments suffices for salvation. The good works requirement taught by the Catholic Church, they claim, is not truly demanded of us.
Far be it from this dime-store theologian to attempt to unravel so long-standing a debate. I will note that among the sins of the Church in the medieval and Renaissance eras was the exploitation of the good-works doctrine to enrich clerics and prelates. That the theologians of the Schism should have rejected that teaching because of its misuse seems, in retrospect, all but inevitable. But I note this as well: Protestant Christians perform prodigies of charity each and every day. Indeed, they always have -- and I consider practice to stand above theory in this exceedingly practical matter.
But that's not exactly what I'm here to talk about on this fine Doubting Thomas Sunday morning.
Some Protestant denominations feel an unhealthful degree of disdain for Catholics and our Church. Sadly, there are Catholics who reciprocate that disdain. There are several reasons, not all of which apply to all the relevant denominations. In the main, they're founded on errors in theology and emphasis, but this is neither the time nor the place to delve into the details.
We are all Christians. That is, we all repose our faith in the Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
one in Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he was born of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered, died, and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.Amen.
Christ Himself delineated the path to salvation:
Now someone came up to him and said, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to gain eternal life?” He said to him, “Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.” “Which ones?” he asked. Jesus replied, “Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.” [Matthew 19:16-19]
To "love your neighbor as yourself" encompasses every variety of good works. It also forbids encroachments on one's neighbor's rights and prerogatives, no matter how good one's intentions. The personal puzzle each of us faces lies in the application of the dictum to our particular circumstances. For we know full well that many supposed "good works" wreak immense harm.
From which I infer that the "good works" doctrine is no true barrier between Catholics and our Protestant Christian brethren.
The Christian Ecumenism movement of the early Sixties foundered on a single shoal: the supreme authority of the Bishop of Rome, a.k.a. His Holiness the Pope. Protestants rejected that tenet of Catholic doctrine; indeed, it would have been a development for the ages had they accepted it. But the error actually lay with the Catholic Church, for "our side" insisted on an excessively broad interpretation of Pius IX's proclamation of the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Infallibility, shorn of all context, would imply that the Pope cannot be wrong about anything. But this is clearly a violation of a far more fundamental precept: the freedom of the human will, without which sin would be meaningless. The Pope's will is just as free as any other man's; therefore, he can be wrong -- and many popes have provided us with examples.
A somewhat more defensible version of papal infallibility is that doctrine that the Pope "cannot teach error." This is nearer the mark, but still not quite right. It leaves papal authority infinite in scope, capable of touching upon every aspect of existence. But the Pope's authority can never supersede that of Jesus Christ, Who created the papacy and elevated the Apostle Peter to that position as the first head of the Church. So a Pope who dared to contradict one of the Redeemer's teachings -- say, by proclaiming that theft is okay in a good cause -- would thereby be teaching error.
No, the only interpretation of papal infallibility that holds water is that the Pope will not teach error. That is: he can, but he won't -- and he won't because his proper domain of authority is over Christian theology. This is nicely confirmed by the only two explicit invocations of papal infallibility in all of Church history: the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the Blessed Virgin; and the Assumption of Mary bodily into heaven after her death.
The late Joseph Sobran commented on this in an especially charming way:
If I were Pope -- not that I’m seeking the office, or being considered for it -- I’d keep a slogan on my desk: “You’re infallible. Don’t blow it.”Most people, including Catholics, completely misunderstand the principle of papal infallibility. They think of it as a sort of magical privilege or power of the Pope, something like omnipotence or omniscience. It isn’t that sort of thing at all.
Infallibility is not a guarantee of papal wisdom. It’s a guarantee of protection against papal follies and foibles. It means that however flawed the Pope’s personal judgment or behavior may be, we can trust that it won’t permanently mislead ordinary believers in essential matters of faith and morals. Since God expects us to accept the Church’s authority, he assures us that that authority won’t draw us into error. It means that even if I were Pope, the Church would somehow survive.
In the nature of things, all human authority, including papal authority, is and must be limited. Among other things, the limits restrict the infallibility doctrine to the Pope alone. Any attempt by the Curia, by an Ecumenical Council, or by any individual or body other than the Pope to claim infallibility for some proposition is doctrinally felonious, detrimental to the Church, and to be condemned as such. Thus, when a body such as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith claims that this or that teaching is secured by infallibility, it attempts to usurp that attribute of the Pope, and should be castigated roundly for it. (Which is not to say that whatever doctrine it was promulgating must therefore be wrong.)
If more Protestants understood this, and if Catholics were a bit more humble about it, ecumenism would have better prospects in the years ahead of us.
