Eternity Road - WAP Version

Friday, June 10, 2005

The Ghosts Among Us

They're everywhere.

People, or apparitions that resemble people, who upon close inspection prove not to be there. Oh, they look present enough, and they sound present enough, and should you dare to touch one, you'd find that they feel present enough as well, but for all practical purposes they're somewhere else entirely.

Where are they really? Well, that depends on what's coming through their headphones.

Some are silent and glazed of eye as they walk the city streets or the office corridors. The devices connected to their headphones usually bear the sigil of Apple Corporation. You wouldn't want to hear what's streaming into their ears. Trust your Curmudgeon.

Others carry themselves with an unusual alertness, if not 5% more. They don't merely listen; they talk as well. But it soon becomes clear that they're addressing no one in the vicinity. Their headphones are connected to compact silvery devices with keypads and backlit screens. No, you wouldn't want to hear what they're listening to, either.

Behold the New Oblivion: the technologically enabled separation from the world that has come to displace the meditations of the monk and the maunderings of the mundane. Wherever these folks may be physically, mentally they've contrived to absent themselves from our common ruck.

This nuevo oblivio seems to have a powerful hold. Your Curmudgeon has seen conversations on which hung millions of dollars suspended without warning, so that one of the participants could answer his cell phone. He was on it for quite a while. It was his wife. No, your Curmudgeon will not relate the part of the conversation he chanced to overhear.

In truth, the musically addicted are the more annoying. We all have some trouble refraining from answering a ringing phone. It gets even harder when we know the call is for us. But what could more effectively denigrate Smith, who wants or needs Jones's attention, than Jones's reluctance -- sometimes his outright refusal -- to remove his iPod headphones? In an office environment, where matters of some moment are the regular order of business?

(That such persons can seldom be deterred, when the headphones are off, from raving about their iPods as if they were the solution to world hunger is yet another reason to despise them. As if your Curmudgeon needed one.)

A few other pundits have commented about this new mass phenomenon of "absent presence," where the body is here but the mind is demonstrably not. No one has looked upon it with unalloyed approval. Yet no one has yet analyzed the forces that drive the nuevo obliviado wave.

Is it a bad thing? We'll get to that.

The world is a noisy place. In some parts, it screams at us continuously. Atop that, it manifests a multitude of inconveniences upon us at every turn. Ever since the first parties of hunter-gatherers sallied forth after the bison herds, men have sought a way to communicate with others at some remove, whether to announce the evening's entree or to summon first aid. The incentives to develop and deploy portable communicators and portable entertainment are venerable and strong.

But that which is useful or comforting is nearly always capable of being perverted. The portable music source becomes a shield, not merely against ambient noise, but against the demands of one's surroundings and the importunings of others. The cell phone, purchased to provide an unfailing link to home, or a lifeline to a taxi or tow truck at need, becomes a collar and leash, by which persons at a distance can yank one away from attending to one's immediate concerns. These devices don't come pre-equipped with the disciplines required to use them wisely and well.

Time was, it was widely regarded as rude, a mortal insult, to deny one's attention to one's immediate companion in preference for some less proximate focus. Duels were fought over less. But our century's experiences with the telephone have dulled that response, even under conditions where the insult was matched by a prospect of great financial loss. Your Curmudgeon will not soon forget the salesman who spent twenty minutes reading spec sheets to a distant caller in preference to attending to your Curmudgeon and the C.S.O., who had made ready to place a $5000 order for a granite countertop with him...up to the moment he answered the phone. Most Americans have had a similar encounter.

Technology alone cannot be blamed for the deterioration of general courtesy. There are other factors at work. But the result is what counts, and it is bad, bad, bad.

Your Curmudgeon carried a cell phone for three years. Today he has none, by choice. He seldom turned it on; were he to do so, it might ring while he was attending to something important, or conversing with someone actually present, or making one of his trademarked puns. That always struck him as the worst of all possible worlds, even if he could bring himself to ignore the ring. People actually got offended when he declined to answer his cell phone, and the ring pattern is easily interpreted to tell who's ignoring the incoming call and who's merely turned the infernal thing off. If he must give offense, your Curmudgeon prefers to do so actively.

Your Curmudgeon was also an "early adopter" of "walkman" technology. It took him a while to decode the message he was giving, all unknowing, to his colleagues and friends.

