John C. Wright's Blog, page 128

The Skeptical Doctor Quote for the Day

From Theodore Dalrymple’s latest book, ANYTHING GOES:

The most famous object in Colmar is the Issenheim Altarpiece, painted by someone the world knows as Matthias Grunewald, though whether anyone of that surname ever actually existed is doubtful. The altarpiece has had a colourful history, having been shifted hither and thither in the last century and a half as a pawn in the cultural politics of France and Germany in their struggle over the ownership of Alsace.

It was painted for the confraternity of St Anthony at Issenheim, an order that no longer exists and that once specialised in the care of the sick on religious pilgrimages in search of a cure. St Anthony had a disease named in his honour, St Anthony’s Fire, which was caused by the growth of a mould on damp rye, the consumption of which gave rise to ergotism. Ergot produced a powerful constriction of the peripheral arteries that was agonisingly painful. Gangrenous extremities had to be amputated (without anaesthetic, of course, and no doubt in conditions of the utmost filth); ergotism also caused dramatic visual hallucinations that led people to behave in bizarre ways. These hallucinatory experiences have sometimes been used to explain the extravagant fantasies in Netherlandish or German paintings of the Temptation of St Anthony, such as one of the panels of the Issenheim altarpiece, and by extension to argue for the mind-expanding properties of psychotropic and pschedelic drugs (it is the same argument that De Quincey used in favour of opium in The Confessions of an English Opium Eater). Thus self-indulgence is given a patina of intellectual and aesthetic enquiry.

I don’t think it necessary for people to have had drug-induced visual hallucinations for them to be able to imagine monsters, or indeed anything else; but even if one or other of the painters such as Grunewald, Bosch or Breughel had experienced them, it is inconceivable that they should have produced their work while still under their influence, when they needed the utmost eye-hand co-ordination as well as self-consciousness. I don’t know of any serious work of art that is directly attributable to the consumption of psychotropic or psychedelic drugs. Thus there is nothing to be said, from the mind-expansion point of view, for repeated use of these drugs.

I insist upon this, because I came to adulthood in the decade when the young were invited to tune in, turn on and drop out. Extravagant claims were made for the beneficial effects, both personal and social, of various illicit drugs; but when I compare these claims today with the devastation caused by the mass use of these drugs, especially by the poor in rich societies, among whom I have spent so much of my professional life, I feel something approaching rage. It has given me an biding hatred of intellectual frivolity.

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SFFing in the Rain

And one more memory of Ray Bradbury

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302040/remembering-ray-ted-elrick

From this let me reprint the money quote:

I once was professionally fortunate enough to interview Ray and Harlan Ellison, separately, for an article on the question “What makes a science-fiction film?” Many films were dismissed because they were stories that could never happen. To them, science-fiction stories occur without violating the laws of science. At the time Ellison was conceptual consultant on Babylon 5 and spoke about how that series fell well within the genre of science fiction, rather than fantasy, like Star Wars.

Ray explained to me that he really didn’t consider himself a science-fiction writer, but he did have a very interesting example of a science-fiction film — Singing in the Rain. He explained that the plot exists solely because of a technological advancement, in this case sound coming to movies, and how that technology affects every character’s life.

I had to ask Ellison a follow-up question, and in the process wondered what he thought of Ray’s example. Ellison said, “Well, I respect Ray greatly, but you have to remember . . . ”

And there was a long pause. Then he said, “You know, Ray has a point.”

 

 

 

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Bradbury and Card

Orson Scott Card sings of the power of the prose of Ray Bradbury, may his poetic soul in peace eternal rejoice.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/302032/thoughts-ray-bradbury-orson-scott-card

He he took his leave of earthly life during the transit of Venus.

And here is another memorandum from a man who shared an agent with him:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/302065/ray-and-don-michael-walsh

 

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Dalrymple and Mieville

Theodore Dalrymple chides China Mieville.

http://www.city-journal.org/2012/eon0308td.html

My respect for Mr Mieville increases. I had not realized that one of my guild, a science fiction writer, was famous enough to earn a tongue lashing from Theodore Dalrymple.

Of course, I know nothing of Mr Mieville aside from what I read of the first hundred pages of PERDIDO STREET STATION, to which my reaction was negative. I have not read the article the good doctor denounces.

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What Makes a Great Book?

In this space, I reprinted a copy of a list painstakingly compiled by an Ubiquitous Mr Baxter of the Great Books. It was immediately greeted with scoffers who would throw away half the list or more.

Lest the conversation be entirely occupied with criticisms of what should and should not be called a Great Book, it is useful in his space to reprint Mortimer Alder’s own description of the process which compiled this list.

The words below are his:

What were those three criteria of selection? The first was the book’s contemporary significance — relevance to the problems and issues of the twentieth century. The books were not to be regarded as archaeological relics — monuments in our intellectual tradition. They should be works that are as much of concern to us today as at the time they were written, even if that was centuries ago. They are thus essentially timeless — always contemporary, and not confined to interests that change from time to time or from place to place.

The second criterion was their infinite rereadability or, in the case of the more difficult mathematical and scientific works, their studiability again and again. Most of the 400,000 books published each year are not worth carefully reading even once; many fewer than 1,000 each year are worth reading more than once. When, infrequently in any century, a great book does appear, it is a book worth reading again and again and again. It is inexhaustibly rereadable. It cannot be fully understood on one, two, or three readings. More is to be found on all subsequent readings. This is an exacting criterion, an ideal that is fully attained by only a small number of the 511 works that we selected. It is approximated in varying degrees by the rest.

The third criterion was the relevance of the work to a very large number of great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last twenty-five centuries.

The authors of these books take part in the great conversation, not only by reading the works of many of their predecessors, but also by discussing many of the 102 great ideas treated in the “Syntopicon”. In other words, the great books are the books in which the great conversation occurs about the great ideas. It is the set of great ideas that determines the choice of the great books.

In a book entitled “The Great Conversation”, which is not a part of the set’s second edition but which accompanies it as an introduction to the set and as a guide to its use, we have demonstrated this point by two devices. One is something that we called the Author-to-Author Index, which shows how many of each author’s predecessors that author has cited in his work. The other is the author-to-Idea Index, which shows in how many of the 102 great ideas treated in the “Syntopicon” readers will find references to that author’s work on one or more topics, usually many. These two indices, along with the “Syntopicon” itself, are clear evidence of the reality of the great conversation, in which the great authors and the great books have participated.

By this criterion, the difference between great books and good books is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. There is not a continuum that has poor books on the far left, average books in the middle, good and very good books on the right, and a few Great Books on the far right.

