Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Good God, Not Another One!

Yet another story, "Upgrade," has been added to the Fiction section.

Inference Versus Assumption

When all the errors are in the bank's favor, you can be pardoned for thinking there's more at work than sloppy arithmetic. -- your Curmudgeon

As your Curmudgeon expected, from the moment CBS released the investigative report on the "RatherGate" Killian-memo scandal, the Blogosphere was all over it. The trend of Web opinion is that the Thornburgh-Boccardi report is a marginal whitewash. That is, it touches on all the salient facts and processes involved in the notorious "60 Minutes" attempt to sway the presidential election, but daintily refrains from concluding that anything so crass as a political motive was at work. In fact, the report expressly disclaims the intent to imply that Mary Mapes, Dan Rather, et al. were acting out of political motives.

Your Curmudgeon has not done his own investigation of this sordid business, and so will refrain from comment on the substantive findings of the report. However, he's fascinated by the enveloping question that's gone unasked to this point: Since a man's motives are an internal matter that can never be known by direct means, what sort of objective evidence is sufficient to conclude fairly that his motives in some known circumstance were of a particular sort?

One must note that a hefty portion of the Internet Commentariat disbelieved the "Killian memos" allegations before the examinations performed by Charles Johnson and others revealed them to be forgeries. That spate of disbelief and denial arose from a predisposition to discount negative stories about President Bush, or from CBS's and Dan Rather's history of hostility toward the Bush family and the Republican Party, or both. In other words, it was not based on evidence, but on established patterns of behavior that tipped the credibility balances toward Dubya and away from his detractors.

Patterns are the raw material of all inferences. In mathematics, this form of reasoning is called induction. When it adheres to certain constraints, its conclusions are regarded as perfectly sound. However, those constraints are not perfectly reproducible in the material world. When we infer things there, we'll always risk having mistaken a "glitch in the curve" for a pattern that would apply however long and hard we might watch.

The "glitch in the curve" problem is prominent in economics. Many luxury goods, when introduced, experience price increases even as their market supply increases. This would appear to contradict the Law of Supply and Demand. However, this counter-intuitive pattern doesn't last. As the supply continues to expand, the price of the good levels off and then drops, falling at last to well below its price at introduction. The early price increases were a temporal effect: discretionary income was being redirected over a measurable time interval toward a good whose makers at first underestimated the demand it would elicit.

But those glitches have nonetheless been used as the foundation stones of several nonsensical economic theories. Thorstein Veblen based his theory of "conspicuous consumption" entirely upon them. Because Veblen's theories could be put to the support of socioeconomic re-engineering schemes, they were in turn taken up by a multitude of politicians and activists, and became a core component of the New Deal. All this despite the inevitable restoration of the usual pattern of increases in supply causing declines in price, if only one were to watch long enough.

Veblen wanted what he proposed to be true. So did his followers, both in the halls of academe and the halls of the State. So he blinded himself to the counter-evidence.

With regard to the Killian forgeries, the "curve" of relevance is the behavior of CBS News, Dan Rather, and Mary Mapes toward the Bush family and the Republican Party over the past thirty years. Over that period, this curve is "un-glitched": CBS, Rather, and Mapes have exhibited only hostility, sometimes extreme enough to be called hatred, toward the Bushes and the GOP, while extending the most unctuous courtesy and praise to their political and ideological opponents. The "curve" cannot be extended further into the past, and, because of Mapes's dismissal and Rather's reduction in status, cannot be continued smoothly into the future.

Do we have enough data to infer with confidence that CBS and its employees were pursuing a political agenda? Your Curmudgeon thinks so. However, if the "curve" were appreciably shorter, he'd be proportionally less sure. If CBS News as an institution less regularly denigrated conservative ideas and their promoters, that would weaken the inference still further; political ideologues determined to grind an axe while at work would have a much harder time hanging on and rising within a truly evenhanded news organization.

