Brett Alan Williams's Blog, page 6
December 2, 2019
December 2, 2019: U.S. government Deep State impregnates our daughters with illegal aliens from other planets!
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a first-hand eye witness account of U.S. government Deep State operators from someone on the inside. From a man of utmost integrity. A moral monitor for Judeo-Christian family values and champion of liberty. A man suspicious of all branches of government, with patients registered at the USPTO.gov. He won Inventor of The Year in 2008 at the world’s largest defense contractor, defending America from communists, socialists, and liberals. Make no mistake, he supports the troops. This man is a front line first responder against government control and regulation. He cherishes the U.S. Constitution, that document of governance and regulation. As one of the forgotten white men (with Cherokee and Blackfoot Native American matriarchs in his bloodline), he has not forgotten that greatest of men, President Ronald Reagan, for whom he has a shrine in…his…home. This “straight-talking,” “no-nonsense,” “get ‘er done” real man even has a soft side as an animal lover.
Who is this man?
Me.
And what did I see? Where I worked was, and remains, Building 59. Like Area 51, with its crash-landed aliens (notice both lead with the number “5”), this building’s only designation is a nondescript number. An integer. A large integer compared to, say, 1, or 2, or other numbers we can grasp less than 10. Building 59 could have been built in any shape. It could have been made spherical, octagonal, or geodesic. But it wasn’t. It’s rectangular, precisely so it won’t stand out from other rectangular buildings, lost in this common design as though strange things don’t go on there. It has four floors, but many have asked, Why not one? What could be so important to require so much space? A space with not one…single…window. Why can’t we see in there? What are they trying to hide?
I know. I worked there.
In Building 59 are dozens and dozens of—brace for it—vaults. One after another, down long hallways as far as the eye can see, just before the restroom. On and around each vault are cipher-locks, spin dials, illuminated numeric touch-pads, and cameras. When I first entered that building, those halls were empty. Was the entire complex built just for me? Was I the only one working on “Black Programs”? This designation has nothing to do with race, and should not be taken as insensitive to people of color or campus snowflakes who cry over exposure to words. It’s merely a long-standing description of what happens there. Every activity, computation, simulation or lab test and their results go dark. No one knows what happens but for a small clique of privileged people chosen by higher powers to be there. They even have an enigmatic designation for programs that occupy those vaults: SAR—Special Access Required. But why don’t they say for what? Why not, Special Access Required for Accounting, or Storage, or what it is—impregnation of our daughters. And by who? Space aliens, illegally escorted by our own government via the UFO super skyway. All coordinated by the CIA and Food Stamp program, because aliens require assistance early in any invasion. This Deep State Black Program uses innocent American girls seized by the U.S. government’s Pizza Parlor Pedophile Syndicate in Washington, DC. Recall this Syndicate was first revealed by a courageous 29-year-old man from North Carolina who—after his arduous 400-mile quest—has been awarded a 4-year rest, in prison. True. Google it. [1]
By now, you must know this is authentic. Like Nobel Prize-winning physicist and manmade global warming science denier, Ivar Giaever (we met him before [2]), I’m a scientist too. I worked for this nation’s defense. This appears in print. It’s on the Internet. I’ll bet anybody 50 cents that QAnon, 8Chan, 4Chan, Breitbart, the Klan, and FOX RT will log this as eyewitness evidence of truth, fact, and justice in support of Our Dear Leader and his mumblings of a Deep State coup. Doesn’t that make it gospel? As radio talker Rush Limbaugh says, “Don’t doubt me!”
Or maybe you do.
Maybe you weren’t raised in America with our rankings in math, science, and reading education near bottom in the world. [3] Perhaps you live in a democracy, while ours now ranks 25th, as a “flawed democracy,” just above “banana republic.” [4] Even the life expectancy of Americans is declining; currently, we’re 43rd. [5] Infant mortality in this “technological powerhouse” is 55th from the best. [6] Trump’s budget staff projects to add $9 trillion to our national debt, the world’s highest, currently at $20T, with a GDP to debt ratio just 8 places better than Greece. [7] So much for Tea Party austerity. “Great again,” we ain’t.
When it comes to the “Deep State,” one might assume it’s that first stat above that leads a sizable fraction of Americans to so effortlessly believe what they’re told to believe. Yet, I count 11 of my friends with university degrees, some with PhDs, who support the sleaze promoted by our current administration. Some of them even parrot Russian Ops promoted by GOPP luminaries witnessed in Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry. (Once known as Lincoln's Grand Old Party, it's now Trump's Grand Old Putin Party). It’s not America’s so-called “educational divide” alone that's responsible for this group (dawning t-shirts reading “Proud to be deplorable!”). Alexander Hamilton warned us about them, as did George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address when he said partisans holding party over country would embrace foreign powers to take control. It would seem, as we saw with Hitler’s inner circle, that innate primate tribalism is stronger than education or common sense.
Ask any in the GOPP to define “Deep State,” including their Golden Calf himself (orange, actually), and they can’t say. Having served in the “Deep State,” I can attest to the sad reality clear to anyone who worked there, it doesn’t exist—yet. I’m saddened by this because the world would be so much more forgiving with a multitude of covert, nefarious, TOP SECRET schemes running interference against my every move. Such could be my excuse for not having achieved more. But, turns out, so numerous are the compartments, serfdoms, turf wars, and financial buckets from disparate entities, most of them secret from the others, to coordinate on anything but their own efforts would be remarkably difficult and dangerous to their livelihoods. As Jon D. Michaels noted in Foreign Affairs, the term “Deep State” applies in countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey where one or a few individuals control all or most of the ministries, and their money. That no such arrangement exists in the U.S. is also why government is so frustratingly inefficient, and safer. “Officials inside these agencies,” writes Michaels, “…can investigate, document, and publicize instances of high-level government malfeasance…in no small part because they are insulated by law from political pressure, enjoy de facto tenure, and have strong codes of professional conduct. [Trump never imagined any of this.] In some ways, the Trump administration—in truth, any administration—is right to see them, collectively, as a potentially dangerous adversary. But unlike deep states in authoritarian countries, the American state should be embraced rather than feared. It is not secretive, exclusive, and monolithic, but open, diverse, and fragmented. Its purpose is not to pursue a private agenda contrary to public will but to execute that will.” [8] Just as those 12 courageous witnesses we saw in Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry. Honest, working people doing their job, having sworn an oath to the Constitution, not Pharaoh.
Outside motivated-reason (otherwise known as lying) and motivated-morality (which isn’t moral), both practiced with adoring care by the GOPP, in the real world of facts the Deep State has collapsed. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is about to absolve the FBI from GOPP claims of abuse of power, finding the FBI met proper legal evidence thresholds for FISA warrants to surveil Trump advisor Carter Page; the Steele Dossier did not open FBI investigations into Trump’s Russian influenced campaign; the FBI did not politicize the investigation; the CIA was not involved; professor Joseph Mifsud was not an FBI informant; there were no planted “spies” in Trump World; and no, Obama never spied on Trump. Sad news for Attorney General William Barr and his Liar in Chief. [9] (UPDATE 12/9/19: And as the IG officially announces all of this, Trump states, "It's far worse than I ever thought possible." [10] Which should have been good for him. 12/10/19: Yet one day later Trump slammed his own appointed FBI Director for agreeing with the IG report. The White House needs a schedule of which Trump split-personality is talking when. [11])
Crash goes the Deep State, alive now only as desperate assertions in the tavern, Trump's Joseph Goebbels Networks, and his GOPP. But as I showed at the top of this post, it's easy to invent another conspiracy theory.
(This irregular post, contrary to the bimonthly schedule, is the 1st of 5 in succession before the U.S. Senate is expected to betray their Constitutional promise for personal gain and the excoriation of history.)
[1] Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison, New York Times, June 22, 2017
[2] Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, Goodreads, November 5, 2018
[3] DREW DESILVER, U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries, PEW, FEBRUARY 15, 2017
[4] Democracy Index, Wikipedia
[5] World Fact Book, Life expectancy by nation, CIA. Michael Devitt, CDC Data Show U.S. Life Expectancy Continues to Decline, CDC AAFP, December 10, 2018
[6] World Fact Book, Infant mortality by nation, CIA.
[7] KIMBERLY AMADEO, Trump and the National Debt, The Balance, November 27, 2019. Debt to GDP Ratio by Country 2019, World Population Review. List of countries by external debt, Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[8]Jon D. Michaels, Trump and the “Deep State”: The Government Strikes Back, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2017.
[9] Adam Goldman & Charlie Savage, Russia Inquiry Review Is Said to Criticize F.B.I. but Rebuff Claims of Biased Acts, New York Times, November 22, 2019
[10] Dave Boyer, Trump says watchdog report on FBI is 'far worse' than he expected, The Washington Times, December 9, 2019
[11] Allan Smith, Trump blasts FBI director Wray for backing IG report that 2016 campaign probe was justified, ABC NEWS, Dec. 10, 2019
Who is this man?
Me.
And what did I see? Where I worked was, and remains, Building 59. Like Area 51, with its crash-landed aliens (notice both lead with the number “5”), this building’s only designation is a nondescript number. An integer. A large integer compared to, say, 1, or 2, or other numbers we can grasp less than 10. Building 59 could have been built in any shape. It could have been made spherical, octagonal, or geodesic. But it wasn’t. It’s rectangular, precisely so it won’t stand out from other rectangular buildings, lost in this common design as though strange things don’t go on there. It has four floors, but many have asked, Why not one? What could be so important to require so much space? A space with not one…single…window. Why can’t we see in there? What are they trying to hide?
I know. I worked there.
In Building 59 are dozens and dozens of—brace for it—vaults. One after another, down long hallways as far as the eye can see, just before the restroom. On and around each vault are cipher-locks, spin dials, illuminated numeric touch-pads, and cameras. When I first entered that building, those halls were empty. Was the entire complex built just for me? Was I the only one working on “Black Programs”? This designation has nothing to do with race, and should not be taken as insensitive to people of color or campus snowflakes who cry over exposure to words. It’s merely a long-standing description of what happens there. Every activity, computation, simulation or lab test and their results go dark. No one knows what happens but for a small clique of privileged people chosen by higher powers to be there. They even have an enigmatic designation for programs that occupy those vaults: SAR—Special Access Required. But why don’t they say for what? Why not, Special Access Required for Accounting, or Storage, or what it is—impregnation of our daughters. And by who? Space aliens, illegally escorted by our own government via the UFO super skyway. All coordinated by the CIA and Food Stamp program, because aliens require assistance early in any invasion. This Deep State Black Program uses innocent American girls seized by the U.S. government’s Pizza Parlor Pedophile Syndicate in Washington, DC. Recall this Syndicate was first revealed by a courageous 29-year-old man from North Carolina who—after his arduous 400-mile quest—has been awarded a 4-year rest, in prison. True. Google it. [1]
By now, you must know this is authentic. Like Nobel Prize-winning physicist and manmade global warming science denier, Ivar Giaever (we met him before [2]), I’m a scientist too. I worked for this nation’s defense. This appears in print. It’s on the Internet. I’ll bet anybody 50 cents that QAnon, 8Chan, 4Chan, Breitbart, the Klan, and FOX RT will log this as eyewitness evidence of truth, fact, and justice in support of Our Dear Leader and his mumblings of a Deep State coup. Doesn’t that make it gospel? As radio talker Rush Limbaugh says, “Don’t doubt me!”
Or maybe you do.
Maybe you weren’t raised in America with our rankings in math, science, and reading education near bottom in the world. [3] Perhaps you live in a democracy, while ours now ranks 25th, as a “flawed democracy,” just above “banana republic.” [4] Even the life expectancy of Americans is declining; currently, we’re 43rd. [5] Infant mortality in this “technological powerhouse” is 55th from the best. [6] Trump’s budget staff projects to add $9 trillion to our national debt, the world’s highest, currently at $20T, with a GDP to debt ratio just 8 places better than Greece. [7] So much for Tea Party austerity. “Great again,” we ain’t.
When it comes to the “Deep State,” one might assume it’s that first stat above that leads a sizable fraction of Americans to so effortlessly believe what they’re told to believe. Yet, I count 11 of my friends with university degrees, some with PhDs, who support the sleaze promoted by our current administration. Some of them even parrot Russian Ops promoted by GOPP luminaries witnessed in Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry. (Once known as Lincoln's Grand Old Party, it's now Trump's Grand Old Putin Party). It’s not America’s so-called “educational divide” alone that's responsible for this group (dawning t-shirts reading “Proud to be deplorable!”). Alexander Hamilton warned us about them, as did George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address when he said partisans holding party over country would embrace foreign powers to take control. It would seem, as we saw with Hitler’s inner circle, that innate primate tribalism is stronger than education or common sense.
Ask any in the GOPP to define “Deep State,” including their Golden Calf himself (orange, actually), and they can’t say. Having served in the “Deep State,” I can attest to the sad reality clear to anyone who worked there, it doesn’t exist—yet. I’m saddened by this because the world would be so much more forgiving with a multitude of covert, nefarious, TOP SECRET schemes running interference against my every move. Such could be my excuse for not having achieved more. But, turns out, so numerous are the compartments, serfdoms, turf wars, and financial buckets from disparate entities, most of them secret from the others, to coordinate on anything but their own efforts would be remarkably difficult and dangerous to their livelihoods. As Jon D. Michaels noted in Foreign Affairs, the term “Deep State” applies in countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey where one or a few individuals control all or most of the ministries, and their money. That no such arrangement exists in the U.S. is also why government is so frustratingly inefficient, and safer. “Officials inside these agencies,” writes Michaels, “…can investigate, document, and publicize instances of high-level government malfeasance…in no small part because they are insulated by law from political pressure, enjoy de facto tenure, and have strong codes of professional conduct. [Trump never imagined any of this.] In some ways, the Trump administration—in truth, any administration—is right to see them, collectively, as a potentially dangerous adversary. But unlike deep states in authoritarian countries, the American state should be embraced rather than feared. It is not secretive, exclusive, and monolithic, but open, diverse, and fragmented. Its purpose is not to pursue a private agenda contrary to public will but to execute that will.” [8] Just as those 12 courageous witnesses we saw in Trump’s Impeachment Inquiry. Honest, working people doing their job, having sworn an oath to the Constitution, not Pharaoh.
Outside motivated-reason (otherwise known as lying) and motivated-morality (which isn’t moral), both practiced with adoring care by the GOPP, in the real world of facts the Deep State has collapsed. DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is about to absolve the FBI from GOPP claims of abuse of power, finding the FBI met proper legal evidence thresholds for FISA warrants to surveil Trump advisor Carter Page; the Steele Dossier did not open FBI investigations into Trump’s Russian influenced campaign; the FBI did not politicize the investigation; the CIA was not involved; professor Joseph Mifsud was not an FBI informant; there were no planted “spies” in Trump World; and no, Obama never spied on Trump. Sad news for Attorney General William Barr and his Liar in Chief. [9] (UPDATE 12/9/19: And as the IG officially announces all of this, Trump states, "It's far worse than I ever thought possible." [10] Which should have been good for him. 12/10/19: Yet one day later Trump slammed his own appointed FBI Director for agreeing with the IG report. The White House needs a schedule of which Trump split-personality is talking when. [11])
Crash goes the Deep State, alive now only as desperate assertions in the tavern, Trump's Joseph Goebbels Networks, and his GOPP. But as I showed at the top of this post, it's easy to invent another conspiracy theory.
(This irregular post, contrary to the bimonthly schedule, is the 1st of 5 in succession before the U.S. Senate is expected to betray their Constitutional promise for personal gain and the excoriation of history.)
[1] Matthew Haag and Maya Salam, Gunman in ‘Pizzagate’ Shooting Is Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison, New York Times, June 22, 2017
[2] Brett Williams, The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial, Goodreads, November 5, 2018
[3] DREW DESILVER, U.S. students’ academic achievement still lags that of their peers in many other countries, PEW, FEBRUARY 15, 2017
[4] Democracy Index, Wikipedia
[5] World Fact Book, Life expectancy by nation, CIA. Michael Devitt, CDC Data Show U.S. Life Expectancy Continues to Decline, CDC AAFP, December 10, 2018
[6] World Fact Book, Infant mortality by nation, CIA.
[7] KIMBERLY AMADEO, Trump and the National Debt, The Balance, November 27, 2019. Debt to GDP Ratio by Country 2019, World Population Review. List of countries by external debt, Goodreads, November 5, 2018.
[8]Jon D. Michaels, Trump and the “Deep State”: The Government Strikes Back, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2017.
[9] Adam Goldman & Charlie Savage, Russia Inquiry Review Is Said to Criticize F.B.I. but Rebuff Claims of Biased Acts, New York Times, November 22, 2019
[10] Dave Boyer, Trump says watchdog report on FBI is 'far worse' than he expected, The Washington Times, December 9, 2019
[11] Allan Smith, Trump blasts FBI director Wray for backing IG report that 2016 campaign probe was justified, ABC NEWS, Dec. 10, 2019
November 4, 2019
November 4, 2019: After five years, my second novel is complete. What I wish I hadn’t learned:
I discovered long ago a common thread in art and science that keeps me coming back to both. Those equations that lift off the page to reveal nature, possessing what physicists call “beauty,” are like the brushstroke that ties the painting together or the stage scene that clicks. They all provide a sense of awe. Writing can be like that. But, like the other forms of art and science, only after colossal exertion, and only on occasion. So it was that my self-imposed schedule of one book every five years has produced a second.
But writing has a dark side. This second book took 2226 hours to write. While I don’t record research time, I estimate approximately another 2000 hours. And that’s where the danger is, which I'll get to in a moment. Funny I didn’t realize that after the first book. Such research is required to predict as accurately and plausibly as possible the future of 2057 when the story in book two commences. Historical, philosophical, and geopolitical facts laced together by the nebulous nature of human psychology make both accuracy and plausibly, 40 years hence, a tall order, and why it took me 4000 hours to do it. Whether I succeeded is up to the reader to decide.
With plausibility of a future America in mind, there are several scenes that make me wonder if the reader may suspect the author as mad. Yet, in each of those acts, a significant or majority fraction of details (depending on the scene) are a matter of yesterday’s news. I even added where possible the place and dates to pique the reader’s memory or offer a reference to check these realities online. The remaining extrapolations are a bare extension from what we already have. Who in America just a few decades ago could imagine we would distinguish ourselves as the mass shooting capital of the world? Where, by late 2019, we suffered more mass shootings than there were days in the year by then. [1] Americans now take this as normal. The people cry for corrective measures and Congress promises to do so. All then returns to normal as we go about our daily lives hopeful our loved ones or ourselves aren't shot today, prepared to shout into the void again tomorrow. What should we expect in four decades when this second novel takes place? While some may find political and social evolution in America addressed in this book as bizarre, disconcerting or offensive, I’m not writing children’s books. I’m striving to make these novels not merely entertaining in whatever way people find the fall of civilization entertaining, but in an attempt to predict the future.
Given that a subtopic of this series hinges on the eventual collapse of planet Earth under human assault, I had to study current calamities around the globe and their cause in detail. Like hundreds of massive fires that torched Alaska and Siberia after a record series of hot years, including 50°F above average during Alaska’s winter (6 years in a row). Soot from those fires blanketed Greenland’s ice sheet to accelerate its loss by elevated solar absorption, expanding disruption of the Gulf Stream with 197 billion tons of melt in July of 2019 alone. [2] The Arctic ice cap continues to shrink to record lows as animals that depend on it blink out of existence due to lost habitat and hunting grounds now too far away to reach. While the lower 48 periodically freezes in another drifted Polar Vortex, then floods much of the country, both the result of a failing Jet Stream. All as human CO2 emissions driving manmade global warming responsible for these disasters reach new highs. [3] After the 5th Great Extinction sealed by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the 6th Great Extinction continues unabated in this, our Anthropocene, driven by liars and ineptitude. [4] What I wish I hadn’t learned.