As I have recently written elsewhere, the adjective “great” in the phrase “great books” derives its primary meaning from its use in the phrase “great ideas.” There are many other criteria by which people make up diverse lists of the books they wish to honor by calling them “great books.” But from the primary significance of the adjustive “great” as applied to the great ideas is derived the significance of that adjective as used in the phrase, “the great conversation.”

In other words, we chose the great books on the basis of their relevance to at least 25 of the 102 great ideas. Many of the great books are relevant to a much larger number of the 102 great ideas, as many as 75 or more great ideas, a few to all 102 great ideas. In sharp contrast are the good books that are relevant to less than 10 or even as few as 4 or 5 great ideas. We placed such books in the lists of Recommended Readings to be found in the last section in each of the 102 chapters of the “Syntopicon.” Here readers will find many twentieth-century female authors, black authors, and Latin American authors whose works we recommended but did not include in the second edition of the Great Books.

To complete the picture of the criteria that controlled our editorial process of selection, it is necessary for me to mention a number of things that we definitely excluded from our deliberations.

We did not base our selections on an author’s nationality, religion, politics, or field of study; nor on an author’s race or gender [sic he means sex]. Great books were not chosen to make up quotas of any kind; there was no “affirmative action” in the process.

In the second place, we did not consider the influence exerted by an author or a book on later developments in literature or society. That factor alone did not suffice to merit inclusion. Scholars may point out the extraordinary influence exerted by an author or a book, but if the three criteria stated above were not met, that author or book was not to be chosen. Many of the great books have exerted great influence upon later generations, but that by itself was not the reason for their inclusion.

In the third place, a consideration not operative in the selection process was the truth of an author’s opinions or views, or the truth to be found in a particular work. This point is generally misunderstood; many persons think that we regard the great books as a repository of mankind’s success in its ever-continuing pursuit of the truth. “That is simply not the case”. There is much more error in the great books than there is truth. By anyone’s criteria of what is true or false, the great books will be found to contain some truths, but many more mistakes and errors.

Mortimer Adler

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After two centuries of intolerance, not dead

Here is a corner of history I did not know. At the risk of sounding like a shallow novelist, I wonder if anyone has ever done an historical novel in praise of those who died. At the risk of seeming like a lazy schoolboy, allow me to reprint the whole article here:

Japanese Martyrs

There is not in the whole history of the Church a single people who can offer to the admiration of the Christian world annals as glorious, and a martyrology as lengthy, as those of the people of Japan. In January, 1552, St. Francis Xavier had remarked the proselytizing spirit of the early neophytes. “I saw them”, he wrote, “rejoicing in our successes, manifesting an ardent zeal to spread the faith and to win over to baptism the pagans they conquered.” He foresaw the obstacles that would block the progress of the faith in certain provinces, the absolutism of this or that daimyo, a class at that time very independent of the Mikado and in revolt against his supreme authority. As a matter of fact, in the province of Hirado, where he made a hundred converts, and where six years after him, 600 pagans were baptized in three days, a Christian woman (the proto-martyr) was beheaded for praying before a cross. In 1561 the daimyo forced the Christians to abjure their faith, “but they preferred to abandon all their possessions and live in the Bungo, poor with Christ, rather than rich without Him”, wrote a missionary, 11 October, 1562. When, under the Shogunate of Yoshiaki, Ota Nobunaga, supported by Wada Koresama, a Christian, had subdued the greater part of the provinces and had restored monarchical unity, there came to pass what St. Francis Xavier had hoped for. At Miyako (the modern Kiyoto) the faith was recognized and a church built 15 Aug., 1576. Then the faith continued to spread without notable opposition, as the daimyos followed the lead of the Mikado (Ogimachi, 1558-1586) and Ota Nobunaga. The toleration or favor of the central authority brought about everywhere the extension of the Christian religion, and only a few isolated cases of martyrdom are known (Le Catholicisme au Japon, I, 173).

It was not until 1587, when there were 200,000 Christians in Japan, that an edict of persecution, or rather of prescription, was passed to the surprise of everyone, at the instigation of a bigoted bonze, Nichijoshonin, zealous for the religion of his race. Twenty-six residences and 140 churches were destroyed; the missionaries were condemned to exile, but were clever enough to hide or scatter. They never doubted the constancy of their converts; they assisted them in secret and in ten years there were 100,000 other converts in Japan. We read of two martyrdoms, one at Takata, the other at Notsuhara; but very many Christians were dispossessed of their goods and reduced to poverty. The first bloody persecution dates from 1597. It is attributed to two causes: (1) Four years earlier some Castilian religious had come from the Philippines and, in spite of the decisions of the Holy See, had joined themselves to the 130 Jesuits who, on account of the delicate situation created by the edict were acting with great caution. In spite of every charitable advice given them, these men set to work in a very indiscreet manner, and violated the terms of the edict even in the capital itself; (2) a Castilian vessel cast by the storm on the coast of Japan was confiscated under the laws then in vigour. Some artillery was found on board, and Japanese susceptibilities were further excited by the lying tales of the pilot, so that the idea went abroad that the Castilians were thinking of annexing the country. A list of all the Christians in Miyado and Osaka was made out, and on 5 Feb., 1597, 26 Christians, among whom were 6 Fransciscan missionaries, were crucified at Nagasaki. Among the 20 native Christians there was one, a child of 13, and another of 12 years. “The astonishing fruit of the generous sacrifice of our 26 martyrs” (wrote a Jesuit missionary) “is that the Christians, recent converts and those of maturer faith, have been confirmed in the faith and hope of eternal salvation; they have firmly resolved to lay down their lives for the name of Christ. The very pagans who assisted at the martyrdom were struck at seeing the joy of the blessed ones as they suffered on their crosses and the courage with which they met death”.

Ten years before this another missionary had foreseen and predicted that “from the courage of the Japanese, aided by the grace of God, it is to be expected that persecution will inaugurate a race for martyrdom“. True it is that the national and religious customs of the people predisposed them to lay down their lives with singular fatalism; certain of their established usages, religious suicide, hara-kiri, had developed a contempt for death; but if grace does not destroy nature it exalts it, and their fervent charity and love for Christ led the Japanese neophytes to scourgings that the missionaries had to restrain. When this love for Christ had grown strong in the midst of suffering freely chosen, it became easier for the faithful to give the Saviour that greatest proof of love by laying down their lives in a cruel death for His name’s sake. “The fifty crosses, ordered for the holy mountain of Nagasaki, multiplied ten or a hundred fold, would not have sufficed” (wrote one missionary) “for all the faithful who longed for martyrdom“. Associations (Kumi) were formed under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin with the object of preparing the members by prayer and scourgings even to blood, to be ready to lay down their lives for the faith. After the persecution of 1597, there were isolated cases of martyrdom until 1614, in all about 70. The reigns of Ieyasu, who is better known in Christian annals by the name of Daifu Sama, and of his successors Hidetada and Iemitziu, were the more disastrous. We are not concerned now with the causes of that persecution, which lasted half a century with some brief intervals of peace. According to Mr. Ernest Satow (quoted by Thurston in “The Month”, March, 1905, “Japan and Christianity”): “As the Jesuit missionaries conducted themselves with great tact, it is by no means improbable that they might have continued to make converts year by year until the great part of the nation had been brought over to the Catholic religion, had it not been for the rivalry of the missionaries of other orders.” These were the Castilian religious; and hence the fear of seeing Spain spread its conquests from the Philippines to Japan. Furthermore the zeal of certain religious Franciscans and Dominicans was wanting in prudence, and led to the persecution.