As matters stand, the "curve" is consistent in all its components. We who believe that Rather, Mapes, and various potentates behind the scenes really were pursuing an agenda of political harm to the president cannot fairly be accused of assuming our conclusions. But it would pay to remember that the curves of other organizations will not always be this clear. Nor should inferences fairly drawn about CBS News be transported without modification or reexamination to the backs of other news media. Let each have the right to blot his own escutcheon.

Another Piercing Robert Spencer Column

Today at FrontPage, Spencer notes that Muslim gratitude toward the U.S. for our tsunami relief efforts would go against the grain of history:

...when disaster of any kind strikes, it is all too frequently interpreted as having been caused by a failure on the part of the people to be Islamic enough. So the result is a renewed fervor, and new miseries for non-Muslims inside and often also outside the Islamic state in question. It is beginning to look as if the tsunami may be another occasion of this. There is nothing wrong with focusing and reforming one’s actions in the face of the reality of death; the potential problem here is that when the Muslims “wake up,” as they are being called to do now in Indonesia, they will direct their attentions not only to matters of individual piety, but to that other Muslim obligation, jihad.

After Mt. Tambora erupted in 1815, killing 100,000, a Christian Science Monitor report notes that “imams on the northwest coast of Java preached that the eruption was a sign of Allah’s displeasure at infidel rule, and urged a violent jihad, according to Sartono Kartodirdjo, am Indonesian historian.”

Likewise, after the eruption of Mt. Krakatoa in 1883, according to historian Simon Winchester, “the Dutch made this superhuman effort to bring relief to the area because they were aware of the significance of the event and that the Muslim clerics were quickly making political capital from the event.” But the relief changed no hearts, and Muslims mounted a violent assassination campaign against Dutch officials.

Several powerful minds have noted that the false appearance of gratitude to conceal true envy and resentment, rather than genuine appreciation for boons in time of need, is the norm even among non-Muslims. Helmut Schoeck's monumental work Envy: A Theory Of Social Behaviour deals with this phenomenon in depth. Americans, long prone to generous efforts in the hope that the beneficiaries will thereafter like us, ought to give the matter some thought.

If We’re “Anti-Choice”…

...does that make them "anti-life"?

Even fascist Faux News and the Moonie Times agree that the bizarre creature brutally extracted from a murdered woman last week was a fetus. Not a human child, mind you, but a F-E-T-U-S. Yet despite a media consensus to the contrary, the anti-choice crowd still insists on referring to the damned thing as a "baby". A poor womyn is killed and a fetus is on the loose, yet all these repugs can think about is how to exploit this tragedy in order to undermine Roe v. Wade.

Now, one can't reasonably expect either evenhandedness or dispassion from a Website whose subhead motto is "Because Bush is to blame for everything," but your Curmudgeon would say the above goes a little beyond the call of political advocacy.

But leaving matters of taste to one side, this citation illustrates beautifully how important the linguistic high ground is to the national discourse. The writer used the terms "anti-choice" and "fetus" because they conduce to her position. Obviously, if the victim was a "fetus" rather than a baby, then abortion is all about choice, and no "anti-choice" outsider should have the right to interfere.

The pro-life position has been kept out of the public discourse largely by linguistic tactics of this sort. It's made its recent gains from the accumulation of tragic history surrounding abortion -- the many thousands of women who now bitterly regret having had one and are willing to admit it -- and from the invalidation of the pro-abortion crowd's linguistic choices by way of the inexpensive sonogram. Once glimpsed, however darkly, it becomes all but impossible to refer to the creature growing in the womb as anything but a baby.

As with the earlier discussion of "war" versus "insurgency," it pays to choose one's words carefully.

(Reference courtesy of columnist Doug Bandow at TownHall.)

UPDATE: Andrea Harris notes that "Blame Bush!" is a parody site. Well, yes. But that doesn't invalidate the linguistic points made above. As Inspector Clouseau might have said in such a case, "I did that on purpose."

Monday, January 10, 2005

Do They Realize What They Sound Like?