Today, a casual stroll down any public street will bring innumerable absent-present folks into view. Why are they where they are, when it's so clear that they'd rather be somewhere else? Are they merely expressing their bitterness at their displacement from reality according to today's most socially acceptable fashion, or are they salving some spiritual pain too poignant to disclose?

Be here. Now.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/10 at 04:22 PM | (6) View Comments |

An Indispensable Man…

...is being threatened with death for daring to publicize the deeds of Muslims in this country.

Please note that your Curmudgeon didn't call them American Muslims, or Muslim-Americans, or any similar formulation. A Muslim gives his allegiance to Islam and nothing else. Ask one.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/10 at 03:24 PM | (1) View Comments |

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Shapers

Your Curmudgeon has an occupational interest in feedback cycles, particularly positive-feedback cycles. Positive feedback -- that is, a state of affairs in which a particular behavior automatically produces incentives to do more of it -- is always and everywhere a signal of impending disaster. Its record is unbroken, which suggests that people should generally be aware of its destructiveness. Yet many aren't.

Recent news reports about Howard Dean's public meltdown-in-progress, spotlighted in recent columns by Tony Snow and Thomas Sowell, illuminate the Democrats' and left-liberals' current positive-feedback cycle: with each increment of support they lose among ordinary Americans, they become an increment more dismissive and contemptuous toward us and our concerns, which eventuates in further alienation of Americans from the Left. This is as plain a death spiral as anyone has ever seen, yet the Democrats appear incapable of slowing it, even to the extent of deposing wild man Dean from his bully pulpit in the Democratic National Committee chair.

Numerous indicators to the contrary notwithstanding, Democrats are neither categorically stupid nor categorically blind. So what's going on?

Political involvement is compounded of many parts, and powered by many different sorts of motivations. However, there are three forces that exceed the others in their importance:

These three fuels are found blended in varying proportions in the psyches of the great majority of political activists and politicians. In some obvious ways, they energize one another. For example, one who deems himself intellectually or morally superior to the common run of Man is more likely than others to consider himself entitled to riches, fame and power. Alternately, one who has convinced himself that he's really, truly laboring in the political vineyards out of a sincere desire to help others is likely, over time, to become convinced of his own wisdom and virtue. And so it goes.

But politics is a funny sort of endeavor. The heart of it is persuasion: the persuasion of others, not initially inclined to follow one's lead, to accept one's convictions about what the State ought to do or not do as wholesome, right, and necessary. And persuasion is a two-player game from which the other guy can always defect.

If Smith, filled with the conviction of his own rightness and virtue, should fail to persuade Jones, who has no good reason for remaining so insistently wrongheaded, what will Smith's natural reaction be? Is he more likely to reassess his own positions and approaches to spreading them, or to classify Jones as stupid, evil, or perhaps a little of both?

It would seem that the Democrats' current positive-feedback tailspin is more natural for a political activist than self-reassessment and self-correction. Other forces are in play, of course, but this one looks to have a firm grip on their tiller. What would it take for them to right themselves and bid for the affections of the electorate with a chance of success?

The Republican Party spent a long time "on the outs," roughly from 1932 to 1980. Yes, the GOP did elect two presidents during that interval, but both were compelled by circumstances, most notably hostile Democratic majorities in Congress, to act more like Democrats than Republicans. It's instructive to review the posture the GOP adopted at various points during that time of trial, and reflect on what worked either for or against them.

The Hoover Administration was the kickoff for the Republican decline. Hoover was a statist; one of his monikers was "The Great Engineer," and he tried to live up to it at every opportunity. His Administration was largely responsible for bringing about the Great Depression, which didn't really begin with the fabled Black Tuesday stock market crash, but rather with the contraction of international trade that resulted from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the coordinated protectionist measures that followed.

It is noteworthy that Warren Harding came into office on the heels of a similar panic in the aftermath of World War I, and relieved the malaise of the economy by cutting federal spending nearly 40%, a feat not equaled since then. But that wasn't Hoover's way. He wanted more control over the economy, not less. He set the stage for the Roosevelt Administration's thoroughgoing transformation of American government and commerce by acting essentially as Roosevelt did in his turn, but without Roosevelt's charisma or warmth.