Year by year after 1614 the number of martyrdoms was 55, 15, 25, 62, 88, 15, 20. The year 1622 was particularly fruitful in Christian heroes. The Japanese martyrology counts 128 with name, Christian name and place of execution. Before this the four religious orders, Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians and Jesuits, had had their martyrs, but on 10 Sept., 1622, 9 Jesuits, 6 Dominicans, 4 Franciscans, and 6 lay Christians were put to death at the stake after witnessing the beheading of about 30 of the faithful. From December until the end of September, 1624, there were 285 martyrs. The English captain, Richard Cocks (Calendar of State Papers: Colonial East Indies, 1617-1621, p. 357) “saw 55 martyred at Miako at one time. . .and among them little children 5 or 6 years old burned in their mother’s arms, crying out: ‘Jesus receive our souls’. Many more are in prison who look hourly when they shall die, for very few turn pagans“. We cannot go into the details of these horrible slaughters, the skilful tortures of Mount Unaen, the refined cruelty of the trench. After 1627 death grew more and more terrible for the Christians; in 1627, 123 died, during the years that followed, 65, 79, and 198. Persecution went on unceasingly as long as there were missionaries, and the last of whom we learn were 5 Jesuits and 3 seculars, who suffered the torture of the trench from 25 to 31 March, 1643. The list of martyrs we know of (name, Christian name, and place of execution) has 1648 names. If we add to this group the groups we learn of from the missionaries, or later from the Dutch travellers between 1649 and 1660, the total goes to 3125, and this does not include Christians who were banished, whose property was confiscated, or who died in poverty. A Japanese judge, Arai Hakuseki, bore witness about 1710, that at the close of the reign of Iemitzu (1650) “it was ordered that the converts should all lean on their own staff”. At that time an immense number, from 200,000 to 300,000 perished. Without counting the members of Third Orders and Congregations, the Jesuits had, according to the martyrology (Delplace, II, 181-195; 263-275), 55 martyrs, the Franciscans 36, the Dominicans 38, the Augustinians 20. Pius IX and Leo XIII declared worthy of public cult 36 Jesuit martyrs, 25 Franciscans, 21 Dominicans, 5 Augustinians and 107 lay victims. After 1632 it ceased to be possible to obtain reliable data or information which would lead to canonical beatification. When in 1854, Commodore Perry forced an entry to Japan, it was learned that the Christian faith, after two centuries of intolerance, was not dead. In 1865, priests of the foreign Missions found 20,000 Christians practising their religion in secret at Kiushu. Religious liberty was not granted them by Japanese law until 1873. Up to that time in 20 provinces, 3404 had suffered for the faith in exile or in prison; 660 of these had died, and 1981 returned to their homes. In 1858, 112 Christians, among whom were two chief-baptizers, were put to death by torture. One missionary calculates that in all 1200 died for the faith.

Sources

PAGES, “Histoire de la religion chretienne au Japon” (Paris, 1869); VALENTYN, “Beschryving” (Dordrecht, 1716; MONTANUS, “Gezantschappen, Japan” (Amsterdam, 1669); DELPLACE, “Le Catholicisme au Japon”, I, 1540-1593; II, 1593-1640 (Brussels, 1910); “Katholische Missionen” (Freiburg, 1894). See also works referred to in text.

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Politics of Star Trek

I thought these articles by Andrew Price might interest the readers of my journal:

Conservatives often talk about what they don’t like about Hollywood. That’s okay, but it’s not productive. Maybe it’s time we talked about what we do like? More to the point, let’s point out when Hollywood has gotten it right. And that brings me to the original “Star Trek” series.

I’m not saying the creators of “Star Trek” were conservatives; they weren’t. But liberalism has shifting values, and for a brief period at the end of the 1960s, liberalism temporarily overlapped with the values of classical liberalism, which is the foundation of modern conservatism. “Star Trek” benefited from this. In fact, I think you’ll be surprised how deeply conservative these shows are.

The Nazi Episode:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/02/11/the-politics-of-star-trek-patterns-of-force

The Hamlet Episode:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/03/30/politics-star-trek-conscience-king

The Viet Nam War Episode:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2012/06/02/Politics-of-Star-Trek

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Economists and Antieconomists

Someone unwisely asked me to put forth my arguments in favor of my political position. Obviously this would take a small book, or a large, to do rigorously. But as a courtesy to any reader curious about my basic assumptions, allow me by way of introductory matter to reprint an article from two years ago on the topic of economics.

*   *   *

A reader comments:

 “I believe that most socialists strongly believe the world would be a better place if everyone believed and acted as they do and they may well be right. The problem is that everyone doesn’t believe and act as they do but their system requires such a thing for it to succeed so they turn to government to enforce the act part if not the believe part. In the end, any system that starts with, “If only everyone would do X…” is doomed to failure.”

Here I must respectfully disagree. Even if everyone believed as the Marxists believe and acted as unselfishly and irrationally as Marxist theory commands, they still would not be right.

In other words, Marxists are not only evil. They are also wrong.

Economics studies the invariant relations of cause and effect surrounding human action, particularly economic phenomena. Economists deal with categories like cause and effect, cost and benefit, barter, currency, scarcity, priority, price, interest, time-preference, trade barriers, transaction costs, and so on and on. There are invariants in the phenomena that fit these categories.

For example, there is something called scarcity, which says that one factor of production cannot at the same time fulfill all possible mutually exclusive uses to which it might be put. This is also known as the law that “you cannot keep your cake and eat it too.”

For example, there is something called priority, which says that of two mutually exclusive uses, the one that serves a human desire more or better or more thoroughly is preferred to one that does serves less well.

Forgoing the less desired use for the sake of the best use is called the opportunity cost. This is also known as the law that “there aint no such thing as a free lunch.”

For example, there is also something called the disutility of labor, which says that, unlike machines, to persuade a man to forgo a desired idleness involves an opportunity cost.