If the connection between doubt and ecumenism seems murky to you at this point, I beg your pardon for my circuitousness. Doubt, as Pope Benedict XVI himself has told us, is inseparable from faith. The more we are expected to "accept on faith," the more numerous will be our occasions for doubt -- and quite likely, the more intense, as well. For the assertion that a vast number of propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved -- the defining characteristic of faith -- must be true "because I say so" shifts the focus from the propositions to him who posits them. An emphasis on the proclamations of a particular non-divine mortal, rather than on the teachings of the Redeemer, would be fatal to the Church. At any rate, I rather think that God would frown on it.
Christ Himself limited the imperative Commandments to a bare few, as illustrated in the episode of the "rich young man." More, He tied them to two Great Commandments which underpin the whole of natural-law morality; therefore, nothing that cross-cuts those Great Commandments can have moral authority. He who accepts the Nicene Creed as a truthful statement of the Christian mythos, and who accepts the imperatives of the Ten Commandments, is as thoroughly Christian as anyone of any denomination. And Christ's own explicitly expressed will is that we accept him:
So Pilate went back into the governor’s residence, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus replied, “Are you saying this on your own initiative, or have others told you about me?” Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people and your chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus replied, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my servants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jewish authorities. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Then Pilate said, “So you are a king!” Jesus replied, “You say that I am a king. For this reason I was born, and for this reason I came into the world—to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice." [John 18:33-37]
The foundation for Christian ecumenism -- the great ingathering of all Christ's followers into a single spiritual body -- lies in doubt: readiness to allow doubt of the pronouncements of this or that "authority" whenever they go beyond the Creed and the Commandments as Jesus Himself expressed them. That ingathering is becoming ever more urgent as the years pass.
May God bless and keep you all.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
What Was And Is No Longer
(With appropriate apologies to Plant, Page, Bonham, & Jones)
The redoubtable Joan of Argghh! points us to this extremely incisive John Hayward essay. The core of Hayward's thesis:
Collectivism finds its worst enemy among a large body of people whose fortunes are tied to the general health of the economy, and have enough votes to translate resistance into electoral defeat for social engineers.In other words, the middle class.
Please, please read the whole thing at once. Along with admirable brevity and punch, it has that rarest of virtues in this day of ubiquitous opinioneering: it makes the incomprehensible comprehensible, simply by telling us what we already know...or should.
Your Curmudgeon will wait.
As your Curmudgeon has said before, if you want to see a thing clearly, look away from it.
Look away from Barack Hussein Obama. Look instead at your community, your neighbors, and the trends in their movements and decisions. Look at your own scale of priorities and fears for the future. Look at the problems that confront your maturing children, if you have any. And of course, look at the price tags on the things you most regularly purchase.
Try to extend your viewport to cover the past ten years, roughly since the inauguration of George W. Bush. Annotate the graph with the most significant political events, and the changes in economic direction that followed them. Try to do as a tactical analyst would do: reason backward, from tactics to strategy to objectives to motives. What is the Left side of the American political spectrum, instantiated in our time as the Democrat Party, trying to achieve?
Doesn't the answer just leap off the page? Is John Hayward on the mark or not?
If your answer is yes, ask yourself this: Why would leftists want to achieve such a thing?
Americans have prided themselves for two centuries on our nation's lack of a class structure. That's sometimes narrowly interpreted to mean only that we have no hereditary royalty or nobility, but in truth it's about economic mobility: the lack of barriers to the acquisition (or dissipation) of wealth.
The basis of such barriers in class- or caste-ridden societies is the possession of privileges by some classes that are denied to others. Perhaps only nobles are allowed to own real estate. Perhaps only Brahmins are permitted to enter certain occupations. Perhaps the nieblankes must live and work in certain regions only, though the restriction packs them in almost too tightly to breathe. Some such barriers will exist, and crossing or finessing them will be punishable by law...the legislation and adjudication of which is of course the exclusive province of the privileged classes.
Even though we think of America as a classless society, we still speak of the "upper class," the "middle class," the "working class," and so forth. We recognize the lack of walls around those economic groups, and the transience of tenancy in any one of them, but the terms are nevertheless useful in analyzing social behavior and political trends. In particular, we use such demarcations to answer questions such as:
- Who will benefit most?
- Who is safe?
- Who will suffer?
...from some actual or proposed change in the legal environment. The answers are deemed useful in predicting changes in political trends and alignments. They become more useful as those classes rigidify and practical barriers to inter-class mobility arise.
It would have been hard to foresee, in 1896, that the ascendancy of Bryan's proto-inflationist forces to the helm of the Democrat Party would give rise to both the Federal Reserve Act and the Sixteenth Amendment. We didn't speak of classes back then, but of "sections" and "sectional interests:" the grange states; the mining states; the frontier territories; the industrial East and the agrarian South. Americans' geographic mobility was increasing rapidly at that time, due to the explosion of the railroads, which made demographic ties to "sectional interests" too weak to be analytically useful.