Research into political aspects revealed the now visible retreat of Western Civilization—in America, masked by paper dollars. After three decades of China Shock, I understand the populist motivation but oppose the self-destructive response. For a significant fraction of Americans to endorse a criminal monster in flagrant violation of the Founder’s rules for this republic and the teachings of Jesus many of them claim to follow, is to doom liberty for eventual tyranny and lose the soul of this nation. But as my main character states, “To make things right is not so gratifying as to make things worse.” We’ve seen worse done through daily violation of Western civilization’s fundamental element—the rule of law—with the brazen glee of a thin-skinned 5-year old and his bootlickers holding the highest offices in the land. Who could have imagined in 2016 that conspiracy theorists and sympathizers or affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo Nazi’s supported by Breitbart News who likewise support Trump and vise versa would be welcomed by the White House? [5] The very Right-wing fanaticism my father enlisted in WWII to defend this nation against, now embraced. If it weren’t enough to witness three years of blatant immorality practiced by a draft-dodging adulterer, malignant liar, and money fleecing thief, we also witnessed the colipase of American Christianity through a sector of it which sponsors all of this. [6] American Christians on the Idol-supporting Right are now Christian by assertion alone. What I wish I hadn’t learned. Though I did find a silver lining: fortunately for them, this subset of true Christianity in America doesn’t read and or believe their scriptures, lest they find what Judas did for his betrayal. All of this informed the book's trajectory, and assists plausibility in those scenes otherwise strained without it.
Added to this chain of real-life calamities was the bombshell work by Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen, lauded by opposing camps from The America Conservative to Barack Obama, shows that the seeds of our demise were planted from and within the very Founding itself. A point I’ve tried to make in my own books, though without the more historically traceable, step-by-step coherence allowed by Deneen’s non-fiction. I also wasn't so sure of it until he put all the pieces together for me. Through his analysis, what we see now, Left and Right, are distortions of Enlightenment liberalism’s promise to the point of eviscerating the entire project. Not because something went wrong, but because classical Founding liberalism worked so impossibly well. America’s failure was destiny.
Wonder if I can unlearn that?
Finally, since the main character in my books must discover a more complete definition of humanity, beyond the natural man of Enlightenment approximations (for proper governance), so did I. My investigations into the evolution of human psychology, political philosophy, and the arch of civilizations was more than a revelation, it was horrifying. In one of my earliest blog posts here in March of 2015, I wrote, “…whether it be the miraculous mechanics of the living cell or the brightest shinning quasar, few things compare to the lavish spectrum of marvels that humans produce.” I meant that as a complement. Less than half joking, I think now I was wrong. As a physicist having studied as a hobby the nature of quasars, I feel confident enough in their behavior to say their incomprehensible destructiveness is nothing so dangerous as what our race threatens. It’s no wonder our Founders struggled so mightily to find a form of governance of, by, and for unstable humans. The research I performed for this book, to aid predictions of the future, based on our past and present, changed me. I’ll never view the human race the same again. For those who dare to read this book, I hope they won’t either. Not to decimate their lofty views of America once deserved by the Greatest Generation, now dead, but to contribute, however small, to that call to morality, reason, truth, and justice now emerging around the globe from the miasma of modernity. [7]
From my seat in witness to this spectacle, 2019 caps what appears to have been a fulcrum to lever not the US alone into the gales of a perfect storm of planetary and political meltdown, but the Western world with it. It was in this miasmatic atmosphere that this second novel was completed, The Worst of Things: America In The 21st Century. The intersection of these perfect dual storms is what it’s about. While it is second in The Father trilogy, it can stand alone as a prologue summarizes book one.
Until next time, January 6, 2020.
[1] JASON SILVERSTEIN, There have been more mass shootings than days this year, CBS NEWS, SEPTEMBER 1, 2019
[2] Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow, The Greenland ice sheet poured 197 billion tons of water into the North Atlantic in July alone, Washington Post, August 3, 2019
[3] Eleanor Imster and Deborah Byrd, Atmospheric CO2 hits record high in May 2019, EarthSky, June 17, 2019
[4] Do liars believe they’re free of consequences of their lies and ineptitude?
[5] Dylan Byers, Two Breitbart staffers join Trump administration , CNNMoney, January 25, 2017
[6] EMMA GREEN, Why Some Christians ‘Love the Meanest Parts’ of Trump, AUG 18, 2019
[7] Allana Akhtar and Juliana Kaplan, A world on fire: Here are all the major protests happening around the globe right now, AUG 18, 2019, Oct 22, 2019
But writing has a dark side. This second book took 2226 hours to write. While I don’t record research time, I estimate approximately another 2000 hours. And that’s where the danger is, which I'll get to in a moment. Funny I didn’t realize that after the first book. Such research is required to predict as accurately and plausibly as possible the future of 2057 when the story in book two commences. Historical, philosophical, and geopolitical facts laced together by the nebulous nature of human psychology make both accuracy and plausibly, 40 years hence, a tall order, and why it took me 4000 hours to do it. Whether I succeeded is up to the reader to decide.
With plausibility of a future America in mind, there are several scenes that make me wonder if the reader may suspect the author as mad. Yet, in each of those acts, a significant or majority fraction of details (depending on the scene) are a matter of yesterday’s news. I even added where possible the place and dates to pique the reader’s memory or offer a reference to check these realities online. The remaining extrapolations are a bare extension from what we already have. Who in America just a few decades ago could imagine we would distinguish ourselves as the mass shooting capital of the world? Where, by late 2019, we suffered more mass shootings than there were days in the year by then. [1] Americans now take this as normal. The people cry for corrective measures and Congress promises to do so. All then returns to normal as we go about our daily lives hopeful our loved ones or ourselves aren't shot today, prepared to shout into the void again tomorrow. What should we expect in four decades when this second novel takes place? While some may find political and social evolution in America addressed in this book as bizarre, disconcerting or offensive, I’m not writing children’s books. I’m striving to make these novels not merely entertaining in whatever way people find the fall of civilization entertaining, but in an attempt to predict the future.
Given that a subtopic of this series hinges on the eventual collapse of planet Earth under human assault, I had to study current calamities around the globe and their cause in detail. Like hundreds of massive fires that torched Alaska and Siberia after a record series of hot years, including 50°F above average during Alaska’s winter (6 years in a row). Soot from those fires blanketed Greenland’s ice sheet to accelerate its loss by elevated solar absorption, expanding disruption of the Gulf Stream with 197 billion tons of melt in July of 2019 alone. [2] The Arctic ice cap continues to shrink to record lows as animals that depend on it blink out of existence due to lost habitat and hunting grounds now too far away to reach. While the lower 48 periodically freezes in another drifted Polar Vortex, then floods much of the country, both the result of a failing Jet Stream. All as human CO2 emissions driving manmade global warming responsible for these disasters reach new highs. [3] After the 5th Great Extinction sealed by an asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the 6th Great Extinction continues unabated in this, our Anthropocene, driven by liars and ineptitude. [4] What I wish I hadn’t learned.
Research into political aspects revealed the now visible retreat of Western Civilization—in America, masked by paper dollars. After three decades of China Shock, I understand the populist motivation but oppose the self-destructive response. For a significant fraction of Americans to endorse a criminal monster in flagrant violation of the Founder’s rules for this republic and the teachings of Jesus many of them claim to follow, is to doom liberty for eventual tyranny and lose the soul of this nation. But as my main character states, “To make things right is not so gratifying as to make things worse.” We’ve seen worse done through daily violation of Western civilization’s fundamental element—the rule of law—with the brazen glee of a thin-skinned 5-year old and his bootlickers holding the highest offices in the land. Who could have imagined in 2016 that conspiracy theorists and sympathizers or affiliates of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo Nazi’s supported by Breitbart News who likewise support Trump and vise versa would be welcomed by the White House? [5] The very Right-wing fanaticism my father enlisted in WWII to defend this nation against, now embraced. If it weren’t enough to witness three years of blatant immorality practiced by a draft-dodging adulterer, malignant liar, and money fleecing thief, we also witnessed the colipase of American Christianity through a sector of it which sponsors all of this. [6] American Christians on the Idol-supporting Right are now Christian by assertion alone. What I wish I hadn’t learned. Though I did find a silver lining: fortunately for them, this subset of true Christianity in America doesn’t read and or believe their scriptures, lest they find what Judas did for his betrayal. All of this informed the book's trajectory, and assists plausibility in those scenes otherwise strained without it.
Added to this chain of real-life calamities was the bombshell work by Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed. Deneen, lauded by opposing camps from The America Conservative to Barack Obama, shows that the seeds of our demise were planted from and within the very Founding itself. A point I’ve tried to make in my own books, though without the more historically traceable, step-by-step coherence allowed by Deneen’s non-fiction. I also wasn't so sure of it until he put all the pieces together for me. Through his analysis, what we see now, Left and Right, are distortions of Enlightenment liberalism’s promise to the point of eviscerating the entire project. Not because something went wrong, but because classical Founding liberalism worked so impossibly well. America’s failure was destiny.
Wonder if I can unlearn that?
Finally, since the main character in my books must discover a more complete definition of humanity, beyond the natural man of Enlightenment approximations (for proper governance), so did I. My investigations into the evolution of human psychology, political philosophy, and the arch of civilizations was more than a revelation, it was horrifying. In one of my earliest blog posts here in March of 2015, I wrote, “…whether it be the miraculous mechanics of the living cell or the brightest shinning quasar, few things compare to the lavish spectrum of marvels that humans produce.” I meant that as a complement. Less than half joking, I think now I was wrong. As a physicist having studied as a hobby the nature of quasars, I feel confident enough in their behavior to say their incomprehensible destructiveness is nothing so dangerous as what our race threatens. It’s no wonder our Founders struggled so mightily to find a form of governance of, by, and for unstable humans. The research I performed for this book, to aid predictions of the future, based on our past and present, changed me. I’ll never view the human race the same again. For those who dare to read this book, I hope they won’t either. Not to decimate their lofty views of America once deserved by the Greatest Generation, now dead, but to contribute, however small, to that call to morality, reason, truth, and justice now emerging around the globe from the miasma of modernity. [7]
From my seat in witness to this spectacle, 2019 caps what appears to have been a fulcrum to lever not the US alone into the gales of a perfect storm of planetary and political meltdown, but the Western world with it. It was in this miasmatic atmosphere that this second novel was completed, The Worst of Things: America In The 21st Century. The intersection of these perfect dual storms is what it’s about. While it is second in The Father trilogy, it can stand alone as a prologue summarizes book one.
Until next time, January 6, 2020.
[1] JASON SILVERSTEIN, There have been more mass shootings than days this year, CBS NEWS, SEPTEMBER 1, 2019
[2] Andrew Freedman and Jason Samenow, The Greenland ice sheet poured 197 billion tons of water into the North Atlantic in July alone, Washington Post, August 3, 2019
[3] Eleanor Imster and Deborah Byrd, Atmospheric CO2 hits record high in May 2019, EarthSky, June 17, 2019
[4] Do liars believe they’re free of consequences of their lies and ineptitude?
[5] Dylan Byers, Two Breitbart staffers join Trump administration , CNNMoney, January 25, 2017
[6] EMMA GREEN, Why Some Christians ‘Love the Meanest Parts’ of Trump, AUG 18, 2019
[7] Allana Akhtar and Juliana Kaplan, A world on fire: Here are all the major protests happening around the globe right now, AUG 18, 2019, Oct 22, 2019
September 2, 2019
September 2, 2019: Patrick J. Deneen’s argument for the collapse of Western Civilization, right now
Patrick J. Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed adds a compelling hypothesis to Western Civilization’s trajectory. [1] While the present with its flood of information overwhelms historians unable to decipher what matters and what doesn’t, Deneen offers a specific cause as an “emergent property.” [2] A property to emerge only recently from Enlightenment ideals evolved and combined over time. Other notables in this arena deal with history, where information is always lacking, and they deal in generalized rules. [3] For them, collapse of the West is an arc; part of a cycle; moral debasement; or blundering leaders unable to innovate social mutations that survive a changing environment. Deneen’s only generalization appears when he asks if America is “approaching the end of the natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations.” [4]
By “liberalism,” Deneen means “Enlightenment liberalism” employed by America’s Founders. Given liberalism is fundamental to the West, his book is an indictment of not only the outcomes of our constitutional foundation two centuries hence, but of Western Civilization as a whole. It’s a story of patricide without knowing it or wanting it by the very system that Enlightenment provided from the beginning. Per Deneen, “Liberalism created the conditions and the tools for assent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge for its own culpability.” [5] “[It] failed because it succeeded… success measured by its achievement of the opposite of its promise.” [6] In short, liberalism sank not because something went wrong, but because it worked so impossibly well.
Enlightenment’s prioritization of self-interest required an authority to protect it. That authority would be self-governance under rule of law to ensure individual rights allowing self-determination. A free market economy was the natural choice for practical day-to-day practice of it. But as Deneen elaborates, under this dual service to liberty, what began as one, bifurcated as two worldviews: the State to ensure liberty, and the Market to exercise it. Once born, both would evolve like a live organism.
More fundamental than politics, the root of this evolution is human innovation, our strongest tool for survival. Humans don’t innovate technology alone, but also social norms, morality, traditions, and religion. Our irresistible urge to innovate breaks the rules, finds workarounds, and through “creative destruction” terminates what gave it life. Often these innovations are a counter-measure, trying to fix what we broke when we fixed something else. We invented agriculture for greater food certainty than hunter-gatherers, but as evidenced in the chemistry of buried bone remains, made humans sicker. [7] With agriculture came sedentary life and large investments in one location as an invitation to war for those built assets. So humans invented cites as protection. But with so many people so close together, never on the move, focused more on each other than the environment, laws were invented to manage behavior as the personal judgement of kin increased its distance and lost its power. Cities became capitals of wealth with still greater invitations to war, so we invented the State. But States, like modern individuals, are their own centrifugal force, casting themselves apart with ambition while struggling to hold themselves together as a result of change brought on by ambition. [8] Liberalism was a counter-measure fix for one set of problems. Like these other measures, it took centuries to reveal that it created a whole new set of problems, those emergent properties Deneen reveals.
Not an indictment of innovation, the point is there will always be unintended consequences no one can predict. James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light in 1865. No one could know this would lead to radio, TV, and smart phones that allow people to flash mob, riot, or take over countries. Likewise, Enlightenment liberalism could not foresee what its innovation would lead to, though the Founders expressed fear over aspects of it. Eventually for liberalism, any restriction of State/Market partners in advancing liberty would be seen as arbitrary, in need of erasure to fulfill liberalism’s promise.
But this is based on modernity’s shifted definition of liberty. As Deneen explains, to ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance via habits of virtue. Virtue as self-restraint over, and freedom from, base appetites through limits on individual choice. Instead, modernity redefined liberty as the greatest possible freedom from externally imposed boundaries. [9] Like inventing the city, as social restrictions lost control, the State was enlarged through lawmaking to take its place, crossing boundaries of what once were communities of common cause. Simultaneously, sovereignty of individual choice required removal of artificial boundaries to the marketplace, once a delineated space within the city. This “borderlessness” is a shared fundamental, says Deneen, opposed to “arbitrary” restrictions. Expressed in modernity by the Market in which a business has no loyalty to its home or its people. And by the State where, ironically, national boundaries are merely for mapmaking. Even those imposed by biology are to be corrected as legislation “breaks barriers” to gender “preference.” [10] This logic of free choice autonomy eventuates in a mass State architecture and globalized economy. Both set out to liberate the individual, instead leaving them overwhelmed by the machinery of each.
Consider the social elements of custom, tradition, and religion. For generations of Homo sapiens these provided belonging and its consequent meaning. But for today’s political Left these are oppressive of individual free expression. True communities built from these elements are to be opened for State inspection to assure no individual rights are violated, and to ensure no coercion exists that conform individuals to community values (though the Amish get away with it). Instead, our replacement for communities of old are the NASCAR “community,” the Facebook “community,” or this afternoon’s mass murder “community.” For liberals, restraint (i.e. virtue) is seen as an assault on the Sacred Self in worship of Free Choice with a minimum of attachments. Hence liberals continue their deconstruction in a quest to tame these social rudiments, disconnecting people from each other in order to expand personal liberty, then wonder why there’s no concern for the poor, why the rich want to keep all they can, and why corporations would place profit above people and the planet. For liberals, belonging is a kind of weakness, an insult to autonomy.
The political Right is just as ruinous. Like the State, the Market couches this program in terms of free choice as “maximized utility.” To Market conservatives, religion’s embrace of modesty or its prohibitions on excess are obstacles to maximized consumption and profit. Ethics stands in the way of eviscerating the environment or some other species for economic return. Markets must be protected from poor, indigenous, or politically weak people in a say to their own lands if resources are discovered under it. Markets that export occupations overseas from the town they came from are simply engaged in standard business practice. The increased purchasing power of cheap goods is supposed to compensate for the absence of high paying manufacturing jobs. Profit is about the dollar, not the flag (except in China), and it’s certainly not about employees who provide return on investment and yet are expendable while investors somehow are not. Laws that allow corporate polluters to poison the very people that work for them—from coal miners with black lung, to America’s cancer alley in Louisiana and Texas—are passed by “business friendly” conservatives. When it comes to cherished families and their values, try killing off a few—a regular occurrence—then see how their traditions stand up to it. [11]
True communities thrived on our sensitivities of connectedness. State and Market society thrives on our disconnectedness. [12] Three hundred million people in America and according to the World Economic Forum (isn’t that ironic?) loneliness is an epidemic in one of the loneliest places on Earth. [13]
That Enlightenment liberalism worked so well is a testament to the match between the practical results of this philosophical system and human nature. These philosophers came closer than anyone in correctly defining humans, and assigning terms to the “Equation of Man” that describes them. But like the mathematical series approximation to any phenomena, they couldn’t include every variable. They were forced to leave out terms they considered less important in their day, and accepted an approximation. Hence, they did not give us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. What they ignored or assigned less weight, over time evolved to become a predator with its creators as its prey. What began as a society to serve self-interest has become a society of “separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” [14]
In posts to follow we’ll test Deneen’s ideas in hopes of locating where we are in that “natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations,” and ponder solutions.
Until next time, November 4, 2019.
[1] Patrick J. Deneen Why Liberalism Failed, Yale, 2018
[2] Recall that an emergent property is a characteristic that comes about when the right combination of things come together. For example, water feels dry until from a million or so water molecules in contact emerges the property of wetness.
[3] Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West notion is one of arc. Like a person, civilization rises on some idea in youth, advances to middle age stagnation, and decays in elder years. Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay roots collapse in cycles. From superstition, disorder, and lack of control, civilizations rotate out of this and into spans of order and control only to be spiritually and socially eviscerated by their own social machine (like many Americans in the workplace, where each day is another lesson in submission), whereupon the civilization heals over into another superstitious phase of the cycle. Will & Ariel Durrant’s Lessons of History blame moral decay. For Arnold Toynbee’s Story of History it’s a failure of leaders to adjust to ever changing landscapes.
[4] Deneen, pg. 4
[5] pg. xxvi. In regards to Deneen’s remark that liberalism fails to see its own culpability, see the blog post Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?, Brett Williams, November 7, 2016
[6] Deneen pg. 3
[7] Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010
[8] This concept of States that hurl themselves apart as they struggle to hold themselves together comes from Marcel Gauchet and his remarkable Disenchantment Of The World.
[9] Deneen pg. xiii
[10] Deneen uses abortion as corrective to limits imposed on women. The gender preference example is my own and references an actual gender spectrum dictated by biology, not psychological preference as summarized in Radiolab Presents: Gonads , WNYCStudios, June 2018.
[11] As one of countless examples: Miles O'Brien, The danger of coal ash, the toxic dust the fossil fuel leaves behind, PBS Newshour, Aug 14, 2019. As Louis Dumont clarifies in From Mandeville to Marx, economics divorced itself from religion and morality in order to make “rational” numerical judgment without interference. Which reminds me of libertarian guru Murry Rothbard’s notion that freedom is defined for individuals as though each were alone in the universe—which don’t exist. See more on Dumont on this blog at Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall, Brett Williams, July 6, 2015, and for Rothbard, Murray Rothbard’s strange and zany world, Brett Williams, September 5, 2016.