For example, there is something called time preference, which says that eating a hamburger today and eating a hamburger tomorrow are not equally desirable, time being what it is: and that to overcome the reluctance of delayed gratification, interest must be added to the future use. I might be willing to give you my lunch money today, so that you can buy a hamburger, if, in return, you promise to buy me a hamburger and an order of French fries tomorrow. This is also known as the law that “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”

For example, there is something called specialization of labor, which holds that between two people (or two countries) if one specializes in what he does best, and he trades the fruits of his labor for what the second man does best, they both benefit, even if the first man is more skilled than the second in both areas. Imagine a surgeon and a handyman. The surgeon’s skill at surgery is worth one hundred pounds an hour; the surgeon also can clean his instruments between operations in six minutes. The handyman is not as adept at cleaning instruments as the surgeon. It takes him half an hour, five times as long, to do the same task. However, the handyman’s basic skill, to do odd jobs, is only worth five pounds an hour. The six minutes it takes the surgeon to clean his instruments, if he were to do it himself, has an opportunity cost of ten pounds. Even if he hires the handyman to do in thirty minutes what he can do in ten, provided the wage is less than his opportunity cost (he can be making 100 pounds an hour in the operating theater), there is a benefit to him; and if the wage is greater than the opportunity cost of the handyman’s next most efficient use (he can make 5 pounds per hour for odd jobs) then the benefit is mutual. This is also known as Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage.

However, the calculation as to whether or not having someone do a task five times as slowly for the same result is worth it cannot be made unless the comparative value of the opportunity cost related to their wages is known or can be assessed.

Socialism, at least in its Marxist form, is necessarily based on the assumption that all these are political or psychological or philosophical phenomenon, if not defects, and ergo they are not laws of nature. Marxism is the faith that refining or re-engineering political institutions, and training (or conditioning) human beings to a different psychology never before seen in human history will produce a new type of man and a new type of reality. In this reality, there is such a thing as a free lunch, because goods and services will be produced without cost, by fiat, and distributed without cost, by fiat, and men will labor without wages, by fiat, because no disutility of labor nor opportunity cost will apply to their labor. There will be no want, no scarcity, and hence no need to conserve or economize or prioritize scarce goods and resources. At the same time, and for no particular reason, human beings will no longer crave those things the Marxists regard as luxury goods. This reality technically is called Utopia, Cockaigne or Cloudcuckooland.

This is why discussions between Marxists and economists are mostly fruitless. One side, the economists, regards the subject matter as a matter of scientific logic, able to be rationally debated with reference to reality; whereas the other side, the so-called scientific socialists, regards the subject matter as an epiphenomenon of psychological defects on the part of the Benighted, and psychological perfection or enlightenment on the part of the Elect, and no rational debate is possible or even needed, because reality is a fluid waste-product of a materialist dialectic unfolding with the inevitability of Calvinist double predestination throughout the stages of history.

In a Marxist commonwealth, there is no need for a price structure, no need to buy and sell, no need to borrow money nor charge interest, because there will be no time preference related to present as opposed to future uses of goods and services.

Marxism not only postulates that utopia is possible in reality, it also pretends that reality is a dystopia. For example, where an economist would look at a handyman and a surgeon and discover a possibility of mutual benefit, the Marxist denies the possibility of mutual benefit, and assigns one party to the trade the role of exploiter, and the other party to the trade the role of victim. Contrary to logic and evidence, the assertion here is the that  mutually beneficial exchanges do not and cannot exist. Since economics is the study of mutually beneficial exchanges and how to facilitate them, in effect Marxism is the assertion contrary to logic and evidence that economics does not exist. The only thing that exists is politics, and the power struggle between mutually belligerent factions, which must end in the utter obliteration of one and the triumph of the other.

For no particular reason the Marxist always picks the employer as the exploiter and the employee as the victim, but I myself have been in the position of being a paralegal in a rich law firm who was the employee and the servant of an indigent employer, and we dictated the terms of the employment contract, a contingency fee with a healthy percentage if we won the case going to us. (Sixty percent, if I recall.) The percentage was unconscionable: we were exploiting our employers. No other firm in the county was willing to take the case, so we bargained for an unusual degree of profit. There was nothing in the economic category of the trade, us being servants and them being employers, that had any bearing on who was getting the raw side of the deal. Sometimes it is the investors, the capitalists, who get the raw side of the deal. According to Marxist theory, it is impossible for capitalists to be in the exploited position.

The other and bigger problem with Marxism is that even in a world where everyone did do X (where X, in this case, was live like monks in dormitories, eat communal food, work without reward, and have all goods and services distributed by a central quartermaster) the Marxist program could not work. Even if elves or angels and Martians or some other being with a completely different psychology and nature than human beings tried to run an economy larger than a family without specialization of labor or the exchange of goods and services, IT COULD NOT BE DONE.

The reason why it could not be done is that no central quartermaster of any group of activities larger than a family can keep track of the comparative worth of every possible use to which a good or a service, or any of the factors of production, including labor, that goes into making that good or service can be put. Further, no comparison can be made between the value of one possible use of a factor of production and the value of all other possible uses.

Let us say, for example, that you are a Martian. For this hypothetical,you, dear reader, may pick your Martian psychology and philosophy; it can be anything imaginable, no matter how outlandish: you are a dog-man with a strong sense of pack, or a bull-man with the strong sense of herd, or a bug-man entirely devoted to the hive. It does not matter.

What matters is that, for this hypothetical, you have the power to decide what happens to a certain tonnage of iron. One group of members of your society has approached you and ask it be made into an ironclad barge to sail the canals of Mars, to bring needed supplies from Lesser Helium. Another asks that it be made into rails, to build a steam engine running from Greater Helium to Mons Olympos. Of this second group, one faction prefers the rail line go over the Mountain, and that effort be expended to carve out a pass. The other faction opines that drilling a tunnel a shorter distance straight through the mountain would take less effort and yield better results. At the same time, yet another group wants the iron made into girders and beams to build a telescoping tower powered by radium to stand in yet another location, having nothing to do with whether the supplies are brought in by rail or barge. At the same time, some planners believe that the need for iron will be greater in the future than at present, and they ask you to store it without using it against those coming lean years.

In a Marxist commonwealth, there is no non-arbitrary price, rent, or wage. All these things are set by fiat by commissars like yourself. You therefor cannot compare the cost and benefit of selling the iron to the tower builders, the barge builders, the tunnel-rail builders or the pass-rail builders. The cost is something you yourself decide. Nor is there any quid-pro-quo: the four possible customers are not customers are all, but assignees. You simply assign the iron to whom you would. You cannot decide based on comparing cost and benefit, because the loss to you in each case is the same: your commissariat loses the iron, and then you have it no more.

