John C. Wright's Blog, page 126

No.11-182 – Arizona v. United States

June 25, 2012 Justice Antonin Scalia Bench Statement

For almost a century after the Constitution was ratified, there were no federal immigration laws except one of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts that was discredited and allowed to expire. In that first century all regulation of immigration was by the States, which excluded various categories of would-be immigrants, including convicted criminals and indigents. Indeed, many questioned whether the federal government had any power to control immigration—that was Jefferson’s and Madison’s objection to the Alien Act.

The States’ power to control immigration, however, has always been accepted, and is indeed reflected in some provisions of the Constitution. The provision that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States” was a revision of the provision in the Articles of Confederation which gave those privileges and immunities to “inhabitants” of each State. It was revised because giving that protection to mere “inhabitants” would allow the immigration policies of one State to be imposed on the others. Even that revision was not thought to be enough, because the States were not willing to have their immigration policies determined by the citizenship requirements of other States. Hence the Naturalization Clause of the Constitution, which enables the federal government to control who can be a citizen.

Of course the federal power to control immigration was ultimately accepted, and rightly so. But where does that power come from? Jefferson and Madison were correct that it is nowhere to be found in the Constitution’s enumeration of federal powers. The federal power over immigration cannot plausibly derive from the Naturalization Clause. Not only does the power to confer citizenship have nothing to do with the power to exclude immigrants, but, as I have described, the Naturalization Clause was a vindication of state rather than federal power over immigration.

Federal power over immigration comes from the same source as state power over immigration: it is an inherent attribute—perhaps the fundamental attribute— of sovereignty. The States, of course, are sovereign, the United States being a Union of sovereign States. To be sovereign is necessarily to possess the power to exclude unwanted persons and things from the territory. That is why the Constitution’s prohibition of a State’s imposing duties on imports made an exception for “what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection Laws.”

Thus, this Court’s cases have held that the States retain an inherent power to exclude. That power can be limited only by the Constitution or by laws enacted pursuant to the Constitution. The Constitution, as we have seen, does not limit the States’ power over immigration but to the contrary vindicates it. So the question in this case is whether the laws of the United States forbid what Arizona has done.

Our cases have held, with regard to claimed federal abridgment by law of another inherent sovereign power of the States—their sovereign immunity from suit—that the abridgement must be “unequivocally expressed.” The same requirement must apply here; and there is no unequivocal congressional prohibition of what Arizona has done. It is not enough to say that the federal immigration laws implicitly “occupy the field.” No federal law says that the States cannot have their own immigration law.

Of course the Supremacy Clause establishes that federal immigration law is supreme, so that the States’ immigration laws cannot conflict with it—cannot admit those whom federal law would exclude or exclude those whom federal law would admit But that has not occurred here. Arizona has attached consequences under state law to acts that are unlawful under federal law—illegal aliens’ presence in Arizona and their failure to maintain federal alien registration. It is not at all unusual for state law to impose additional penalties or attach additional consequences to acts that are unlawful under federal law—state drug laws are a good example. That does not conflict with federal law.

In sum, Arizona is entitled to impose additional penalties and consequences for violations of the federal immigration laws, because it is entitled to have its own immigration laws.

As my opinion describes in more detail, however, most of the provisions challenged here do not even impose additional penalties or consequences for violation of federal immigration laws; they merely apply stricter enforcement. The federal government would have us believe (and the Court today agrees) that even that is forbidden.

The government’s brief asserted that “the Executive Branch’s ability to exercise discretion and set priorities is particularly important because of the need to allocate scarce enforcement resources wisely.” But there is no reason why the federal Executive’s need to allocate its scarce enforcement resources should disable Arizona from devoting its resources to illegal immigration in Arizona that in its view the Federal Executive has given short shrift.

Arizona asserts without contradiction and with supporting citations the following: “[I]n the last decade federal enforcement efforts have focused primarily on areas in California and Texas, leaving Arizona’s border to suffer from comparative neglect. The result has been the funneling of an increasing tide of illegal border crossings into Arizona.

Indeed, over the past decade, over a third of the Nation’s illegal border crossings occurred in Arizona,” Must Arizona’s ability to protect its borders yield to the reality that Congress has provided inadequate funding for federal enforcement—or, even worse, to the Executive’s unwise targeting of that funding?

But leave that aside. It has become clear that federal enforcement priorities—in the sense of priorities based on the need to allocate so-called scarce enforcement resources—is not the problem here. After this case was argued and while it was under consideration, the Secretary of Homeland Security announced a program exempting from immigration enforcement some 1 .4 million illegal immigrants. The husbanding of scarce enforcement resources can hardly be the justification for this, since those resources will be eaten up by the considerable administrative cost of conducting the nonenforcement program, which will require as many as 1.4 million background checks and biennial rulings on requests for dispensation.

The President has said that the new program is “the right thing to do” in light of Congress’s failure to pass the Administration’s proposed revision of the immigration laws. Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so. But to say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of federal immigration law that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind.

The Court’s opinion paints what it considers a looming specter of inutterable horror: “If §3 of the Arizona statute were valid, every State could give itself independent authority to prosecute federal registration violations,” That seems to me not so horrible and even less looming. But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it predicted: A federal government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws exclude.

So the issue is a stark one: Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws?

A good way of answering that question is to ask: Would the States conceivably have entered into the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding? Imagine a provision—perhaps inserted right after Art. I, §8, ci. 4, the Naturalization Clause— which included among the enumerated powers of Congress “To establish Limitations upon Immigration that will be exclusive and that will be enforced only to the extent the President deems appropriate.” The delegates to the Grand Convention would have rushed to the exits from Independence Hall.

As is often the case, discussion of the dry legalities that are the proper object of our attention suppresses the very human realities that gave rise to the suit.

Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are simply unwilling to do so.

Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State. For these reasons, I dissent.

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For I dine on Celestial Food

And now, in case you have heard so much rock and pop and rap that you consider that music, dear reader, or if you have read one too many a nihilistic story where anti-heroes and anti-villains get away their various crimes that you consider such to be a tale worth telling, here is something more old school:

For those of you not familiar with the set-up, Don Juan, notorious womanizer and murderer, earlier slew the Commander, whose daughter he outraged, and when she erected a statue in the churchyard to his memory, Don Juan mocked it by inviting the statue to dine with him.

That night as he dines, he and his manservant Leparello are visited by a supernatural apparition. Being a noble Don to the last, the proud Don Juan shows no fear, but invites the horror to his table, as the customs of honor command.

Something of the dark majesty of Don Juan as he is dragged unrepentant to hell by the man he has murdered is lost on the modern spirit, since Don Juan’s insistence that he follow his own moral code, invented only to please himself, without concern for worldly or heavenly or hellish condemnation is to this generation the bland and even boring platitude heard from ten thousand tales and cartoons and bumper stickers and stump speeches and all advertisements for products both commercial and imponderable.

The fire of rebellion is impossible to capture, and the defiance of God is not blasphemous, but boring, to the modern ear which not only disbelieves in God, but regards such disbelief as a sign of elevation and enlightenment.

In the same way that the modern attitude toward sex, where all things are permitted except fertility, makes even glancing-eyed Aphrodite yawn, so too the Miltonian pride of Lucifer is routine. No modern author would show the natural result of such arrogance, crashing to its own hideous and infernal ruin.

The modern author would call it self esteem. The modern author would side with Don Juan, being unable to see the Stone Guest as anything but a bully imposing an arbitrary will upon the helpless victim.

It the creepy Looking Glass world of the modern mind, the rapist and womanizer and murderer is the cherished and beloved figure, and the divine judgment is the hated figure. The only evil a generation deeply in love with evil recognizes as evil is this: Heaven is intolerant of sin.

The intolerance of Heaven toward those things that separate Man from his Father, that intolerance is the indeed only sin the permissive generation finds intolerable.

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Antifatherhood postscript: The Parable of the Good Chef

AS AN ADDENDUM to the last article, a reader named Patrick offered this following analogy on the difference between power and authority I thought brilliantly clear, so I here reproduce it as a postscript. The italic text is reader Stephen, whom Patrick is answering:

“If we require wielders of violence to be truly effective and dedicated to their job, after all, it is only human nature that they will grow to enjoy doing what they are good at, or that those likeliest to become good at it are those who enjoy it”

I think you’re equivocating ‘wielders of violence’ with ‘holders of authority’ – we all know that the qualities that make a good ruler or magistrate are not the qualities that make an effective killer.

We know the qualities that make an effective policeman or general are not the qualities we find in effective murderers and criminals.

The quality of loving constant violence would make a more exemplary criminal, but would be a defect in a policeman.

But men who ‘enjoy’ violence are, inasmuch as they enjoy, are like men who pursue any other kind of appetite – and there’s no reason to think they are any better at pleasing themselves with violence than a hungry person is when pleasing himself with food.