The indispensable Middle East Media Research Institute has provided translations of several statements about the Indian Ocean tsunami from leading Islamic clerics. First, we have Friday’s sermon on Palestinian Authority TV by Sheik Ibrahim Mudeiris:

What happened there, in South-East Asia … we ask God to have mercy upon all the martyrs - for he who dies by drowning is a martyr. We ask God to have mercy upon all the Muslims who died there. Allah willing, they are martyrs. But, don’t you think that the wrath of the earth and the wrath of the sea should make us reflect? Tens of thousands dead, and many predict that the number will be in the hundreds of thousands. We ask God for forgiveness. When oppression and corruption increase, the law of equilibrium applies. I can see in your eyes that you are wondering what the ‘universal law of equilibrium’ is. This law is a divine law. If people are remiss in implementing God’s law and in being zealous and vengeful for His sake, Allah sets his soldiers in action to take revenge.

The oppression and corruption caused by America and the Jews have increased. Have you heard of these beaches that are called ‘tourists’ paradise?’ You have all probably heard of Bangkok. We read about it, and knew it as the center of corruption on the face of this earth. Over there, there are Zionist and American investments. Over there they bring Muslims and others to prostitution. Over there, there are beaches, which they dubbed ‘tourists’ paradise,’ while only a few meters away, the locals live in hell on earth. They cannot make ends meet, while a few meters away there is a paradise, ‘tourists’ paradise.’

Do you want the earth to turn a blind eye to the corrupt oppressors? Do you want the sea… Do you want the sea to lower its waves in the face of corruption that it sees with its own eyes?! No, the zero hour has come.

Second, here is Ibrahim al-Bashar, an assistant to Saudi Arabia’s Justice Minister, speaking on Saudi/ UAE Al-Majd TV:

Whoever reads the Koran, given by the Maker of the World, can see how these nations were destroyed. There is one reason: they lied, they sinned, and [they] were infidels. Whoever studies the Koran can see this is the result…

These countries, in which these things occurred – don’t they refrain from adopting Allah’s law, which is a form of heresy? Man-made laws have been chosen over Allah’s law, which has been deemed unsuitable to judge people?! Whoever does not act according to Allah’s law is a heretic, that’s what Allah said in the Koran. Don’t these countries have witchcraft, sorcery, deceitfulness, and abomination?”

Third, here is Saudi Professor Sheikh Fawzan Al-Fawzan, again on Saudi/UAE’s Al-Majd TV:

“These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities, and even entire countries, are Allah’s punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims....

The fact that it happened at this particular time is a sign from Allah. It happened at Christmas, when fornicators and corrupt people from all over the world come to commit fornication and sexual perversion. That’s when this tragedy took place, striking them all and destroyed everything. It turned the land into wasteland, where only the cries of the ravens are heard. I say this is a great sign and punishment on which Muslims should reflect.

Fourth, we have Saudi Cleric Muhammad Al-Munajjid, also on Saudi/UAE’s Al-Majd TV:

The problem is that the [Christian] holidays are accompanied by forbidden things, by immorality, abomination, adultery, alcohol, drunken dancing, and … and revelry. A belly dancer costs 2500 pounds per minute and a singer costs 50,000 pounds per hour, and they hop from one hotel to another from night to dawn. Then he spends the entire night defying Allah....

It was said that they were tourists on New Year’s vacation who went to the crowded coral islands for the holiday period, and then they were struck by this earthquake, caused by the Almighty Lord of the worlds. He showed them His wrath and His strength. He showed them His vengeance. Is there anyone learning the lesson? Is it impossible that we will be struck like them? Why do we go their way? Why do we want to be like them, with their holidays, their forbidden things, and their heresy?”

All of the above statements came from major figures in the Islamic world, and were given implicit government sanction. The bloodthirsty lunacy of them does not appear to have bothered the makers, the hosts, or the broadcasters in the slightest.

Your Curmudgeon is as tired of saying it as you probably are of hearing it, but it must be said until it is accepted throughout the West: there can be no accommodations made with a people who believe such things. If admitted into our lands, they will wreak our destruction—and throughout Western Europe, that is exactly what we see in progress at this time.

Sunday, January 09, 2005

“Ve Haff Vays Uff Making You Talk!”

First, let's get one thing perfectly, indisputably clear: Your Curmudgeon is against torture, except when he's not.