However, the creation of the Federal Reserve system and the income tax were themselves germinative. They put great power in the hands of a small group of men: power enough to create classes where none had previously existed. That power has been used irregularly over the decades since then, but every exertion has had the same general effect: to reduce Americans' economic mobility.
You might not want to believe it, Gentle Reader. Your Curmudgeon can hardly blame you. Nevertheless, it is so. Ponder it while your Curmudgeon fetches a fresh cup of coffee.
If you've been reading Eternity Road for a while, you may have noticed your Curmudgeon's occasional use of the term "master intellect." In case its meaning isn't clear, he means by it to refer to a truly great mind, one capable of penetrating to the heart of things, finding basic truths, and expressing, dramatizing, or actuating them for the rest of us. Such minds are exceedingly few in any era. Your Curmudgeon doesn't claim to sit among them, but he's bright enough to recognize them when they swing by on God's carousel.
One such master intellect, though underappreciated in his own years and since, was British naval historian and social analyst Cyril Northcote Parkinson:
There are many achievements, including some of the finest, which need more than a single lifetime for completion. The individual can compose a symphony or paint a canvas, build up a business or restore order in a city. He cannot build a cathedral or grow an avenue of oak trees. Still less can he gain the stature essential to statesmanship in a highly developed and complex society. There is a need for continuity of effort, spread over several generations, and for just such a continuity as governments must lack. Given the party system more especially, under the democratic form of rule, policy is continually modified or reversed. A family can be biologically stable in a way that a modern legislature is not. It is to families, therefore, that we look for such stability as society may need. But how can the family function if subject to crippling taxes during every lifetime and partial confiscation with every death? How can one generation provide the springboard for the next? Without such a springboard, all must start alike, and none can excel; and where none can excel, nothing excellent will result. Without sustained effort, without stability, no civilisation can for long survive.[From Parkinson's essay "Limits of Taxation, or Self-Defeat"]
This insight was and remains unequaled. Regardless of the uses to which tax monies are put, a tax system that directly touches individuals and families inherently embodies the power to create class barriers that are effectively unbreachable. Those who have will continue to have, while those who strive will struggle in vain to enter their number. As taxes rise and ramify, the walls that partition the classes rise and solidify. Note how the use of the tax-privileged foundation has secured the wealth of America's wealthiest families, while the rest of us are relegated to squeezing what we can from our property-tax and charitable-contribution deductions.
Nor is taxation the only political mechanism with this effect.
Large changes may come to pass that the existing thought-structure had never contemplated and have difficulty accommodating. With time, these changes alter habit and experience and create conflicts between the old customs and the new, apparent reality. Eventually, necessity demands that they be addressed by law and custom. As the conflict roils, residues of the old habits will serve to guide society in the interim, and some residue that does not much conflict may persist and survive long after the conflict has been settled, well into the new order and even beyond. But at some point the new way of things must prevail in producing a new social order where it collides with old customs. [Scott Angell]
The economic component of the "existing thought-structure" to which Esteemed Co-Conspirator Scott Angell refers -- how lucky Eternity Road is to have him writing here! -- was, at the time of the Progressive Ascendancy, summarizable in two words: free enterprise.
In 1890, no one could have imagined that unelected regulators would ever be conceded the power to decree what businesses were legal, where they might operate, what they might make, at what prices they might sell and to whom, or how they might relate to their workforces. The supremacy of contract, which is written into the Constitution:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
...was regarded as an absolute barrier to political interference in industry and commerce. The 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first counterexample to that charming notion. Others followed swiftly upon its heels, as America's first regulators were empowered to decide exactly what constitutes a "combination in restraint of trade."
The Wilson and New Deal eras greatly intensified the trend toward regulation by unelected bureaucrats. So also began the era of "constituent service," in which federal legislators became de facto ombudsmen for their constituents against the regulatory bureaucracy, de-emphasizing their role as lawgivers in favor of their new function as favor-granters. Step by step, the class barriers were built higher and thicker, as the era's wealthy found ways to exploit the new regime against actual and potential competitors, and the political class discovered the enormous possibilities inherent in the sale of regulatory exemptions.
Despite these developments, Americans maintained that ours remained a "free enterprise system." The Horatio Alger vision of the American economy was deeply driven into the nation, particularly our newest and most dynamic demographic: families derived from recent immigration. Both new and old Americans continued to plan and function as if they were economically free, as if "anyone can make it big" in America. Their enlightenment would be slow and painful.