Both hunger and violence, without additional qualification, morally neutral – they become occasions of praise or blame in context of something else.

Think of two different kinds of love for food – one is the gourmand, who enjoys and especially appreciates food for all it can be, and the other is the obese, who eats her pleasure and eats her fill and eats some more and eats when she doesn’t want and wants when she doesn’t eat.

The gourmand’s zest for food has its occasions; the obese eats at any opportunity.

If our authorities enjoy what they are doing and do it well, we notice that they do well what we put them in charge of – we don’t see an endless escalation of violence or obesity among them, but an increase of moderation and the order of justice.

Good authority has its occasions for violence, where the powerful must be just and effective; the tyrannous prefer violence to reasonable government.

A gourmand may become a cook or a chef, for the love of the craft of foodmaking.

A good chef knows how to clean his kitchen, and takes satisfaction in puttng away his tools, as much as taking them out. He would not be so good a chef if he left them for others to do, or let them rust or wear out. A good chef knows how to make enough, and not too much – he would not be a good chef if he could not say how much food there would be when he was finished. These are important parts of mastering food. To resent or neglect these would be a defect of craft.

To be a good chef, you have to love food, but there’s more to it. To be obese, you need not love food, but you certainly must eat more than you need. A gourmand may be a good chef, and may be an obese chef, but I don’t see how one could be a ‘good’ obese.

A lover of violence who knows how to make violence, who knows how to make enough violence, but not too much, is acquainted with justice, and can pursue violence ‘for’ something. The more he knows justice, the better he will be at using violence.

Being in authority is like being a chef – a good chef at least cannot hate foodcraft, and a good ruler at least cannot hate statecraft. A chef who despises food and cooking will be immoderate and make poor dishes, and a ruler who hates power and judgement will be immoderate and make poor decisions – in any event, both lead to dissatisfied, untended people.

A magistrate who decided like a lover of murder would be a bad and untrustworthy magistrate; an executioner of justice who killed like a psychotic would be a bad and untrustworthy executioner of justice.

In a good policeman, enjoying his craft, we would find a ‘bad’ psychopath – we would watch him all day for spectacular and unprovoked bloodshed, and be disappointed. As much a good policeman might excel at violent force, we’d rarely see him at it – he loves many things about his work just as much. A good magistrate, at her desk, is ‘bad’ at tyranny – she would make wise and sensible recommendations from dawn to dusk, and never spend an hour – not even her lunch hour – acting like Caligula.

 

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Antifatherhood

Antifatherhood, or A Belated Father’s Day Thought

I saw a skit or commercial where the female characters from the television show MAD MEN, secretaries and office girls from the 1960′s, were confronted by the time traveler with Ellen Degeneris, a celebrity of some sort but known to me only because of her widely publicized sexual degeneracy. In the little skit, Miss Degeneris exclaims to the benighted damsels of the allegedly remote past that women in the future have full equal rights. She includes “the right to get married” as the crown in the list of such civil rights enjoyed by the future women. The writers of the skit intended this to be a triumphant rather than a ridiculous statement, and intended it to mean that women of the future have the civil right to get married to each other, that is, to have an unnatural lesbian liaison with one of their own sex called marriage, and treated with solemnity and legal recognition.

As I watched in awe at the perfection of tonedeafness parochialism involved in retrofitting modern Lefty echo-chamber sentiments to the generations of our mothers and grandmothers, I could not help but wonder: by what means have we come to this?

Whether the time traveling ambassador of female emancipation also mentioned the woman’s right to alter their bodies with carcinogenic chemicals to produce temporary sterility, or to kill their own beloved offspring in the womb, and to compel the public coffers to pay for both abominations, that I do not happen to recall, and I am unwilling, due to my delicacy of digestion, to move my finger the half-inch it would require to look the matter up on the worldwide computer system we enjoy here in the future.

I felt a moment of vertigo as I contemplated the immensity of the gulf that stretched between the rational creatures of the universe and the creatures that had, in all seriousness, conceived and wrote and produced this skit and aired it to the public.

So the character is oppressed by being feminine but the actress is liberated? How does that work again?

The writers were not writing a parody, and there was a certain charming innocence and fecklessness about the ham-handed approach. As best I can tell, the writers actually expected the characters from the 1960′s to regard their lives as intolerable thralldom akin to the slaves of the antebellum south toiling under the lash, or the Hebrew under the taskmasters in Egypt, and moreover to regard the indulgence in a sexual perversion so disgusting that it could not be mentioned in public during the era in question as the culmination of the Lincolnesque or Mosaic manumission the Year 2000 promised.

The writers expected the ladies of our mothers’ generation to greet the advent of sexual promiscuity, culminating in infanticide and abomination, by an ovation of incredulous joy, as if that was what all feminists and suffragettes and lovers of liberty had indeed been yearning and dreaming and sacrificing and struggling forever to achieve. The lack of proportion is disoriented, like meeting a man who soberly intones that the whole of World War Two was fought to save one private soldier.

Furthermore, the writers apparently expected the modern audience bovinely to accept the idea that the women of that era would indeed regard these matters in this light, to frame their opinions in this frame.

By “this frame” I mean specifically the philosophical axiom (or rhetorical conceit) that the male-female dynamic, the institution of marriage, the role of women in society, should be analyzed in Marxist terms of an oppressive possessing class and an oppressed laboring class; and that the male-female question was the same as the race question and was nothing but that.

Lest any think I exaggerate, allow me in this context to quote from Shulamith Firestone in her landmark 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex (http://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm).

“So that just as to assure elimination of economic classes requires the revolt of the underclass (the proletariat) and, in a temporary dictatorship, their seizure of the means of production, so to assure the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and the seizure of control of reproduction: not only the full restoration to women of ownership of their own bodies, but also their (temporary) seizure of control of human fertility – the new population biology as well as all the social institutions of child-bearing and child-rearing.

“And just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ – would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would born to both sexes equally, or independently of. either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labour would be ended by the elimination of labour altogether (through cybernetics). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken. “

If you are like me, a safety valve in your brain is preventing you from noticing the true depth of depravity and insanity this passage embraces. Reread it. Savor it. In this passage, Miss (or so I assume, for none would marry such a termagant) Firestone explicitly says she is expanding the analysis of Marxism to declare war both on the cultural institutions of the family and on biological reality of sex.

She proposes to liberate women from womanhood, to achieve freedom for her sex by eliminating sex.

To call this barking-mad moonbat lunacy would be a mild understatement. When King Canute waved his sword at the sea to drive back the tide, he did it to silence the flattery of his courtiers by reminding them of the limitations of royal power. No man’s sword can turn the tide. Nor more can any social revolution, even one armed with the considerable power to denude humans of the adjuncts of their human nature, eliminate humanness without eliminating the humans. Far more foolish than this ancient king is the dame who waves her sword in daintier hand in earnest at a sea which rages larger and is pulled by deeper tides.

Reading this passage by Miss Firestone is like overhearing the raving apocalyptic visions of flat-earthers who declare war on the dome of the sky, and who then, with a battlecry and brave flourish of lance and saber, charge boldly for the spot on their horizon where their theory says the sky-dome surely touches the ground.

And, again, I cannot help but wonder: by what means have we come to this?

The argument is too large and long to fit into one essay, or even a series of essays. Here, I hope only to cover the basic points, not to make the argument, but merely to lay out where the argument should go.

Allow me to submit that there is a certain logic to thought, to the relation of concept to concept, which operated in a man or in a society much the same way precedent operates for courts of law. Namely, if a concept relates to an analogous concept where that man or that society  has made an unambiguous judgment, he must either follow that judgment, or must distinguish the cases. The fewer points in common or weaker the analogy between the two concepts, the easier the distinction is to make convincingly; the closer the analogy, the harder.

When we have a situation where one concept influences and sets the precedent for a whole host of subsidiary concepts, we can call it a principle or crucial or fundamental or governing concept.

Human nature being what it is, it frequently happens that the crucial concepts governing a man or a society is unquestioned, unknown, or known without being articulate. When it is articulate, we can speak of a man’s or a society’s fundamental philosophy or virtues; when inarticulate, we call it a vision or a worldview or a sense of life or a set of values.

Discovering which concepts are crucial is a delicate an uncertain process. In no small part this is because, human nature being what it is, many a man and indeed more than one society is reluctant (at time hysterically so) to admit what really governs and guide them, and will not put a name to what they idolize. Unfortunately, human nature also being what it is, the most popular sport of the modern day is to attribute secret motives or fundamental concepts to one’s ideological foes, selecting only the most despicable motives and concepts, those which any man, truly or not, would deny move him. So the discovery of fundamental motives is itself untrustworthy.