The problem of torture is much like David Friedman's classic problem of property rights opposed to a life-saving action. This problem comes in two forms:

1. Smith, a non-swimmer, has fallen into the water and will drown unless he saves himself by climbing onto a private jetty. However, as he does so, the jetty's owner demands that he cease his trespass at once, on pain of legal consequences.
2. A machete-wielding madman is rampaging through a crowd, killing indiscriminately. Jones, a crack shot, could take him out, but the only firearm available is a rifle lying in plain sight on the front porch of a private home -- a home owned and occupied by a man who has let it be widely known that he will prosecute anyone who touches his property.

Reasonable persons would not halt at the legal threats of the misanthropic property owners in the above posers. For one thing, the preservation of innocent life is a higher priority than the protection of property rights. For another, no jury in the world would convict either Smith or Jones for a minor act of trespass committed in the circumstances described. But from a rights perspective, there is no question that to effect a greater good, a man's rights as they would be understood in normal circumstances must be violated.

Such questions fall within the sphere called "lifeboat ethics": the study of conditions wherein it is impossible to respect all the rights we would honor under normal circumstances, because the consequences would be too horrific to bear. The subject gets its name from the classic case of two men adrift in a lifeboat without any provisions. If neither acts, both will die, but if one kills and eats the other, he might live to be rescued. In such a situation, respecting the otherwise unchallengeable right to life guarantees that the worst possible outcome -- two deaths -- will arise.

The conditions that obtain before a terrorist act certainly look normal. At any rate, they don't much resemble a provisionless lifeboat. If a criminal suspect has a right to his life, surely he has a right not to be tortured, or threatened with torture. But we concede that under certain circumstances, a man can forfeit all his rights, including his right to life. Would such a forfeiture open the gates to torture?

And if the object of our attentions has not forfeited his nominal rights, but we have compelling reasons to believe that he possesses information critical to preventing a terrorist atrocity, what then? Just how good, how far beyond reasonable doubt, does "compelling" have to be? Who shall decide, and by what post hoc standards and procedure shall we judge him?

There are no easy answers. Nor have we addressed the problem in its entirety.

Torture is not merely an invasion of a man's bodily integrity in a quest for information. It's also a willful demotion of that man to a subhuman status. It requires that the torturer see his subject as a thing to be manipulated rather than a being with moral and spiritual status equal to his own. This applies equally to those who authorize or defend the practice. In its effects on its practitioners, torture is quite similar to slaveholding: it degrades all it touches, even when an airtight case can be made that there's no other possible way to save innumerable innocent lives.

This is not a path to be trodden lightly. But as with lifeboat situations, if one is placed on it by forces beyond one's control, the questions involved must be faced squarely.

Perhaps the best guidance ever offered on the subject comes from a novel, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime And Punishment. Early in the book, a conversation between a pseudo-revolutionist and a policeman revolves around the justice of killing an old woman known in her neighborhood as a miser and a usurer. The young firebrand is arguing passionately in defense of such a deed when the policeman hauls him up short with a pointed question: would you do it yourself? For "If you would not do it yourself, there's no justice in it."

Imagine for a moment that Osama bin Laden, archfiend of Islamic terrorism, were in your power. Imagine further that you had excellent but not perfect reasons to believe that he could tell you of terrorist plots already in motion, which if consummated would reap thousands of lives, a toll on the scale of Black Tuesday. Would you torture him to learn what he knows, or would you refrain? If the former, would you expect your actions to be judged according to your intentions or your results? If the latter, what would your reason be?

There's a continuum between crude physical torture and other sorts of pressure. For example, there are several drugs which deaden the inner censor, allowing a skilled interrogator to elicit information from a captive that the captive would normally withhold. There are discomforts and threats that leave no lasting mark, but which can exert a great leverage upon a man's mind, according to his convictions and conditioning. There are even Mission Impossible-style deceits that can trick a man into revealing what he knows before he can deduce that he's the star of a charade. Measured against the strict standards of American criminal justice, all of these are beyond the pale. But if thousands of lives were at stake, what then?