[12] Free market economy promoter, Michael Polanyi who schooled Frederick Hayek on this matter, had a brother, Karl, who’s The Great Transformation makes this very point, that the Market embeds society in economy rather than the other (original) way around as modern economy now has it.
[13] Kevin Loria, Most Americans are lonely, World Economic Forum, 3 May 2018. Amy Brannan, TOP 10 LONELIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD , IMMIGroup, Aug 30, 2017
[14] Deneen pg. 46
By “liberalism,” Deneen means “Enlightenment liberalism” employed by America’s Founders. Given liberalism is fundamental to the West, his book is an indictment of not only the outcomes of our constitutional foundation two centuries hence, but of Western Civilization as a whole. It’s a story of patricide without knowing it or wanting it by the very system that Enlightenment provided from the beginning. Per Deneen, “Liberalism created the conditions and the tools for assent of its own worst nightmare, yet it lacks the self-knowledge for its own culpability.” [5] “[It] failed because it succeeded… success measured by its achievement of the opposite of its promise.” [6] In short, liberalism sank not because something went wrong, but because it worked so impossibly well.
Enlightenment’s prioritization of self-interest required an authority to protect it. That authority would be self-governance under rule of law to ensure individual rights allowing self-determination. A free market economy was the natural choice for practical day-to-day practice of it. But as Deneen elaborates, under this dual service to liberty, what began as one, bifurcated as two worldviews: the State to ensure liberty, and the Market to exercise it. Once born, both would evolve like a live organism.
More fundamental than politics, the root of this evolution is human innovation, our strongest tool for survival. Humans don’t innovate technology alone, but also social norms, morality, traditions, and religion. Our irresistible urge to innovate breaks the rules, finds workarounds, and through “creative destruction” terminates what gave it life. Often these innovations are a counter-measure, trying to fix what we broke when we fixed something else. We invented agriculture for greater food certainty than hunter-gatherers, but as evidenced in the chemistry of buried bone remains, made humans sicker. [7] With agriculture came sedentary life and large investments in one location as an invitation to war for those built assets. So humans invented cites as protection. But with so many people so close together, never on the move, focused more on each other than the environment, laws were invented to manage behavior as the personal judgement of kin increased its distance and lost its power. Cities became capitals of wealth with still greater invitations to war, so we invented the State. But States, like modern individuals, are their own centrifugal force, casting themselves apart with ambition while struggling to hold themselves together as a result of change brought on by ambition. [8] Liberalism was a counter-measure fix for one set of problems. Like these other measures, it took centuries to reveal that it created a whole new set of problems, those emergent properties Deneen reveals.
Not an indictment of innovation, the point is there will always be unintended consequences no one can predict. James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light in 1865. No one could know this would lead to radio, TV, and smart phones that allow people to flash mob, riot, or take over countries. Likewise, Enlightenment liberalism could not foresee what its innovation would lead to, though the Founders expressed fear over aspects of it. Eventually for liberalism, any restriction of State/Market partners in advancing liberty would be seen as arbitrary, in need of erasure to fulfill liberalism’s promise.
But this is based on modernity’s shifted definition of liberty. As Deneen explains, to ancient and Christian understandings, liberty was the condition of self-governance via habits of virtue. Virtue as self-restraint over, and freedom from, base appetites through limits on individual choice. Instead, modernity redefined liberty as the greatest possible freedom from externally imposed boundaries. [9] Like inventing the city, as social restrictions lost control, the State was enlarged through lawmaking to take its place, crossing boundaries of what once were communities of common cause. Simultaneously, sovereignty of individual choice required removal of artificial boundaries to the marketplace, once a delineated space within the city. This “borderlessness” is a shared fundamental, says Deneen, opposed to “arbitrary” restrictions. Expressed in modernity by the Market in which a business has no loyalty to its home or its people. And by the State where, ironically, national boundaries are merely for mapmaking. Even those imposed by biology are to be corrected as legislation “breaks barriers” to gender “preference.” [10] This logic of free choice autonomy eventuates in a mass State architecture and globalized economy. Both set out to liberate the individual, instead leaving them overwhelmed by the machinery of each.
Consider the social elements of custom, tradition, and religion. For generations of Homo sapiens these provided belonging and its consequent meaning. But for today’s political Left these are oppressive of individual free expression. True communities built from these elements are to be opened for State inspection to assure no individual rights are violated, and to ensure no coercion exists that conform individuals to community values (though the Amish get away with it). Instead, our replacement for communities of old are the NASCAR “community,” the Facebook “community,” or this afternoon’s mass murder “community.” For liberals, restraint (i.e. virtue) is seen as an assault on the Sacred Self in worship of Free Choice with a minimum of attachments. Hence liberals continue their deconstruction in a quest to tame these social rudiments, disconnecting people from each other in order to expand personal liberty, then wonder why there’s no concern for the poor, why the rich want to keep all they can, and why corporations would place profit above people and the planet. For liberals, belonging is a kind of weakness, an insult to autonomy.
The political Right is just as ruinous. Like the State, the Market couches this program in terms of free choice as “maximized utility.” To Market conservatives, religion’s embrace of modesty or its prohibitions on excess are obstacles to maximized consumption and profit. Ethics stands in the way of eviscerating the environment or some other species for economic return. Markets must be protected from poor, indigenous, or politically weak people in a say to their own lands if resources are discovered under it. Markets that export occupations overseas from the town they came from are simply engaged in standard business practice. The increased purchasing power of cheap goods is supposed to compensate for the absence of high paying manufacturing jobs. Profit is about the dollar, not the flag (except in China), and it’s certainly not about employees who provide return on investment and yet are expendable while investors somehow are not. Laws that allow corporate polluters to poison the very people that work for them—from coal miners with black lung, to America’s cancer alley in Louisiana and Texas—are passed by “business friendly” conservatives. When it comes to cherished families and their values, try killing off a few—a regular occurrence—then see how their traditions stand up to it. [11]
True communities thrived on our sensitivities of connectedness. State and Market society thrives on our disconnectedness. [12] Three hundred million people in America and according to the World Economic Forum (isn’t that ironic?) loneliness is an epidemic in one of the loneliest places on Earth. [13]
That Enlightenment liberalism worked so well is a testament to the match between the practical results of this philosophical system and human nature. These philosophers came closer than anyone in correctly defining humans, and assigning terms to the “Equation of Man” that describes them. But like the mathematical series approximation to any phenomena, they couldn’t include every variable. They were forced to leave out terms they considered less important in their day, and accepted an approximation. Hence, they did not give us a Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. What they ignored or assigned less weight, over time evolved to become a predator with its creators as its prey. What began as a society to serve self-interest has become a society of “separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” [14]
In posts to follow we’ll test Deneen’s ideas in hopes of locating where we are in that “natural cycle of corruption and decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations,” and ponder solutions.
Until next time, November 4, 2019.
[1] Patrick J. Deneen Why Liberalism Failed, Yale, 2018
[2] Recall that an emergent property is a characteristic that comes about when the right combination of things come together. For example, water feels dry until from a million or so water molecules in contact emerges the property of wetness.
[3] Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West notion is one of arc. Like a person, civilization rises on some idea in youth, advances to middle age stagnation, and decays in elder years. Brooks Adams’ Law of Civilization and Decay roots collapse in cycles. From superstition, disorder, and lack of control, civilizations rotate out of this and into spans of order and control only to be spiritually and socially eviscerated by their own social machine (like many Americans in the workplace, where each day is another lesson in submission), whereupon the civilization heals over into another superstitious phase of the cycle. Will & Ariel Durrant’s Lessons of History blame moral decay. For Arnold Toynbee’s Story of History it’s a failure of leaders to adjust to ever changing landscapes.
[4] Deneen, pg. 4
[5] pg. xxvi. In regards to Deneen’s remark that liberalism fails to see its own culpability, see the blog post Is PCD an acronym for Programmed Civilization Death?, Brett Williams, November 7, 2016
[6] Deneen pg. 3
[7] Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization, Random House, 2010
[8] This concept of States that hurl themselves apart as they struggle to hold themselves together comes from Marcel Gauchet and his remarkable Disenchantment Of The World.
[9] Deneen pg. xiii
[10] Deneen uses abortion as corrective to limits imposed on women. The gender preference example is my own and references an actual gender spectrum dictated by biology, not psychological preference as summarized in Radiolab Presents: Gonads , WNYCStudios, June 2018.
[11] As one of countless examples: Miles O'Brien, The danger of coal ash, the toxic dust the fossil fuel leaves behind, PBS Newshour, Aug 14, 2019. As Louis Dumont clarifies in From Mandeville to Marx, economics divorced itself from religion and morality in order to make “rational” numerical judgment without interference. Which reminds me of libertarian guru Murry Rothbard’s notion that freedom is defined for individuals as though each were alone in the universe—which don’t exist. See more on Dumont on this blog at Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall, Brett Williams, July 6, 2015, and for Rothbard, Murray Rothbard’s strange and zany world, Brett Williams, September 5, 2016.
[12] Free market economy promoter, Michael Polanyi who schooled Frederick Hayek on this matter, had a brother, Karl, who’s The Great Transformation makes this very point, that the Market embeds society in economy rather than the other (original) way around as modern economy now has it.
[13] Kevin Loria, Most Americans are lonely, World Economic Forum, 3 May 2018. Amy Brannan, TOP 10 LONELIEST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD , IMMIGroup, Aug 30, 2017
[14] Deneen pg. 46
July 1, 2019
July 1, 2019: Confronting the Constitution. Part 5: Utilitarians vs. the Founders. Who was right?
In Joseph Hamburger’s contribution to Confronting the Constitution he looks at debates between the 18th century British utilitarians of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, and John Austin vs. builders of the US Constitution. [1] The utilitarians had great respect for the new Constitution and its creation, but they also had withering criticisms. None of them a secret as The Federalist papers (1787-88) explicitly condemned utilitarians in their written arguments, while utilitarians labeled its authors foolish and ignorant.
It helps to keep in mind the context of the times. Europe was sky high on the new science of Isaac Newton. His method applied to the natural world also penetrated the human realm with a froth of new thinking about a “science of politics.” The Renaissance preceding this Enlightenment had rediscovered and made widely available the findings of Greece and Rome with historic reference to universal human nature. And the Enlightenment itself was frequently hostile to all forms of authority, especially religion as represented by Voltaire and Paine. The utilitarians were more enamored with these movements than the Founders who, while products of the Enlightenment and uniquely crafted by the same forces, where able to retain an even strain between the power of popular fashions and a more practical approach. Religion, for example, would not be crushed by the Founder’s Constitution, but made a right, albeit a right to an opinion, as no religion could among all the others be considered a fact supported by the State.
“North America was ‘one of the most, if not the most enlightened, at this day on the globe,’” claimed Bentham. [2] While, as individualists like me now recognize, Bentham also portentously regarded the US as “unhampered by the weight of tradition.” [3] Tradition had been suffocating for the new individualism and Bentham wanted it ended, that “dead hand of the past… from savage and stupid ages, [that made people] slaves of custom… in the infancy of reason.” [4] Likewise, Bentham dismissed the establishment of traditions through the Constitution’s principles and institutions. Instead, he suggested a complete set of statute laws to Madison in 1811, to free the US from “perplexity and plague.” After five years unanswered, Madison finally replied, No thanks.
Contrary to Alexander Hamilton’s remark that if men were angels, there’d be no need of governance (meaning constraints on the populous and government), “utilitarians were opposed to the very idea of constitutional limitations… It was the character of a sovereign body to be incapable of legal limitation.” [5] “Sovereign” here meaning something like a parliament of Plato’s philosopher kings. Good luck finding one of those. According to Hamburger, utilitarians had “a powerful faith that a science of legislation could be developed,” where Bentham wanted to “play Newton’s role for a science of law.” [6]
It’s ironic that while utilitarians believed popular power must be checked by a forceful sovereign, they also envisioned an almost unlimited freedom of the people—so long as people behaved in accordance with what I’ll loosely term a scientifically perfected behavior. On the other hand, for the Founders that check was between the people themselves and their self-interests. According to The Federalist, “There is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust… But [and here we see separation from dogma] the supposition of universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning than the supposition of universal rectitude.” [7]
For the Framers, an iron fist sovereign carried with it an inference “that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.” [8] The Constitution would appeal to our better natures. And yet, the system our Founders built has become one with a ceaseless expansion in liberty. Ours is now a nation where the self-restraint of virtue—in service to a no-longer-existent common good—is an obstacle to not only liberty but the market. Where religious teachings of modesty are obstacles to consumer spending, and ethical treatment of animals or the environment impose production costs that restrain profit. In America, virtue is nearly as dead as the communities from which they emanated. Instead, we have the NASCAR “community,” the latest mass murder “community,” or of all the laughs, the Internet “community.” As Aristotle said, a community is not merely a common location that people occupy to ease exchange, which is exactly how Americans define it. With this evolution, we've reached a point in American history when tens of millions of disconnected, disaffected, rugged individualists support an authoritarian dictatorship. Does this not indicate “that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government”? Could it be social disconnectedness is what utilitarians sought to avoid by cohesion of a forceful sovereign?
Apparently not. For Bentham, communities are no less oppressive than their traditions. Slightly later, Tocqueville would warn of the “unwholesome condition of isolation that left individuals without attachments to others and to larger communities." And when this happens, he said, "a society is ripe for despotism.” [9] (Hmm… Fast forward to the 2016 election.) For John Stuart Mill, tradition composed of “religion and the expectations of one’s peers in associations and other groups were oppressive and, in the case of custom, despotic. For Tocqueville these were things that would serve as obstacles to tyranny… What for Mill was an ideally free society was Tocqueville’s nightmare.” [10] The utilitarian’s sovereign was intended to maintain order in society among disconnected island-individuals — laws alone, not sentiment. Either this is complete ignorance of human nature and the masses’ need for belonging and the meaning it provides, or it’s a willful perversion. Had the utilitarians had their desires codified into founding documents and institutions, they’d have only accelerated our social / spiritual decline.
The utilitarians also protested the Founder’s separation of powers. Utilitarians warned that with a tripartite system two of the three would combine to dominate the third. Did the utilitarians fail to notice that 3 might be seen as 4 branches given a bicameral Congress? With a Congress divided between House and Senate, collusion between Congress and the Executive was frustrated by the 2018 election, thus allowing corruption to be addressed, including impeachment expressly provided by the Constitution because so much damage can be done between elections. As it turns out the utilitarians did recognize bicameralism and dismissed it because “it caused a delay and checked the power of the more democratically elected House.” By now it might seem the utilitarians were making the Founders case for them. Delays were for the purpose of allowing reason to rise above dangerous passions hardwired into human nature. And who would not want a check on the most populist branch of government? Under the utilitarian system the nation would be whipsawed from one idiotic passion to the next.
The judges weren’t safe either. For utilitarians, the power of legislative annulment transferred “a portion of the supreme power from an assembly from which the people had some share in choosing, to a set of men [they didn’t choose].” [11] But rather than create another body subject to the people’s capricious will, the Founders wanted an unelected group steeped in legal philosophy and practice to stand outside the usual fray, with reasoned contemplation unencumbered by political machinations.
Lastly, utilitarians considered the Founder’s checking mechanism of varied self-interests as sinister and divisive. As an example, and harkening back to the ancient’s small republic, John Austin claimed the Reformation was “an evil to mankind” as it popularized theological questions and made people quarrelsome. For utilitarians, stable society seems to have depended on making human political thought robotically uniform, while the Founders saw our race as a spectrum from rational to ridiculous. From those of “reason and good sense” to those with “the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions…sufficient to kindle…and excite their most violent conflicts.” [12] Consequently, “They wanted effective but also republican government, liberty but also stability, energy in the executive…but due dependence on the people.” [13] The Federalist acknowledged their solution was an imperfect contrivance and improvisation. One should not be surprised their solution was forced to adopt “deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry [of the utilitarians] which…might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination.” [14]
While understandable with hindsight, utilitarians were overly idealistic about embracing the new science applied to human behavior. Their system of governance seems likely to be short-lived, arriving sooner to where we are now. Utilitarian arguments only strengthen the Founder’s case. The Founders instead accepted human flaws to create a system of, by, and for unstable humans. A system that unleashed human potential like never before in the history of our species. It was also a system that would destroy itself as we’ll see in future posts when we look at Patrick J. Deneen’s alarming work, Why Liberalism Failed. [15] As it turned out, the Founders handed us a time bomb.
Until next time, September 2, 2019.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed. Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[2] ibid, pg. 235
[3] ibid, pg. 235. Italics added.
[4] ibid, pg. 242
[5] ibid, pg. 236
[6] ibid, pg. 237
[7] ibid, pg. 243
[8] ibid, pg. 243
[9] ibid, pg. 253
[10] ibid, pg. 255
[11] ibid, pg. 241
[12] ibid, pg. 244
[13] ibid, pg. 248
[14] ibid, pg. 248
[15] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018
It helps to keep in mind the context of the times. Europe was sky high on the new science of Isaac Newton. His method applied to the natural world also penetrated the human realm with a froth of new thinking about a “science of politics.” The Renaissance preceding this Enlightenment had rediscovered and made widely available the findings of Greece and Rome with historic reference to universal human nature. And the Enlightenment itself was frequently hostile to all forms of authority, especially religion as represented by Voltaire and Paine. The utilitarians were more enamored with these movements than the Founders who, while products of the Enlightenment and uniquely crafted by the same forces, where able to retain an even strain between the power of popular fashions and a more practical approach. Religion, for example, would not be crushed by the Founder’s Constitution, but made a right, albeit a right to an opinion, as no religion could among all the others be considered a fact supported by the State.
“North America was ‘one of the most, if not the most enlightened, at this day on the globe,’” claimed Bentham. [2] While, as individualists like me now recognize, Bentham also portentously regarded the US as “unhampered by the weight of tradition.” [3] Tradition had been suffocating for the new individualism and Bentham wanted it ended, that “dead hand of the past… from savage and stupid ages, [that made people] slaves of custom… in the infancy of reason.” [4] Likewise, Bentham dismissed the establishment of traditions through the Constitution’s principles and institutions. Instead, he suggested a complete set of statute laws to Madison in 1811, to free the US from “perplexity and plague.” After five years unanswered, Madison finally replied, No thanks.
Contrary to Alexander Hamilton’s remark that if men were angels, there’d be no need of governance (meaning constraints on the populous and government), “utilitarians were opposed to the very idea of constitutional limitations… It was the character of a sovereign body to be incapable of legal limitation.” [5] “Sovereign” here meaning something like a parliament of Plato’s philosopher kings. Good luck finding one of those. According to Hamburger, utilitarians had “a powerful faith that a science of legislation could be developed,” where Bentham wanted to “play Newton’s role for a science of law.” [6]
It’s ironic that while utilitarians believed popular power must be checked by a forceful sovereign, they also envisioned an almost unlimited freedom of the people—so long as people behaved in accordance with what I’ll loosely term a scientifically perfected behavior. On the other hand, for the Founders that check was between the people themselves and their self-interests. According to The Federalist, “There is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust… But [and here we see separation from dogma] the supposition of universal venality in human nature is little less an error in political reasoning than the supposition of universal rectitude.” [7]
For the Framers, an iron fist sovereign carried with it an inference “that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.” [8] The Constitution would appeal to our better natures. And yet, the system our Founders built has become one with a ceaseless expansion in liberty. Ours is now a nation where the self-restraint of virtue—in service to a no-longer-existent common good—is an obstacle to not only liberty but the market. Where religious teachings of modesty are obstacles to consumer spending, and ethical treatment of animals or the environment impose production costs that restrain profit. In America, virtue is nearly as dead as the communities from which they emanated. Instead, we have the NASCAR “community,” the latest mass murder “community,” or of all the laughs, the Internet “community.” As Aristotle said, a community is not merely a common location that people occupy to ease exchange, which is exactly how Americans define it. With this evolution, we've reached a point in American history when tens of millions of disconnected, disaffected, rugged individualists support an authoritarian dictatorship. Does this not indicate “that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government”? Could it be social disconnectedness is what utilitarians sought to avoid by cohesion of a forceful sovereign?