We return at last to the Hayward essay:
Social engineers love to wax poetic about their eternal devotion to the middle class, but their highest goal is to subdue it. This can be done with dependency, which can be created by combining high unemployment with long-term public benefits that slowly mutate into an immense welfare program. The golden dream of socialists is the control of health care, which forever changes the relationship between citizens and their government, creating a permanent bureaucracy with roots that tap into blood and bone.The middle class can also be weakened by destroying its mobility. People driving around in cars are much more difficult to control than people riding in trains. The ability to work and shop over great distances raises the information state of a populace that finds itself caring about economic conditions beyond the visible horizon. The ability to move between cities and states allows irate citizens to withdraw their consent from local governments.
Destroying the value of property compromises the independence of the middle class. Owning property makes them much more conscious of municipal affairs, as they find themselves owning literal pieces of America. A monetary policy that wipes out purchasing power through inflation is also helpful for quenching that fiery spirit of free choice, especially as it pushes the lower levels of the middle class into poverty. Making the middle class smaller is a useful tool of social architecture.
Above all, the accumulation of vast government debt is a weight poised above the heads of the reluctant middle class. Eventually that debt will become unbearable… and if enough of the populace is so dependent on government spending that it cannot be reduced, debt becomes the irresistible leverage for tax increases on the middle class. It is mathematically impossible to obtain the money needed to pay off a $14 trillion national debt and $1.3 trillion deficit from the Evil Rich. The taxation of the middle class can be presented to them as regrettable, but inevitable. With those new tax dollars, old freedoms are lost. Taxation is a method of control – that’s why tax law runs into thousands of pages, and is riddled with countless exemptions and credits.
The policy initiatives of the Obamunists address all four of the above-delineated mechanisms of social control:
- Federal regulations and redistributions are multiplying as never before;
- The assault on energy and transportation is abrading our mobility;
- The alternation of debt issuances and currency inflation is destroying our savings;
- The Obamunist answer to the entire pyramid of our financial and fiscal woes is accelerated and broadened taxation.
This is not accidental. It is not unprecedented. Indeed, it's been inherent in the "progressive vision" ever since the Free Silver movement. It's the culmination of a century of social-fascist / neosocialist "progressivism."
It's the one and only logical terminus of state-corporate "crony capitalist" fascism under the guise of "representative democracy," the color of "law" made by bureaucrats, and the simpering rationale of "protecting the public safety" and "looking out for the poor." If your Curmudgeon may use George Orwell's terms, it aims to keep the High where they are and keep the Middle and Low "in their place."
And it is succeeding to an ever greater extent in doing so.
The problem is insoluble within the current legal and judicial framework.
Your Curmudgeon begs your indulgence here. He's assumed:
- That you, Gentle Reader, are roughly speaking "a member of the middle class;"
- That you have an interest, whether moral, practical, or aesthetic, in seeing freedom and the concomitant economic mobility restored to America;
- And that you would therefore concur with your Curmudgeon that the existing state of affairs and its de facto rigidification of our economic classes must be improved upon.
At this point we enter upon what your Curmudgeon has previously called a "connectedness problem." The threads of control are snarled together, and all have been supported -- most affirmatively, others tacitly -- by the judicial system. We face a Gordian knot. Like the original, it cannot be unraveled; it can only be cut.
Nor are the Obama Administration and its henchmen in Congress, nor the existing regulatory / redistributionist scheme the whole of the problem. We could fill every elective and appointive position in the federal government with an ardent conservative without making significant progress. Scott Angell has already told us the reason:
But at some point the new way of things must prevail in producing a new social order where it collides with old customs.
The "new way of things" has changed Americans' attitude toward the legitimate functions of government too greatly to be undone from the ballot box. We cannot simply "elect" a solution to the problem; we are the problem.
Imagine trying to persuade a Louisiana sugar-beet farmer that he should do without his tariff protection.
Imagine trying to persuade a New York dairy farmer that he should do without his subsidies.
Imagine trying to persuade an executive at a defense contractor that the defense budget has swelled beyond its proper bounds.
Imagine trying to persuade your neighbor that his college-age kids should do without their federal tuition assistance.
Imagine trying to persuade a typical homeowner that he should do without his mortgage interest and property tax exemptions.
Imagine trying to persuade doctors and lawyers that the licensure of the medical and legal professions should be undone.
Imagine trying to persuade any homemaker that there's no need for the Food and Drug Administration.
Needless to say, that's an incomplete list of the practical hurdles a dedicated freedom activist must surmount. It gets worse from there:
- Congress has effectively conceded the power to legislate to the executive branch.
- The courts have declined to consider the constitutionality of regulator-made law, of "executive orders" binding on private citizens, and (of course) of courts' assumption of the power to make public policy contradictory to the text of existing law.
- Usage has persuaded Americans, mainly through persistence, that this is all right and necessary, or at least acceptable, or failing that, inevitable. ("Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything!")