Keep in mind that all these uses are mutually exclusive. Keep in mind that the value of a use is discontinuous. Giving the railroad builders an amount of iron allowing them to build nine-tenths of a rail road is worse less (probably far less) than giving them the amount needed to build the whole rail road all the way to the destination. Rare and unusual would be the passenger or freight who would receive nine-tenths of the value of a railway ticket when dumped nine-tenths of the way to his or its destination.

Now, keep in mind also that iron comes in different grades and conditions and degrees of availability. Iron that has to be shipped costs more, due to transaction costs, than iron on site. Some iron is less useful for certain uses, and some not useful at all. If a steel plant is not available, or coal, iron cannot be made into steel.

You, as the Martian, even if your motives were entirely benevolent and angelic simply do not have the information necessary to make the decisions involved in this hypothetical.

Even if an highly trained and technical staff were at hand to assist you in answering every single question of fact involved, such as the length of the two proposed alternative train routes, the tonnage and composition of the barge, the height and structural properties of the proposed tower, no one can tell you what the aggregate needs and preferences and wants of all persons involved in the decision would be. Some of those persons, for example, are train passengers for a train that does not yet exist, and may never.

In the market economy, the information is readily available, because the price is set by supply and demand. The supply side tells you how much iron is ready to sell as opposed to store, both your own and that of your competition, and the demand side tells you whose needs or wants are most urgent. When the price information does not reflect this reality (and in a market economy, the reflection is never perfect) an opportunity is created either for you to underbid your competitor and make a sale, or an opportunity is created for one buyer to outbid another, and in either case the trade is a better bargain that it would have been had the price information been perfect.

In the market economy of Mars in this hypothetical, no one has all the information needed to weigh the comparative value of all the factors of production of all the uses of the iron in question. The specialization of labor involves a specialization of information as well. The capitalist seeking stock to drive a train tunnel through Mons Olympos will be able to make a cost estimate of the whole project, by adding the costs of all the factors of production, whose costs estimates each vendor and workingman contributing to the project makes for himself by setting his prices and wages where he would. If he sets his price or wage above or below the market rate, an opportunity is created for someone else to profit from his mis-estimation. The tunnel builder will place a bid against the pass builders, and either will be vindicated, if they attract the custom they anticipate, or, if they suffer a loss, the loss is not due to an arbitrary decision on your part.

For that matter, if speculators in the futures market anticipate lean years to come when iron will be more in demand, they will buy it now when the price is low, and wisely husband it against future use, and, again, will make a profit if and only if their expectations are correct. They have a strong incentive to be right.

You, as the Martian Commissar of Iron, have no incentive to be right. If your nephew could do your job better than you, there is no way for the Supreme Coordinator of Mars to determine that and replace you and put you in a job where you could serve Mars better. The Supreme Coordinator is in the position of a teacher who never gives tests or talks to his students and no grades can be assigned, or of an umpire in a game where no goals are defined and no score can be kept, but the teacher must select a valedictorian, and the umpire must declare a winner.

Nothing in the free market protects a person from the ills that follow from a poor estimate of the cost and benefit involved in organizing such projects. Nothing says that for certain each time an opportunity is created for profit, someone will arise to exploit the opportunity. Nothing says everyone acts with perfect information about the market conditions. But we are not comparing the disadvantages of reality to the advantages of Cloudcuckooland, because reality exists and Cloudcuckooland does not. What the free market does do is avoid the even more severe drawbacks of the socialist commonwealth, where instead of having imperfect market information, the commissars have no information at all. What the free market does is provide opportunities, when waste and inefficiency arise in the system, for someone to be rewarded if he finds an efficient way to correct it. What the socialist commonwealth provides is an incentive toward waste and inefficiency, so that someone will be rewarded if he makes the waste and inefficiency worse.

There were prices for goods and wages for services in Soviet Russia, but these prices were nominal only, and did not reflect the real market information in any way, shape or form. They were assigned by fiat, in the most arbitrary fashion imaginable: the Soviet pricing board met and examined the price of similar or similar-sounding goods in France and England, and commanded the price tags on goods and services to be raised or lowered according to the aggregate supply and demand of people living far away who neither offered to buy or offered to sell anything in the Soviet economy. If there was a good year for cows in England, the price of cheese was lowered in Russia, whether the Russian cows produced more milk or less. If more women bought red shoes in France, the cost of red shows was raised in Russia, even if fewer people needed or wanted red women’s shoes that season, or had the shoemakers to make them.

The hypothetical above applies to a situation where the mining and refining and railway industry on Mars has been nationalized or Sovietized. In other words, the hypothetical reflects the conditions of a theoretical Marxist commonwealth. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxism lost much of the hypnotic glamour it employed to deceive the world into a century of brutal genocidal bloodshed by inhuman thugs in the East and the corresponding blind apologetics and encouragement by inhuman and smug intellectual vermin in the West. The records from the Soviet archives show to all non-partisan historians that Senator McCarthy was completely vindicated: everyone he accused of being a Soviet spy was in fact a soviet spy. Hiss was in the pay of the Soviets; the Rosenbergs were in the pay of the Soviets; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had been telling the complete truth; Walter Duranty had been telling a complete lie. Marxism as an effective and alluring “narrative” to excuse bloodthirsty class-envy and hatred of the Jews had been exploded, at least insofar as the mainstream of Western intellectual leaders were concerned.

However, at the same time pure Marxism was corroding the civilization in Eastern Europe, China, Asia, Africa and South America, a milder form of the mental disease became a permanent fixture of the West. It is often mislabeled “socialism” (honestly speaking, socialism and communism are synonyms) and it refers to an incoherent version of Marxism, or, rather, an even more incoherent version, that adopts a haphazard collection of some Marxist policies and elements but not others. The best term for this is “Fabianism” and it is best thought of as a peaceful form of Marxism that proposes substituting commissariat ukase for price and wage information in some areas and not others, and does not seek immediate nationalization of all industries, only of certain crucial industries. As far as I know, no single coherent apologetic of Fabianism has ever been written, any more than a coherent apologetic for fascism has ever been written: reasonable men can even differ as to what this means.

Fabianism is a mild form of Marxism and its flaws are milder forms of the flaws of Marxism. The commissar who sets the price of goods and services for the nationalized industry is not making an utterly and entirely arbitrary decision, as in our Martian hypothetical. Instead he is making a mostly arbitrary decision, and one which the normal market mechanisms for correcting an erroneous decision have been jammed and dismantled.

A single example will have to suffice for the whole. Suppose the rulers of Ruritania hear the clamor of people who say there is not enough milk in Ruritania. A new law, enacted for the stated goal of increasing the milk supply and lowering costs, sets the price dairy farmers are allowed to charge for milk.