Apparently not. For Bentham, communities are no less oppressive than their traditions. Slightly later, Tocqueville would warn of the “unwholesome condition of isolation that left individuals without attachments to others and to larger communities." And when this happens, he said, "a society is ripe for despotism.” [9] (Hmm… Fast forward to the 2016 election.) For John Stuart Mill, tradition composed of “religion and the expectations of one’s peers in associations and other groups were oppressive and, in the case of custom, despotic. For Tocqueville these were things that would serve as obstacles to tyranny… What for Mill was an ideally free society was Tocqueville’s nightmare.” [10] The utilitarian’s sovereign was intended to maintain order in society among disconnected island-individuals — laws alone, not sentiment. Either this is complete ignorance of human nature and the masses’ need for belonging and the meaning it provides, or it’s a willful perversion. Had the utilitarians had their desires codified into founding documents and institutions, they’d have only accelerated our social / spiritual decline.
The utilitarians also protested the Founder’s separation of powers. Utilitarians warned that with a tripartite system two of the three would combine to dominate the third. Did the utilitarians fail to notice that 3 might be seen as 4 branches given a bicameral Congress? With a Congress divided between House and Senate, collusion between Congress and the Executive was frustrated by the 2018 election, thus allowing corruption to be addressed, including impeachment expressly provided by the Constitution because so much damage can be done between elections. As it turns out the utilitarians did recognize bicameralism and dismissed it because “it caused a delay and checked the power of the more democratically elected House.” By now it might seem the utilitarians were making the Founders case for them. Delays were for the purpose of allowing reason to rise above dangerous passions hardwired into human nature. And who would not want a check on the most populist branch of government? Under the utilitarian system the nation would be whipsawed from one idiotic passion to the next.
The judges weren’t safe either. For utilitarians, the power of legislative annulment transferred “a portion of the supreme power from an assembly from which the people had some share in choosing, to a set of men [they didn’t choose].” [11] But rather than create another body subject to the people’s capricious will, the Founders wanted an unelected group steeped in legal philosophy and practice to stand outside the usual fray, with reasoned contemplation unencumbered by political machinations.
Lastly, utilitarians considered the Founder’s checking mechanism of varied self-interests as sinister and divisive. As an example, and harkening back to the ancient’s small republic, John Austin claimed the Reformation was “an evil to mankind” as it popularized theological questions and made people quarrelsome. For utilitarians, stable society seems to have depended on making human political thought robotically uniform, while the Founders saw our race as a spectrum from rational to ridiculous. From those of “reason and good sense” to those with “the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions…sufficient to kindle…and excite their most violent conflicts.” [12] Consequently, “They wanted effective but also republican government, liberty but also stability, energy in the executive…but due dependence on the people.” [13] The Federalist acknowledged their solution was an imperfect contrivance and improvisation. One should not be surprised their solution was forced to adopt “deviations from that artificial structure and regular symmetry [of the utilitarians] which…might lead an ingenious theorist to bestow on a Constitution planned in his closet or in his imagination.” [14]
While understandable with hindsight, utilitarians were overly idealistic about embracing the new science applied to human behavior. Their system of governance seems likely to be short-lived, arriving sooner to where we are now. Utilitarian arguments only strengthen the Founder’s case. The Founders instead accepted human flaws to create a system of, by, and for unstable humans. A system that unleashed human potential like never before in the history of our species. It was also a system that would destroy itself as we’ll see in future posts when we look at Patrick J. Deneen’s alarming work, Why Liberalism Failed. [15] As it turned out, the Founders handed us a time bomb.
Until next time, September 2, 2019.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed. Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[2] ibid, pg. 235
[3] ibid, pg. 235. Italics added.
[4] ibid, pg. 242
[5] ibid, pg. 236
[6] ibid, pg. 237
[7] ibid, pg. 243
[8] ibid, pg. 243
[9] ibid, pg. 253
[10] ibid, pg. 255
[11] ibid, pg. 241
[12] ibid, pg. 244
[13] ibid, pg. 248
[14] ibid, pg. 248
[15] Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, Yale University Press, 2018
May 6, 2019
May 6, 2019: Notre Dame, and the religious experience in science
As I write this post on April 15, 2019, Notre Dame in Paris has collapsed into a caldron. The shimmering embers of its delicate spire have tumbled into an eruption of cinders, consumed by billows of incandescent smoke. The visible apse and nave of that magnificent church—one of the world’s greatest architectural wonders—has been lifted to the sky in a column of ash, chaired remains on the ground, and mass converted to energy as photons of light now some six light hours distant, almost to the planet Neptune. While now, here on earth, one of the bell towers is on fire. [1]
Notre Dame was the holiest of holy places I’d ever been. That place which so stirred a hard agnostic like me, 800 years after it was built to inspire. When I walked between those massive bell towers, beneath those many saints on guard at its entrance portal, and looked up at that magnificent North Rose Window, I knew I was in the right place. Kaleidoscopic colors carved the shadows. Sounds were vague and cavernous. Thousands of candles lit fissures otherwise black as pitch. Above me, that vault of heaven dripped with golden shimmers off the boney marrow of stone supports like those other imposing sanctuaries in France: Lascaux, Trois-Frères, and Chauvet. All of it combined to lift me skyward as though an iron man drawn by its magnetic antiquity. A religious experience without the religion. I felt dizzy. I stood in that spot for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something. I walked to the nearest pew and for two hours absorbed the place by every pore on my skin. I was staggered by what humans can do.
It wasn’t the last time I had such a revelation. In a completely different and sterile setting, it happened in Los Angeles.
When I approached LAX from the sky it was just “another day of sun,” as the song by that name sings from the musical La La Land. They don’t call it a Mediterranean climate for nothing. One of just five slivers on planet earth with ideal sun, temperature, and humidity (unlike Florida). Conditions so foreign to the rest of us that after six months of living there I went outside one morning to wonder if I’d ever see another cloud. I became solar powered, an attitudinal boost that must be lived to be understood. Visitors can never grasp it. With all those rays from Ra, how could I have ever felt so down about life, death, corruption, money launderers, adulterers, and criminal presidents above the law? (Actually, the combination of money launderer, adulterer, and criminal president above the law did not yet exist.)
But, sadly, I was flying into Southern California because I didn’t live there anymore. I had moved back to Dallas, leaving behind that celebrated California climate where I could tell what time of day it was by how the air tasted (who needs a clock?), and regularly sat in traffic to turn my wheels over 3 miles in 90 minutes (“relaxation”).
Still relishing the memories from my window seat, I saw what I could of those arousing Sierra Mountains: Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Death Valley, and Yosemite National Parks. Those beaches and islands in the world’s largest body of water where each night after a jog on the Strand I watched that orange, oblate spheroid dive into the Underworld. In Dallas, I had Starbucks. And the most remarkable work of my career in an applied research group of the most innovative, motivated engineers and scientists I would ever have the good fortune to know.
Our group at Lockheed had hired a JPL spinoff called OEWaves in Pasadena. Pasadena lies just below that great telescope where in 1924 Edwin Hubble discovered we live in but one galaxy among billions, each with hundreds of billions of suns. Downhill at OEWaves, the engineers and scientists there were building a microwave photonic receiver born from a design we created, improved by their own intellectual property. The word receiver simply means we were building a radio. The words microwave and photonic means we were leveraging a new technology that unifies radio waves with laser light for all sorts of advantages. [2]
In OEWaves’ clean room I suited up in hermetic attire to look through a microscope at that itsy-bitsy device. Not just any radio, it used something called the whispering gallery mode of a microdisk. “Whispering gallery” gets its name from London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, where in 1878 Lord Rayleigh discovered he could hear a person whisper from the other side of the dome’s gallery many meters away. In that case, sound waves were pressed against the circular dome as they bounced around its perimeter. In our case, light waves made that transit in a miniature disk of something like glass.
As I envision my magnified eye gazing down into that tiny house furnished with dazzling physical phenomena, one in particular deserves embroidery. As far back as Isaac Newton, people knew that when light is shone into a prism there are angles of entry beyond which all light will reflect off the back of that prism with none passed through the other side. A process called—and for once appropriately—total internal reflection. But at the point of reflection, something inexplicable happens. Recall that light photons, be they from your computer screen, lightbulb, or our receiver’s laser, exist in only one state—gliding through space at 186,000 miles per second (3e8 m/s). Photons are always and only on the move. Except when totally internally reflected, from one dense medium to a less dense medium, like the glass of a prism interfaced with air. On the other side of that glass, in the air hugging its surface, is a fuzz of virtual photons. [3] Virtual because they’re not real. Yet, there they are, loitering at zero miles per second.
Weird.
By creating this fuzz of magic light, and only by this means, can those photons be “frustrated” by another dense medium like glass placed within mere nanometers of the prism. Simply intruding upon that ghostly space makes those photons real again. As though they’ve been seen to violate the law and run away humiliated. In our radio, it was the microdisk that so rudely disturbed their peaceful misbehavior. Once revived, those particles of laser light would whiz about its whispering gallery. And do so for long periods of time as we imposed information upon them by the modulation of radio waves applied to the disk. Without elaborating that last process, it’s how we made laser light carry radio waves to then manipulate the result in useful ways.
As my eye peered down into that enigmatic world, we turned on the device, and absolutely nothing happened. No explosions, no fist fights, no car chases. All those circuit elements just sat there. Yet on the spectrum analyzer output, a brassy signal hurled above the noise from our elfin radio. Rock and roll was never so loud. A sorcerer’s brew of Nature’s mysteries and God’s laws swirled in that tiny tabernacle to science smaller than a sugar cube. Those virtual-not-real photons I couldn’t see were resurrected from the dead, right in front of me. It was an epiphany.
Like my elevation at Notre Dame, I felt dizzy. I hunched over that microscope for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something. I walked to a chair. I sat down and tried to absorb what just happened. Overcome with awe, momentarily speechless, I was staggered by what humans can do.
Much is made of the potential for science to steal meaning from our world. But as physicist Richard Feynman said, “I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. Do I see less, or more?” That answer’s easy: much more. I used to watch my advisor and one time astronomy instructor, James Van Allen preach science to students filling the pews in a 300 seat temple to learning. Nary a one came away undazzled. So enthusiastic in his measured way was he for the subject, he seemed like a priest for Truth, possessed by the Spirit, the Salvation of Science.
So, religion and science; are the two aspirations really so different? I don’t mean in how they talk, or the way they practice. Religion accepts supernatural cause, and the effects are miracles. Science accepts only natural cause, and there are no miracles. I mean in the way they make us feel. Not small, not insignificant as so many claim, but bigger than life. More expansive than the galaxy we live in and know so much about, while forever more to learn, ascendant by that knowledge.
By the time I upload this post, the final flash from Notre Dame will be over 300 billion miles distant. Far beyond the 13 billion mile boundary of our solar system—which took Voyager 40 years to reach—but still over four years from our nearest stellar neighbor. The marvel of photosynthesis formed into plant cells of wood, carved by craftsman, exalted by art, and part of that church will sail on as the memory of what it was. It’s odd to think that it will do so long after those who saw it are dead. Long after the human race is extinct. Long after earth is vaporized by a dying sun, Notre Dame’s whisper will persist, like a prayer for help from the cosmos. Another prayer unanswered.
Until next time, July 1, 2019.
[1] The bell towers were saved by Parisian firefighters.
[2] Notice that I, like all of us familiar with the discipline use the words “light,” “waves,” and “photons” interchangeably.
[3] Physicists familiar with the term “virtual photon” will protest my use of the word here since it is usually attributed to those photons engaged in force exchange between charged particles, i.e. the particle representation of electromagnetic interaction. A more proper designation would be that TIA produces evanescent waves that fall away exponentially in amplitude from the prism/air interface. But that’s a whole other bag of worms to elucidate.
Notre Dame was the holiest of holy places I’d ever been. That place which so stirred a hard agnostic like me, 800 years after it was built to inspire. When I walked between those massive bell towers, beneath those many saints on guard at its entrance portal, and looked up at that magnificent North Rose Window, I knew I was in the right place. Kaleidoscopic colors carved the shadows. Sounds were vague and cavernous. Thousands of candles lit fissures otherwise black as pitch. Above me, that vault of heaven dripped with golden shimmers off the boney marrow of stone supports like those other imposing sanctuaries in France: Lascaux, Trois-Frères, and Chauvet. All of it combined to lift me skyward as though an iron man drawn by its magnetic antiquity. A religious experience without the religion. I felt dizzy. I stood in that spot for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something. I walked to the nearest pew and for two hours absorbed the place by every pore on my skin. I was staggered by what humans can do.
It wasn’t the last time I had such a revelation. In a completely different and sterile setting, it happened in Los Angeles.
When I approached LAX from the sky it was just “another day of sun,” as the song by that name sings from the musical La La Land. They don’t call it a Mediterranean climate for nothing. One of just five slivers on planet earth with ideal sun, temperature, and humidity (unlike Florida). Conditions so foreign to the rest of us that after six months of living there I went outside one morning to wonder if I’d ever see another cloud. I became solar powered, an attitudinal boost that must be lived to be understood. Visitors can never grasp it. With all those rays from Ra, how could I have ever felt so down about life, death, corruption, money launderers, adulterers, and criminal presidents above the law? (Actually, the combination of money launderer, adulterer, and criminal president above the law did not yet exist.)
But, sadly, I was flying into Southern California because I didn’t live there anymore. I had moved back to Dallas, leaving behind that celebrated California climate where I could tell what time of day it was by how the air tasted (who needs a clock?), and regularly sat in traffic to turn my wheels over 3 miles in 90 minutes (“relaxation”).
Still relishing the memories from my window seat, I saw what I could of those arousing Sierra Mountains: Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Death Valley, and Yosemite National Parks. Those beaches and islands in the world’s largest body of water where each night after a jog on the Strand I watched that orange, oblate spheroid dive into the Underworld. In Dallas, I had Starbucks. And the most remarkable work of my career in an applied research group of the most innovative, motivated engineers and scientists I would ever have the good fortune to know.
Our group at Lockheed had hired a JPL spinoff called OEWaves in Pasadena. Pasadena lies just below that great telescope where in 1924 Edwin Hubble discovered we live in but one galaxy among billions, each with hundreds of billions of suns. Downhill at OEWaves, the engineers and scientists there were building a microwave photonic receiver born from a design we created, improved by their own intellectual property. The word receiver simply means we were building a radio. The words microwave and photonic means we were leveraging a new technology that unifies radio waves with laser light for all sorts of advantages. [2]
In OEWaves’ clean room I suited up in hermetic attire to look through a microscope at that itsy-bitsy device. Not just any radio, it used something called the whispering gallery mode of a microdisk. “Whispering gallery” gets its name from London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, where in 1878 Lord Rayleigh discovered he could hear a person whisper from the other side of the dome’s gallery many meters away. In that case, sound waves were pressed against the circular dome as they bounced around its perimeter. In our case, light waves made that transit in a miniature disk of something like glass.
As I envision my magnified eye gazing down into that tiny house furnished with dazzling physical phenomena, one in particular deserves embroidery. As far back as Isaac Newton, people knew that when light is shone into a prism there are angles of entry beyond which all light will reflect off the back of that prism with none passed through the other side. A process called—and for once appropriately—total internal reflection. But at the point of reflection, something inexplicable happens. Recall that light photons, be they from your computer screen, lightbulb, or our receiver’s laser, exist in only one state—gliding through space at 186,000 miles per second (3e8 m/s). Photons are always and only on the move. Except when totally internally reflected, from one dense medium to a less dense medium, like the glass of a prism interfaced with air. On the other side of that glass, in the air hugging its surface, is a fuzz of virtual photons. [3] Virtual because they’re not real. Yet, there they are, loitering at zero miles per second.
Weird.
By creating this fuzz of magic light, and only by this means, can those photons be “frustrated” by another dense medium like glass placed within mere nanometers of the prism. Simply intruding upon that ghostly space makes those photons real again. As though they’ve been seen to violate the law and run away humiliated. In our radio, it was the microdisk that so rudely disturbed their peaceful misbehavior. Once revived, those particles of laser light would whiz about its whispering gallery. And do so for long periods of time as we imposed information upon them by the modulation of radio waves applied to the disk. Without elaborating that last process, it’s how we made laser light carry radio waves to then manipulate the result in useful ways.
As my eye peered down into that enigmatic world, we turned on the device, and absolutely nothing happened. No explosions, no fist fights, no car chases. All those circuit elements just sat there. Yet on the spectrum analyzer output, a brassy signal hurled above the noise from our elfin radio. Rock and roll was never so loud. A sorcerer’s brew of Nature’s mysteries and God’s laws swirled in that tiny tabernacle to science smaller than a sugar cube. Those virtual-not-real photons I couldn’t see were resurrected from the dead, right in front of me. It was an epiphany.
Like my elevation at Notre Dame, I felt dizzy. I hunched over that microscope for the longest time, afraid to move and miss something. I walked to a chair. I sat down and tried to absorb what just happened. Overcome with awe, momentarily speechless, I was staggered by what humans can do.
Much is made of the potential for science to steal meaning from our world. But as physicist Richard Feynman said, “I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. Do I see less, or more?” That answer’s easy: much more. I used to watch my advisor and one time astronomy instructor, James Van Allen preach science to students filling the pews in a 300 seat temple to learning. Nary a one came away undazzled. So enthusiastic in his measured way was he for the subject, he seemed like a priest for Truth, possessed by the Spirit, the Salvation of Science.
So, religion and science; are the two aspirations really so different? I don’t mean in how they talk, or the way they practice. Religion accepts supernatural cause, and the effects are miracles. Science accepts only natural cause, and there are no miracles. I mean in the way they make us feel. Not small, not insignificant as so many claim, but bigger than life. More expansive than the galaxy we live in and know so much about, while forever more to learn, ascendant by that knowledge.
By the time I upload this post, the final flash from Notre Dame will be over 300 billion miles distant. Far beyond the 13 billion mile boundary of our solar system—which took Voyager 40 years to reach—but still over four years from our nearest stellar neighbor. The marvel of photosynthesis formed into plant cells of wood, carved by craftsman, exalted by art, and part of that church will sail on as the memory of what it was. It’s odd to think that it will do so long after those who saw it are dead. Long after the human race is extinct. Long after earth is vaporized by a dying sun, Notre Dame’s whisper will persist, like a prayer for help from the cosmos. Another prayer unanswered.
Until next time, July 1, 2019.
[1] The bell towers were saved by Parisian firefighters.
[2] Notice that I, like all of us familiar with the discipline use the words “light,” “waves,” and “photons” interchangeably.
[3] Physicists familiar with the term “virtual photon” will protest my use of the word here since it is usually attributed to those photons engaged in force exchange between charged particles, i.e. the particle representation of electromagnetic interaction. A more proper designation would be that TIA produces evanescent waves that fall away exponentially in amplitude from the prism/air interface. But that’s a whole other bag of worms to elucidate.