Despite that, a certain confidence is permitted a detective seeking the crucial philosophical foundations of his society, if and when the crucial concept is indeed found at the crux of many lines of inquiry. If one idea, over and over, crops up as a core idea, the pattern of repetition lends some credibility to the assertion that this idea, this concept, is crucial.

The pattern I have seen governing our modern thought is a simple one. Call it antifatherhood.

You have heard of the war on women. This is a “war” where the Roman Catholic Church, because God Almighty has so ordered and command, is unwilling to abet gross moral evils which mock the two millennia old teachings of the Church,  and fund with our money the wickedness of women of loose morals, who wish to float in a cesspool of consequence-free sexual encounters, send us the tab for their contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortions. The rhetoric under which all this is concealed, is a concern for woman’s “health” — as if a baby were a disease, or as if chastity were a plague. It is like calling the victim of the hold-up man making war on the robber by refusing to pay for the bullets.

As with all most things promoted by the mainstream media and pontificated by self appointed intellectuals, it is the mere opposite of truth.

The truth is that the the modern age is the age of the war on fathers.

What is a father?

A father is naturally the source not just of strength but of authority, not just of masculinity, but also of fertility. A father is one who fathers his children; who has the moral right to command whether he has the strength to compel obedience or not; he is the king and lord of his family and establishes their laws; his role is more combative than the maternal role , and he is naturally suited for toil and war, and so his role also includes elements of breadwinner and warrior.

In that role he fears no shock of war, either literal or figurative battle against the hardships of life called earning a wage; and lacking weakness, he shuns dishonorable victory; and to shun dishonor is to shun dishonesty. A woman might adorn the truth as she adorns herself to make the gentle side of nature foremost; or a mother shield her child from a hurtful reality with a fairy tale or a diplomatic word; a manly word is straight as an arrow and meant to hit the heart of the mark.

To his wife, the father is both Romeo and Galahad and Adonis, at once her master and her retainer her worshipper. The father is also a slave, bound by the unbreakable chain of his marriage oath forever, unwilling and unable to forsake wife or child, if he be true, and vowing to forsake all others and cleave to her whom God has made one flesh with him.

If you recoil in confusion or disgust, dear reader, to hear the matter put so bluntly; or if a nagging sense flutters like a cloud of bats about your skull that this description gives too little worship to equality; or too little praise to womanhood and motherhood, or dishonors children by refusing them their dignity and equality; or displays homophobia by not rushing to qualify the statements with a reassurance that either “gender” can play the masculine role; or if you are taken off balance like a man who steps on a missing stair as you wait for me to assure you that all these concepts are odd anachronisms having no place in the utopia of tomorrow-land in which we live; or to assure you that only our culture, one among many, upholds these arbitrary “values”; or to assure you that I speak mine opinion only, and yours if it differs is as good as mine; or that I am using the words master and authority and masculinity in some abstract or bloodless way; or if the very concept of authority sounds jarring in your ear like a clamor of brass vessels; why, then, dear reader, whether you admit it or not,  you have supped the food of the elves which nourishes no man but bewitches them, and bibbed the wine of the modern world, for one of your crucial concepts that influences or governs you is antifatherhood.

In sum, the concept of fatherhood includes and controls the concept of strength, of courage, of honor, of authority and obedience, of equality, of individuality, of maternity, of femininity, chastity, of childhood, of true liberty, of life itself and of all true faith. Let us turn to these concepts one by one and see their relation to the crucial concept.

If this is a father, what is the antifather?

It is the opposite of any of these things, or even of all these things.

Antifatherhood is weakness, either the physical weakness of a sexual pervert who cannot control his flesh, or the mental and moral weakness of a tyrant and a bully. This includes the more pathetic mental and moral weakness of that gossip and backbiter who minds everybody’s business but his own, whose tongue is quick to venom, and whose heart is so small it can hold only the burning ember of condemnation, punier than an atom. A busybody is merely a tyrant without a scepter.

Antifatherhood is effeminate waffling and fear, or childish intemperance, or an inability either to obey without rebellion or to lead without tyrannizing. It is the cowardice that attacks imaginary or symbolic enemies, while leaving real enemies untouched, or, worse, it is the folly that aids and lauds real enemies with no forethought for the children under one’s care.

Antifatherhood is the pusillanimity disguised as cynical realism which says that dishonest means and dishonorable means to win an argument or win an election or win a war are forgivable means.  A father teaches his children that sports are to teach sportsmanship, and that a fallen foe treated with honor today may be an ally tomorrow. The antifather teaches that the ends justify the means. A childless man never has to contemplate how he must explain himself when innocent and adoring eyes are turned up to him so trustingly, to imitate the lessons of his life.

Authority is the one concept that the concept of Antifatherhood has successfully destroyed in modern life, so much so that even to talk about it is to speak a language as dead as Latin. The Antifather sees only earthly power, the power to compel, the power to inflict. The Antifather defines all power as tyranny, as unauthorized or illegitimate power. Hence the antifather cannot obey and follow, since the follower lacks power and is hence automatically the oppressive victim. Hence the antifather cannot lead without tyranny, doing only those acts his authority authorizes, since, to him, to lead is to have total and totalitarian control over all life.

Imagine a king on his deathbed, with barely the strength to speak or raise his hand. What makes his knights still bow the knee to him, or elevate his infant son to be their liege, is authority. Imagine a president in a wheelchair, crippled by polio, and imagine that you are his last soldier after all his armies have been wiped out by a treacherous rebellion or turned their coats. If he commands you to stand in the door of the Oval Office and shoot rebels until they overwhelm you, that command has presidential authority, even if he himself has no power to punish you should you disobey. You did not obey him in the first place only because of fear of punishment. Only the antifather speaks of obedience in such terms as this.

The perversion of the concept of equality that demands all success be punished and heroism be dragged to the lowest gutter level of the dullest philistine is the opposite of the concept of a father, for a father does not make himself a child to raise his child. A true father serves a nobler concept of equality, the one that raises up sons to be fathers in turn, the knight who leads the hesitant squire to knighthood.

The concept of individualism that preaches an utter atomism of all social and civil relations, as if each man were an independent sovereign, making no bonds with his fellows aside from alliances of convenience or mercantile mutual advantage is likewise opposite the concept of a father. No man is a father without a wife who is a mother. The one man in fiction who tried to be a virgin father was Dr Frankenstein, whose name has since been rightly made a synonym for the unbalanced hubris of the intellect. No man is a father who lacks children dependent upon him for provender and protection and leadership, especially moral leadership.

Fatherhood implies motherhood as yin implies yang. The concept that all things masculine or feminine are all hateful or oppressive or arbitrary or optional likewise is antithetical to fatherhood, for the concept of a father is the concept of a true man, and true man seeks and adores a true woman, without which he is as nothing. Fathers are masculine because mothers are feminine.

As fatherhood implies motherhood, so motherhood implies femininity, which,  upon reflection, we can see to be either those qualities which make for good mothers, or signs and symbols adopted by a culture to advertise those qualities. Like all advertisements, they might be true or false. Antifatherhood equates femininity with weakness, and weakness is the despicable state of the oppressed, the victim, the downtrodden. Antifatherhood equates femininity with the silliness of peroxide blondes pretending to be stupid so as not to scare off men mistrustful of brains in women. The antifather wants strong women for the same reason as he wants weak men, because he is shallow, and he mistakes physical or political strength for spiritual strength, an art of which he knows nothing. A truly feminine woman has the strength to drive a lover to suicide, a betrothed to the altar, a husband to fatherhood, a boy to manhood, a man to heroism. This is not a power to be despised, but it is a deep and profound power, and the shallow mind which dwells forever on simple and material things cannot see it. The antifather thinks the mating dance is an arm-wrestling match and nothing more. If a man has more upper body strength than a woman, the antifather calls this an injustice.

The central point at which fatherhood and antifatherhood clash is that very point in the human soul where the reason clashes with the base and animal appetites, that crucial point of sex. Fatherhood is a sexual role, indeed, it is one of the three essential roles of sex. The other two roles are motherhood and childhood. A father is not the father of a bastard. The reason why we make a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children is because we make a distinction between chastity and fornication, that is, between sex within marriage and sex without marriage.

This is the main point of the modern attack on fatherhood. The reason why it has been so successful is that it has an ally in the base appetites of man, and it unleashes the most powerful of human drives, the sexual appetite.  I will not bother to repeat or refuse the bogus arguments used to promote the sexual revolution; any reader blind to the social pathologies that comes of adopting the Playboy Magazine philosophy cannot be made to open their eyes if I point to the various landmarks on the long downward slope of corruption, or point to the cyclopean and monstrous abomination of desolation looming in the holy place so that the sun hides it face.

On the other hand, any reader whose daughter complains that her husband would rather watch pornography than consummate their marriage and deliver him a grandson will feel the cold wind of that desolation without my touching on it.