During the Roosevelt / Truman years, the Republicans' mantra was "We can do it better and cheaper." They had no new ideas, nor did they advance a principled defense of the free market or the American traditions of small government, federalism, and self-reliance. It was uninspiring, as such approaches always are. The personal popularity of Thomas Dewey was insufficient to displace even the relatively weak Harry Truman, given the obvious vacuity of the 1948 Dewey / GOP platform.

The Democrats' hegemony continued to be marked by Republican unease about articulating specific principles to which their candidates would adhere. Neither Nixon nor Eisenhower made any strong points about the Constitutional tenets or the traditional usages under which American government was organized. They won their offices more because of unusually weak opponents -- Adlai Stevenson; Hubert Humphrey -- and singular Democratic disasters -- Korea; Vietnam -- than for their positions.

The Democrats absorbed their current attitudes from that half-century of dominance:

Clearly, those attitudes have a long half-life, or the Democrats would not be so insistent about steering the federal government from a weak minority position, twenty-five years after their last tenure in unchallenged control. The stupid-or-evil reflex that responds to popular rejection of their spokesmen and proposals synergizes with those attitudes. Until the whole conglomeration is weakened, their auto da fe will continue.

The Republicans learned different things from their decades in the desert:

These maxims were not uniformly embraced; there are far more "Republicans In Name Only" than conservative Democrats. But the example of Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser degree that of George W. Bush, have provided object lessons in how they function in the political sphere. They have not been lost on the party's steersmen.

At the base of these differences, by your Curmudgeon's assessment, lies a fundamental difference in attitudes toward the great body of private Americans. While every politician has a desire to shape things, they vary in how willing they are to be shaped. Ardent Democrats, believing they have all the answers and speak from the moral summit, are largely unwilling to be shaped, or to reshape themselves. Some Democrats depart from this pattern, but as a generalization it holds rather well. Ardent Republicans, despite the strengths of their convictions, are more open to admitting error and studying their failures. Not all Republicans are completely open to correction, and not on all subjects, but in the main they're readier than Democrats to concede a wrong turn and to try to undo it.

The correlation between those attitudes and the policy preferences of the two parties is incredibly striking. The Democrats feel it's their privilege to shape the rest of the country with strong and minute schemes of social engineering, taxation, regulation, litigation, and so forth. The Republican preference is the opposite: a preference for diminishing government control and interference on the vast majority of subjects, such that private Americans' lives and enterprises would be returned to their own control.

Once again, the word humility is ringing in your Curmudgeon's head. But another rests beside it: a virtue made possible by humility, because humility opens one to the possibility that the preferences of others might be quite as important in the larger scheme of things as anything one might value for oneself: charity. Or, if you prefer: love.

"You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself." -- Jesus of Nazareth

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/09 at 07:57 AM | (8) View Comments |

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Oh, So It’s Memes You Want, Eh?

Well, then, have one on your Curmudgeon! And this one will be really nasty. You see, it's an exploration of your least favorite "inner resident:" your skull DJ.

1. What's the last popular tune that got stuck in your head?
(For your Curmudgeon, it was "Shall We Dance?" from The King & I.)

2. What popular tunes do you most dread to hear, because they get stuck in your head?
(Your Curmudgeon is particularly vulnerable to two...gasp!...Barry Manilow tunes: "Copacabana" and "American Bandstand.")

3. When last you were in a commercial establishment, and their "courtesy" music caused a tune to get stuck in your head:
a. Where were you?
(Your Curmudgeon was in a Burger King in Shirley, NY.)
b. What was the tune?
(A Muzak version of the main theme to Anton Dvorak's New World Symphony, done by a saxophone combo, to a samba beat. No kidding.)
c. Did you complete the transaction you'd gone there for, or did you flee screaming and vowing never to return?
(The latter.)

4. When last a television commercial caused a tune to get stuck in your head:
a. What was the commercial for?
(Carvel ice cream cakes)
b. What was the tune?
(The "garden respite" theme from Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker")
c. Did you shrug it off, or vow never again to patronize the establishment?
(The former, but it was hard.)

5. What is your usual recourse when a tune gets irritatingly, stubbornly, maddeningly stuck in your head?
(Your Curmudgeon usually pours himself a drink. A big one.)

6. What five bloggers would you like to afflict, ah, infect with this meme?

HAH!