March 4, 2019
March 4, 2019: Confronting the Constitution Part 4: Rousseau’s enduring rebuke of Enlightenment governance
In Allan Bloom’s contribution to Confronting the Constitution he depicts the insights of, and threats to, Enlightenment political philosophy posed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). [1] Rousseau’s ideas were inspiring and inflammatory to those of his age, and since, though most today don’t know Rousseau as the source of their own outlook. According to Harvard’s Leo Damrosch, while the Founders were chiefly influenced by Locke and Montesquieu, all were moved by Rousseau one way or another, especially Jefferson. [2] While Rousseau’s radical reputation made it imprudent to affiliate, Jefferson’s declaratory line comes from Rousseau’s Social Contract: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” [3]
Rousseau’s reach extended past the Counter-Enlightenment, past Romanticism, and into the brains of Hume, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Thoreau, Marx, Leo Strauss, Goethe, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., America's Right, Left, and me. It was 20 years ago when I first met Rousseau, who puzzled, agitated, and knocked me off my feet. As Allan Bloom tells it, Rousseau “possessed an unsurpassed intellectual clarity accompanied by a stirring and seductive rhetoric.” [4] His reflections “had the effect of outflanking the Framers on the Left, where they thought they were invulnerable.” [5] While the Founders sought to neuter the old European orders of power propped up by the church and wealth on the Right, their “movement from prejudice to reason, despotism to freedom, inequality to equality [was not meant] to be infinite,” nor driven by a policy of retribution. [6] Yet Rousseau’s philosophy did just that, multiple times throughout history.
Striking at the heart of Enlightenment philosophy and thus foundations of our Constitution, Rousseau proved to himself that the “attempt to use man’s natural passions as the foundation of civil society fails while it perverts those passions.” [7] “The fulfillment of unnecessary desires, begun as a pleasure, ends up being a necessity… Desire emancipated becomes limitless and calls forth an economy to provide it.” [8] “[This economy] instituted to serve life alters the purpose of life, and the activity of society becomes subservient to it… [while] a prosperous future is always just beyond the horizon. As politics turns into economics… men are abstractions while money is real.” [9] Or, per anthropologist Louis Dumont, things become more important than people. [10]
What's created from a philosophical background of politics is an economic system that as Brooks Adam’s tells it in his Law of Civilization and Decay will continue to squeeze out inefficiencies until it has squashed the last of humane nature from its maker—man rebuilt by the system he made. [11] An artificial man, whose central interest was once self-preservation becomes “covetous” in theological language. Which rings again the bell of contradiction between the selflessness of religion and the belonging it provides, vs. the selfishness of interest-based economics with its promise of autonomy. Precisely Rousseau’s concern.
Four years ago on this blog we considered Rousseau’s fears realized: “The economic promise to make individuals independent was a resounding success. Compared to the past, we are materially rich, socially and spiritually impoverished. We’ve decided without knowing it to trade one domain for the other. As political philosopher Michael J. Sandal puts it, ‘liberated and dispossessed.’ Economics is not merely a tool of analysis to tell us what happened or attempt predictions; it sets public policy to structure the very society we live in. By Dumont’s account, ‘Something that remains opaque in this transition in mental perspective is that the new morality regulates social relationships whether or not goods are involved.’” [12]
It’s a complex social system. The economic model is a consequence of the political philosophy. [13] The political philosophy is a consequence of the human definition. That human definition delineates what moral ethics require—rights or responsibilities? This moral ethic reevaluates others in a world of more than ourselves alone, when it used to be those others in the form of true communities of deep human connection that gave us meaning (different from purpose [14]). A meaning once set so high above the self there was no need for an afterlife, as what lived on was the readily visible community on earth in the here and now. [15] Much later (800 BC - 200 BC), with the inward turn of Axial Age meditation, prayer, and philosophy, the individual ascends and community begins its long decay. Preservation of the self becomes a lot more important when death is psychologically final. An afterlife becomes essential. The new world religions provided it. Individualism that the Axial Age gave rise to is how we got on this self-interest track to begin with. It’s what Enlightenment tried to sort out, and what our Founders had to engage. It’s a package deal of historic span. [16]
Like the Founders, Rousseau believed passion must control passion, not unreliable virtue. As his solution, “Rousseau chooses patriotism,” writes Bloom, “a motive tinged with fanaticism, [but he does so] because it alone can counterpoise the natural inclination to prefer oneself over everyone else, an inclination much intensified and perverted [by Enlightenment]… Patriotism is a sublimated form of self-love, seeking the first place for one’s country.” [17]
Or maybe not. As demonstrated by the satisfaction of bloodlust in the French Revolution, more than a little tinged by fanaticism and a policy of retribution, “traced, without intermediaries, to Rousseau’s influence,” says Bloom. [18] For all Rousseau’s opposition to Locke’s self-interested system, “Locke was simply right in one decisive aspect. Everybody, not just the rich, gets richer in a system of liberal economy. Gross inequalities of wealth persist or are encouraged by it, but the absolute material wellbeing of each is greatly enhanced.” [19] And as Alexander Hamilton told us in January, “In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many… Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself” because talents are unequal. [20] As we saw back in September, the Founders provided “not the best government they could devise, but the best government the people would accept.” [21]
But despite the practicalities and positives of Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau's portentous warnings have arrived. With a level field the Constitution strives to maintain, it’s up to individuals to make the most of a system that frees them to pursue their interests, or be eaten by it.
If not dominated by the combat of “just getting by,” most Americans chase primate hierarchies of status, material display for sexual selection (the male purview of most species), while possessed by our possessions with so much stuff we rent storage. A little mediation goes a long way to a life of freedom in pursuit of interests worth pursuing. I know because I did it. I committed to my career for a limited number of years (though up to 98 hours/week). Having learned from my mistakes, I saved all I could, invested wisely, and for a decade and half had little more than a pad to sleep on, a spoon, fork, knife, and two plates—one for the cats. That prosperous future (of freedom) need not be forever “just beyond the horizon.”
I was lucky. For most, each day’s commute is another lesson in submission, where, as Mark Twain said, “All men live lives of quiet desperation.” I relished applied physics in engineering. Yet, despite that fascination, for me there were other important matters that pay nothing. Like painting, writing, the study of history, philosophy, and other sciences on another hike in the Sierras with my pups, without a deadline. Some young people have figured this out through the Mister Money Mustache movement. [22] I salute them as smarter than I was at their age when I bought into America’s consumerist society hook, line, and sinker. Then sunk into spiritual ruin in short order after my idyllic university experience. Preparation for calamity.
While anecdotal, my example implies Rousseau correctly diagnosed the symptoms of modernity, but he got the medication wrong. He tried to impose pre-Axial Age community on individualist society; errors Marxism and socialism would repeat with Rousseau’s help. Enlightenment offered the right prescription for post-community modernity (with caveats [23]). Most right for those who can turn from those shiny lures modernity also offers that come with a sharp hook.
Aside from his brilliance, which I cannot parallel, Rousseau was able to see the ills because he was an idealist, believing solutions exist. In that regard, Rousseau and I are birds of a feather. For people like this it is their mission to exhume a remedy to civilization’s troubles somewhere in that deepest fissure of the human nucleus where “The Truth” resides. For these types it’s an irresistible quest from the day they realize they’re on one. A quest for salvation. Saved by understanding, and with that, forgiveness for the species we hold liable—our own. But as is said of idealists, “They’re always in a moral huff.” Idealists can’t find the solution because it does not exist. They engage in a tireless fistfight to square the circle in an attempt to make sense of a creature that can’t. An exhumation that unearths not salvation, but damnation of a cerebral sort. Rousseau was damned in this same glorious and inspiring way.
Until next time, May 6, 2019.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed. Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. Notice that Rousseau was sandwiched between the duos of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) as pioneers in the modern movement, with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) capping the phase, conventionally closed by 1789, commencement of the French Revolution.
[2] Leo Damrosch, Friends of Rousseau: Some of the people he has influenced don’t even know it, Humanities, July/August 2012, v. 33, No. 4, , Leo Damrosch is professor of literature at Harvard University and author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, Houghton Mifflin, 2005
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Oxford, 1994
[4] Bloom, pg. 214
[5] ibid, pg. 212
[6] ibid, pg. 212
[7] ibid, pg. 217
[8] ibid, pg. 217
[9] ibid, pg. 222
[10] Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1977
[11] Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, Macmillan, 1916
[12] Brett Williams, July 6, 2015: Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall
[13] Recall Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that codified capitalism was first published in 1776.
[14] “Different from purpose.” In keeping with my hypothesis that meaning is externally granted from those who value us, while purpose in internally generated with an endless list of things to do.
[15] Mark W. Muesse, Religions of the Axial Age, The Great Courses, 2007
[16] Recall that Enlightenment philosophy from which all this blooms was built on the fruits of Newton’s Scientific Revolution, with an attempt to apply its kind of thinking to man. Newton was built on Renaissance, which was the West’s rediscovery of ancient Greece, their philosophy, science, and mathematics. It was Thales who ca. 600 BC said, we will—in this new pursuit one day to be called science—no longer accept supernatural explanations. There are no miracles in science. Why? Because the gods are as fickle as the people who invent them. Science accepts only natural causes that bear testable predictions. Now, 2600 years later, planes, trains, internet and automobiles prove his method quite right—The Truth in nature with a capital T. But success in nature does not necessarily make it a discipline appropriate for the mastery of human nature. Except that the Founders tried to do just that with Enlightenment’s new “science of political philosophy.” Could it be, as Marcel Gauchet terms it, an “illogical solution to our illogical condition,” that we exist and that we won’t, would be more appropriate? Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A political History of Religion, Princeton, 1997. Furthermore, I hide here in the footnotes a notion that the Axial Age is the second indication of too many humans on earth, the first as a swap in priority from goddess to god. I suggest the goddess with her powers of reproduction were initially paramount as survival of the species depended on it. Once there were too many humans, especially with sedentary agriculture and its highly invested settlements (no more hunter-gatherer wandering), then war gods rise to primacy in order to defend and dispose of threats from all those humans. War gods favor only a chosen people, with little regard for the humans themselves. Dramatic individualization that accompanies the Axial Age occurs (I suggest) not because of increasing change, effects of the State, or Empires and their wars, but one level down: because there’s too many humans that result in all these compensations—social countermeasures as innovations to counter innovations. We just keep trying to fix what we broke. Then break something else.
[17] ibid, pg. 216. Notice Rousseau turns to patriotism, not religion.
[18] ibid, pg. 212
[19] ibid, pg. 223
[20] Brett Williams, January 7, 2019: Confronting the Constitution, Part 3: Has social change made the US Constitution obsolete?
[21] Brett Williams, September 3, 2018: Confronting the Constitution, Part 2: Government of, by, and for unstable humans
[22] Mister Money Mustache
[23] However, as we now witness, self-interest based political philosophy and its resulting economic model come with an unstated assumption, and lethal on a planetary scale: limitless resources. Couple that assumption with massive human overpopulation and we get what we got.
Rousseau’s reach extended past the Counter-Enlightenment, past Romanticism, and into the brains of Hume, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, Thoreau, Marx, Leo Strauss, Goethe, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., America's Right, Left, and me. It was 20 years ago when I first met Rousseau, who puzzled, agitated, and knocked me off my feet. As Allan Bloom tells it, Rousseau “possessed an unsurpassed intellectual clarity accompanied by a stirring and seductive rhetoric.” [4] His reflections “had the effect of outflanking the Framers on the Left, where they thought they were invulnerable.” [5] While the Founders sought to neuter the old European orders of power propped up by the church and wealth on the Right, their “movement from prejudice to reason, despotism to freedom, inequality to equality [was not meant] to be infinite,” nor driven by a policy of retribution. [6] Yet Rousseau’s philosophy did just that, multiple times throughout history.
Striking at the heart of Enlightenment philosophy and thus foundations of our Constitution, Rousseau proved to himself that the “attempt to use man’s natural passions as the foundation of civil society fails while it perverts those passions.” [7] “The fulfillment of unnecessary desires, begun as a pleasure, ends up being a necessity… Desire emancipated becomes limitless and calls forth an economy to provide it.” [8] “[This economy] instituted to serve life alters the purpose of life, and the activity of society becomes subservient to it… [while] a prosperous future is always just beyond the horizon. As politics turns into economics… men are abstractions while money is real.” [9] Or, per anthropologist Louis Dumont, things become more important than people. [10]
What's created from a philosophical background of politics is an economic system that as Brooks Adam’s tells it in his Law of Civilization and Decay will continue to squeeze out inefficiencies until it has squashed the last of humane nature from its maker—man rebuilt by the system he made. [11] An artificial man, whose central interest was once self-preservation becomes “covetous” in theological language. Which rings again the bell of contradiction between the selflessness of religion and the belonging it provides, vs. the selfishness of interest-based economics with its promise of autonomy. Precisely Rousseau’s concern.
Four years ago on this blog we considered Rousseau’s fears realized: “The economic promise to make individuals independent was a resounding success. Compared to the past, we are materially rich, socially and spiritually impoverished. We’ve decided without knowing it to trade one domain for the other. As political philosopher Michael J. Sandal puts it, ‘liberated and dispossessed.’ Economics is not merely a tool of analysis to tell us what happened or attempt predictions; it sets public policy to structure the very society we live in. By Dumont’s account, ‘Something that remains opaque in this transition in mental perspective is that the new morality regulates social relationships whether or not goods are involved.’” [12]
It’s a complex social system. The economic model is a consequence of the political philosophy. [13] The political philosophy is a consequence of the human definition. That human definition delineates what moral ethics require—rights or responsibilities? This moral ethic reevaluates others in a world of more than ourselves alone, when it used to be those others in the form of true communities of deep human connection that gave us meaning (different from purpose [14]). A meaning once set so high above the self there was no need for an afterlife, as what lived on was the readily visible community on earth in the here and now. [15] Much later (800 BC - 200 BC), with the inward turn of Axial Age meditation, prayer, and philosophy, the individual ascends and community begins its long decay. Preservation of the self becomes a lot more important when death is psychologically final. An afterlife becomes essential. The new world religions provided it. Individualism that the Axial Age gave rise to is how we got on this self-interest track to begin with. It’s what Enlightenment tried to sort out, and what our Founders had to engage. It’s a package deal of historic span. [16]
Like the Founders, Rousseau believed passion must control passion, not unreliable virtue. As his solution, “Rousseau chooses patriotism,” writes Bloom, “a motive tinged with fanaticism, [but he does so] because it alone can counterpoise the natural inclination to prefer oneself over everyone else, an inclination much intensified and perverted [by Enlightenment]… Patriotism is a sublimated form of self-love, seeking the first place for one’s country.” [17]
Or maybe not. As demonstrated by the satisfaction of bloodlust in the French Revolution, more than a little tinged by fanaticism and a policy of retribution, “traced, without intermediaries, to Rousseau’s influence,” says Bloom. [18] For all Rousseau’s opposition to Locke’s self-interested system, “Locke was simply right in one decisive aspect. Everybody, not just the rich, gets richer in a system of liberal economy. Gross inequalities of wealth persist or are encouraged by it, but the absolute material wellbeing of each is greatly enhanced.” [19] And as Alexander Hamilton told us in January, “In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many… Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself” because talents are unequal. [20] As we saw back in September, the Founders provided “not the best government they could devise, but the best government the people would accept.” [21]
But despite the practicalities and positives of Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau's portentous warnings have arrived. With a level field the Constitution strives to maintain, it’s up to individuals to make the most of a system that frees them to pursue their interests, or be eaten by it.
If not dominated by the combat of “just getting by,” most Americans chase primate hierarchies of status, material display for sexual selection (the male purview of most species), while possessed by our possessions with so much stuff we rent storage. A little mediation goes a long way to a life of freedom in pursuit of interests worth pursuing. I know because I did it. I committed to my career for a limited number of years (though up to 98 hours/week). Having learned from my mistakes, I saved all I could, invested wisely, and for a decade and half had little more than a pad to sleep on, a spoon, fork, knife, and two plates—one for the cats. That prosperous future (of freedom) need not be forever “just beyond the horizon.”
I was lucky. For most, each day’s commute is another lesson in submission, where, as Mark Twain said, “All men live lives of quiet desperation.” I relished applied physics in engineering. Yet, despite that fascination, for me there were other important matters that pay nothing. Like painting, writing, the study of history, philosophy, and other sciences on another hike in the Sierras with my pups, without a deadline. Some young people have figured this out through the Mister Money Mustache movement. [22] I salute them as smarter than I was at their age when I bought into America’s consumerist society hook, line, and sinker. Then sunk into spiritual ruin in short order after my idyllic university experience. Preparation for calamity.
While anecdotal, my example implies Rousseau correctly diagnosed the symptoms of modernity, but he got the medication wrong. He tried to impose pre-Axial Age community on individualist society; errors Marxism and socialism would repeat with Rousseau’s help. Enlightenment offered the right prescription for post-community modernity (with caveats [23]). Most right for those who can turn from those shiny lures modernity also offers that come with a sharp hook.
Aside from his brilliance, which I cannot parallel, Rousseau was able to see the ills because he was an idealist, believing solutions exist. In that regard, Rousseau and I are birds of a feather. For people like this it is their mission to exhume a remedy to civilization’s troubles somewhere in that deepest fissure of the human nucleus where “The Truth” resides. For these types it’s an irresistible quest from the day they realize they’re on one. A quest for salvation. Saved by understanding, and with that, forgiveness for the species we hold liable—our own. But as is said of idealists, “They’re always in a moral huff.” Idealists can’t find the solution because it does not exist. They engage in a tireless fistfight to square the circle in an attempt to make sense of a creature that can’t. An exhumation that unearths not salvation, but damnation of a cerebral sort. Rousseau was damned in this same glorious and inspiring way.
Until next time, May 6, 2019.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed. Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. Notice that Rousseau was sandwiched between the duos of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and John Locke (1632-1704) as pioneers in the modern movement, with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) capping the phase, conventionally closed by 1789, commencement of the French Revolution.
[2] Leo Damrosch, Friends of Rousseau: Some of the people he has influenced don’t even know it, Humanities, July/August 2012, v. 33, No. 4, , Leo Damrosch is professor of literature at Harvard University and author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, Houghton Mifflin, 2005
[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Oxford, 1994
[4] Bloom, pg. 214
[5] ibid, pg. 212
[6] ibid, pg. 212
[7] ibid, pg. 217
[8] ibid, pg. 217
[9] ibid, pg. 222
[10] Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, University of Chicago Press, 1977
[11] Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay, Macmillan, 1916
[12] Brett Williams, July 6, 2015: Mount Economics – It Wasn’t Always So Tall
[13] Recall Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that codified capitalism was first published in 1776.
[14] “Different from purpose.” In keeping with my hypothesis that meaning is externally granted from those who value us, while purpose in internally generated with an endless list of things to do.
[15] Mark W. Muesse, Religions of the Axial Age, The Great Courses, 2007
[16] Recall that Enlightenment philosophy from which all this blooms was built on the fruits of Newton’s Scientific Revolution, with an attempt to apply its kind of thinking to man. Newton was built on Renaissance, which was the West’s rediscovery of ancient Greece, their philosophy, science, and mathematics. It was Thales who ca. 600 BC said, we will—in this new pursuit one day to be called science—no longer accept supernatural explanations. There are no miracles in science. Why? Because the gods are as fickle as the people who invent them. Science accepts only natural causes that bear testable predictions. Now, 2600 years later, planes, trains, internet and automobiles prove his method quite right—The Truth in nature with a capital T. But success in nature does not necessarily make it a discipline appropriate for the mastery of human nature. Except that the Founders tried to do just that with Enlightenment’s new “science of political philosophy.” Could it be, as Marcel Gauchet terms it, an “illogical solution to our illogical condition,” that we exist and that we won’t, would be more appropriate? Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A political History of Religion, Princeton, 1997. Furthermore, I hide here in the footnotes a notion that the Axial Age is the second indication of too many humans on earth, the first as a swap in priority from goddess to god. I suggest the goddess with her powers of reproduction were initially paramount as survival of the species depended on it. Once there were too many humans, especially with sedentary agriculture and its highly invested settlements (no more hunter-gatherer wandering), then war gods rise to primacy in order to defend and dispose of threats from all those humans. War gods favor only a chosen people, with little regard for the humans themselves. Dramatic individualization that accompanies the Axial Age occurs (I suggest) not because of increasing change, effects of the State, or Empires and their wars, but one level down: because there’s too many humans that result in all these compensations—social countermeasures as innovations to counter innovations. We just keep trying to fix what we broke. Then break something else.