- Ours is the only country in the world in which even a vestige of de jure freedom remains -- and that vestige is being flensed away as you read this.
Inter-class mobility, and the essential anarchism of private society, cannot be restored in its entirety, nor even enlarged to a significant degree, unless the existing system is wholly dismantled -- and the mindsets of our people are now contrary to such a proposition.
And our social engineers and politico-economic elite -- almost entirely, as the late R. A. Lafferty might say, "men with the smell of the Pit on them" -- sit back, fingers interlaced behind their heads, and smile in quiet irony.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Burke, Veblen, and the New Feudalism: Part III-ii—Veblen the Economic Historian and Sociologist
The previous section focused mainly on the historical lead up to the modern social order and the conflict it has with the modern economic order. This section will focus on the state of the nature of that conflict as it stood at the turn of the 20th century.
***
The Modern Enlightenment Legal Order
According to Veblen, at the center of the Enlightenment legal order that eventually prevailed over the West are two nearly inviolable legal principles—the absolute right of property, with the implicit absolute right of usage, and secondly, the right to freedom of contract. Rarely are residues of the Medieval order allowed to impinge on these two absolute rights, at least in Veblen’s opinion of his day. Almost all other legal conventions are the logical corollaries of these two rights. Like the absolute right of property, the absolute right to freedom of contract conflicted with Medieval practices. This discussion is not particularly noteworthy except in one or two regards as to its practical effects on the pursuit of business.
The first is that the right to absolute freedom of contract creates a very restrictive legal climate towards injunctions attempting to enforce fair dealing in the marketplace. Apart from the prohibitions against force and fraud, freedom of contract and injunctions to ‘play fair’ are almost completely incompatible. The second is that competition against one’s business rivals is strictly limited to what may be accomplished through the use of contracts and property, for example, lawsuits or other applications of the legal system, fooling your customers or suppliers with tricky contracts, uses of property which interfere with a rival’s operations, like buying a plot of land and leaving it idle simply because it would be useful to a competitor. That would, of course, be in addition to the normal modes of economic competition—the pursuit of higher efficiency and better meeting of consumer demand.
These two legal absolutes form the bedrock of the modern business environment which Veblen calls the ‘pecuniary norm.’ Other important assumptions of this norm are that the value of money is effectively stable, and that all property and claims are inherently able to be liquidated to a cash value. Instability in the value of money would implicitly violate the notion of the inviolability of money contracts. The assumption of the ‘universal ability of liquidation’ is what allows the legal order to settle practically any dispute in a pecuniary fashion no matter how seemingly unrelated to property, such as a fine of restitution for assault or even wrongful death. That kind of thing would have resulted in a contest of arms in medieval times. (And somehow, the medieval way actually strikes me as more appropriate.)
Machine Processes and Machine People
According to Veblen, the advent of the machine process created a powerful social bifurcation that is a major source of its antagonism towards the Enlightenment order. Under the artisan economy, the tradesman was both the businessman and the laborer. The two aspects of business—the physical act of production and the negotiation of the markets—were united in one actor. But with the coming of the machine process there came a split between these two responsibilities as part of the new division of labor. Some tended to markets and the issues of property, ownership, and business transactions. This was Veblen’s ‘pecuniary class.’ The others focused solely on the mechanical aspects of production—the machine class.
The intensive use of machinery in the industrial process created a class of workers whose lives, and therefore habits of thought, revolved around the service and manipulation of machines. The focus and attention necessary to operate complex mechanical equipment led to habits of thinking that diverged from what had predominated for centuries. Certain skills and abilities became heavily emphasized while others were allowed to languish. Mechanical cause and effect became the nearly exclusive acceptable grounds of reasoning for a large fraction of the population, and particular gifts and skill in this area became highly prized.
The focus of academic inquiry, and scientific investigation in particular, shifted from mere causal and effectual relationships to the actual mechanical process by which cause produced effect. This is the period that produced Charles Darwin and his famous theory, and who can even guess whether his ideas would have caused such a stir if they had been articulated a century before, or if he even would have been able to articulate them for lack of background. The transition to the machine economy also marks the rise of the modern pursuit of science and the beginnings of its perceived dominance over the other academic disciplines.
In addition, the changes in production led to changes in lifestyle. For the artisan, tools and modes of production revolved around him and his life. His tools aided him and supplemented his output as he undertook production for the marketplace. But for the modern machine worker, his life revolves around the machines he serves. He is a supplementary factor of their production, not the other way around. Eventually, industrial production began to involve things like intensive shift work and urbanization, in many ways a radical and unnatural departure from the human norm. The industrial worker’s labor is often repetitive, he does not see the process of production through from beginning to end (and therefore has little invested in the Enlightenment notion of ownership in it), and he has very reduced human contact and minimal communication throughout the workday.