Any reader who has given herself to a live-in lower, coupling with him in the hopes that the boy will somehow grow into a man and come to love and cherish her, but overhears him joking with his other girlfriends about not needing to buy the cow when the milk is free, she also feels the deadly breathe of the desolation, and needs no word from me.

Any reader not a widow who is raising her child without a man, and sees her boy allured to gang membership, to drugs, to suicide, or sees her girl allured to men as worthless as the absent father, also feels the desolation. And father robbed of his family by an ungrateful and unfaithful wife, horsecollared with alimony and child-support, and yet a man who did no wrong, and perhaps does not even know why his wife left him, he not only feels but lives the desolation.

The attack on fatherhood has been so successful than many a man these days cannot even imagine a society where fatherhood exists, and assumes all ages must have been like ours, and all leaders adulterers, and all women harlots, except when they make the voluntary (yet inexplicable) choice not to be. The idea of chastity strikes the modern mind as unnatural.

Likewise, the idea of children strikes the modern ear with the sound like that of a plague of locusts being carried in on the east wind, a noise of menace, an alarm that the bounty of earth is threatened. Here is part of the logic of concepts which earlier I mentioned: a man, or a society, can feel reverence and respect for sexual perversion, such as incest or sodomy, because it values personal autonomy as sacred; or that man or that society can feel reverence and respect for chastity and marriage, because he holds virginity and motherhood as mystical and sacred; but he cannot hold chastity and sexual perversion as sacred without making a distinction so artificial between the two concepts as to persuade no one. Likewise here: if it is a crucial concept to you or to your society that sex is merely recreation, such that even the sex of one’s sexual partner is of no nevermind, then the use of sex for procreation cannot also be sacred; children cannot be sacred; virginity cannot be sacred.

Even the word “virgin” will sound awkward and anachronistic when you hear it, and you will giggle or perhaps sneer. Whereas screaming the word “vagina” will sound like a warlord’s trumpet in your ear, and you will ride to battle, banners bravely waving.

How did a crudity become your battlecry, O ye generation of vipers? How did we come to the situation where you cannot tell the difference between “all men are created equal” and “women can marry each other”?

It is because all the concepts related to fatherhood are inverted when the concept of fatherhood is inverted. You hold it a sacred duty to desecrate what is decent, because to you any sign of decency is a sign of oppression. You have simply equated, or your teachers have equated for you, the concept of self command in sexual matters and the concept of political oppression or psychological repression. Someone has convinced you that nature is unnatural and that the unnatural is the most natural thing in the world.

It is because your crucial concept, whether you know it or not, is that sterility is better than fecundity, that children are bad and contraception is good, that marriage is oppression but whoredom is freedom, that authority is oppression, the femininity is weakness, that masculinity is tyranny, that sex itself is unfair because the two sexes are not one (and you reject marriage, the one why where the two sexes can in truth become one), and that everything is opposed to your independence and self-expression and self-esteem, and you want to whore around and play the whore, because you wish you lived in a world where you could get away with every sin without every paying any price.

The secret never spoken but always hanging huge as stormclouds in the background, covering the mental landscape of the modern age from horizon to horizon, is that you are not just in rebellion against political and social institutions who labeled instruments of oppression. You are not lovers of liberty as you claim, for true liberty consists in the perfection of the nature of man, not in the abolition of man.

You are an odd combination of anarchists and tyrants: anarchic in any matter where self-command is called for, or honor, or honesty, or truth to one’s word, and tyrants in any matter where some girlish fear smothers you, either fear of overpopulation, or global warming, or global cooling, or both at once; fear of ozone depletion and fear of cellphones and fear of lightbulbs and fear of flush toilets; and fear of being in want and fear of being unloved and fear of being hated and fear of being mobbed and killed by throngs and hordes of insane Episcopalians or mass-murdering Baptists; but most of all, you fear to lose your cheaply-won and meaningless self-anointment of moral superiority, where you go through the motions (without understanding them) of Christian concern for the dignity of women and children and Christian compassion for the poor and downtrodden; and you classify as downtrodden the Mohammedan Jihadist whose dearest dream for which he is willing to die and kill is to impose Sharia law on you and yours; but you fear the loss of your cheap illusion of moral superiority more than you fear the sword of Jihad, and so in the name of whatever the fashionable buzzword  might be this season to excuse your sins and crimes, you act like tyrants when you have the power, and you act like gossips and backbiters when you lack the power, to aid your enemies and wound your protectors.

The reason, once seen, is simple. Your protectors are man who remind you of fatherhood. Soldiers and lawmakers and police are man of authority, who must be physically brave, and act as honor demands, and serve and obey and command. Your enemies do not remind you of fatherhood. If anything, they remind you uncomfortably of your own life of comfort and ease which your father fought and toiled to bestow on your ungrateful and wasteful and empty souls, and you see them as charity cases, even though they say that want nothing from you, and do not see them as enemies, even though they never cease to proclaim in loudest words and louder actions that they are.

The crux or overlap between the concepts of sexual sterility and aiding an enemy is the concept of life and death. The modern world with its empty soul speaks in terms of enjoying the endless party of life while it speaks in actions of lurching glassy-eyed toward the crumbling brink overlooking an abyss. The modern world is a death cult.

Why? Why does the modern world celebrate choice, the act of choosing, with such cheers and paeans of praise and ringing tambourines, and then chose cowardice, dishonor, perversion, sterility, childlessness, self-destruction and death? If life is such a rollicking party, why depart by jumping off the roof? If you are having such fun, why are you trying to die?

Because you are not just anarchists rebelling against men. You are addicts of unreason rebelling against reality. You are slaves of hell rebelling against God.

He is the source of all life, and in rejecting Him, whether you know it or not, you reject life. His is the authority behind all moral principles, the mind behind all logic and reason, the inspiration behind all true and wholesome art, and He is love, the source and summit of which all earthly loves are reflections and shadows and foreshadowing of greater loves to come.

The modern world has no choice. In the name of individuality and liberty and equality and fraternity (or whatever other meaningless word-fetishes the witch doctors of modernity invoke, merely for the sonorous sound of the words) the modern world rebels against fatherhood. But, due to the logic of concepts aforementioned, it is sad and telling truth that no one can rebel against the concept of fatherhood without rebelling against God Almighty. They either demote Him to some emasculated hermaphrodite, or making a doting grandfather in his dotage who freely grants gifts but never delivers judgment, or they join fully with the pride of Lucifer, and mock the Lord as a myth or figment or fairytale lie.

That, simply put, is why we have come to the house of madness in the land of make believe in the world of the looking glass where everything is backward. God has put the choice before us, to chose life and be blessed, or to chose death and perish – and the modern generations have thought it would be chic and stylish to chose death, because the other choice offended their self esteem.

Women, now that a world without fathers, without husbands, without families, without homes, has been brought into being now are free of the restriction of being feminine or female or women at all. They soon will be merely sexless persons in a powerless void, where their only provider will be faceless bureaucrats as remorseless and inhuman as the Mandarins of China, and with all other institutions, family and clan and church and local community destroyed, will be naked before that power.

Women and men, young and old, are approaching the perfect freedom the postmodern world promises, the perfect freedom of as an astronaut whose umbilical cable is severed and spaceship is lost, and nothing for infinite lightyears reaches to any side of him as he falls.

Congratulations. All you had to do to win the freedom to sin was give away your soul.  You did not even bargain for it, or get anything in return. Faust would be ashamed.

 

 

 

 

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Quote for the Day

“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament… There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.”

— The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to his son, Christopher.

My comment: If I may be droll, allow me to recommend to my fellow science fiction and fantasy novelists that they become Catholic merely to increase their chance of writing a novel of lasting worth, power, and beauty, on the grounds that we Catholics see the cosmos as a sacramental temple whose stained glasses are lit with supernal light streaming in from beyond, and where the many-colored light touches, enchantment, magic, wonder and all the sacred things which give life richness spring up like elfin flowers, like the moly herb that wipes the lies of the eyes away, or like trees whose leaves are for the healing of nations: and like a wind in the stars we hear, far above the mystic horns of elfland blowing, the deeper magic ring in choirs of angelic song whose breath is the breath of life.

Professor Tolkien continues:

“The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.

“Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children – from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn – open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand – after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.”

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Fabio Paolo Barbieri on the Contempt of the American Command for the Enlisted Man

A powerful and brief statement by the wise albeit irascible Mr Barbieri about the sad state of the US military:

http://fpb.livejournal.com/632086.html

He quotes an article from LifeSiteNews.com:

Col. Crews recounted an interchange in 2010 between Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a military chaplain. While Adm. Mullen was briefing the troops on what the repeal might look like, the chaplain asked if those with “biblical views that homosexuality is a sin [would] still be protected to express those views?”

Adm. Mullen reportedly responded, “Chaplain, if you can’t get in line with this policy, resign your commission.”