It stands to reason that if the dairy farmers of Ruritania had been able to make a profit at that price, they would have underbid each other to reach that price, each farmer hoping to maximize sale and hence increase his total profit by lowering his marginal profit (selling six buckets of milk for five zloty nets you more than selling four buckets for six zloty, even though you lowered your price per bucket). While it is possible that no dairy farmer noticed the opportunity for lowering his price and outselling his competitor, or that all farmers somehow combined to sell above the natural rate, the idea that the central government would know the particular conditions of the dairy market better than the dairy farmers is even less possible. So we can assume the price mandated by the new law is below the natural market price.

If a vendor is required by law to sell any good or service below the natural rate as defined by the realities of supply and demand, he does so at a loss. He loses a zloty a bucket for each bucket of mail he hauls to market. This creates an opportunity for profit in another field: if the farmer instead churns the milk into butter or cream, or some other good whose price is not dictated by a commissar, he diverts production from milk to some other good. Less milk is produced, and shortages develop. Since the farmers are not allowed to react to the opportunity for profit engendered by the shortage (in an unhindered market, buyers eager for milk would bid against each other, driving up the price, and hence luring marginal dairy farmers eager for profit back into the field) the milk is distributed according to first-come-first-serve, and any latercomers are forbidden by law from satisfying their wants and needs for milk, no matter how high they would have been willing to bid to get the milk. (If the latecomers want to buy buckets of milk from scalpers or speculators who arrived early and bought milk on speculation, the law would forbid this, since the price of milk is controlled.)

In order to correct the shortage, the rulers of Ruritania either have to admit their error, and go take a Freshman course in economics, or they have to control the prices of all the secondary markets for the good, such as butter and cream. If the resulting regulations force marginal users out of the dairy business altogether, this create an opportunity for farmers to turn the cows toward the next highest priority demand the market expresses for this particular factor of production: for example, they might slaughter the milk-cows for meat. Again, in order to prevent the shortages caused by the regulation, the rulers of Ruritania have to regulate the secondary markets as well, and set the wages and prices for butchers as well as farmers. In theory, nothing would prevent the same logic from operating, until the market had abolished all price information, whereupon we are in the same position as the Martian hypothetical above; in reality, the dictates of which industries and services are nationalized depends on purely political considerations, so that the shortages are forced onto a group with less political power and willpower by a group with more, and the sum result of the regulations is to act as a transfer payment from the weaker group to the stronger.

In the example given above, small farms would be forced out of business to the benefit of large agribusiness combines, who would then give such generous donations to political parties, as to ensure a government mandate to sell ethanol, so that the price of grain to the very poor would go up rather than down. If this sounds eerily reminiscent of real-world events, that is because economics offers a framework for rendering real world events meaningful, whereas socialism describes the conditions of Cloudcuckooland. If this sounds paradoxical, that a policy intended to lower the price of some needed good or service to the poor ends up raising the price or creating a shortage, this is because the so called social engineers not only do not bother to study the real world laws of cause and effect underpinning society, they heap scorn, hate, and opprobrium on any who do.

Not only do they not read the owner’s manual, not only do they sneer at you if you try to tell them what the owner’s manual says, these self-appointed geniuses of social engineering blame those of us who read the manual when their actions break the machine they are tinkering with, or drive us all off a cliff.

Whatever you call a person who is proud of the fact that he does not know a thing about engineering, (not even schoolboy-level basics like the mechanics of screws, levers, and pulleys) who nonetheless monkeys with a machine he never tries to understand, you cannot call him an engineer. He is an anti-engineer, someone who thinks the laws of engineering are optional.

Whatever you call a person who is proud of the fact that he knows not a damn thing about economics, (not even schoolboy-level basics like the mechanics of supply and demand, profit and interest, opportunity costs) who monkeys with an economy he never tries to understand, you cannot call him an economist. He is an anti-economist, someone who thinks the laws of economics are optional.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

The Disabled Hardly Even Mentioned

Michael Coren a Canadian TV Host and columnist, writes this guest editorial in the National Review on the topic of how well the secular humanist policy has run in Canada, and he asks us to take warning.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/reply/301641

He writes in part:

Four years ago, a Christian organization in Ontario that works with some of the most marginalized disabled people in the country was taken to court because of its disapproval of an employee who wanted to be part of a same-sex marriage. The government paid the group to do the work because, frankly, nobody else was willing to. As with so many such bodies, it had a set of policies for its employees. While homosexuality was not mentioned, the employment policies did require that employees remain chaste outside of marriage, and marriage was interpreted as the union of a man and a woman. The group was told it had to change its hiring and employment policy or be closed down; as for the disabled people being helped, they were hardly even mentioned.

In small-town British Columbia, a Knights of Columbus chapter rented out its building for a wedding party. They were not aware that the marriage was to be of a lesbian couple, even though the lesbians were well aware that the hall was a Roman Catholic center — it’s increasingly obvious that Christian people, leaders, and organizations are being targeted, almost certainly to create legal precedents. The managers of the hall apologized to the couple but explained that they could not proceed with the arrangement, and agreed to find an alternative venue and pay for new invitations to be printed. The couple said that this was not good enough, and the hall management was prosecuted. The human-rights commission ruled that the Knights of Columbus should not have turned the couple down, and imposed a small fine on them. The couple have been vague in their subsequent demands, but feel that the fine and reprimand are inadequate.

As I write, two Canadian provinces are considering legislation that would likely prevent educators even in private denominational schools from teaching that they disapprove of same-sex marriage, and a senior government minister in Ontario recently announced that if the Roman Catholic Church did not approve of homosexuality or gay marriage, it “would have to change its teaching.”

He mentions some other points.

It’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. [Meanwhile the number of so-called homosexual marriages performed is minuscule.]


A well-known television anchor on a major sports show was fired just hours after he tweeted his support for “the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage.” He had merely been defending a hockey player’s agent who was receiving numerous death threats and other abuse for refusing to support a pro-gay-marriage campaign.
The Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary, Alberta, Fred Henry, was threatened with litigation and charged with a human-rights violation after he wrote a letter to local churches outlining standard Catholic teaching on marriage.
A marriage commissioners contacted by a gay man eager to marry his partner under the new legislation happened to be an evangelical Christian, who explained that he had religious objections to carrying out the ceremony but would find someone who would. He did so and gave the name to the man wanting to get married. Even though the gay couple had had their marriage, they decided to make an official complaint and demand that the commissioner be reprimanded and punished.