To complicate the moral equations to unbearability, we have this: a disaster averted can often be characterized a posteriori as something that might not have happened anyway, or that might have been thwarted by other, more savory means. It's Monday-morning quarterbacking, to be sure, but it's a common consideration in the thoughts of police, FBI agents, intelligence operatives, and military interrogators.

For the present, a man who has tortured a suspect for information should have to stand trial for his deeds. He should have to justify his actions to a civilian jury, just as would any other man accused of a heinous crime. His prosecutors should have to convince that jury that torture was not the only way, or that the carnage the torturer foresaw and strove to avert existed only in his fantasies. And twelve good men and true should have to ponder whether, in the circumstances faced by the accused, they would have done it themselves.

There are no palatable alternatives.

Saturday, January 08, 2005

Trust? Trust Who?

A significant number of Americans feel that non-Muslims should grant "ordinary" Muslims a large benefit of the doubt, despite the bloodthirsty proclamations of their creed and the horrific deeds of their co-religionists, which few Muslims will rise to condemn. But shouldn't extensions of trust be in both directions?

The west is often criticised by Muslims for many reasons, such as allowing women go to work.

But shouldnt the west also recieve praise because its always them who intervenve when muslims r being tortured,they stopped Milosovic kiling muslims and sent their own troops to the country,they r usually the first to send aid when theres a flood,they r also intervening in Isreal and condeming them killing Muslims ,so should we appreciate their efforts or not?

Answer 1394:

In simple the Kuffaar can never be trusted for any possible good they do. They have their own interest at heart.

Was salaam

Mufti Ebrahim Desai
FATWA DEPT.

In your Curmudgeon's practicum, they who will not trust are themselves unworthy of trust. Your mileage may vary.

(Link courtesy of Little Green Footballs.)

Yet Another Story Posted

"Discount" has been posted to the Fiction section.

A Pit Lined With Spikes

With the recent mini-resurgence in religious sentiment and general acceptance thereof, germinated in part from the presence of an authentic Christian in the Oval Office and in part from a backlash against let-'er-rip moral relativism in the entertainment media, we approach an old hazard in a freshly cleaned and pressed habit, one that has undone the best impulses in Man repeatedly over the millennia.

Wait for it. Your Curmudgeon wants to develop a couple of supporting ideas first. It's quite possible that they're crucial to the survival of the world, so allow him a few paragraphs, would you please?

---

The Judaic ethic, prominent contemporaneously with Socratic and Confucian philosophy, was the first serious advance in human relations recorded in written history. It set down a small set of firm principles of conduct, the violation of which put one in a state of moral deficit that would require expiation, and sometimes criminal penalties as well. Those principles have come down to us as the Ten Commandments.

The Commandments are largely a set of prohibitions: "thou shalt nots" that set boundaries around the rights of every man. Christ's enunciation of the positive dictum to act with love toward our "neighbors" -- more concretely, those whom God has placed in our path -- completed Judaism's moral edifice and gave Christian thought its unique character.

Atheists, agnostics, and devotees of other religions, regardless of their quarrels with Christian theocosmogony, seldom dispute the soundness of Christian moral-ethical theory. It would be pointless; when practiced, the theory works brilliantly, better than any contending system of moral thought. It is responsible, among other things, for that unique success in human relations best known as the United States of America.

In point of fact, the closest contender to Christian ethics is the Randian ethics imbedded in Ayn Rand's aggressively atheist philosophy of Objectivism. Strikingly, Christian moral-ethical thought and Randian thought correspond on almost every significant matter concerning relations with others. The sole exception is that Randians put less emphasis on reaching out to the less fortunate than Christians, seeing the spectre of altruism lurking behind it. In this, they may be wiser than some less-than-thoughtful Christians, who risk transgressing the first-do-no-harm principle by ill-considered charitable efforts.

Thus, we have empirical evidence that Christian belief is not a requirement for a virtuous, entirely praiseworthy life.