Notably, education also became mechanized, especially towards the end of the 19th century in the US. Schools were eventually to be run like factories, regimented and impersonal, with bells to signal shifts in the day. The notion that education should be practical and efficient, ‘like a business’ took hold, and subject matter began to change as schools shifted to prepare workers for what were likely to be mechanical professions. The classics, foreign language, and history were pushed aside. Science, mathematics, and even, ironically, entire ‘trade schools’ took their place.
The Enlightenment philosophy began to have less and less meaning for this class as life and work became more and more mechanized. As noted earlier, the nature of the work tended towards standardization and homogeneity, in output, in the process of production, and the lifestyle that participating in this division of labor afforded. This effect tended to commoditize labor. Such a state must be caustic to the spirit of individualism that characterized the Enlightenment. The notions of property ownership being rooted in the act of creation are almost totally irrelevant to such a system. The commoditization of wage labor tends to undermine the notion of freedom of contract. Property rights mean little to those without much property to speak of.
According to Veblen, the further the machine process carries things, the more the Enlightenment begins to sound like so much make-believe that does not reflect the real world. The new mechanical class begins to have very little connection to the pecuniary norm that forms the atmosphere of the business world around them, and often have very little skill in negotiating it, finding contact with it troubling and irksome.
The Pecuniary Class
Meanwhile, the other half of business operations—management, salesmen, lawyers, and generally, businessmen—have abandoned very nearly all connection to mechanical processes of production and have become thoroughly saturated in the customs and thought processes of the pecuniary norm, the established Enlightenment legal order. This class spends its time in the assertion of property rights, the acquisition and disposal of property, strategizing the best application of pecuniary maneuvering to business advantage, and the like. Often, the businessmen in charge have little or no idea how the processes under their control actually work, though they may be experts in the world of business affairs.
This group has a great deal ‘invested’ in the Enlightenment notions of natural rights, natural law, property and contracts, so to speak, and little patience for attempts to modify them. Among them, there is a strong tendency to ‘turn facts to account for the purposes of maintaining an accepted convention,’ rather than modifying convention to account for facts. Veblen characterizes the pecuniary class as operating more in the abstract and acting on the basis of de jure reasoning, while the mechanical class tends to the de facto and has a strong matter of fact point of view. The pecuniary class is inherently conservative, and perfectly comfortable with the pecuniary customs that dominate Western society within and outside of the business world, unwilling to change them.
Veblen saw the established governments of the West as being inherently pecuniary and operated towards pecuniary ends, even at the national level, such as in the conduct of war. But he also saw the pecuniary order eroding, as the value that the Enlightenment placed on equality gave the common man and his opinions considerable influence over government and law. As the common man was decidedly mechanical in outlook, so the government would sway. He saw the tension very visibly in his own day, citing, for example, the way that juries of common folk were regularly at odds with the higher courts.
The Tension
That, in a nutshell, is the unarticulated tension that Veblen thought dominated the political landscape of his day. It was somewhat related to class, in that one observes a class segregation about the tension, but was really about how to deal with an economic product of the Enlightenment order—the machine process—being incompatible with that order. Where the two collided, in particular the mechanical class desired custom and law to address the new circumstances. Veblen felt that the changes in life brought about by the machine process amounted to a mechanical form of coercion that was, nevertheless, unrecognized by a law that did not tolerate coercion by one party against another. This angered the mechanical class in a way that they could not clearly articulate. To them, if life was to be mechanical and commoditized, so ought the law to reflect it.
Veblen saw the socialist movement, syndicalism, and unionism, as well as the anarchist movement, as an attempt to address this tension, in the same way that the Enlightenment was an answer to the medieval tension against the artisan economy. However, while he did sympathize with the complaints of the mechanical class, he thought that socialism was theoretically unsound and a failure. The Enlightenment really did address the new circumstances and were in harmony with them while these movements did not.
He also thought that as the machine process ‘produced’ socialism, it also produced many of the social-ills that are often associated with that movement. He thought that the lifestyle and mechanical outlook it produced helped destroy the family, eroding old social bonds and the authority of the father, just as the Enlightenment had also weakened those bonds with its notions of equality and nearly eradicated the medieval notion of paternalistic leadership. He thought that as the Enlightenment had demoted God from King to Artisan in the popular mind, so the machine process had made Him an irrelevant relic and pushed an atheistic outlook on those that it touched. And since the mechanical mentality is not much given to ‘mythmaking,’ as these ‘conventions’ were corroded away to nothing, they would not be replaced with new ones.
I think that if Veblen were still alive today, he would probably see the history of the 20th century as the West’s continuing attempt to resolve the internal ideological inconsistencies and social tensions that were created and revealed by the machine process. I don’t think that he would believe that as yet it had come up with an acceptable answer.