[17] ibid, pg. 216. Notice Rousseau turns to patriotism, not religion.
[18] ibid, pg. 212
[19] ibid, pg. 223
[20] Brett Williams, January 7, 2019: Confronting the Constitution, Part 3: Has social change made the US Constitution obsolete?
[21] Brett Williams, September 3, 2018: Confronting the Constitution, Part 2: Government of, by, and for unstable humans
[22] Mister Money Mustache
[23] However, as we now witness, self-interest based political philosophy and its resulting economic model come with an unstated assumption, and lethal on a planetary scale: limitless resources. Couple that assumption with massive human overpopulation and we get what we got.
January 7, 2019
January 7, 2019: Confronting the Constitution Part 3: Has social change made the US Constitution obsolete?
In Nathan Tarcov’s contribution to Confronting the Constitution he argues that American society has changed dramatically in the last two centuries while its political framework barely budged. [1] With a charter hard to change, the Founders did not, however, “freeze social facts or aspirations,” writes Tarcov, and bound us to no social theory. [2] This was different from ancient or modern sociopolitical founders, “who alike were creators or destroyers of classes.” [3] By design, “the founding tended to leave society free to develop outside the purview not only of constitution making but of government altogether.” [4] The Constitution was to remain largely as it was while society evolved—the abolition of slavery as an example. [5] This is not to say the structure had no social intent. “They gave careful thought to the kind of free society that is compatible with republican government…” [6] Their goal, “That society be made of free [individuals], and that individuals be fit for free society.” [7]
But today, “there is an uneasy sense,” claims Tarcov, “that our inherited political institutions and principles are inappropriate to our new society… Must we abandon our political inheritance…to fit our social practices and goals?” Before we can answer that, he considers what sort of society the Founders thought appropriate for republican institutions. These institutions and their interaction with society were central to the 1787 Convention, and this is where Tarcov dives into the competition of ideas between these statesmen, not politicians. [8]
One perennial problem of civilization has been the tension between the few and the many. The “haves,” which constitute the few, must not be allowed to dominate the “have nots,” which constitute the many. Nor should the “have nots” be allowed to confiscate legal property of the “haves” (with caveats). [9]
At the Convention, Charles Pinckney tried to make the case that America is of one social order with “greater equality than is to be found among people of any other country.” [10] Alexander Hamilton disagreed. “Whereas Pinckney hoped that America could avoid either a dangerously influential rich few or a dangerously poor many, Hamilton declared ‘In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many… Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself.’” [11] Material inequality characterized a free nation.
Yet the potential for extreme economic inequality was well known in the ancient example of Solon who, in his establishment of direct democracy, engaged in dramatic redistribution to keep the peace in Greece. But as Tarcov elucidates, “The point of republican equality is not an economic notion of just distribution…but a political notion of a social structure suitable to maintaining political equality and liberty.” [12] For the Founders, a level field was fundamental, prior to economic concerns, which would follow and be naturally unequal by talent. (Does political equality render the free speech argument of Citizens United counter to the Constitution by giving the rich more political clout?)
In debates over the branches of government, how independent they should be, how long they should serve, and the consequences of each branch for the few and the many, it was Gouverneur Morris who acknowledged Hamilton’s perspective, with caution. “Wealth tends to corrupt the mind, nourish its love of power, and stimulate it to oppression...” he said. [13] Despite Pinckney’s hope that a vast territory would preserve a single class of industrious yeoman, Morris countered, “The schemes of the rich will be favored by the extent of the country… [The people] will be dupes of those who have more knowledge and intercourse. Thus it has been the world over. So it will be among us. Reason tells us we are but men: and we are not to expect any particular interference of Heaven in our favor.” [14] “Pride is,” Morris claimed, “the great principle that actuates both the poor and the rich...which in the former resists, in the latter abuses authority.” [15] (Look about yourself today; Morris comes across as scarcely short of prophetic.) His social psychology was more political than economic, more concerned with power and freedom than wealth. Republican government was more likely to succeed if it “expressed and arbitrated, rather than repressed or neglected the fundamental [and inevitable] social division between the few and the many.” [16]
It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that the sticky issue here is one of balance. Too much inequality leads to social upheaval and/or the immorality of master/slave. Too much equality leads to tyrannical oppression of talent and its reward, commensurate with the least of us. Everyone has different talents, and it was just such talents the Founders sought to unleash. Enabled by an arrangement that invited a society suitable to political equality and liberty, not equality of outcomes.
Madison offered a third vision distinct from Pinckney’s social homogeneity, or Morris and Hamilton’s laissez-faire acceptance between rich and poor. Madison’s was regulation by default. Regulation by the structure of the system itself as an expansive republic, in direct violation of the ancient’s goal to keep republics small, thus producing citizens like-minded enough to be stable. An expansive republic multiplies interests, thus diluting their power. Farmers have different interests from fishermen. But there’s a bonus. Rich and poor fishermen have interests different from rich and poor farmers. Interests have an opportunity to unite the few and the many within each interest in competition with other interests. With numerous interests dictated by local environment over an expansive country, Madison expected to weaken any particular one in its potential to constitute a tyranny of the majority. “Not to prevent majority rule,” Tarcov writes, “but [at least the opportunity] to form majority coalitions on principles of justice and the general good.” Assuming a general good exists.
As Francis Fukuyama characterizes America’s current status, “[Our] preoccupation with identity has clashed with the need for civic discourse. The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over rational examination of issues in the outside world, and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation…” [17] We now live in an age when identity groups have chosen to be treated not “the same [as] dominant groups” but to “assert a separate identity…[demanding] respect for them as different from mainstream society.” [18] Insisting “not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal…but also that broader society recognize and celebrate intrinsic differences that sets them apart.” [19] This bearing born from the Left, Fukuyama alerts, has now been implemented by the Right, worldwide. Where demagogues pander to groups aggrieved by threats to their identity real or imagined.
As 50 years of Leftist relativism has taught the Right “alternative facts,” fake news, and Rudy Gulliani’s postmodernist impersonation with his “truth isn’t truth,” so too has Left-wing segregation under the politically correct guise of modern “multiculturalism” and “diversity” invigorated the populist Right’s appeal to the “white working class on ethnocultural grounds.” [20] A revival of bigots on the Right, by bigots on the Left.
Is there a common good in this new social theory? Is it “compatible with republican government?” Tarcov makes an unstated assumption that Americans would want such a government in perpetuity. Could it be social change has made the US Constitution obsolete, the people desirous of another form? Perhaps the totalitarianism of perfect equality dreamed of by the idealistic fringe Left, so long as each group is regarded in a manner particular to their victim status. Or should it be Right-wing authoritarianism? To “take back America” by force, given that the undereducated many have proven themselves incapable of reasonably disputing intellectual convolutions of those educated few. After decades without civics education in self-governance we Americans don’t know the difference between republican government and any other. How hard can it be to embrace something else? [21] Tarcov doesn’t say. Currently in America, 51% of young people favor the economic-political blend of socialism. [22]
It may be the Founder’s vision has been incrementally corrupted by the interests they aspired to enable, just as they feared. As Ralph Lerner notes elsewhere in the text, they wanted a system that could endure “a thousand daily circumstances [that] drew citizen’s thoughts and energies earthward and inward. Where the enticements of immediate material reward threatened to drain public life of the indispensable involvement of the many and the indispensable contribution of the best.” [23] But, knowing human nature, they feared “A nation of private calculators with short memories would forget the long-term consequences of not tending to the public business.” [24] Thus failing to remind “people of the evils self-governance helps them avoid.” [25]
Until next time, March 4, 2019.
[1] Nathan Tarcov, “The Social Theory of the Founders,” in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. Tarcov’s remark is not to say America’s politics, and fidelity to the Constitution has remained the same. We now have Gerrymandering, primaries, Senators elected by the people, and an Electoral College no longer the last safeguard against despots given that the Parties take precedence over the country and its Constitution, to name but a few changes.
[2] ibid, pg. 167
[3] ibid, pg. 167
[4] ibid, pg. 167
[5] Recall from a previous post here how Michael Polanyi argues for an open society based on a fixed tradition that nonetheless makes room for and invites change in the interest of justice. Likewise he notes a similar tradition of practice in science inviting the completion of knowledge in the interest of truth. Note also the effort required to change the Constitution as spelled out in that document through the process of Amendment with satisfactory majorities in the House, Senate, and the States themselves. By no means can the Constitution, by its own decree, be adjusted willy-nilly by the latest fool to occupy the White House through an executive order. That Trump could utter such inanity reinforces what we already know.
[6] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 167
[7] Ralph Lerner, “Jefferson’s Pulse of Republican Reformation,” pg. 164, in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[8] Brett Williams, September 3, 2018: Confronting the Constitution. Part 2: Government of, by, and for unstable humans
[9] We should add not only “legal property” but morally acquired, as free from seizure by authorities. An old idea included as far back as the Magna Carta, which gave to the people rights to confiscate the King’s property if wrongfully acquired. American Big Pharma is a shining example in their immoral dumping of harmful and/or ineffective drugs into patients for profit. In some cases these drugs are known to be harmful or potentially lethal and in some cases these drugs are shielded by the FDA, whose charter it is to protect public health, not pad Pharma profits. See Redacted: Is the FDA withholding drug trial data to protect corporate secrets of pharmaceutical companies?, Scientific American, February, 2018, pg. 38-43. Are those profits free from seizure by government fine or public lawsuits? For direct violations in healthcare when FDA does (or did) its job, Google: Haldol and Dementia. You’ll find Haldol, according to NIH the most hazardous antipsychotic among all antipsychotics when used on elderly dementia patients, with tortuous and/or lethal consequences. While Haldol has been shown to have some efficacy on patients with schizophrenia, no benefits have been shown when used on the completely different category of dementia patients. Yet still it’s prescribed despite FDA’s 2008 black box warning against it. As Bernie Sanders noted, hundreds of millions in lost legal cases by Big Pharma is the “cost of doing business” for drugs that earn in the billions. Such is corruption of the Founder’s system, when business buys the representatives that write laws for the business few, not the many.
[10] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 171. Pinkney did however see equality “in the first place legal and political, and only secondarily economic…as every freeman has a right to the same protection and security.”
[11] ibid. pg. 172
[12] ibid. pg. 171, italics added
[13] ibid. pg. 175
[14] ibid. pg. 176
[15] ibid. pg. 176
[16] ibid. pg. 173
[17] Francis Fukuyama, Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018, pg. 101
[18] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 97
[19] ibid. pg. 98. This is in wonderful agreement with postmodernist self-contradictions infecting the Left. “We demand equality. But treat us differently.”
[20] Eric Kaufmann, Immigration and the Future of the West, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2018, pg. 224-231
[21] Questioning republican governance, Americans are currently engaged in a low-level rebellion, not without cause. As we’ve seen before, the Founder’s enthusiasm for prosperity was not only for taxes to pay defense and law enforcement ensuring liberty and rights, but to gain popular consent for republicanism. Today, after Afghanistan (losing to the Taliban) and the much bigger boondoggle in Iraq to destabilize not only the Middle East but Europe with a total of $5T spent in the Mid-East, and tens of thousands dead, how does government look now? See, Gordon Lubold, U.S. Spent $5.6 Trillion on Wars in Middle East and Asia , Nov. 8, 2017. Add to this the already reeling effects from the China Shock, when Wall Street took down the Western world’s economy only to reward themselves $21B in bonuses with none of them in jail and no laws to restrain elusive CDOs and derivatives that put us there. How does globalism, and capitalism itself, long embraced by representatives—who wrote the laws for banks and corporations that bought them—look to those who lost their jobs, homes, and families? These people can’t afford congressmen. The Founder’s system has been corrupted, in both these examples in ways they feared: foreign entanglements, and the rich few.
[22] Kathleen Elkins, Most young Americans prefer socialism to capitalism , CNBC, Aug 14 2018
[23] Ralph Lerner, “Jefferson’s Pulse of Republican Reformation,” pg. 165, in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[24] ibid. pg. 165
[25] ibid. pg. 165
But today, “there is an uneasy sense,” claims Tarcov, “that our inherited political institutions and principles are inappropriate to our new society… Must we abandon our political inheritance…to fit our social practices and goals?” Before we can answer that, he considers what sort of society the Founders thought appropriate for republican institutions. These institutions and their interaction with society were central to the 1787 Convention, and this is where Tarcov dives into the competition of ideas between these statesmen, not politicians. [8]
One perennial problem of civilization has been the tension between the few and the many. The “haves,” which constitute the few, must not be allowed to dominate the “have nots,” which constitute the many. Nor should the “have nots” be allowed to confiscate legal property of the “haves” (with caveats). [9]
At the Convention, Charles Pinckney tried to make the case that America is of one social order with “greater equality than is to be found among people of any other country.” [10] Alexander Hamilton disagreed. “Whereas Pinckney hoped that America could avoid either a dangerously influential rich few or a dangerously poor many, Hamilton declared ‘In every community where industry is encouraged, there will be a division of it into the few and the many… Inequality would exist as long as liberty existed, and it would unavoidably result from that very liberty itself.’” [11] Material inequality characterized a free nation.
Yet the potential for extreme economic inequality was well known in the ancient example of Solon who, in his establishment of direct democracy, engaged in dramatic redistribution to keep the peace in Greece. But as Tarcov elucidates, “The point of republican equality is not an economic notion of just distribution…but a political notion of a social structure suitable to maintaining political equality and liberty.” [12] For the Founders, a level field was fundamental, prior to economic concerns, which would follow and be naturally unequal by talent. (Does political equality render the free speech argument of Citizens United counter to the Constitution by giving the rich more political clout?)
In debates over the branches of government, how independent they should be, how long they should serve, and the consequences of each branch for the few and the many, it was Gouverneur Morris who acknowledged Hamilton’s perspective, with caution. “Wealth tends to corrupt the mind, nourish its love of power, and stimulate it to oppression...” he said. [13] Despite Pinckney’s hope that a vast territory would preserve a single class of industrious yeoman, Morris countered, “The schemes of the rich will be favored by the extent of the country… [The people] will be dupes of those who have more knowledge and intercourse. Thus it has been the world over. So it will be among us. Reason tells us we are but men: and we are not to expect any particular interference of Heaven in our favor.” [14] “Pride is,” Morris claimed, “the great principle that actuates both the poor and the rich...which in the former resists, in the latter abuses authority.” [15] (Look about yourself today; Morris comes across as scarcely short of prophetic.) His social psychology was more political than economic, more concerned with power and freedom than wealth. Republican government was more likely to succeed if it “expressed and arbitrated, rather than repressed or neglected the fundamental [and inevitable] social division between the few and the many.” [16]
It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves that the sticky issue here is one of balance. Too much inequality leads to social upheaval and/or the immorality of master/slave. Too much equality leads to tyrannical oppression of talent and its reward, commensurate with the least of us. Everyone has different talents, and it was just such talents the Founders sought to unleash. Enabled by an arrangement that invited a society suitable to political equality and liberty, not equality of outcomes.
Madison offered a third vision distinct from Pinckney’s social homogeneity, or Morris and Hamilton’s laissez-faire acceptance between rich and poor. Madison’s was regulation by default. Regulation by the structure of the system itself as an expansive republic, in direct violation of the ancient’s goal to keep republics small, thus producing citizens like-minded enough to be stable. An expansive republic multiplies interests, thus diluting their power. Farmers have different interests from fishermen. But there’s a bonus. Rich and poor fishermen have interests different from rich and poor farmers. Interests have an opportunity to unite the few and the many within each interest in competition with other interests. With numerous interests dictated by local environment over an expansive country, Madison expected to weaken any particular one in its potential to constitute a tyranny of the majority. “Not to prevent majority rule,” Tarcov writes, “but [at least the opportunity] to form majority coalitions on principles of justice and the general good.” Assuming a general good exists.
As Francis Fukuyama characterizes America’s current status, “[Our] preoccupation with identity has clashed with the need for civic discourse. The focus on lived experience by identity groups prioritizes the emotional world of the inner self over rational examination of issues in the outside world, and privileges sincerely held opinions over a process of reasoned deliberation…” [17] We now live in an age when identity groups have chosen to be treated not “the same [as] dominant groups” but to “assert a separate identity…[demanding] respect for them as different from mainstream society.” [18] Insisting “not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal…but also that broader society recognize and celebrate intrinsic differences that sets them apart.” [19] This bearing born from the Left, Fukuyama alerts, has now been implemented by the Right, worldwide. Where demagogues pander to groups aggrieved by threats to their identity real or imagined.
As 50 years of Leftist relativism has taught the Right “alternative facts,” fake news, and Rudy Gulliani’s postmodernist impersonation with his “truth isn’t truth,” so too has Left-wing segregation under the politically correct guise of modern “multiculturalism” and “diversity” invigorated the populist Right’s appeal to the “white working class on ethnocultural grounds.” [20] A revival of bigots on the Right, by bigots on the Left.
Is there a common good in this new social theory? Is it “compatible with republican government?” Tarcov makes an unstated assumption that Americans would want such a government in perpetuity. Could it be social change has made the US Constitution obsolete, the people desirous of another form? Perhaps the totalitarianism of perfect equality dreamed of by the idealistic fringe Left, so long as each group is regarded in a manner particular to their victim status. Or should it be Right-wing authoritarianism? To “take back America” by force, given that the undereducated many have proven themselves incapable of reasonably disputing intellectual convolutions of those educated few. After decades without civics education in self-governance we Americans don’t know the difference between republican government and any other. How hard can it be to embrace something else? [21] Tarcov doesn’t say. Currently in America, 51% of young people favor the economic-political blend of socialism. [22]
It may be the Founder’s vision has been incrementally corrupted by the interests they aspired to enable, just as they feared. As Ralph Lerner notes elsewhere in the text, they wanted a system that could endure “a thousand daily circumstances [that] drew citizen’s thoughts and energies earthward and inward. Where the enticements of immediate material reward threatened to drain public life of the indispensable involvement of the many and the indispensable contribution of the best.” [23] But, knowing human nature, they feared “A nation of private calculators with short memories would forget the long-term consequences of not tending to the public business.” [24] Thus failing to remind “people of the evils self-governance helps them avoid.” [25]
Until next time, March 4, 2019.
[1] Nathan Tarcov, “The Social Theory of the Founders,” in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. Tarcov’s remark is not to say America’s politics, and fidelity to the Constitution has remained the same. We now have Gerrymandering, primaries, Senators elected by the people, and an Electoral College no longer the last safeguard against despots given that the Parties take precedence over the country and its Constitution, to name but a few changes.
[2] ibid, pg. 167
[3] ibid, pg. 167
[4] ibid, pg. 167
[5] Recall from a previous post here how Michael Polanyi argues for an open society based on a fixed tradition that nonetheless makes room for and invites change in the interest of justice. Likewise he notes a similar tradition of practice in science inviting the completion of knowledge in the interest of truth. Note also the effort required to change the Constitution as spelled out in that document through the process of Amendment with satisfactory majorities in the House, Senate, and the States themselves. By no means can the Constitution, by its own decree, be adjusted willy-nilly by the latest fool to occupy the White House through an executive order. That Trump could utter such inanity reinforces what we already know.
[6] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 167
[7] Ralph Lerner, “Jefferson’s Pulse of Republican Reformation,” pg. 164, in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[8] Brett Williams, September 3, 2018: Confronting the Constitution. Part 2: Government of, by, and for unstable humans
[9] We should add not only “legal property” but morally acquired, as free from seizure by authorities. An old idea included as far back as the Magna Carta, which gave to the people rights to confiscate the King’s property if wrongfully acquired. American Big Pharma is a shining example in their immoral dumping of harmful and/or ineffective drugs into patients for profit. In some cases these drugs are known to be harmful or potentially lethal and in some cases these drugs are shielded by the FDA, whose charter it is to protect public health, not pad Pharma profits. See Redacted: Is the FDA withholding drug trial data to protect corporate secrets of pharmaceutical companies?, Scientific American, February, 2018, pg. 38-43. Are those profits free from seizure by government fine or public lawsuits? For direct violations in healthcare when FDA does (or did) its job, Google: Haldol and Dementia. You’ll find Haldol, according to NIH the most hazardous antipsychotic among all antipsychotics when used on elderly dementia patients, with tortuous and/or lethal consequences. While Haldol has been shown to have some efficacy on patients with schizophrenia, no benefits have been shown when used on the completely different category of dementia patients. Yet still it’s prescribed despite FDA’s 2008 black box warning against it. As Bernie Sanders noted, hundreds of millions in lost legal cases by Big Pharma is the “cost of doing business” for drugs that earn in the billions. Such is corruption of the Founder’s system, when business buys the representatives that write laws for the business few, not the many.