---

It is a tenet of Christian doctrine that Christ's dictum that "no man shall come to the Father except through Me" is to be interpreted as an allusion to His moral-ethical dispensation -- the Commandments plus the command to "love your neighbor as you love yourself," rather than as a requirement that a man must profess Christian allegiance to be saved. This is in keeping with a fundamental requirement of justice: that no man shall be held to account for conditions he cannot control.

What conditions might be meant?

• Never having heard the Gospels.
• Having had the Gospels presented to one by a negligent, incompetent, or malicious source.
• Encystment in an environment so hostile to Christian belief that it's effectively impossible to adopt it.

No doubt there are others. Christian doctrine demands that persons so afflicted, if they live morally worthy lives, must have the same access to salvation as any actively believing Christian. Any other premise would contradict the premise that God is both just and merciful.

The tragedy of such situations is unmixed. But that tragedy reaches only the sufferer's temporal life. The moral order of the universe is deducible from the bones of reality itself. There's no impassable barrier to comprehending it or living by it, even in the absence of the Gospels. The empirical evidence for this is irrefutable.

Christ's mission on Earth was not merely to proclaim His Covenant. It was also to underline it with the most emphatic conceivable and I mean it, by his submission to torture and death at the hands of His enemies.

---

Your Curmudgeon has witnessed some unfortunate things lately: Christians expressing a degree of spiritual arrogance that's both unbecoming to a disciple of Christ and counterproductive to our shared faith. As with so many other things, C. S. Lewis captured the danger of it brilliantly in The Screwtape Letters:

My dear Wormwood,

I have been in correspondence with Slumtrimpet who is in charge of your patient's young woman, and begin to see the chink in her armour. It is an unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief; and it consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous....It is not, in fact, very different from the conviction she would have felt at the age of ten that the kind of fish knives used in her father's house were the proper or normal or "real" kind, while those of the neighboring families were "not real fish knives" at all.

It is always the novice who exaggerates. The man who has risen in society is overrefined; the young scholar is pedantic....Can you get him to imitate this defect in his mistress and to exaggerate it until what was venial in her becomes in him the strongest and most beautiful of the vices -- Spiritual Pride?

This is a caution of immense importance. With recent indications that the sociopolitical contempt for (and in some cases militant hostility to) Christianity is falling back, the lure of spiritual pride, and the concomitant temptation to indulge in dismissal of or contempt for non-Christians, looms at our backs. There is no danger of the spirit that's more immediate, or more grave.

Actually, there never is. But at times like these, one must keep firmly in mind that a fully virtuous life is eminently possible to non-Christians, agnostics, and outright atheists, and that professing Christians have been known to commit every sin and outrage in history's catalog. Worse, religious arrogance always rebounds against those who espouse it, and against their faith as well. What weapon have the secularists found more effective against Christian allegiance than the arrogance of Christians -- the insistence that ours is the only way -- the belief that Christian convictions ought to be written into the statute law that governs Christian and non-Christian alike?

Eternity Road has a number of agnostic and atheist readers. Your Curmudgeon prizes them quite as much as his Christian devotees. No doubt every weakness known to Man is present in all of us. No doubt the full range of Earthly temptations, and the surrenders to them, are uniform among us as well.

Gentle reader, whatever your convictions or affiliations, do not preen yourself for your faith. Do not indulge in invidious religious comparisons among generally virtuous men. Do not raise yourself to a height above your brethren. You would put your soul at stake for it.

Christ Himself did not. How, then, dare we?

Friday, January 07, 2005

The Quilt Part 3: Writers and Readers

In the previous essays in this little series, your Curmudgeon proposed a new mindset for freedom activists, and spent some time exploring both its nature and its natural enemies. In his ruminations over how to continue the exploration, his thoughts caught on a couple of home truths that suggest that it's not just our mindsets that deserve some refurbishment:

Ideas can only be fought with better ideas. -- Ayn Rand

Nevertheless, in the inexplicable universal votings and debatings of these Ages, an idea or rather a dumb presumption to the contrary has gone idly abroad, and at this day, over extensive tracts of the world, poor human beings are to be found, whose practical belief it is that if we "vote" this or that, so this or that will thenceforth be. Practically men have come to imagine that the Laws of this Universe, like the laws of constitutional countries, are decided by voting. It is an idle fancy. The Laws of this Universe, of which if the Laws of England are not an exact transcript, they should passionately study to become, are fixed by the everlasting congruity of things, and are not fixable or changeable by voting! -- Anonymous, presented in Herbert Spencer's The Proper Sphere Of Government

Which is to say: When our legislators, in their guaranteed-to-be-less-than-infinite wisdom, convene to confer, confute, and ultimately pass laws by which the rest of us must live, what is their mindset? What is their governing set of assumptions and moral compass, by which they approach the issues brought before them? And most important, what can freedom activists do to alter that mindset: to make it set individual liberty as the supreme political value, only to be abridged when the survival of the nation is threatened?

A pretty problem!

---

As Mr. Anonymous -- not to be confused with Joe "Anonymous" Klein, author of Primary Colors -- stated above, the laws of the universe are "fixed in the everlasting congruity of things," which Congress can neither repeal nor modify. Legislated laws that are crosscut by natural laws will create chaos, no matter what the intentions of the legislators. This is the first and greatest of the reasons why writing laws to "send a message," when the legislature knows full well that they cannot be enforced, is a vain and idle folly.

The second reason not to write laws that contravene natural law is that their second-order effects, operating on men's minds through example and incentive, are guaranteed to be destructive. Those who attempt to comply with them will discover that they're trying to "swim against the current." They'll expend their resources of energy and enterprise to no avail. Some will become embittered. Others not so public-minded will choose persons of less scruple to emulate.

The third reason to resist temptations to legislative overreach is that bad law, which most certainly includes unenforceable law, weakens the general respect for all law, whether bad or good. When respect for the law declines below some unknowable threshold, thugs and thieves rise to hegemony, both in the halls of the State and on the public streets. "That society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter" (Ayn Rand), a process currently dismantling the once proud nation of Great Britain.

These are the indispensable postulates of the lawgiver...but how many lawgivers would concede them today?

For several centuries prior to the Thirty Years' War, the English judge was a self-employed person renowned for his probity and wisdom, who sold those commodities on the open market. That is, persons who wanted some legal or quasi-legal controversy resolved would wait until the judge rode by on his circuit, and present their case to him when he came to town.

Such a judge had no power to enforce his decisions, yet those decisions were seldom disregarded. Nor did he work from a corpus of legislated law that some parliamentary body could alter at will. Instead, he recurred to the common law, a body of doctrines about equity and justice that had taken shape slowly over the years, largely from the decisions of men like himself.

These judges, who held English society together from the backs of their horses, were among the most learned and respected men of their time. In large measure that was because they did not see themselves as the creators of the common law they promulgated, but rather as its discoverers. They did not write the law; they read it from the very bones of reality. First, last, and always, they strained to discern how the natural tendencies of men would most harmoniously be served, and how the history of England testified to prior attempts to decide cases like the ones before them.

Your Curmudgeon proposes that this is the mindset freedom activists should strive to inculcate in America's legislators.

---

The preceding is quite abstract. More, it doesn't appear to blend naturally with the "freedom commando" attitude your Curmudgeon advocated in the previous essay. How, then, are we to make use of it?

A pretty problem, truly. For it expresses our ground-state orientation, rather than any particular result toward which we strive. But as foundation material, it might prove quite valuable, for it can guide the freedom commando toward alternative solutions he can suggest to those who agitate for statist approaches to their dissatisfactions.

He who reads the law rather than writes it is naturally drawn to history and precedent. History can provide solutions to many contemporary problems -- solutions that don't require a legislature to flex its muscles. Legislators who prefer to write law, the better to immortalize their own names upon it, won't like this. However, the more modest sort who don't care who gets the credit as long as progress is made will appreciate it. Their successes will spur others to emulate them.

For example, a great deal of anguish among American homeowners can be traced to the power of zoning boards, which exercise near-total power over how we may use and dispose of our real property, and whose decisions are typically unreviewable. Zoning was originally conceived as a way to curb wild urban growth and protect the "character" of existing neighborhoods. It first arose in the late Nineteenth Century, as the great East Coast cities began to swell under the pressure of the immigrations of that time.