"Never get into a land war in Asia, and never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" -- William Goldman, The Princess Bride.
"... and never try to match nuisances with a Curmudgeon!" -- Me.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/08 at 05:53 AM | (4) View Comments |

Oh, Lord

Seems I’ve been tagged with the dreaded Book Meme. Well, anything for a quick post, I suppose…

1. The number of books I own. I don’t really know. It’s a very big number. I have sixteen large bookcases, each 78 inches high and 36 inches wide, all of them filled to capacity, and an unknown number of books in boxes in my basement and attic. Besides, I don’t want to have to decide whether my complete sets of VAX/VMS and IBM OS/360 documentation count.

2. The last book I bought. This one is easier, as I went to Borders just this past Sunday, and came back with:

3. The last book I read. This is a little tougher, since I read several books at once, and seldom keep track of which one I finished first. I think the answer would be Harry Crocker’s Triumph: The Power And The Glory Of The Catholic Church.

4. Five books that mean a lot to me. Hey, is this an open-book test? I sure hope so, because I have to scan my shelves to answer this one. I think I’ll restrict the answers to fiction, just to retain some air of mystery:

Those are not necessarily my favorite novels; they’re just five that I love that come to mind at the moment, and that I return to frequently. As for non-fiction, well, you don’t really want to hear about those. Besides, the arguments are still raging over whether the Win32 API User’s Guide and Windows Device Driver Design Guide by Microsoft Press are really non-fiction. Be happy.

No, I shall not “tag” anyone else with this devilish meme. Memes are supposed to propagate genetically. Let’s see how this one does without my assistance.

(I’ll get you for this, Curt.)

UPDATE: I’ve had a change of heart. Let’s see how:

...will reply to this unconscionable invasion of privacy.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/08 at 03:31 AM | (5) View Comments |

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Changing The Premises Part 6: Hard Truths

Hey, remember the Sixties? If you're at all disposed like your Curmudgeon, you've been trying to forget them, but let's grit our teeth just this once.

With the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a host of accompanying bills, America set out on an unprecedented sociopolitical adventure: unprecedented not merely here, but anywhere in the world. The nation had proposed to pull the American Negro, whose economic attainments had lagged seriously behind those of American Caucasians, up into the mainstream of our life: to invite him to share equally with whites in the nation's material progress. Many programs were erected; many social workers were sent forth; a ton of money was spent.

And close to nothing good came of it.

The Johnson Administration -- hey, remember Lyndon Baines Johnson? Oh, never mind -- did its best to put a hopeful face on matters, but one of its insiders gave the game away. In 1968, Joseph Califano, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, openly disavowed the Administration's previous position that a-hand-not-a-handout welfare would eventually obsolete itself. He said that eight million welfare recipients -- the great majority of all federal welfare clients -- were doomed to remain so for the duration of their natural lives, and that they would be followed by others just as doomed. He deemed them the victims of "structural poverty," a condition to which no American politico had ever before conceded.

What went wrong? Theories flew madly. Theorists, nearly all of them in tune with the Zeitgeist of the time, strained to overlook certain tender correlations, both from kindness and from fear of castigation or worse. As always, the federal government, faced with the utter failure of its racial improvement schemes, stepped down on the gas: If it isn't working, do it harder.

Then came psychometrician Arthur Jensen.

Jensen interpreted the available psychometric and sociological evidence to suggest that there were limits to what America could expect from any remedial program -- that there were natural limitations on the capacities of the Negro underclass. He took pains to make clear that he was speaking statistically rather than uniformly. He expressed admirable compassion for those whose prospects he considered innately limited. He agreed that the architects of the federal welfare system ought to orient the system toward long-term mitigation of poverty rather than toward short-term assistance into middle-class independence. But he had dared to contradict a sacred piety of the day -- that by nature, people are all exactly alike, and therefore that all differences among them spring from their environments and their opportunities -- and he was pilloried for it. "Racist" was the mildest of the terms applied to that good and gentle man.

Every prediction Jensen made has come true in all particulars. Yet, since Jensen, it's a rare individual who's dared to question that piety. The benefits are too small and the price is too high.

It's every man's lot, at some time in his life, to confront a hard truth: one which blocks his attainment of something he greatly desires. The stages of his passage from infancy to adulthood are marked by the way in which he copes with such a discovery:

Reality is indifferent to our opinions and desires. The universe is not trying to please us; neither is it trying to thwart us. Progress toward the acceptance of this ultimate hard truth is a major component of human maturation.

But not everyone matures. And a thwarted desire, if sufficiently ardent, can sting enough to make some persons shuck their maturity like a dirty shirt.