Another chaplain’s promotion was unexpectedly rescinded, said the colonel. The reason: forwarding an email sent by a fellow chaplain that was critical of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal. Due to this action he was told he would need to be “more closely supervised.”

Yet another chaplain wished for his chapel to be considered “sacred space” and not used to officiate same-sex marriages. He was told that despite his wishes, his chapel would be “sexual neutral territory.”

After Chaplain (Major General) Douglas Carver, the U.S. Army’s Chief Chaplain, called for a day of prayer and fasting “in keeping with your religious traditions,” the Military Religious Foundation (MRF) “wanted him fired,” said Col. Jacob Goldstein, a panelist and senior U.S. Army Jewish chaplain. He added that despite the MRF’s claims that this was offensive to Jewish people, “this fasting follows in our tradition.”

Chaplains are not the only ones feeling pressure. Veteran’s Affairs officials told veteran honor guards that mentioning God in prayer was not acceptable. It took a Temporary Restraining Order from U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes and four months of litigation for the name of God to again be permissible.

Four months was not soon enough to prevent heartbreak to the widows of the fallen. Lisa Ward, the widow of a war veteran, made a promise to her husband – in the event of his death, he would receive the full burial ritual. But arriving to bury her husband and fulfill her promise, she was told the full burial ritual was against federal government regulations. The ritual mentioned God.

“I can’t redo my husband’s funeral,” she said with tears in her eyes.

My comment: This is the result obtained when you have your military institutions being used as a sandbox for social experimentation rather than as a cadre for the defense of democracy around the world.

 

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And now for some real news, fans of science!

This is not a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but a once-in-history thing. I am only sorry there will not be a firm date which defines a clear boundary line, but at some point soon, Voyager One becomes the first manmade object ever to depart from the solar system.

The cameras were shut off long ago, but the instruments record an uptick in the particle count which indicates the spaceship has departed from, or nearly so, the relatively empty space that a sun sweeps clear of interstellar particles via solar light pressure. This envelope is called the heliosphere. The interstellar medium, if I can use the word without smiling, is thicker, by which I mean the vacuum is marginally less perfectly empty.

The signal takes sixteen hours at lightspeed to reach from the ship to receivers here on Earth or about about 121 astronomical units away.

Here is an article with some details

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/get-ready-because-voyager-i-is-this-close-to-leaving-our-solar-system/258456/

Voyager is a piece of tech that launched in 1977, and bears a famous gold plate with our greetings from Earth to any spacefaring civilizations who may be out in space waiting to greet us, whether Klingon or Kzinti or Barsoomians or Boskonians. Unfortunately, the man pictured on the plaque is in bell bottom jeans, dressed like John Travolta from SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. It was the 70′s after all.

The fine fellows at Jet Propulsion Laboratories are still mildly embarrassed about that one.

BUT I NOTICE THE GOLD PLAQUE LISTS PLUTO AS A PLANET YOU DARN PLUTO-HATERS!

 

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The Penguin Equation

I should tell my loyal readers that obviously I intend to spend the rest of my adult life kvetching about the Drake Equation. Sad, but manic obsession can strike anywhere, and at any time. I blame Carl Sagan.

Doc Rampage writes:

<blockquote>”“Haste makes waste” is not an equation for the trivial reason that it does not express an equivalence but rather a causal relationship. “</blockquote>

Thank you. I think we can agree on this point, as well as on the point that “Slithy were the borogroves” is not really a sentence despite having the appearance of the subject-verb-object form of a declarative sentence. I also agree that God=Love is not an equation for the reasons you give, that the nouns in the sentence are not mathematical operands.

I will make the further statement that in order to be a “scientific equation”, the operands must refer to something science can define or measure, such as the number of stars which produce planets. When you get to concepts that involve a judgment call of something which cannot be reduced to a measurement, such as the definition of life or the definition of civilization or the lifespan of a civilization, we are no longer talking about something in the realm of physics.

Instead saying “The Drake Equation is not an equation” I will now, armed with the distinction you have given me, rephrase my bitter complaint:

I myself take it to be true that the more stars there are, the harder it is to believe that life, if it arises naturally and automatically, will not arise among the stars in their countless myriads. If there were fewer stars, it would be easier to believe we are alone. But the so called Drake Equation does not express an equivalence but rather a causal relationship.

The equation offends me, because it looks like science, it looks like an statistical expression of something like Mendeleevian genetics.

The Drake so-called Equation is actually more like taking a birdwatcher to a marsh, and saying, “The more birds that there are in the marsh, the greater your chances of seeing an ostrich or a penguin” without knowing whether or not those who species, or any species, inhabit that particular marsh.

It is true that it is harder to believe that a marsh crowded with birds will not contain the one rare bird you seek; and if the marsh were small, your hopes would be easier to dash. But it is not true that the relationship between the unknown number of birds, the size of the marsh, the number of bird species on Earth, and the chances of seeing a penguin can be expressed in an Equation.

And I use this analogy advisedly: the “Birdwatcher Equation” is nonsensical because it does not take into account that penguins and ostriches are not marsh dwellers. It does not mention climate or habitat at all.

Let us define “P=Ms x Bs x Wt” where P is the chance of seeing a penguin, Ms is the size in acres of the marsh, Bs is the number of bird species on earth and Wt is the time the bird watcher spends watching. Surely it is a matter of common sense that the more bird species there are on earth, the greater is the bird watcher’s chance of seeing a penguin in the marsh, and also the large the marsh the greater his odds, and also if he watches longer, the greater are the birdwatcher’s chances of spotting the elusive marsh penguin.

Nonetheless, “P=Ms x Bs x Wt” is simply not an equation. It does not measure anything or express an equivalence except, perhaps, that all tautologies are equivalences. The fact of the matter is that penguins are not found in marshes. The birdwatcher equation uses the word “chances” the same way the Drake Equation does: NOT as an expression of how many trials out of one hundred we have a result, but only as a common sense feeling that if there are more birds in the air, the harder it is to believe that a penguin is not flying among them. But, again, this is just a feeling that we in English happen to use the word “chance” to express. In reality, penguins do not fly, so the “chance” of seeing a penguin flying over a marsh is exactly zero, if we define “chance” scientifically rather than emotionally.

Likewise, the Drake Equation lists some factors that common sense says may have something to do with the origins of life, but we do not even know whether “x” is one of those factors or not (and x could be anything from star type to orbital width to moon size to nickle-iron core to free oxygen in the atmosphere to the arrival of cometary amino acids).

And, in the spirit of the last few posts, I will now post a picture of a penguin:

And what would Penguin be without Catwoman?

 

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Drake = Not an Equation

Revisiting this dead horse to whip it a few more time might clarify a question of terminology. I apologize for imposing on the patience of my readers.

Doc Rampage asks:

<blockquote>”When you say that the Drake equation is not really an equation I presume you mean to say something similar to “it is nonsense and it does not express a proposition”.”</blockquote>

I am saying something very specific, not merely ‘it is nonsense’. I am not concerned with whether it expresses a proposition, I am concerned with whether it expresses an equation.

Let me try again: in physics, we observe that certain proportions exist between things we call constants. For example, when observing the flight of a musket ball, we note that it forms a parabola, that is, the forward motion is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to the powder charge and the drop is PROPORTIONAL IN THE SQUARE to the distance thrown. This can be expressed by the same equation used to graph a parabola. The color of the musket ball does not change the equation. It is an irrelevant factor. Again, the angle of the shot defines the distance to the spot where the ball falls, such that a 45 degree angle casts the ball the farthest length for a given charge of powder and mass of shot. This also I can express as a proportion or an equation relating the angle to the point at which the parabola cross the origin.

When the proportion is expressed in terms of a unity, that is, all the terms are defined in relation to one term, this is called an equation. By definition, where there is no proportion, there is no way to express all the terms in relation to one term. When that happens, we do not have a poorly formulated equation, we have something that is no equation at all.

It is in no wise a matter of formal syntax, for, if it were,  “too many cooks spoil the broth” would become an equation if expressed in the science-y looking terms “x = nb where x is the number of cooks, n the chance of spoiling and b is the spoilage ickyness factor of the broth” whereas the inverse square ratio is not an equation if written in text not using an equals sign “a cube of twice the height fills eight times the volume.”

What the Drake Equation does is list things that are not defined (how do we measure how alive a thing is, or how civilized?) and which at our present state of knowledge is an unknown and invents a term which has no meaning other than the sum of all the undefined unknowns. While it is written in the form of an equation, is not an equation, because it does not express a proportion between the factors given.

Again, contemplate the statement “kinetic energy equals one half times mass times velocity squared”. This is another way of saying that the kinetic energy is directly proportional to the mass and proportional in a geometric ratio to the velocity. All the terms, energy, mass, velocity, refer to real entities that can be measured. The statement is an equation.