In the comments section, one secular humanists pens this, hardly an advertisement for toleration and accommodation:

Those of us who are not Christian are getting awful tired of religious people forcing their views down our throats…and I think you will all find that we are going to start using some strategies that you will not like in the least. We have tolerated your religion for far too long, and it is time to push it into the realm of the private. In other words, keep your religion to yourself and feel free to believe whatever you want. But it is time to start rolling back all the non-secular laws that have been stealthily injected into our system.

My comment:

A friend of mine claims I write about the pro-homosex lobby all the time, and that I hate gays. To the contrary, I think perhaps I do not write about this lobby enough, for they are the ones who actually hate gays.

I don’t call the lobbyist “pro-homosexual” because they have contempt for the person suffering homosexuality. I call them “pro-homosex” The lobbyists are only supporting and cheering the act of sodomy, not cheering the man who suffers it. A chaste and temperate gay man is both inconceivable and abhorrent to the lobbyists. A man cured of the syndrome, they abhor even more, to the point of denying his existence.

Or, to be specific, the lobbyists are cheering and applauding the breakdown of the moral imagination, the loss of character, the dissipation of healthy and sane manliness, which springs from and leads to a sophisticated agnostic indifference to questions of sexual morality.

To make this point, allow me to quote from THE EVERLASTING MAN by GK Chesterton:

“Let any lad who has had the look to grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened. And that first impression, as has been said here so often about first impressions, will be right. Our cynical indifference is an illusion…”

The vice that Chesterton is too old-fashioned to name aloud is now being shouted from the rooftops with all the perverse pride the vicious have for vice; and voices raised against being silenced, by pressure in America, by law in Canada.

My point is that it is that lad, and his sanity and simplicity, which is the enemy of the pervertarians. They care nothing for the perversion itself. Most pervertartians are happily married heterosexuals with 2.5 children. It is the IDEA of perversion that they like, the moral grandeur of not making any moral judgments and hence being free of all condemnation. And so the only thing on which they pass moral judgment is moralism, also called being judgmental.

It is the cynical indifference the lobbyists love and seek, and the illusion. They are not seeking the good, much less the interests, of the homosexuals: the absurdly minuscule number who have taken advantage of the make believe marriage in Canada attests to that. The absurdly high number of prosecutions for those who dare voice even the mildest opposition attests to their real purpose, whether they admit it or no.

To be sure, some of the pro-homosex lobby are homosexuals. This is not odd. You could also find Jewish Nazis in prewar Germany, or Blacks in the antebellum South who were anti-Abolitionists.

But just in case I have spoken too often and too bluntly on the topic, let me merely note the legal theory involved in the comment that “it is time to start rolling back all the non-secular laws that have been stealthily injected into our system.”

The idea that the marriage law was safely secular contract back in the remote past, and subtle Churchmen injected non-secular attitudes making marriage a sacrament in the law without the alert public being aware of the deception is beyond nutbaggering barking moonbattery, and well into flat-earther territory.

Let me indulge in an immensity of understatement by saying the comment is not historically accurate.

As far as I know, nor Anglo-American Common law has ever treated marriage as a secular contract between two or more persons of any sex or degree of consanguinity, nor Civic law, nor Canon law, nor the Code of Napoleon, nor the Code of Justinian, nor the Mosaic law or the Code of Hammurabi. Perhaps there is a cave painting of the Neolithic which supports this odd legal interpretation, but no written law since the invention of writing.

Since the days of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries so eager for heaven on Earth have produced nothing but hell.

They have no interest in toleration, nor justice, nor reason. They do not love gays; they only hate God. The destruction of the Church their goal.  They will throw the gays under the bus as quickly as they threw women under the bus. (Or are there feminists protesting the treatment of women under Sharia law of which I am unaware?)

Are you offended that the Church denies to polygamists and to pederasts and other types of perverts the sacrament of marriage?

She does not deny to them the sacrament of baptism and confession.

*   *   *

As a postscript, let me off my advice to my fellow Christians. We are fighting the wrong enemy if we fight the homosex lobby. No fault divorce is the enemy. The sexual revolution is the enemy. Gay marriage is a non-issue: it is merely the vultures gathering to a body which has long been lying motionless in the wasteland. Let us first revive the body by eliminating no-cause divorce laws; let us begin again to enforce the laws against adultery and fornication. Once the body is on its feet again, the vultures will seek weaker prey elsewhere.

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.

Hudson and Adler and the Unexpected Treasure

Let me tell of events many years apart, and you will see the connection, and, it is hoped, understand my disorientation and delight.

First:

Mortimer Adler is to alumni of St John’s College what Moses is to Jews, or, if you like, what Lycurgus is to Spartans. He is our founder. I would never have read or learned the Great Book had it not been for him, and, indeed the Great Books would be a less well defined list were it not for him.

As it so happens, as a student I asked him a question or two, no more, during the Q&A session after his annual lecture.

The topic was whether science would soon prove an insuperable obstacle to religion, such as, when and if computer engineers ever designed an artificial self aware being, or when and if neuropsychologists learned to read or download or manipulate human thought artificially.

Even though a zealous atheist at the time, I saw clearly that Mr Adler was underestimating the resilience of religion to mere changes of fact and circumstances. As if a Byzantine in the Sixth Century were to opine that the fall of the  Empire in the West would sweep away Christianity without a murmur.

I was pleased, of course, that such a potent intellect was on my side, the side of reason (for in such terms in that day I flattered my atheism) against the chaotic forces of unreason (for in such terms I dismissed all religion.)

Mr Adler was making a simple category error: treating religious belief as a physical rather than metaphysical theory, and therefore thinking the invention of new physical sciences, such as robo-psychology, or new techniques, such as brain-washing or mesmerism , would invalidate, or even influence, the metaphysical beliefs of Christians.

I, who cannot recall my own phone number, can remember the conversation.

I questioned whether Christian theologians would be any more troubled by someone making a machine that mimicked human thought than they were troubled by the existence of bees, who react by instinct in a mechanical fashion not seemingly much different from complex clockworks. The theologian of the future could either say computers had souls on the same nonempirical grounds that he said men had souls, or deny that computers had souls on the same nonempirical ground that he denied souls to bees.

And Mr Adler briefly dismissed the question (so I thought in my youthful curiosity) in fashion not in keeping with the curiosity of a philosopher. I tried buttonhole him after the Q&A, and pursue the question, and he gave me a polite brush off, pretending not to see me.

His whole demeanor was that of a harassed and unhappy man, and, looking back, I am certain that bandying word with a smart alecky college boy was something which diminishes no man’s unhappiness or harassment.

But at the time, I was irked by the slight. My roommate of the time, Jed Arkin explained this curious incuriousity this way: “Any question you ask him, this man has heard not only a million times, but all the answers and counterarguments and answers to those answers a million times.”