[10] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 171. Pinkney did however see equality “in the first place legal and political, and only secondarily economic…as every freeman has a right to the same protection and security.”
[11] ibid. pg. 172
[12] ibid. pg. 171, italics added
[13] ibid. pg. 175
[14] ibid. pg. 176
[15] ibid. pg. 176
[16] ibid. pg. 173
[17] Francis Fukuyama, Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2018, pg. 101
[18] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 97
[19] ibid. pg. 98. This is in wonderful agreement with postmodernist self-contradictions infecting the Left. “We demand equality. But treat us differently.”
[20] Eric Kaufmann, Immigration and the Future of the West, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2018, pg. 224-231
[21] Questioning republican governance, Americans are currently engaged in a low-level rebellion, not without cause. As we’ve seen before, the Founder’s enthusiasm for prosperity was not only for taxes to pay defense and law enforcement ensuring liberty and rights, but to gain popular consent for republicanism. Today, after Afghanistan (losing to the Taliban) and the much bigger boondoggle in Iraq to destabilize not only the Middle East but Europe with a total of $5T spent in the Mid-East, and tens of thousands dead, how does government look now? See, Gordon Lubold, U.S. Spent $5.6 Trillion on Wars in Middle East and Asia , Nov. 8, 2017. Add to this the already reeling effects from the China Shock, when Wall Street took down the Western world’s economy only to reward themselves $21B in bonuses with none of them in jail and no laws to restrain elusive CDOs and derivatives that put us there. How does globalism, and capitalism itself, long embraced by representatives—who wrote the laws for banks and corporations that bought them—look to those who lost their jobs, homes, and families? These people can’t afford congressmen. The Founder’s system has been corrupted, in both these examples in ways they feared: foreign entanglements, and the rich few.
[22] Kathleen Elkins, Most young Americans prefer socialism to capitalism , CNBC, Aug 14 2018
[23] Ralph Lerner, “Jefferson’s Pulse of Republican Reformation,” pg. 165, in Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990.
[24] ibid. pg. 165
[25] ibid. pg. 165
November 5, 2018
November 5, 2018: The betrayal of Christ: global warming denial
I get prickly about a few things.
Well… maybe more than a few. But I’m most prickly about liars.
I get prickly when I catch myself lying. My deceit is never so large as to lie about porn star adultery, stealing millions from students at my fake university, Russian money laundering or treason. Nothing like that. My lies are exaggerations fueled by the thrill of talking too much. With time I’ve come to hear a cautionary voice. I halt before the offense or pause and correct. Rarely now do I get away with it.
That voice came from my parents, still alive in my head. But the teaching came not only from their moral lessons of Great Depression hardship but from what I learned in Sunday school as a boy. “Jesus said, ‘Seek the truth, and it will set you free,’” I was told, and I never forgot it. [1]
By traditional standards, I’m no longer a Christian because I don’t take mythic elements like miracles, virgin birth, and resurrection from the dead as real. Almost all gods in antiquity, centuries or millennia before Jesus, performed miracles, were virgin born and resurrected from the dead. For me, these are distractions from the teachings of Jesus as one of the great philosophers. And a unique one, hence the designation Chistos, worthy of reverence in another sense. [2]
If there’s one thing I do worship, it’s truth, likely born from those youthful lessons. In those younger days, the political Right in America stood—sometimes—for objective morality based on a version of Natural Law (i.e. human nature). They respected our Constitution and the spirit of compromise our Founders saw as central to republican democracy. They saw science as the Western Way that would defeat Soviet Communism in the space race. Above all, when I was young, the Right tried to live by the teachings of Jesus Christ, at least in my house.
I once reported here the penance I served as a four-year-old, having stolen five 1₵ Tootsie Rolls for the family. [3] I noted how after a series of immoral examples in adulthood, I sought to live a more truthful and moral life. I later came to believe that probing the depths of physics in the workplace served this because, at its root, science is a quest for Truth in nature with a capital T. If you get the science wrong or lie about it or satisfy your politics instead, whatever you build will… not… work. Conversely, this Truth of science is represented by those billions of devices that work just as science said they would. Eventually, with the brazen lies enabling the 2003 Iraq invasion, I came to realize I had to divorce my Right-wing tribe perverted after Reagan and stop lying for it. This doesn’t mean I joined the Left. They lie about different things. But since those younger days, the Right has betrayed every ideal they once stood for. Morality no longer matters. [4] The Constitution is too cumbersome for obstructionist governance seeking authoritarianism. [5] Instead of champions for science like the Apollo mission, the Right’s spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, broadcasts anti-science homilies claiming, “Science is one of the four corners of deceit.” [6] A message transmitted over radio waves discovered by science, with electronics built by science. Much like Al-Ghazali’s successful 11th-century sermons against rational thought that threatened belief in the Koran, only to destroy the world’s preeminent culture. [7] But most striking, and wedded to America’s anti-science movement, is the Right’s rejection of Christ’s instruction. Instead of the truth to set them free, truth is willfully abandoned. Notably, when it comes to manmade global warming, one of this planet’s greatest threats since an asteroid extinguished 75% of all life 66 million years ago. [8]
After a career where facts are the stock-in-trade, I’m still surprised to see what sells in the world outside. Many Americans, perhaps most now, have little tolerance for truth, facts, or morality. All are obstacles to winning their political arguments. As an example, psychologists Boven and Sherman found a majority of Republicans surveyed think manmade global warming is true, but they can’t say so because it violates tribal doctrine. [9] Given that the Left accepts the science, the Right prefers they betray Christ by seeking the lie rather than admit liberals are correct. [10] More than mere adolescent defiance, Right-wing politicians make policies and laws that kill science funding, block solutions, and harass scientists like all despotic regimes that target intellectuals first. [11] Since when did the Right vilify innovators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists who solve hard problems to get rich and create jobs?
I recently witnessed this in a debate about global warming with a conservative man. At first, I assumed that as a very devout Christian, he sought the truth. “The cost to fix global warming is too high,” he said. “What will it cost to lose Miami, New York, and LA underwater?” I asked. [12] For vital interests, like trillions in defense, do we shirk our duty because the cost is high? “It’s been warm before.” “And we know why,” I responded. “Does that make manmade global warming OK?” There have been murders before. Does that justify the next one? “What about CO2 from fires, and volcanoes? There’s always been fires and volcanoes.” Measured in the geologic record, what climate scientists will never find in all earth history is the much larger 30 to 40 gigatons of CO2 jacked into the atmosphere per year by humans—until now. [13] And the comment that verified the source of these remarks, “Limbaugh’s not anti-science. He’s anti-junk-science.” Note Limbaugh’s reference above. What is junk science to Limbaugh is whatever he says it is—whatever violates his dogma. [14]
Despite all this man’s church participation, Christian retreats, and Bible study, what I realized was, he didn’t want answers. He didn’t seek truth. He wanted to win what he viewed as a political argument. His talking points were meant to mint that paramount American political currency of doubt. Doubt in order to deny answers because people like this hate liberals more than they love truth. Since Limbaugh and comrades define global warming as liberal, no logic, no measurements, or truth will change the mind of True Believers. Pun intended, it was a Revelation: for these types of Christians their political tribe is more important than Christ.
Not only is there no initiative among deniers to seek the truth, as in this instance, but answers provided are labeled junk science with another red herring lined up to thwart resolution. Instead of sound-bite answers to sound-bite questions, when I offered the climate science, he ended the conversation with, “I’m not going to listen to your facts and data.” The dogma was safe. As Hoffer wrote, “To rely on…reason is heresy and treason… [the True Believer] cannot be freighted by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.” [15] If facts and data are rejected, not only is Christ’s search for truth jettisoned, but we have an entirely different quasi-religious creed to coddle lies. [16] A creed that dare not be challenged lest the Radio Oracle label us liberal.
By the time this conversation was over, I was a little prickly.
But there are more elaborate maneuvers than Limbaugh. A year ago, I received a video making rounds on the Internet. It was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Ivar Giaever who just “proved” global warming a pseudoscience. As a member of the field I watched Giaever’s 30-minute video with interest, then created a 10 slide presentation refuting every one of his deceptions. It wasn’t hard, even for an average hillbilly, hayseed plowboy like me. Apparently the Nobel doesn’t confer honesty, though it does garner connections to cash as Giaever is paid by global warming deniers: the Heartland Institute in Chicago. Having completed my presentation I blanketed my email list with it. From scientists and engineers I knew would examine its contents with a fine-toothed comb, to those deniers I’d received it from. Yet even these Limbaugh disciples were silent. They knew enough about the game not to venture into verifiable measurements and logic. Forget Christ’s instruction. Better to keep their distance from Truth than jeopardize clan affiliation. It’s informative to see just how fraudulent Giaever’s sham is. A link to his video and my presentation is here and in references below. [17]
The science that makes planes, trains, automobiles, computers, TV, and radio work just as science says they will, is precisely the same science that proves manmade global warming a fact—physics and chemistry. No difference. The central quest in science meets Christ’s guidance in complete accord—at the Truth.
It’s remarkable what science can do. [18] Remarkable that while dependent on science in their daily lives Americans can lie about it over the airwaves or right to your face. And remarkable that many of these same people call themselves Christians. [19] Christ’s teachings are a matter of convenience to them, practiced on Sunday morning, or to patch their fears when needed. The ultimate hypocrites, the ultimate liars, and that makes me really prickly. As a non-believer, in practice, I’m more Christian than they are.
But so what if people violate what they once stood for, or if they deny science? One reason is China. China is spending $361B on the science of renewables, creating 13 million new jobs over the next four years. They’ve committed $6T (that’s trillion) to low carbon power by 2040. [20] This deliberately targets American foreign influence with its newfound oil and gas vs. Chinese green power. Meanwhile, America hobbles technology, investment, and policy that would create wealth and jobs with solutions because Americans believe what they’re told to believe by a celebrity on the radio. Another celebrity who wouldn’t know science from a kumquat. Welcome to the Chinese Century.
But another reason to care is deeper in America itself. If, as Trump said, he wants to avoid “shithole countries,” he should leave the one he’s in. Not a material shithole, a moral one. Denial of truth from the man on the street to political leaders speaks to character, a topic Americans no longer raise for obvious reasons. Coupled to this weakness are the moral consequences of science rejection by the Right and Left we’ve considered before. [21] The upshot is, when science is ditched, so too is the reason it’s built on, and with reason goes morality. Why? Because morality requires we know what really happened for just decisions to be made—essential for republican democracy.
It’s a malignant moment here in America. We’ve the potential to rival 11th century Islam, or through political pressures bastardize science as communists did with “Proletariat Science” that starved to death 20 to 40 million people. If Americans want America to be “great again” they’ll have to learn how to tell the truth.
Until next time, January 7, 2019.
[1] John 8:32. According to the New Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday, 1985, pg. 1763), what this verse actually says is, “You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Its context is set by John 8:31: “To the Jews who believed in him Jesus said: If you make my word your home you will indeed be my disciples.” Some religious scholars claim this truth is the truth about God. But if God created the physical universe, and given science is merely how we understand that universe, then is the truth of science not also the truth of God? In Ephesians 4:25, Paul says, “So from now on there must be no more lies. Speak the truth to one another…”
[2] The Greek word “Christos” is translated as “the Messiah” or “anointed one.” While I find the universal nature of mythical elements in religion in regards to human psychology and traditions fascinating, my position on divinity is similar to that of the fictional character I created in The Father, a man named Morgan who debates with his devout son John: “What I believe, John, is that there can be no greater hero than a man who would live by the truth all the way to his doom…If Jesus was God, or a god, where’s the risk in death on the cross? There’s no loss. No permanent consequence to his suffering. But for the man who does this, who knows his life will end if he stands for justice, that is greatness worthy of worship.”
[3] Brett Williams, September 4, 2017: Has America become a nation of liars?
[4] Danielle Kurtzleben, Under Trump, America's religious right is rewriting its code of ethics , NPR, October 23, 2016.
Randall Balmer, POLL: White Evangelicals Have Warmed To Politicians Who Commit 'Immoral' Acts , The Guardian, February 18, 2018
[5] Thomas B. Edsall, The Contract With Authoritarianism , New York Times, April 5, 2018.
[6] Rush Limbaugh: "The Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media," in The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up , April 29, 2013.
Heather Horn, Is the Right Wing Anti-Science? , The Atlantic, 9.10.2010.
[7] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle For Rationality, Zed, 1991, pg. 126.
[8] Global warming is but one of earth’s great threats. Others include habitat loss, mostly due to agriculture for almost 8 billion humans. Another is simply eating species into oblivion like the 95% of tuna to vanish in the last 20 years. Another is pollution. Another is the wild animal trade driving species into extinction garnering a bonus with higher prices before they are poached out of existence. See “Loved To Death,” Scientific American October, 2017.
[9] Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman, Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change , New York Times, July 28, 2018.
[10] My interpretation, not Boven and Sherman’s.
[11] Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe claims global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people.” He’s chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. See, Brad Johnson, Inhofe: God Says Global Warming Is A Hoax , ThinkProgress, March 9, 2012. Texas Republican Representative and science denier Lamar Smith has built his reputation on harassment of climate scientists and attorneys general with 25 subpoenas, from a committee that issued only one since its creation in 1958. Smith is chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. See, Lisa Rein, House science chairman gets heat in Texas race for being a global warming skeptic , Washington Post, November 7, 2016. For harassment of scientists see, Phil Plait, Scientists Stand Up To Congressional Attacks , SLATE, June 2, 2016.
[12] Having listened to Limbaugh for 22 years, I was already familiar with his sound bites, with ample sound bite responses. Jordan B. Peterson would say my response was in keeping with the true cultural warrior by answering a talking point with a talking point, thus denying the potential for resolution, stimulating the next Limbaugh talking point. A more revealing response to “It will cost too much,” may have been, “How much will it cost?” Since that cost would be unknown it could be asked, “Then how can we claim it costs too much?” Thus asking the talking point promoter to ask themselves instead of trying to skewer them, which is a natural bad habit. As Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker have noted, facts and data harden opposing orthodoxy in today’s America. As stated, truth is an obstacle to winning political arguments.
[13] The volcanic effect on climate depends on the type of volcano. Short term effects can cool, not heat, through albedo increase of ejecta (see Toba eruption). Volcanoes place approximately 0.3 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year, or about 1/60th human annual injection according to NOAA , June 15, 2016. At time of writing, 2018 California CO2 output from fires appears not yet available. But 2015 data show about 25M tons of CO2 from California fires: David R. Baker, Huge wildfires can wipe out California’s greenhouse gas gains , San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 22, 2017. There are of course fires worldwide. Though forest fire CO2 output is decreasing because the forests are being replaced by CO2 producing farmland. See, Daisy Dunne, CO2 emissions from wildfires have fallen over past 80 years, study finds , Carbon Brief, 7 April 2018.
[14] There’s a parallel between Limbaugh’s anti-science declarations and modern art in an old joke: “A modern artist is anyone who says they are. And modern art is anything they say it is.” Notice, Limbaugh also relishes his iPhone and consumer tech. But as America’s most talented propagandist, he also claims to be a Christian. I did not say he’s not a hypocrite.
[15] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989. It goes without saying this does not apply universally to all Christians, nor that a single group (like Christians) are subject to this self-deception, which happens to be the point of Hoffer’s book.
[16] One can see a potential flaw in this argument. If any validated science must be treated like gospel lest we reject the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t that mean we’ve traded one dogma for another? Not if we adhere to the practice of science, based on a vital and healthy doubt. A recognition of fallibility that preserves open minded examination in the interest of truth. As science is not a dogma it invites discoveries that expand our understanding of nature, even to the point of upending our current understanding for a better one. (See Michael Polanyi’s Meaning.) We award such rebels with Nobels. Only in the extraordinary case of an Ivar Giaever are such people liars. Science is an open, not closed practice, where lies cannot survive open scrutiny from strangers around the world applying the scientific method.
[17]. 10 slide Giaever rebuttal . The careful viewer will find I violated one cardinal sin in the document: Never fail to provide a reference. See slide 6, lower right-hand corner. It comes from Climate Science . Sin rectified.
[18] When it comes to global warming, climate scientists can even judge the source of individual carbon atoms in carbon dioxide molecules as from living sources or fossil fuels. With radioactive C14 produced daily in the stratosphere, the CO2 molecule with its lone carbon atom from recent emissions like forest fires contain C14 because plants ingest it freshly made. But with a 6000 year half-life, in about 10 half-life cycles, or 60,000 years, C14 produced today will disappear. After millions of years buried underground, how much C14 do fossil fuels have? Zero. With total atmospheric volume and known variation over altitude and region, at 411 ppm CO2, the annual excess matches annual fossil fuel inventories sold. This NOAA site illuminates the matter, with pages navigated before and after the one linked to here, elaborating details and definitions. Written by a student it’s accessible to anybody.
[19] This entire issue is a lesson in motivated-reason, and motivated-morality. Motivated-reason, defined by Michael Shermer, is the acceptance of validated evidence only if it supports what you already believe. Likewise, it rejects validated evidence that refutes what you already believe. What I call motivated-morality follows the same logic. Applying mortality only to the other tribe while allowing our own tribe every vulgarity. This act is pronounced by evangelical Christians who ranked morality as most critical for a president during Bill Clinton’s sexual thrills. Now, under Trump, this same group ranks morality of a president among their least important measures.
[20] China’s $361B green technologies . China’s $6T for low carbon power: Amy Myers Jaffe, Green Giant: Renewable Energy and Chinese Power , Foreign Affairs, pg. 87. Myers Jaffe reports, with China’s push on batteries and electric cars they expect to be gasless by 2040.
[21] Brett Williams, March 6, 2017: Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter. Part I: The Right . Brett Williams, January 1, 2018: Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter: Part II, The Left
Well… maybe more than a few. But I’m most prickly about liars.
I get prickly when I catch myself lying. My deceit is never so large as to lie about porn star adultery, stealing millions from students at my fake university, Russian money laundering or treason. Nothing like that. My lies are exaggerations fueled by the thrill of talking too much. With time I’ve come to hear a cautionary voice. I halt before the offense or pause and correct. Rarely now do I get away with it.
That voice came from my parents, still alive in my head. But the teaching came not only from their moral lessons of Great Depression hardship but from what I learned in Sunday school as a boy. “Jesus said, ‘Seek the truth, and it will set you free,’” I was told, and I never forgot it. [1]
By traditional standards, I’m no longer a Christian because I don’t take mythic elements like miracles, virgin birth, and resurrection from the dead as real. Almost all gods in antiquity, centuries or millennia before Jesus, performed miracles, were virgin born and resurrected from the dead. For me, these are distractions from the teachings of Jesus as one of the great philosophers. And a unique one, hence the designation Chistos, worthy of reverence in another sense. [2]
If there’s one thing I do worship, it’s truth, likely born from those youthful lessons. In those younger days, the political Right in America stood—sometimes—for objective morality based on a version of Natural Law (i.e. human nature). They respected our Constitution and the spirit of compromise our Founders saw as central to republican democracy. They saw science as the Western Way that would defeat Soviet Communism in the space race. Above all, when I was young, the Right tried to live by the teachings of Jesus Christ, at least in my house.