There's no way to argue the importance, or lack thereof, of the "character of a neighborhood." Some will resonate to the claim; others will be left cold. As a claim of rights, it has little objective basis. Yet it's marshaled significant amounts of popular passion in many places and times. In our more recent days, the zoning board's powers have functioned more to preserve the advantages of particular groups than toward any other end. For example, well-to-do communities have used zoning to forbid the erection of multi-family dwellings, to keep "undesirable elements" out of their schools and other public facilities. Regardless of one's evaluation of such things, the secondary consequences of zoning -- the near-total abridgment of the rights of private property applied to land and permanent structures on it -- are widely agreed to be noxious.

But John Q. Public will ask you, "Other than zoning, how am I to keep the riff-raff and inappropriate forms of commerce out of my neighborhood? I don't want to live next door to a crack house -- or a slaughterhouse." And you must have an answer for him.

By recourse to history, we discover the legal device called the restrictive covenant. It's acquired a bad name in recent years, because the covenants the Old Media has seen fit to publicize have forbidden the sale of this or that house or parcel to blacks or Jews. Nevertheless, the device can be made to satisfy any demand for the "protection" of a neighborhood, by extracting a binding commitment from property owners in that neighborhood never to do certain things, always to respect certain easements, and so forth.

Is the contractual covenant a perfect and complete solution to all the "problems" addressed by zoning? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Bernard Siegan, in his book Land Use Without Zoning, found much good in it, and pointed out that the city of Houston had avoided legalistic zoning by using it. Nor would this sort of approach be applicable to all public controversies; for example, it would appear to be irrelevant to the right to keep and bear arms. The point is that when John Q. Public demands a solution to something he sees as a problem, the freedom commando must have something positive to offer him. He can't content himself with clucking "naughty, naughty, going to the State like that!" Whenever possible, history, precedent, and the pro-freedom mindset must be coupled together.

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"The way to a man's heart is with a broadsword." -- Paul Martin "Spider" Robinson

In his blockbuster book The Alpha Strategy, financial writer John Pugsley notes that it's the demands of the great mass of citizens that make possible the depredations inflicted on us by our legislatures. The legislators can almost always claim to be serving the commonweal, as they've come to see it from the input of their constituents, until they're turned out of office. Therefore, one can't work directly on the mindset of the political class. One must operate on the attitudes of private citizens, to make them ever less tolerant of opportunistic statist encroachments by their elected representatives.

When one has chosen a single issue to work on -- the heart of the "freedom commando" attitude -- this might seem an impossible goal. How, the activist might ask, do I encourage an overall freedom-first mindset among those I approach if I must confine myself to a single topic?

In fact, the difficulties are more apparent than real. The key is that, no matter how specific or limited the topic on which the freedom commando chooses to work, he will not be alone. His brethren will be working on their topics as well, and with every advance on any of those fronts, the overall propensity of the American people to look first for private and contractual solutions to their problems will be strengthened.

Aristotle declared that man can only become virtuous by the unrelenting practice of virtue. That is, even before one appreciates why the virtuous life is the only one worth living, one should condition oneself to it by acting as if one already believed it. So it is also with the "readers, not writers" mindset. Americans in the large must reacquaint themselves with the practice of social organization through private and contractual mechanisms. As these regain sway, the general satisfaction with the results will translate into a decreased tolerance for politicians who lean the other way.

There's no question that it's a long term strategy. However, America's infection with "quilted" fascism has been a long time in the incubation; it would be foolish to think that it could be reversed overnight.

There's a lot of fun to be had here, too. For what your Curmudgeon has been elaborating is the steady process of re-privatizing the law, such that the overwhelming majority of the rules under which we live are no longer handed down by elected parliaments, but rather emerge from our own negotiations and agreements with one another. If it works, we'd come to settle most of our disputes by reading from our own handiwork, rather than that of unaccountable third parties with little or no stake in the outcome.

Wouldn't that be a gas?