Veblen, Prophet of Doom
Veblen considered how the situation might resolve itself, and in his prognostication one finds some frightening insights.
First, he notes that considering what ‘should’ happen is totally irrelevant to the question, as it provides no guidance as to happenings in the real world. The only realistic question was what ‘would’ happen. As such, he considered that the resolution, if there were to be one, would come as a ‘business proposition,’ as this is the source of initiative under the pecuniary order and the clearest mode of addressing the problems to the Enlightenment order created by the machine process. It was the system of business enterprise itself that was threatened most by it and thus the members of this quarter would have the most motivation to protect themselves.
The machine process was principally incompatible with business enterprise because it was corrosive to the pecuniary order that undergirded it. If a mode of business enerprise could be undertaken that was not incompatible with the machine process, such as, for example, a return to the artisan style of business, then the tension would be relieved. However, that was clearly not a solution, as any society that tried that would lose the material benefits of the machine process and quickly fall victim to the aggressions of its rivals.
The solution Veblen thought most likely was cartellization of business and militarization of society. Both were business propositions that addressed the central issues. Cartellization allowed outsize profits for businessmen in a stable fashion (assuming the cartel could be held together, of course) ensuring that there would be no ‘decapitalization’ threat to their abilities to squabble with each other and extract excess gains out of the economy, as is their wont. It represents a permanent institutionalization of their interests, as it were, giving them as a group more control over changes to the economic system. The militarization of society tends to stoke patriotism and a loyalist spirit to the the established social institutions, including the legal order, providing a buffer from the caustic sentiments of the mechanical class without actually addressing their concerns. It also provides another profit opportunity to the cartels who make it their business to provide armaments to government. He described the resulting system as ‘aggressive dynastic politics.’
In summary, Veblen basically predicted that, as the machine process was an existential threat to business enterprise, the present order of things as they stood in the late 19th century and very early 20th could not stand. The West would likely come under the sway of entrenched interests that would militarize society and pursue an aggressive foreign policy in response to the social strains created by the ravenous advances of the machine process. He was not sure, however, that the advancing machine process itself might not in some way undermine the entire system before the described entrenchment could take place or in some other way overwhelm the attempt, and left that avenue of change open as a strong alternative possibility.
Military-industrial complex, anyone? Did I mention that this was written in 1909?
Conclusion
I tend to be a generous reader where I see important insight, and when I do I usually struggle with strict objectivity. I have likely presented Veblen in a better light than a more critical reader might have, simply because I found some of his observations to be especially profound. That is not to say that I didn’t find anything I thought a little screwy. I just tend to overlook such blunders where I find something extraordinary. And who knows? Perhaps I am the one making the blunder. As always, and as the reader should have concluded at the outset of the first essay, anyone seeking a perfectly objective opinion is advised to read the original book himself.
Veblen’s historical explanation, however odd it may seem in light of other more accepted narratives (or what one might rather like to believe), appeals to me for several reasons. First and foremost, the major assertions are consistent with what I have learned from other sources that I trust, and consistent with what I observe in everyday life. He has clearly addressed issues that I thought were poorly or unrealistically dealt with by others, usually in a begging-the-question type manner, in a way that makes sense to me. In particular, his dealing with the issue of the spreading mechanical mindset and the erosion and demeaning of other human qualities, the integration and interplay of this change with other social changes, the parallels between the medieval-to-enlightenment transition with this one, as well as his explanation of the tension between much of society and the old Enlightenment norms, seems to me very insightful. In every other form I have encountered them, they were presented as isolated, unconnected phenomena that obviously are connected. These are all issues I think critical to the unfolding of 20th century history and of critical importance today, but are generally overlooked by modern investigators who seem to be blinded by the very effects these happenings have produced in our culture. Most people do not seem aware of them.
However, as my own understanding and mental retention of the specifics of history is less than perfect and I tend to favor the subject of economics, I acknowledge that I may have been quite too generous in this regard. Sometimes facts and ideas I encounter in a work like this are actually widely known and obvious to people with more familiarity with the subject, but they are new to me. Most of Burke’s arguments that he considered ‘obvious’ I found to be his most powerful.
Just as a disclaimer, I have made some additions and subtractions to my recounting of Veblen’s views where I thought it would make for more insightful or approachable reading, and I have also retained a number of ideas even where I disagreed so long as I didn’t think them too outrageous or irrelevant to the topic. Again, if you want it straight from the horse’s mouth, go get it.
Next time, I’ll start doing my own analysis of things.
The Birth Certificate
Your Curmudgeon is amused. But then, your Curmudgeon is rather frequently amused. When he detects some self-important public figure attempting to rewrite the laws of nature, his amusement reaches its highest heights.