By contrast, the statement, “haste makes waste” is not an equation, even if you express it syntactically in the form of an equation “Waste increases as a direct proportion of hastiness.” Because, unlike velocity, which is a precisely defined concept, “hastiness” is not precisely defined. It is not reduced to a measurement. There is no number put on it. Likewise with the term “waste.”

Where the relationship has no proportion to each other, such as the relationship between how often I get a haircut and how often I get a date, there is no proportion that can be expressed. Or, rather, to be specific, if I get a haircut on Monday and a date on Friday, the ratio of haircuts to dates is one to one, and it does not tell me whether I would have gotten this date anyway even with longer hair, nor does it tell me whether getting a second haircut on Tuesday would have gotten me a second date for Saturday. I realize this is hard for modern scientific thinkers to grasp, but merely counting numbers is not science: to be an equation, there would have to be first, a relationship between haircuts and dates, and, second, the relationship would have to be invariant. Suppose again I plot on a graph the number of haircuts in a sample population against the number of dates, and I get a cluster of dots and I draw a line that goes through most of them, and I express that line in terms of rise over run. This is not an equation, because there is no relation being alleged, or, rather, since sometimes have a nice haircut might indeed make a good first impression on a prospective date, the relation is not an invariant one. You cannot equate the two the way you can equate the ratio of force to mass.

Look at the factors in the Drake Equation. Since none of them are known by modern science, it is easy to overlook the fact that only two of the factors (the number of stars bearing planets, and the number of planets bearing life) can be reduced to a number, and be counted. The other factors cannot be reduced to a number. “Civilization” is a term like “haste” — it is not something defined in terms a physicist can measure. How many “civilization” exist on Earth now? Do we count Chinese culture and Christendom as one civilization because they have trade and commerce? You can put a number to it, but that number will not be expressing a fact, it will be a judgment call.

Judgment calls can be true or false, but they are not physics.

And, finally, an equation like force is mass times acceleration is DISPROVABLE. I can myself measure whether it is true or false. Indeed, the at relativistic velocities the equation is false, or, rather, the equation is inadequate because other factors which are insignificant at Newtonian velocities become significant.

Force is mass times acceleration is a definite statement of defined terms. Me saying “the harder I throw the baseball, the harder it hits” is a true statement, but it is not disprovable, because I am making no statement about what ‘harder’ means and what the ratio or relationship is between throwing and hitting.

How would one go about disproving the Drake Equation? I suggest that an “equation” which runs “unknown fudge factor one time unknown fudge factor two times unknown fudge factor three equals unknown fudge result” cannot be disproven because it is not saying anything that can be proved.

The Drake Equation is poetry, not physics. It is a statement that since there are a whole lots of lots of stars, there MUST be space people out there in space, and the more stars there are, the harder it is to believe that there are no space people. That is an emotional sentiment. it is not science, it is not physics, it is not a disprovable statement, it does not measure anything, it establishes no proportion between factors, hence it is not an equation at all.

To be sure, if you want to use the word “equation” to mean that any sentence with an equals sign in it is an equation, why, by that logic, the God Equation read “God = Love” and the Haircut Equation reads “Haircut = Hot Date” and the Haste Equation reads “Haste = Waste” and the Not Equation reads “Drake = Not an Equation.”

You will, however, be using the word in a misleading way, if you attempt, as Drake did, to steal the prestige of science and apply it to what is basically a statement about an imponderable.

And, having nothing to do with the previous conversation, here is another picture of Catwoman:

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Interview with InfoCatólica

Bruno Moreno Ramos asked to interview me for his Spanish speaking audience at www.infocatolica.com Here is the English version of my answers:

Interview John C. Wright

 

Q: You were raised as a Protestant, you grew into an atheist, you married a Christian Scientist and then you went and became a Catholic. It’s hard not to think of a miracle. How were you led into the fold?

A: Odd as this will sound to Christian readers, my reason for being an atheist was because of a deeply rooted love of truth.

Since a young age, I believed that human reason, and only human reason, was man’s path to discover the nature of reality and virtue, to discover what one is and what one ought to be, provided one was sufficiently fearless and objective and dispassionate in the investigation. All belief in anything supernatural I rejected as insufficiently supported the evidence; even the concept of a natural above nature I rejected as paradox. But for all my skepticism I never lost my love of truth.

Three things happened which eroded my faith in atheism.

First, when I became a husband, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of unborn children. The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if my son were not alive, not human, not important; when, of course, any man who loves the truth cannot help but see that he has a duty to love and protect his beloved children. The secular not only lied, they tempted young mothers to commit the most atrocious crime imaginable, for surely to kill one’s own little helpless baby is worse than to kill a stranger, because when a mother who should love her helpless child kills a relative, there is treason involved, a betrayal of her highest duty and her deepest instincts. The baby has no one else to protect him.

My son was wrongly diagnosed with having a disease, and the doctor gently suggested killing him. My wife was a Christian, and would not even hear of the issue. To my infinite shame and regret, for a moment, just for a moment, overcome with the fear of the burdens raising a crippled child would lay on me, I was tempted by the offer, and contemplated killing my own son. You see, I did not have the staff of the Church on which to lean. I was trying with my own unaided human reason to find my way through the thicket of vice and virtue, right and wrong, and so for a moment my foot touched the pathway to hell.

For that moment, in my heart, I thought as a murderer thinks, and not just a healthy, normal murderer, no, a kin-slayer; an infanticide.

What was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?

Second, when I became a father, I realized that my duty as a father was to raise my sons to be men, real men, and not to be weak and foolish creatures enslaved to degrading vices. This was not a matter of opinion or preference: it was a matter of iron duty, which I could not evade any more than I could evade the fact that twice two equals four.  The atheists and secular powers in my country all pretended and acted as if all moral choices are equal and all equally meaningless: that no matter what you choose, your choice is sacred and praiseworthy, because there is no wrong choice. This doctrine is not only a lie, it is illogical, on the grounds that a father cannot instruct his children to make choices without standards, and a standard by definition is something one does not choose. It is a given.

So, once again, I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of human vice and human sexuality. I had been told by the secular culture and by my fellow atheists that sex was a recreation, a source of meaningless pleasure, and I had been told that fornication was better than monogamy, and sexual perversion was better than chastity. Upon becoming a father, logic told me that no matter what my preferences or opinions in the matter, I would be failing in my duty to my sons if I taught them to be unchaste or to be perverts. But everyone around me, the entire world, the media, the press, the culture, the academia, the laws, all were unified against that single, simple idea that truth is better than falsehood and purity better than vice. I realized with a sensation of seasickness that I was surrounded by an empire of lies.

So for the second time I asked myself, what was wrong with the atheist world, if we atheists were so right on so many things, that we could be so grossly wrong about this?

On September 11th, the anniversary of the defeat of the Paynims of the Battle of Vienna, America, and all the Western world, was viciously and cravenly attacked by Mohammedans, and the long war between Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, suspended since Lepanto, was renewed.  As an atheist, I saw this as an example of the extravagant evils of religion in action, and was certain that my fellow atheists would be as outraged as was I with the attack on our most beloved institutions of the West, the liberty – particular intellectual and academic liberty – which we enjoyed.

Instead, the atheists, particularly those of the American Left, vocally and wholeheartedly supported and applauded every effort to stop any retaliation for the unprovoked attack, and sided, wherever possible, with our enemies. While not coming out and saying they wished for enemy victory, they rushed to aid and comfort them, put legal and social barriers in place against our forces to protect the foe, and played the grossly dishonest word-games of moral equivalence and blaming the victim.

I was shocked and appalled to learn that I had been lied to my whole life about the nature of secularism. It was not, as it so often claimed to be, a merely rational and human concern for human life on Earth. To judge from the public reaction of the majority of atheists after the Twin Towers fell, the atheists did not side with civilization against the dark and barbaric terrorists. No, they sided with the terrorists against the Christians.

I stared in all directions in astonishment, with wide eyes and mouth hanging open. What had driven the world I served insane? They were suicidal. The atheists were aiding and abetting the Jihad, offering apologetics and support for it.

The thing I had thought my whole life was atheism was not atheism, it was merely antichristianity.

I was ashamed to the core of my being to see my fellow atheists behaving in such a fashion. In three areas of paramount importance, the nature of life and death, the nature of sex and romance, and the nature of war and peace, my fellow atheists were not only wrong, they were extraordinarily and absurdly and profoundly wrong, wrong to the point of insanity.

At about this same time, atheism started becoming popular, and many books and articles were published that were openly atheistic: authors such as Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris. One would think I would rejoice to see the ideas I supported at long last receiving public attention. But the books and articles were lies. My fellow atheists were not attacking the things about religion I thought mistaken and evil, they were attacking the good things which made religion tolerable, those same three issues of life versus death, chastity versus perversion, self-defense versus self-destruction. They were attacking reason.