Cruelty is the deliberate infliction of suffering on others, whether for personal gain or simply to enjoy their anguish. If Smith can persuade himself that what your Curmudgeon called a hard truth is really an obstruction created by some purposive agency that benefits from frustrating his desires, he can conclude that there's cruelty at work. No decent man sits still for cruelty.

Trouble is, Smith needs to locate the animating agency: a purposive inflictor who can be called to account. He can't pin it on natural law.

Every phenomenon that one wishes to see as a cruelty must be put to the account of some individual, group, or institution. Theories that lay phenomena such as blacks' statistical economic lag at the door of an individual or group are either accusations of criminality if they're specific enough, or devil theories if they're not. Theories that blame such things on "the government" or "society" are harder to cope with.

Now and then "society," in the sense of social practices and traditions that escape close examination for long periods, really is the reason for some identifiable unfairness. For some decades there really was a tendency among American whites to disdain involvement with blacks and shut them out of the capitalist cycle. Dinesh D'Souza's fine book The End Of Racism explores this mindset and its development in detail. Dispelling that attitude was urgent and necessary, and we should be pleased that we've largely done it. But when significant differences between white and black economic performance persist, it would be fatuous to blame those dispelled attitudes when they haven't existed for decades. That would constitute a willful rejection of the data.

However, to turn aside from that notion requires that one confront a hard truth: that at least for the present, there are significant, race-correlated differences between the cognitive norms of American Caucasians and American Negroes. Those differences might themselves be remediable, given time, resources, and effort, but no progress can be made that denies the facts out of preference for a villain whose cruelty can be blamed for the "injustice" of the present tableau.

Your Curmudgeon selected that particular hard truth as his demonstrator-proposition precisely because it's so emotionally charged. There's no epithet in the English language with more power to wound than "racist." There's no categorization the typical American would strive harder to avoid. It can do serious, permanent damage to one's future in every conceivable dimension. But its power is the power of a predisposition, locked in by desire and reinforced by the relentless censure of dissidents: the premise that to question the piety of racial interchangeability, even around the edges, can only be motivated by cruelty. It does not attempt to grapple with the question: What if the piety is false, as the observable data appear to suggest?

Observations that suggest displeasing realities have thus been demoted from objectively verifiable data to cruelties for which some villain is responsible. Sober thought about how to extract useful knowledge from the data is anathematized; that villain must be rooted out and punished.

The premise under attack is that there are hard truths -- that objective data are ideologically neutral. That premise must be destroyed to allow for the necessary devil theories and "don't blame the victim" exculpations. Thus, an avenue of attack can be opened for the victimist mentality and its indispensable corollary: the notion that any social condition with which anyone is dissatisfied, any desire for amelioration that goes unslaked for more than a twinkling, is the deliberate doing of some agent of cruelty.

It calls to mind the persistent belief among some primitive African tribes that death is almost always the result of witchcraft. In the aftermath of a death, the responsible witch must be found and killed. At last check, those tribes aren't doing too well. Just a word to the wise.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/07 at 08:27 AM | (1) View Comments |

Monday, June 06, 2005

Yes, Yes, It’s The Anniversary Of Operation Overlord, But…

"Gentlemen," said General Eisenhower to a roomful of reporters during World War II, "I know you've all been guessing where we're going to attack next. Well, I'm going to let you in on the secret. Our next operation will be in Italy, early in July. General Patton will attack the southern beaches, General Montgomery, the eastern." "General," said one newsman as the reporters gasped at the revelation, "if one of us leaked that plan, couldn't it be disastrous?" Ike nodded. "The slightest hint in your stories would tip it off to German intelligence," he said, "but I'm not going to censor you fellows. I'm just leaving it up to each man's sense of responsibility.." "Wow," exclaimed one reporter, "what a dirty trick!" But not a word of the operation leaked out. [From Jules Archer's Battlefield President: Dwight David Eisenhower.]

Now try to imagine an American general taking that tack with the "journalists" of our time. Just try.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/06 at 07:22 PM | (3) View Comments |

Changing The Premises, Part 5: Hard Cases

Nothing is oversimplified unless it is wrong -- and wrong specifically for the purpose at hand. -- Thomas Sowell

At Right Wing Sparkle, in a challenge to leftists who rail against the American liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq, your Curmudgeon found and was amused by this:

As many here will agree I am no intellectual. As I have said many times, I am a simple woman and I try to look at things in the simplest way possible.