The overall impression from this brief meeting was of a man of immense scholarly attainments and a powerful intellect. I don’t recall the year, but it must have been before my graduation in 1984.

Don’t take the wrong message from my anecdote: I admired then and admire now this man as a personal hero. He is a real intellectual, a man of letters, not a poseur.

Second:

Nowadays, I listen to the radio to and from work. I listen to conservative talk radio to put myself into a bad mood, and Christian radio (particularly Catholic Guadeloupe Radio Network or EWTN) to put myself into a good mood. Upon a time one morning, I was listening to Deal Hudson’s  radio program, where, instead of having a guest, he was reading from his own memoir of his conversion, AN AMERICAN CONVERSION.

I listened with particular interest, because the anti-intellectual bias, the suspicion of philosophy, which all my atheist friends freely say is found in Christianity (but which I have never had the ill fortune to encounter) was indeed found by Mr Hudson in his native denomination, and, although he still blesses them for their prayers and his enlightenment, eventually he sought out the Catholic Church as more fit for his desire to seek God through his intellect and his aesthetic passions.

I was also frankly fascinated by his brief account of teaching theology, philosophy and music to inmates of a prison.

Finding myself, for once, with funds free to devote to books, I bought a copy, and set about reading it.

To my utter surprise, I discover that Mr Hudson was an intimate of Mortimer Alder. Indeed, Mr Adler was a convert to Christianity in 1984 — in other words, only a short time after my one conversation with him.

Evidently Mr Adler did eventually see that Christianity is not a theory of physics.

To my more immense surprise, I read the story of Adler’s conversion to Catholicism in this same book. I had never heard the story before. Here is another version from the same author originally appearing at InsideCatholic.com. I reprint it in part.

The Great Philosopher Who Became Catholic

by Deal Hudson – June 29, 2009

Eight years ago today, a famous American philosopher died who had lived as a Catholic the last year of his life.

[...]

The first time I met Adler I mentioned my fondness for a novelist I was reading, the Australian Nobel Prize winner Patrick White. Adler immediately pulled out a notebook to write down his name and the novels I had mentioned. I was amazed that a philosopher of his stature would care about the opinions of a punky young professor! He encouraged me to stay in touch, and I did.

Some years later, Adler asked me to spend three summers with him at the Aspen Institute assisting him in his seminars. Afternoons were often spent smoking cigars and talking philosophy and religion (usually Catholicism). Talking to Mortimer was like talking to nobody else – his intellectual energy seemed to super-charge my mind, pushing me to think beyond the places where I had stopped before.

There was no question too dumb for Mortimer and no assertion so lame that it couldn’t be the source of another 30 minutes of conversation. During those summers in Aspen we talked for hours and never noticed the time passing, until someone would finally come to remind us about dinner. (It was Adler, by the way, who told me that cigars never taste better than first thing in the morning.)

When I met Mortimer he had not yet suffered the heart condition that led him to his late-life conversion in 1986 to Christianity. When I asked him, at our first meeting in Atlanta, why his love for St. Thomas Aquinas had not led him into the Church, he replied, “Faith is a gift, and I have not received it.” Rather than ending the conversation, that turned out to be a darned good beginning.

He had been attracted to Catholicism for many years, but when he finally received “the gift of faith” he joined a different church. (Rumor has it that his wonderful – and ardently Episcopal – wife, Caroline, made sure of that.) Mortimer became a serious, church-attending Christian, albeit of the liberal variety, reading books by Bishop Spong and others. He once took me to an bookstore to buy me the latest title by Spong, but fortunately they were out.

The more we talked the more I realized Mortimer really wanted to be a Roman Catholic, but issues like abortion and the resistance of his family and friends were keeping him away. I tried to show him that his own Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics of act-potency led him to understand the necessity of protecting unborn life. But just at that moment, Mortimer would uncharacteristically mutter, “It’s all too complicated,” and change the subject. But I knew that he knew he was being inconsistent. I didn’t have to press him – because I knew he knew, and it was only a matter of time before he acquiesced.

At several of our seminars was the Catholic prelate of San Jose, Bishop Pierre DuMaine. The bishop and I would sometimes tag-team the philosopher on the Catholic Church, and we would all end up laughing about how Mortimer deflected the inevitable conclusion. As it turns out, Bishop DuMaine did not stop the Aspen conversations.

After Mortimer finally retired, and Caroline passed away, he moved to the West Coast to spend his final years. We kept in touch by phone, and I called him as soon as I heard from Bishop DuMaine that he had been received into the Catholic Church. To my ears, Mortimer sounded relieved and at peace that he had finally taken that step. The philosopher who had helped bring so many into the Church had himself finally arrived.

Read the whole article here.

The Wikipedia entry on Alder (citing the Famous People website http://www.basicfamouspeople.com/index.php?aid=3028) mentions this:

Adler took a long time to make up his mind about theological issues. When he wrote How to Think About God: A Guide for the Twentieth-Century Pagan in 1980, he claimed to consider himself the pagan of the book’s subtitle. In volume 51 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal (2001), Ken Myers includes his 1980 interview with Adler, conducted after How to Think About God was published. Myers reminisces, “During that interview, I asked him why he had never embraced the Christian faith himself. He explained that while he had been profoundly influenced by a number of Christian thinkers during his life,… there were moral – not intellectual – obstacles to his conversion. He didn’t explain any further.”

Meyer goes on to point out that Adler finally “surrendered to the hound of heaven” and “made a confession of faith and was baptized” only a few years after that interview. Offering insight into Adler’s conversion, Meyer quotes Adler from a subsequent 1990 article in Christianity magazine: “My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What’s the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible, then it would just be another philosophy.” In 2000, Adler became a Roman Catholic.

He can be considered a Catholic philosopher due to his lifelong participation in the Neo-Thomist movement, despite not being a Catholic for most of this time.

My only comment is that I feel the same surprise and astonishment as you would find, dear reader, if you cleaned your basement, found a loose wooden board, pulled it aside, found a locked door, and lo and behold the key you were given as a child by a stranger happens to fit the lock, and inside is some wonder: perhaps a silent pool surrounded by lacy stalagmites freaked with elfin jade yet never seen by eye of sun or eye or man, looming seemingly in midair above their perfect undisturbed reflections; perhaps a neolithic cave, fantastically painted with extinct elk and images of primordial shaman in mid-dance; or perhaps a pirate treasure bright with Inca gold.

Mortimer Adler, my founder and personal hero, was along the same intellectual path, following an honest pagan’s search for truth, and found his true mother in the Church, and his true father which art in heaven.

Rejoice!

View or comment on this post at John C. Wright's Journal.