I was an atheist because I loved truth and I thought that the truth, the unpleasant truth, was that no gods were or could be real. Because I loved truth, I loved virtue, life, reason, and goodness. And I found myself alone. All my fellow atheists, to one degree or another, were on the side of falsehood, death, nonsense and madness and evil.

I have three times mentioned how shocked I was, but I did not say what shocked me so. I was shocked by the sheer frivolity, the lightheartedness, the silliness of my fellow atheists and the whole secular world in their approach to these deep matters of life and death, purity and perversity, peace and war. They treated all issues of philosophy like questions of fashion.

None of my fellow atheists, not one, was an inspiration for me as a husband, or as a father, or as a patriot of the civilization of the West. Even men whom I admired for other reasons, or were dear friends, treated selfishness as if it were the norm, treated love of life as if it were an oddity, or treated history as if it had never happened.

The idea haunted me that the atheists could not be wrong about all the important issues in life, but right about the one paramount issue of whether God existed.

Once my faith in atheism was lost, my deep-seated hatred of Christianity eroded. I began reading Christian authors, particularly C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. In them, I found the sanity and sobriety that was missing in my atheist allies. Lewis and Chesterton were not merely right, but deeply and soundly and soberly right, right in the way a healthy man is right: their hearts were in the right place.

The idea haunted me that the Christians could be right about all the important issues in life, but wrong about the one paramount issue of whether God existed.

So I sat down to read the Summa Theologica. Remember that it was my firm belief that unaided human reason was the only tool men had to discover the nature of reality and morality. I reasoned that this work, written by the most reasonable writer of all time, could settle the matter. If he could not reason me into belief in God, no one could.

Well, the thickness and the dryness, the sheer hard work of the intellectual effort defeated my attempt. I gazed with weary eyes at the endless pages of tightly-reasoned proofs, each as difficult as a math problem, and decided that God Almighty would not, if He were real, expect every illiterate farmer in every village too small to have a paved road run to it to go through this careful and painstaking means of reasoning to discover Him. If He were Almighty, as well as being the creator of the laws of nature of the universe, He would have some means by which the people whom He wished to save from death could be saved.

Armed with this simple reasoning, I decided to put all my lifetime of philosophy to an empirical test! I knelt and prayed perhaps the most arrogant prayer of all time (albeit, at the time, being an atheist, I had no idea how arrogant it was).

“Dear God,” I prayed, “I know you do not exist. I can prove it with the accuracy and elegance of a proof from Euclid. But, as a philosopher, I am honor bound to entertain seriously even ideas I know to be absurd. So, just on the off chance that the absurd idea that You exist is true, sir, I demand that You show Yourself to me and prove that You exist. If You hear this prayer, and do not answer, then You either do not care if I know You, or You cannot. If the first case, You are not all-loving, and in the second, not all-knowing or not all-powerful , so if You do not answer this prayer, You lack one of the defining attributes of God. And if You do not exist at all, I have wasted no more than a lungful of air and a moment, of time, but I have done all my duty as a philosopher requires, and put the matter to the test. I dare You to show Yourself to me.”

Well, God answers prayers, even blasphemous ones, sometimes with a dreadful sense of humor. Three days later, I was stricken out of the clear blue with a heart attack. As I lay on the floor writhing and dying, my wife, a good Christian woman, called her Church, and a man who makes his living praying for the sick and healing them offered to heal me , which he did on the spot and in that same moment. The pain went from being all-consuming to nothing in the time it would take you to snap your fingers.

Astonished and clutching my chest at the sudden and complete surcease of pain, and curious as to what had afflicted me, I went to the hospital emergency room. I was not worried, but I wanted an examination to tell me what had happened.   The doctors ordered major heart surgery, for it seemed that I had five blocked arteries in my heart. So I was in one hospital and then another for several days.

On the first day, before any surgery, while I was waiting in the emergency room, I suddenly grew aware of my own soul, a part of myself which, up until that moment, I would have said was mythical, make-believe. I felt the Holy Spirit enter my body. It was like a physical sensation. I was not drugged nor in pain nor frightened nor influenced by anything that would deceive my senses and memory: nor can I describe it to anyone who had not suffered a similar sensation.

As you can imagine, this gave me much to ponder. After the surgery, to the surprise of the nurses, I did not need any pain killers, because an act of prayer merely made the pain go away.

Then the Virgin Mary came to visit me. She has told me not to speak of what we spoke of, but I will say that there was no secret to it, nothing you could not learn merely by reading your Bible.

That was astonishing enough, but then I saw God. He was like a light, and like perfect love, and I was filled with ecstasy and bliss.

Later, I saw Jesus Christ.  Unlike my other visitors, He terrified me, telling me that He would be my judge on the last day, but that God the Father judged no man. At this point, I suspect that my visions might be hallucinations, because no Christian I had ever met, and no book by any Christian I had ever read, had ever put across this odd and zany doctrine that God does not judge men, but that Christ does.

After I was released from the Hospital, I spend many a day at home recovering. Again, I was not on  any drugs nor pain killers, nothing that would influence my thinking or my perceptions. And I had a religious experience. This was different in nature than the visions, which were experiences much like speaking to  a person, or communing with a loved one. This was more like being a mind taken up into a larger mind, a small soul being embraced in a larger one, a soul larger than the universe. I saw that all thoughts ultimately issue from God, who is the prime mover of thought as He is of action, and I saw the relation of time to free will, and the paradox of God’s foreknowledge and the freedom of men to disobey was explained to me. It was as if I stood outside of time, and could turn and look at it, and see its structure, its symphony.

If this were not enough, two or three weeks later, I decided to read the Bible for the first time since in my adult life. I came across a passage which was word for word the same as the vision of Christ said to me. The passage is from the John, which I had never read before, not even in school.

So, I had asked, nay, demanded proof from God that He show Himself to me, and I was answered as entirely as any man could ask. I experienced a miracle healing, was saved from death, then felt the Holy Spirit, spoke to the Virgin and saw the Father, and later had a religious experience. As a philosopher, I note with wry amusement that the attempts of my atheist friends to explain away my experiences as coincidence or delusion or self-delusion are contemptibly weak, a mere tissue of ad hoc explanations. I note as well, that they cannot explain why virtue is better than vice, logic better than nonsense, life better than death, or why there is a universe instead of a void.

To be sure, there are mysteries and paradoxes in Christianity, questions of incarnation and foreknowledge at which the human reason quails, and yet from these paradoxes come conclusions so sound and clear and wholesome that a man can know how best to live. I have tried my whole life to live up to the strict and stern standards of the noble Roman Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Cicero and Seneca, and to live with as little fear of death as Socrates displayed, even with a cup of poison in his hand.

The only time I was utterly unafraid was when (according to the world’s standards) I should have been most afraid, when I was under the knife for major surgery. Instead, filled with the love of God and a peace that cannot be described, I was buoyant, fearless, and cheerful. I was as unafraid as Saint John when he held a cup of poison in his hand.

In other words, as a Stoic, I could never live as a Stoic, and adhere to the pagan standards of a good and noble life. But as a Christian, I could.

My  atheist friends, when they pontificate on their doctrines of life, utter paradoxes even more paradoxical than any Christian theology, and from their paradoxes come only darkness and hell, conclusions so confused and petty that a man who actually believed them would either throw himself into a whorehouse and live his life in an endless and endlessly vain pursuit of false pleasures,  or throw himself in to the sea and drown his meaningless life in the uncaring salt wave.

I hope that answers the question.

 

Q: The Great Books program of St. John’s College had a significant influence on the way you understand the world and, indirectly, on your becoming a Catholic. Could you tell us something about it?

A: Ah, I see you have resolved only to ask me questions which require page after page to answer!  Saint John’s College in Annapolis is a school of a type that might be more familiar to Europeans than to Americans. There are no tests and no grades, and every student follows the same course of study, which consists of the classical Trivium and Quadrivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy). We read the Great Books of Western literature in roughly chronological order, starting with the ancient Greeks, the Latins, the Medieval and Renaissance writers, the Reformation and Enlightenment, and finally, and disappointingly, the Moderns.

We read literature starting with Homer, philosophy starting with Plato, studies music and languages, science from Ptolemy to Einstein, mathematics from Euclid to Goedel politics from Aristotle to the Federalist Papers, and economics, the youngest of the disciplines, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx.

Such an education is like being a man with a memory in a world of amnesiacs. All the clever ideas which you will hear from all the clever people, repeated as if no one could question them, all come from somewhere and for some reason, usually in answer to a specific problem in philosophy or politics, ethics or mathematics – and the clever people are not clever enough to tell you where their ideas come from. Nor, not knowing their origins, can the clever people defend such ideas.