But shouldn't this be the way one approaches everything? Didn't Albert Einstein himself say so? And in regard to politics, is there any other conceivable approach?

Why, your Curmudgeon asks, does every man in this land feel he's entitled to his political opinions? He doesn't feel entitled to his chemical, biological, or astrophysical opinions, does he? He wouldn't presume to challenge an expert in any of those fields -- assuming he's not an expert himself, of course. With few exceptions, laymen feel unqualified to oppose experts in any field that requires detailed knowledge gained by study or practice.

But it's not that way with politics. Politics is supposed to be simple.

This is not a form of the democratic fallacy. It's an expression of what politics is supposed to be about: the defense of the realm, the administration of justice, and the maintenance of a tolerable degree of public order. In other words, right and wrong, with a dash of decency.

People have a natural understanding of right and wrong. They may be frequently and powerfully tempted to transgress it, and they may occasionally succumb, but they grasp it nonetheless. Without a uniform understanding and acceptance of the irreducible requirements of right and wrong -- basically, Commandments Four through Ten -- no society can long endure.

A political system that dares to undermine those requirements, or that ventures far afield from them in a quest for "equality," "fraternity," "community," or any of a myriad other phantasms, is counterpoised to the true interests of its society. Individuals and voluntary groups will work against it, whether overtly or covertly.

But this is too abstract for a Monday morning tirade. Far better that your Curmudgeon narrow his focus upon one of the "simple" premises that's been relegated to the ashes these past few decades: the old maxim that hard cases make bad law.

Except in an autarchy, law and politics are fundamentally united. Each makes and is made by the other. This arrangement is both stable and unstable for a single reason: it requires that a heavy preponderance of the electorate agree on what the law ought to address, and how.

When the law deviates substantially from the consensus of the electorate, the abovementioned opposition between society and the State manifests itself. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his essay "Compensation":

If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will fail to convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in.

The "hard cases make bad law" maxim points at an undeniable feature of every legal code: that there are marginal cases in which a man ought to be let off for his nominally criminal deed, and others in which a nominally legal deed is in fact one of great evil. The attempt to encompass these "hard cases" with written statutes would result in laws that make things substantially worse for the great majority of men in the great majority of circumstances. Also, the attempt would result in a profusion of law: luxuriant, hypertechnical law that no layman could possibly comprehend.

This is beyond serious dispute. By implication, the law ought to address the great majority of cases and circumstances, rather than concern itself with marginalia. Juries ought to shoulder the responsibility for exculpating the man who ought to be let off. Society should find extra-legal means of deterring and punishing those who chisel at the edges of the law in ways that cause net harm.

So the maxim is slightly misworded; it ought to be "hard cases should make no law." But that would be harder to remember, and has lousy rhythm anyway.

But what is the present state of our legal practice? Do we not find judges at every level of the judicial system recklessly abridging, modifying, or striking down the law from the bench, specifically to deal with some "hard case"? Do we not find legislatures passing laws of the most involute and incomprehensible kinds, written to encompass every imaginable marginal case, with the result that no layman can really know what they prescribe or proscribe? Do these United States not have over a million practicing lawyers precisely because the layman has been taught by experience to fear the law and the legal system, that it's a thicket into which a commoner dare not venture without the company of a hired sword?

One of the most visible contemporary manifestations of this development is the judicial nullification of all restrictions on abortion, with the citation of some "hard case" as the justification. Does the law require that a teenage girl secure her parents' consent before she aborts her baby? Then what of the girl whose pregnancy was brought about by paternal abuse? Does the law protect the unborn child at eight months' gestation? Then what of the woman who'd be injured, or permanently traumatized, by bringing the child to term? Does the law demand that abortion clinics inform their prospective clients of the risks, both physical and psychological? Then what of the woman who declines to abort but suffers unanticipated harm from the decision?

Hard cases such as these have been used to strike down every restriction placed on abortion since the Supreme Court announced its decision in Roe v. Wade. Rather than allow juries to decide when to suspend the rigidities of the law in favor of some extenuating circumstance, judges have required legislators to write laws of such Byzantine complexity that they fail the Constitutional test of "void for vagueness."