A thousand truths do not mark a man as a truth-teller, but a single lie marks him as a damned liar....Lying to other people is your business, but I tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind. [Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy]
The White House is currently occupied by a liar of such regularity and gracelessness as to make Bill Clinton seem an avatar of sincerity. He's lied to the American people shamelessly, relentlessly, for more than three years. Indeed, his first impulse, when confronted by some politically unfavorable development, is to lie about it. As if more were necessary, he's enlisted an immense cadre of enablers and supporters to back his lies: huge crowds lining his path, cheering and complimenting the emperor on his new clothes.
But no politician can continue submitting lies to the American public and expect them to be universally accepted as statements of fact, once he's been caught in one...and Barack Hussein Obama has been caught in several.
The late, great Cyril Northcote Parkinson told us that "Trust me" is something only politicians say. We knew it before he said it, and we ought to know it still better today. What we ought to have learned from our domestic experiences is that politicians vary in their propensity toward deceit and their skill at bringing it off. The former is about a man's personal level of venality; the latter depends mainly on his general intelligence and the degree of his respect, or lack thereof, for his constituents.
Obama's lies to America haven't just been numerous; they've also been extraordinarily clumsy, unprecedentedly so for an occupant of the Oval Office. It hardly matters that he never admits to having lied or distorted the truth; he's been caught enough times that those who don't have a personal or ideological interest in his tenure know to inventory the silverware when he leaves the room. We extend him no presumption of truthfulness.
And so, after three years' dodging of the question, issuing numerous evasions and dissimulations, and dispatching his cat's-paws to trumpet vicious slanders about those with perfectly legitimate questions, he has at long last released a long-form birth certificate...yet the doubts about his origin and antecedents are barely reduced. Old-Media commentators friendly to him demand to know how the "controversy" can possibly continue, after he's provided this "irrefutable" proof of his natural-born American citizenship.
He who is predisposed to believe will believe; he who is indisposed to believe will doubt...especially after he's been given so much reason to do so.
Obama and his supporters have poured huge sums of money and considerable legal expertise into concealing the substantive details of his past. His long-form birth certificate was merely one item of many. But there were several matters he could not conceal:
- His childhood in Indonesia;
- His youthful association with noted Communist Frank Marshall Davis;
- His repeated use of shady electoral tactics to force his opponents to withdraw;
- His record in the Illinois and United States Senates;
- And his association with Tony Rezko, Alex Giannoulias, Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, and of course Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn.
Those blots, combined with his unusual secretiveness about his academic career and his prior writings, gave Americans ample reason to withhold the presumption of sincerity. At this point, he has no chance of establishing himself as trustworthy ab initio. In that light, the incredulity that the PDF image of his long-form birth certificate is not being universally treated as having settled once and for all the matter of his Constitutional eligibility strikes your Curmudgeon as beyond naivety.
It's long been said that in the great roster of "popular" lies, three such indisputably reign over all others for frequency of use. However, Barack Hussein Obama's repetitions of "let me be clear" have demoted the #3 entry on that list to a lesser place...arguably a good thing, as the former holder of that position was unsuited for printing at a family-friendly Website.
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it -- no matter if I have said it! -- except it agree with your own reason and your own common sense." -- Gautama Boddhisattva (the Buddha)
The Birth Certificate Probably Isn’t
A FAKE (but way to keep that controversy alive, guys!), but still and all, doesn’t it say something that SOMEbody couldn’t resist putting lipstick on that pig?
Actually, I suspect the purpose of the delay was to defuse the issue for the long run. Obama’s established a precedent—you don’t have to prove your citizenship status to the People to run; you only have to satisfy the political establishment that it’s a no-win proposition to challenge you on the issue.
Next step is to moot the issue of citizenship altogether.
Anyone have an over-under for how many election cycles it will be before we elect an openly noncitizen without having amended the Constitution?
Previously posted at BabyTrollBlog
Horses Laugh When
VALERIE JARRETT asserts that “Nobody will debate [Obama’s] intelligence…”
::raises hand diffidently::
I will.
The man is a moron. Not an articulate, intelligent man, but a glib and clever moron, a trained seal, barking out by rote the pat shibboleths his teachers drummed into his thick skull-full-of-mush. My evidence? Do I really need to repeat it? He espouses the stupidest, most evil political ideology known to the mind of Man. The two—collectivism and intelligence—are mutually exclusive.
Plus: take him off teleprompter. Take away his script and he goes all hem and haw. Not only that, but he’s not even bright enough to halfway memorize the script well enough to fake it. He is an empty vessel into which others pour words. This is not a bright, articulate man, but a trained monkey. And a poorly-trained monkey at that.
All of which makes me want to question Ms Jarrett’s competence as well.
Cross posted at BabyTrollBlog.