A little knowledge of the great conversation which has been going on between the generations and which forms the basis of our civilization (for the basis of civilization is in the habits of virtue formed by the habits of mind, which in turn are formed by philosophy) would be of inestimable value. Consider that Aristotle, in analyzing the  Utopian Republic of Plato, adroitly identified the problem with all schemes to own property in common, or raise children communally. Imagine the bloodshed that would have been averted, the millions and tens of millions of lives saved in the Twentieth Century, had this adroit criticism of communism been remembered and taken to heart by the intellectuals of those years.

In my day, the school was blissfully free of Political Correctness – there simply are no African American ancient Greek philosophers or playwrights or historians or poets to put onto the list of Great Books, and a writer like Cervantes was present because he was great, not because he was “Hispanic”. I believe that purity has been sullied by the inclusion of at least one writer based on his skin color, not based on the merit of his contribution in the commonwealth of letters.

Q: Should Catholic colleges concentrate on providing that kind of education?

A: I don’t know anything about Catholic colleges to be able to answer the question. I will say that the swiftest and best cure for Protestantism and Modernism is to be familiar with the accomplishments of the past. Nothing shatters the yokel parochialism of the present day more swiftly than recognizing the immense stature of men of genius whose thought built our world.

Q: When you became a Catholic you took the name of a 1st Century martyr, Saint Justin. Why did you choose that patron saint?

He is the patron saint of philosophy.  I think of myself first as a philosopher who writes novels, not as a novelist who writes philosophy.  I pray him to inspire and lead me to be as he was: one who cared more for truth than for life.

Q: You write for a living and, apparently, in your free time, after a long day writing… you keep on writing. You have a successful blog on which you talk about literature and sci-fi, but also about God, philosophy, politics and morals. Why did you start writing a blog?

A: Human weakness, vanity, madness. I was once a newspaperman, and my generous editor gave me leave to write on any of the topics of the day, or, for that many, any topic at all. As if bitten by a bug, I became so used to writing editorials that I find I cannot long do without it. It is sort of like St Vitus’s Dance, except with words rather than foot-twitching.

Q:  Some people think that science fiction and Catholicism are all but incompatible (due to the old Faith vs. Science canard). I guess you don’t agree…

A: I rather strongly do not agree. Catholicism invented Western Civilization which invented science. The scientific method rests on certain metaphysical and theological axioms without which it cannot exist. Because these axioms were not recognized in the ancient world or the Orient, there was no scientific progress properly so called in ancient Greece, or Rome, or before the coming of the White Man, in India, China, or the New World, accomplished though these civilizations in other ways certainly were.

The modern recrudescence of paganism, the bland heathen world view of the materialists, is undermining the ability of the West to continue to do science. The recent scandal and word-war over Global Warming and Global Cooling I suggest is a sign of the decay of modern science. Postmodern science is a dead limb severed from its life giving Catholic roots. Earlier examples of the abortive science of postchristian nations can be seen in Lysenko in Soviet Russia, and the make-believe race sciences and history of the Nazi Germans.

To a smaller degree, science and Protestantism are all but incompatible, since the essential point of Protestantism is the rejection of the unity and the Magisterium of the Church.  This necessitates whole dependence for all matters of faith and morals on a private interpretation of scripture. Such private interpretation is strongly inclined, since there is no certain authority on which to rely, to be literal. Protestantism, with its strong emphasis on private judgment and private reason, ironically is prone to enthusiasm, including outbreaks of mania and emotionalism and esoteric doctrine which an authoritarian Church naturally hinders or checks. Science is unemotional and public and authoritative, and the findings of geology, astronomy, and biology certainly seem to be incompatible with a literal reading of Genesis; and the enthusiastic nature of some Protestant groups urges them to hold science and literature and learning in low regard (the example of Deal Hudson as depicted in his autobiographical AN AMERICAN CONVERSION spring to mind).

That said, it must be emphasized that Protestantism does not contain the direct opposition to science and reason found in the esoteric religions of the East, Buddhism and Taoism, or the indirect opposition to reason and science prompted by paganism and polytheism in general.

Without a belief in a monotheistic creator, there is no assurance that reason is sufficient to discover the laws of nature, or even that there are laws. The materialism of Karl Marx, for example, proposes a universe where by definition the position of brain atoms are determined by mechanics, by the actions of selfish genes or mindless social and economic forces. In such a universe no scientific reasoning, nor reasoning on any topic, is possible or imaginable.

Likewise, without a belief in the independence of secondary causes from the whims of many gods there is no point to the study, since such laws are merely illusions of consistence in an arbitrary acts. For this reason, the classical world never reduced the speculations of its philosophers to an system of natural philosophy called science.

Likewise again, the belief in that all the material world is illusionary of necessity obliterates the motive for scientific research. There are no medical researchers who are practicing Christian Scientists.

And finally, the belief found in mainstream Mohammedanism that the one God participates directly in all acts of cause and effect in effect obliterates cause and effect, since the existence of regularity in nature becomes an illusion produced by the reliability of the inscrutable will of God.

Q:  You’ve recently published a novel called Count to a Trillion. Could a new reader guess that you’re a Catholic just by reading it? Are there Catholic elements in your books?

A: So far in my life, I have not used by books to proselytize or flatter or even to describe my own beliefs, neither my atheist beliefs when I was an atheist, nor theist now. I write enough editorials that I feel little need to editorialize while engaged in the serious business of storytelling. But any writer’s world view appears whether he will or no in the world he invents, so a new reader who was perspicacious might hazard such a guess.  But he would have to be extremely perspicacious.

What I do not do in COUNT TO A TRILLION is have the main characters avoid religion or condemn it. Both the heroine and the villain are Roman Catholics, because they are Spanish, and my conceit is that the Spain of the future will reflect the days of the Spanish Empire, achieving a glory from the discovery of news worlds in space which once she achieved in the discovery of the New World in the Americas.  My hero is something of a skeptic, albeit nominally a Christian.

Because the novel deals with immense spans of time, the Roman Catholic Church obtains an unusual prominence, merely because it is assumed in the novel that the Church will last as far into the future as she has into the past.

Q:  What are you working on now?

A: I am writing the opposite of a Dan Brown novel. My young hero realizes that he is unlike his brothers in looks and nature, and begins to wonder if he was adopted. Tillamook, Oregon, the cheese capital of America somehow does not seem like his home to himself. He father is a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, perhaps an assassin for the Opus Dei or, better yet, a Knight Templar whose grandmaster still controls the Ark of the Covenant.  When our hero goes to work for the Haunted Museum, whose curator is an insane scientists who collects animals that should not or could not still exist in our world, he discovers that there is more than one world. Our young hero falls in love with the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter, and is off to rescue her when the mad scientist warns him she is about to open a doorway into a parallel dimension using the Moebius Coil.

The idea behind the story is that the energy required to create a second and parallel universe is greater than the universe and comes from outside of it, so therefore only when miracles occur or fail to occur is the timeline split into two parallels. The main enemy of the youthful hero is the world that arose when the Tower of Babel, in that version of history, never was struck by the confusion of tongues and never fell. Unfortunately, the Babylonians were the first in all parallel history to discover the secret of how to travel sideways in time, and, being from a world where there are neither nations nor tribes nor divisions, the Babylonians can neither imagine nor tolerate living in peace with neighbors not in union and unity with them, and so they have conquered all the various versions of history, and soon will conquer ours.

There is more to it than that, of course. The story includes monkey-masked ninja-girls, levitating prophets, one eyed Arimaspians, living iron, no-headed Blemmye, blood-quaffers and cynocephalics,  one-legged Sciopods, not to mention the stolen Rhine-gold, the flail of a conquered Pharaoh, the tarncape,  the Cup of Jamshyd, and a prayer-powered “mecha” or walking tower shaped like a shining suit of armor forty stories tall, and a remarkably beautiful mermaid from a world where the fleets descended from the Ark of Noah have yet to find dry ground.

Q:  Finally, two obvious questions for all Catholic sci-fi writers: Has any Cardinal already contacted you to enlist you in the Arcane Conspiracy to replace all Heads of State with robots in order to enslave free countries and subject them to the Tyranny of the Church? Have you received the unbreakable medieval-latin cyphers for secret communications with the Congregation for the Propagation of Faith by the (Laser) Sword?

A: No, but I have been given my secret decoder rosary with built in strangle wire, my stealth jetpack, and I have been shown the secret confessional booth whose trapdoor leads into the secret lair where the crime-solving supercomputer of the Archbishop  hums with power. Adoring the lair walls, along with giant pennies and robots of dinosaurs, is the trophy room of relics and icons. From this cave, cadres of ninja-trained priests in black rush out to track down criminals and evildoers …. in order to hear their confessions and bring them forgiveness and tell them the secret of eternal life.

Compared to how wild and supernatural that is, any mere conspiracy of world conquest seems tame, does it not? The world is already subject to the tyranny of the head of our Church, for all authority in heaven and earth is His.

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