From a certain standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. Private persons -- juries and society at large -- have no incentive to maximize their political power, whereas judges and legislators do. Judges have certainly demonstrated their hostility toward juries' discretionary powers to set aside the law, whether in specific or general cases. Legislators, most of whom are lawyers, haven't exactly resisted the temptation to write laws that only lawyers can puzzle out. Luxuriant, labyrinthine law means more power for politicos and more jobs for lobbyists.

But politics and law are supposed to be simple. The old saying that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" was predicated on the assumption that an ordinary, ordinarily educated man could infer the requirements of the law from the rules of right and wrong as he learned them at his mother's knee. It hardly applies in a society whose law books fill whole buildings, and which contradict one another more often than not.

Another premise -- the premise that the law ought to conform to the common understanding of right and wrong, and that law which doesn't so conform can and should be disregarded by the common man -- has bitten the dust. In part, this is the fruit of another disastrous modern development: the ascendancy of moral relativism. But your Curmudgeon finds Mondays tough enough without trying to unravel that ideological snarl before lunch.

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/06 at 06:01 AM | (4) View Comments |

Sunday, June 05, 2005

A Genius Walks Among Us

In point of fact, he's been "walking" for some thirty-plus years:

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair among mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.

Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth across the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.

As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain.

His name is Glen Cook, and he writes the best fantasy now extant. The above is the opening segment of his new novel The Tyranny Of The Night. Read it!

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/05 at 05:06 PM | (1) View Comments |

Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Power And Despair

There are days when it all gets to be a bit much. I’ve resisted the temptation to head to the rooftop of a tall building with a sniper rifle and a new box of Oreos…so far. But I have to admit that it’s been getting harder.

He who stumbles around the Web in the wee hours is likely to find a lot of things that would normally escape his notice. This gentleman, for instance:

I suspect that what they [Christianity and the Air Force] have in common is that they are both large groups with strict rules. People who are attracted to being part of a big Christian movement and receiving orders from God are also attracted to being part of a big military movement and receiving orders from generals.

The technical term for this sort of conjecture is “self-congratulatory condescension.” But it’s Sunday, if admittedly a trifle early on Sunday, so perhaps I should try not to be quite so technical.

When two phenomena A and B are commonly found together, there are four possible explanations:

  1. A caused B;
  2. B caused A;
  3. Both were results of some common predecessor factor C;
  4. It’s a coincidence.

The cited writer appears to believe that factor 3—a desire to receive one’s “marching orders” from a demanding higher authority—underlies both Christian belief and willingness to serve in the military. The extremely low participation of Muslims in the armed services ought to be adequate counter-evidence to that notion, but I severely doubt that the writer is interested in anything quite as mundane as evidence; he has an axe to grind, and grind it he will, even if it involves slandering the intelligence and dignity of two billion Christians and every man who’s ever taken up arms in service to this country.

This sort of casual calumny is part and parcel of some unbelievers’ need to regard those who differ as somehow inferior. I’ve run into it before. I recall an extremely supercilious fellow who told me to my face that President Bush’s Christianity was merely an expression of “his need for the comfort of an imposed structure.” Yes, I let him live. He didn’t know who he was talking to, after all. Anyway, everyone gets one freebie at the Idiocy Bar.

It’s part of a trend. Time was, the atheist / agnostic called himself “courageous.” Shortly thereafter, he was “more rational.” Today, he simply sneers.

The phenomenon above is also easily observed in respect to political alignment and ideology. Indeed, given the venom that passes for argument these days, one could hardly miss it. One would have to be entirely detached from the national political discourse not to feel himself awash in it.

At this time, I’m moderately happy to say that the edge in civility lies on the Right. The Left has emitted nothing but vilification and slander for some time now, approximately since the elections of November 2000. Liberals have become prone to character assassination of conservatives as a category; they frequently claim that, because of our political beliefs, we must therefore be evil. Though there’s plenty of discourtesy from conservatives toward liberals, it tends to be qualitatively less objectionable: it addresses liberals’ intellectual failures, as conservatives see them, rather than imputing low motives to them.

Citations? You want citations? Haven’t you ever heard of Howard Dean? And what about this gentleman? And this one? And need I mention this one? I could provide more, but you could garner as many as you want from ordinary attention to the demotic styles of the mouthpieces on both sides.

In my guise as the Curmudgeon Emeritus, I’ve strained to spread a gospel of courtesy and humility for some years now. The labor has reaped no significant crop. Indeed, a few folks who could really stand to take the message to heart have spewed their vitriol at me personally. I’m getting rather weary of it all, but a mission is a mission.

One of my most beloved colleagues, Juliette Ochleng, recently emitted a figurative sigh of despair about this shared mission of ours. I sympathize. My God, how I sympathize! When you pour yourself into this sort of undertaking day after day, and see the world go spinning madly on without taking notice, you can’t help but ask yourself why you bother. Now and then, you feel some threshold approaching, and you start to ask yourself whether the time has come for you, too, to detach yourself from it all, out of simple self-preservation.

Juliette isn’t about to hang up her spurs, thank God. Nor am I. Even if we’ve altered no one’s attitudes quite yet, we’ve nonetheless established a presence and a perspective. There’s hope. And hope is all the fuel a writer needs to go on for decades at a time.

But when the hope tank runs low, and one suspects that one might need to pull off the Information Superhighway for a spell, it’s nice to be able to point to some tangible achievement, which damned few of us on the Right side of the Blogosphere can do at this time. Perhaps it’s the same on the Left, but I wouldn’t know.

Coming to grips with the limits on one’s powers is a daunting and difficult task. The more power one possesses, the harder and more painful it is.

Allow me to tell you a few things about myself. I’m 53 years old. I’m highly intelligent, was extremely athletic as a young man, and have always possessed an unusual skill at self-expression. I’ve striven at numerous undertakings for half a century, mostly rather difficult undertakings, and I’ve succeeded at nearly all of them. Considering the gifts I was given as birthrights, no less was to be expected. As the saying goes, “failure was not an option.”

But that only makes failure more painful and less acceptable when it arrives.

Failure is inevitable when one sets out to change others’ minds or hearts. That door is locked from the inside. All one can do is provide evidence, logic, and perspectives. Whether one’s listeners accept those offerings as sincere and accurate, and integrate them into their mindsets, is up to them.

However, the usual emotional reaction to having one’s logic, evidence, and perspectives rejected without consideration will be either anger or despair. Normally anger comes first; the despair arrives when one’s fund of anger-energy has been exhausted.

Irrational? Of course. But though Man possesses a rational faculty, his uses of it are intermittent at best. More frequently than I like to contemplate, we use our reasoning powers not to puzzle our way through our difficulties, but to rationalize why we ought to do what we’ve already decided that we want to do. That’s as true of a genius as it is of a dolt.

If the process of aging has taught me anything, it’s that there’s no avoiding the difficult job of facing one’s limitations. Limitations on one’s powers. Limitations on one’s endurance. Ultimately, limitations on one’s life. Those limitations virtually guarantee that each of us will go to his grave with one or more of his life goals unfulfilled. He who really, truly “gets it all done” has likely set his sights too low.

This does not justify despair. Despair is far worse than failure; it’s self-defeat. It’s fatigue talking when it should be silent, so that one can rest and replenish one’s forces for a fresh effort. Inability to achieve a goal does not invalidate the attempt. If the goal is worthy, then the attempt is worthy. It should and will be remembered as such.

That’s not to say that one should never adjust one’s goals when some appear to have slipped beyond the horizon of probable achievement. But such decisions ought to be founded on changes in one’s priorities, not in the weary self-denigration that arises from frustration.

Quite a departure from the usual blather, eh? Well, it’s Sunday, and you already know I make exceptions for Sundays. Among other things, it’s a stab at refreshment via change of focus. A monotonic concentration on politics or social currents gets boring after a while.

I’m a religious man, a Roman Catholic. I pray regularly. Most of my prayers are petitionary. That is, they ask for something specific. Mostly, I ask God for help in becoming a better man. Lately, the specific area of self-improvement I’ve dwelt upon is my increasing propensity to surrender before my difficulties, particularly as regards my polemic efforts here and elsewhere.

Those efforts might yield nothing in my lifetime, but they’re worthy nonetheless. They’re fueled by sincere conviction and a desire that things be better—for everyone. If I’m wrong about anything I espouse, I’m eager to learn how and why. That desire to improve the common lot of Man is the sole immutable element in my psyche, and undoing any errors I might have made is entirely consistent with it.

But it can get so hard to go on, sometimes, Lord. Only You know how hard. But then You would know, wouldn’t You?

Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 06/05 at 02:56 AM | (5) View Comments |

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