I once reported here the penance I served as a four-year-old, having stolen five 1₵ Tootsie Rolls for the family. [3] I noted how after a series of immoral examples in adulthood, I sought to live a more truthful and moral life. I later came to believe that probing the depths of physics in the workplace served this because, at its root, science is a quest for Truth in nature with a capital T. If you get the science wrong or lie about it or satisfy your politics instead, whatever you build will… not… work. Conversely, this Truth of science is represented by those billions of devices that work just as science said they would. Eventually, with the brazen lies enabling the 2003 Iraq invasion, I came to realize I had to divorce my Right-wing tribe perverted after Reagan and stop lying for it. This doesn’t mean I joined the Left. They lie about different things. But since those younger days, the Right has betrayed every ideal they once stood for. Morality no longer matters. [4] The Constitution is too cumbersome for obstructionist governance seeking authoritarianism. [5] Instead of champions for science like the Apollo mission, the Right’s spokesman, Rush Limbaugh, broadcasts anti-science homilies claiming, “Science is one of the four corners of deceit.” [6] A message transmitted over radio waves discovered by science, with electronics built by science. Much like Al-Ghazali’s successful 11th-century sermons against rational thought that threatened belief in the Koran, only to destroy the world’s preeminent culture. [7] But most striking, and wedded to America’s anti-science movement, is the Right’s rejection of Christ’s instruction. Instead of the truth to set them free, truth is willfully abandoned. Notably, when it comes to manmade global warming, one of this planet’s greatest threats since an asteroid extinguished 75% of all life 66 million years ago. [8]
After a career where facts are the stock-in-trade, I’m still surprised to see what sells in the world outside. Many Americans, perhaps most now, have little tolerance for truth, facts, or morality. All are obstacles to winning their political arguments. As an example, psychologists Boven and Sherman found a majority of Republicans surveyed think manmade global warming is true, but they can’t say so because it violates tribal doctrine. [9] Given that the Left accepts the science, the Right prefers they betray Christ by seeking the lie rather than admit liberals are correct. [10] More than mere adolescent defiance, Right-wing politicians make policies and laws that kill science funding, block solutions, and harass scientists like all despotic regimes that target intellectuals first. [11] Since when did the Right vilify innovators, entrepreneurs, and capitalists who solve hard problems to get rich and create jobs?
I recently witnessed this in a debate about global warming with a conservative man. At first, I assumed that as a very devout Christian, he sought the truth. “The cost to fix global warming is too high,” he said. “What will it cost to lose Miami, New York, and LA underwater?” I asked. [12] For vital interests, like trillions in defense, do we shirk our duty because the cost is high? “It’s been warm before.” “And we know why,” I responded. “Does that make manmade global warming OK?” There have been murders before. Does that justify the next one? “What about CO2 from fires, and volcanoes? There’s always been fires and volcanoes.” Measured in the geologic record, what climate scientists will never find in all earth history is the much larger 30 to 40 gigatons of CO2 jacked into the atmosphere per year by humans—until now. [13] And the comment that verified the source of these remarks, “Limbaugh’s not anti-science. He’s anti-junk-science.” Note Limbaugh’s reference above. What is junk science to Limbaugh is whatever he says it is—whatever violates his dogma. [14]
Despite all this man’s church participation, Christian retreats, and Bible study, what I realized was, he didn’t want answers. He didn’t seek truth. He wanted to win what he viewed as a political argument. His talking points were meant to mint that paramount American political currency of doubt. Doubt in order to deny answers because people like this hate liberals more than they love truth. Since Limbaugh and comrades define global warming as liberal, no logic, no measurements, or truth will change the mind of True Believers. Pun intended, it was a Revelation: for these types of Christians their political tribe is more important than Christ.
Not only is there no initiative among deniers to seek the truth, as in this instance, but answers provided are labeled junk science with another red herring lined up to thwart resolution. Instead of sound-bite answers to sound-bite questions, when I offered the climate science, he ended the conversation with, “I’m not going to listen to your facts and data.” The dogma was safe. As Hoffer wrote, “To rely on…reason is heresy and treason… [the True Believer] cannot be freighted by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence.” [15] If facts and data are rejected, not only is Christ’s search for truth jettisoned, but we have an entirely different quasi-religious creed to coddle lies. [16] A creed that dare not be challenged lest the Radio Oracle label us liberal.
By the time this conversation was over, I was a little prickly.
But there are more elaborate maneuvers than Limbaugh. A year ago, I received a video making rounds on the Internet. It was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Ivar Giaever who just “proved” global warming a pseudoscience. As a member of the field I watched Giaever’s 30-minute video with interest, then created a 10 slide presentation refuting every one of his deceptions. It wasn’t hard, even for an average hillbilly, hayseed plowboy like me. Apparently the Nobel doesn’t confer honesty, though it does garner connections to cash as Giaever is paid by global warming deniers: the Heartland Institute in Chicago. Having completed my presentation I blanketed my email list with it. From scientists and engineers I knew would examine its contents with a fine-toothed comb, to those deniers I’d received it from. Yet even these Limbaugh disciples were silent. They knew enough about the game not to venture into verifiable measurements and logic. Forget Christ’s instruction. Better to keep their distance from Truth than jeopardize clan affiliation. It’s informative to see just how fraudulent Giaever’s sham is. A link to his video and my presentation is here and in references below. [17]
The science that makes planes, trains, automobiles, computers, TV, and radio work just as science says they will, is precisely the same science that proves manmade global warming a fact—physics and chemistry. No difference. The central quest in science meets Christ’s guidance in complete accord—at the Truth.
It’s remarkable what science can do. [18] Remarkable that while dependent on science in their daily lives Americans can lie about it over the airwaves or right to your face. And remarkable that many of these same people call themselves Christians. [19] Christ’s teachings are a matter of convenience to them, practiced on Sunday morning, or to patch their fears when needed. The ultimate hypocrites, the ultimate liars, and that makes me really prickly. As a non-believer, in practice, I’m more Christian than they are.
But so what if people violate what they once stood for, or if they deny science? One reason is China. China is spending $361B on the science of renewables, creating 13 million new jobs over the next four years. They’ve committed $6T (that’s trillion) to low carbon power by 2040. [20] This deliberately targets American foreign influence with its newfound oil and gas vs. Chinese green power. Meanwhile, America hobbles technology, investment, and policy that would create wealth and jobs with solutions because Americans believe what they’re told to believe by a celebrity on the radio. Another celebrity who wouldn’t know science from a kumquat. Welcome to the Chinese Century.
But another reason to care is deeper in America itself. If, as Trump said, he wants to avoid “shithole countries,” he should leave the one he’s in. Not a material shithole, a moral one. Denial of truth from the man on the street to political leaders speaks to character, a topic Americans no longer raise for obvious reasons. Coupled to this weakness are the moral consequences of science rejection by the Right and Left we’ve considered before. [21] The upshot is, when science is ditched, so too is the reason it’s built on, and with reason goes morality. Why? Because morality requires we know what really happened for just decisions to be made—essential for republican democracy.
It’s a malignant moment here in America. We’ve the potential to rival 11th century Islam, or through political pressures bastardize science as communists did with “Proletariat Science” that starved to death 20 to 40 million people. If Americans want America to be “great again” they’ll have to learn how to tell the truth.
Until next time, January 7, 2019.
[1] John 8:32. According to the New Jerusalem Bible (Doubleday, 1985, pg. 1763), what this verse actually says is, “You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Its context is set by John 8:31: “To the Jews who believed in him Jesus said: If you make my word your home you will indeed be my disciples.” Some religious scholars claim this truth is the truth about God. But if God created the physical universe, and given science is merely how we understand that universe, then is the truth of science not also the truth of God? In Ephesians 4:25, Paul says, “So from now on there must be no more lies. Speak the truth to one another…”
[2] The Greek word “Christos” is translated as “the Messiah” or “anointed one.” While I find the universal nature of mythical elements in religion in regards to human psychology and traditions fascinating, my position on divinity is similar to that of the fictional character I created in The Father, a man named Morgan who debates with his devout son John: “What I believe, John, is that there can be no greater hero than a man who would live by the truth all the way to his doom…If Jesus was God, or a god, where’s the risk in death on the cross? There’s no loss. No permanent consequence to his suffering. But for the man who does this, who knows his life will end if he stands for justice, that is greatness worthy of worship.”
[3] Brett Williams, September 4, 2017: Has America become a nation of liars?
[4] Danielle Kurtzleben, Under Trump, America's religious right is rewriting its code of ethics , NPR, October 23, 2016.
Randall Balmer, POLL: White Evangelicals Have Warmed To Politicians Who Commit 'Immoral' Acts , The Guardian, February 18, 2018
[5] Thomas B. Edsall, The Contract With Authoritarianism , New York Times, April 5, 2018.
[6] Rush Limbaugh: "The Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media," in The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up , April 29, 2013.
Heather Horn, Is the Right Wing Anti-Science? , The Atlantic, 9.10.2010.
[7] Pervez Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle For Rationality, Zed, 1991, pg. 126.
[8] Global warming is but one of earth’s great threats. Others include habitat loss, mostly due to agriculture for almost 8 billion humans. Another is simply eating species into oblivion like the 95% of tuna to vanish in the last 20 years. Another is pollution. Another is the wild animal trade driving species into extinction garnering a bonus with higher prices before they are poached out of existence. See “Loved To Death,” Scientific American October, 2017.
[9] Leaf Van Boven and David Sherman, Actually, Republicans Do Believe in Climate Change , New York Times, July 28, 2018.
[10] My interpretation, not Boven and Sherman’s.
[11] Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe claims global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated against the American people.” He’s chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. See, Brad Johnson, Inhofe: God Says Global Warming Is A Hoax , ThinkProgress, March 9, 2012. Texas Republican Representative and science denier Lamar Smith has built his reputation on harassment of climate scientists and attorneys general with 25 subpoenas, from a committee that issued only one since its creation in 1958. Smith is chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. See, Lisa Rein, House science chairman gets heat in Texas race for being a global warming skeptic , Washington Post, November 7, 2016. For harassment of scientists see, Phil Plait, Scientists Stand Up To Congressional Attacks , SLATE, June 2, 2016.
[12] Having listened to Limbaugh for 22 years, I was already familiar with his sound bites, with ample sound bite responses. Jordan B. Peterson would say my response was in keeping with the true cultural warrior by answering a talking point with a talking point, thus denying the potential for resolution, stimulating the next Limbaugh talking point. A more revealing response to “It will cost too much,” may have been, “How much will it cost?” Since that cost would be unknown it could be asked, “Then how can we claim it costs too much?” Thus asking the talking point promoter to ask themselves instead of trying to skewer them, which is a natural bad habit. As Michael Shermer and Steven Pinker have noted, facts and data harden opposing orthodoxy in today’s America. As stated, truth is an obstacle to winning political arguments.
[13] The volcanic effect on climate depends on the type of volcano. Short term effects can cool, not heat, through albedo increase of ejecta (see Toba eruption). Volcanoes place approximately 0.3 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year, or about 1/60th human annual injection according to NOAA , June 15, 2016. At time of writing, 2018 California CO2 output from fires appears not yet available. But 2015 data show about 25M tons of CO2 from California fires: David R. Baker, Huge wildfires can wipe out California’s greenhouse gas gains , San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 22, 2017. There are of course fires worldwide. Though forest fire CO2 output is decreasing because the forests are being replaced by CO2 producing farmland. See, Daisy Dunne, CO2 emissions from wildfires have fallen over past 80 years, study finds , Carbon Brief, 7 April 2018.
[14] There’s a parallel between Limbaugh’s anti-science declarations and modern art in an old joke: “A modern artist is anyone who says they are. And modern art is anything they say it is.” Notice, Limbaugh also relishes his iPhone and consumer tech. But as America’s most talented propagandist, he also claims to be a Christian. I did not say he’s not a hypocrite.
[15] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Perennial, 1989. It goes without saying this does not apply universally to all Christians, nor that a single group (like Christians) are subject to this self-deception, which happens to be the point of Hoffer’s book.
[16] One can see a potential flaw in this argument. If any validated science must be treated like gospel lest we reject the teachings of Jesus, doesn’t that mean we’ve traded one dogma for another? Not if we adhere to the practice of science, based on a vital and healthy doubt. A recognition of fallibility that preserves open minded examination in the interest of truth. As science is not a dogma it invites discoveries that expand our understanding of nature, even to the point of upending our current understanding for a better one. (See Michael Polanyi’s Meaning.) We award such rebels with Nobels. Only in the extraordinary case of an Ivar Giaever are such people liars. Science is an open, not closed practice, where lies cannot survive open scrutiny from strangers around the world applying the scientific method.
[17]. 10 slide Giaever rebuttal . The careful viewer will find I violated one cardinal sin in the document: Never fail to provide a reference. See slide 6, lower right-hand corner. It comes from Climate Science . Sin rectified.
[18] When it comes to global warming, climate scientists can even judge the source of individual carbon atoms in carbon dioxide molecules as from living sources or fossil fuels. With radioactive C14 produced daily in the stratosphere, the CO2 molecule with its lone carbon atom from recent emissions like forest fires contain C14 because plants ingest it freshly made. But with a 6000 year half-life, in about 10 half-life cycles, or 60,000 years, C14 produced today will disappear. After millions of years buried underground, how much C14 do fossil fuels have? Zero. With total atmospheric volume and known variation over altitude and region, at 411 ppm CO2, the annual excess matches annual fossil fuel inventories sold. This NOAA site illuminates the matter, with pages navigated before and after the one linked to here, elaborating details and definitions. Written by a student it’s accessible to anybody.
[19] This entire issue is a lesson in motivated-reason, and motivated-morality. Motivated-reason, defined by Michael Shermer, is the acceptance of validated evidence only if it supports what you already believe. Likewise, it rejects validated evidence that refutes what you already believe. What I call motivated-morality follows the same logic. Applying mortality only to the other tribe while allowing our own tribe every vulgarity. This act is pronounced by evangelical Christians who ranked morality as most critical for a president during Bill Clinton’s sexual thrills. Now, under Trump, this same group ranks morality of a president among their least important measures.
[20] China’s $361B green technologies . China’s $6T for low carbon power: Amy Myers Jaffe, Green Giant: Renewable Energy and Chinese Power , Foreign Affairs, pg. 87. Myers Jaffe reports, with China’s push on batteries and electric cars they expect to be gasless by 2040.
[21] Brett Williams, March 6, 2017: Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter. Part I: The Right . Brett Williams, January 1, 2018: Why America’s anti-science movement is a moral matter: Part II, The Left
September 3, 2018
September 3, 2018: Confronting the Constitution. Part 2: Government of, by, and for unstable humans
In the book Confronting the Constitution, David F. Epstein offers his chapter, “Political Theory of the Constitution.” [1] Here we see what range and depth the Founders explored in their mission for the best form of governance. A government guided by self-evident truths about human nature, natural rights philosophy, and the purposes of government arrived at by the power of reason. “The obstacles of prejudice and partiality,” writes Epstein, “did not persuade the Founders that establishing government by consent was impossible, only that it was difficult. [They feared] that a failure to agree on a government at that time would lead to disunion, anarchy, and eventual usurpation… [Success] appeared fragile and fleeting.” [2] It was a government, in Epstein’s reminder of Solon, which was not the best government they could devise, but the best government the people would accept.
In creating a governmental structure populated with unstable humans in service to unstable humans, the Founders set out to use human nature for and against itself in proper measure for each office and their arrangement. While a marvelous balancing act, Epstein warns that without reference to underlying principles, Constitutional institutions can easily be debased, vilified, or disposed of. [3]
Recall, these men were scientists or heavily influenced by European Enlightenment on the heels of Isaac Newton’s scientific revolution. [4] Their philosophic differences were devoted to reason, not tribe. Each had good and bad ideas, but their quest for truth produced practical solutions that satisfied their purpose in the end. It’s informative to note their kind of thinking is practiced today almost exclusively by science, engineering, and the practical arts of medicine and law, not politics. [5]
Epstein delineates this logic when it could still apply to politics, though as history teaches of their hostilities, far from always. He begins with the abstract and not entirely accurate “state of nature” hypothesis of self-preservation, where each person takes the law into their own hands. (Notice how America's new Stand Your Ground laws return to this.) Hence, in the state of nature are social instabilities of “dissensions and animosities.” [6] But if self-preservation is of primary importance, the necessity for order and control makes a need for governance obvious. With the Declaration’s enunciation of equality for all men and their inalienable rights, government’s purpose is then “to secure these rights.” [7] Foundational to all of it is the source of government’s legitimacy as just powers derived from the consent of the governed. But as James Madison put it in the 1787 debates, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” [8]
But before that, they had to pay for it. If individuals were going to form a new society, surrendering a portion of their liberty once employed to defend themselves, this society’s government, as an enforcer of their rights would need tools to secure them. Laws created, enforced by police, decided by courts all cost money, and that means taxes. “The necessity of taxation alone,” writes Epstein, “means the right to property is not immune to political decision [imposed upon it].” [9] (Take that, conservatives.) And since taxes mean there must to be something to tax, the Founders sought prosperity for all through protection of rights to “honest industry,” not to coddle the wealthy. [10] (Take that, liberals.)
Once paid for, the problem was not only to select but attract meritorious individuals to office. Provide opportunity and motive by catering to human nature but be careful about it. One motive was the ambition that loves office or honor. Despite this salute to the ancient virtue of honor, “Even Montesquieu suggested virtuous men do not entirely forget themselves.” [11] And as Madison said, “If [patriotism] be the only inducement, you will find a great indifferency in filling your legislative body.” [12] More likely “the love of fame… would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit…” [13] To control that love of fame, “the Constitution,” says Epstein, “not only grants powers [to those recruits] but arranges offices so as to encourage those powers to be used well.” [14] The Founders wanted virtue but didn’t count on it, preferring to manage self-interest instead.
But how should these representatives be chosen? Should they be the highest achievers selected via indirect elections by knowledgeable electors - at the risk of cabals and horse trading? Or direct elections by frequently ignorant masses, and selected from a more accurate representation of the people?The solution was a mix. The House as unrefined populist representatives as witnessed today, and the Senate, which used to be distinguished, though more debased with time. [15]
For the Congress and Executive our Founders believed the people could better control by reward and punishment the personal motives of representatives through elections, rather than hope to “elevate men who do not think of themselves at all.” [16] Though as one Anti-Federalist observed, most elected representatives will be complete strangers to electors. Only those locally familiar in small republics (states) can be properly judged. But Federalists, and ultimately the Constitution, argued otherwise. Resemblance between representative and represented is not so important as the represented being able to choose, second-guess, and depose their representatives. Better that power be in the hands of those likely to be jealous rather than friendly with those elected.
What the people could do was limited as well. While they would choose from these recruits and judge the outcome of their polices, the people would not create policies. “A noteworthy feature of the new Constitution was its total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity for any share in government [in its direct creation of laws].” [17] That’s the representative’s job and leaves the people alone to pursue their productive interests.
“The Founders did not bend much effort to conform the principles, morals, and manners of citizens to our republican form of government,” writes Epstein. [18] Because they built one to accommodate “human nature in a rawer, purer form,” one more enduring than what was strived for in strict virtuous republics of old. [19] “Virtue, they judged, was too corruptible to be the main foundation [of government].” [20] Elections were the most obvious way of interesting representatives in preserving the rights of the people.
Though elections could not secure the people in every instance. Corrupt representatives might engage in “harvest as abundant as it was transitory,” [21] employ “concocted deceptions that an inattentive people fail to detect,” [22] or baldly usurp powers. And as John Locke puts it, “for the same Persons who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they exempt themselves from Obedience…is contrary to the end of Society and Government.” [23] So the rule of law would be divided in its execution among the 3-branches of Congress, Executive, and Judiciary.
But even this can be abused by the encroaching nature of power. Witness America’s Executive today as it lauds over a compliant legislature betraying their Constitutional oath to check the president. Hence, the Founders added supplemental separations: the bicameral legislature (each house checks the other); Executive veto over Congress, which can fail if Congress is united enough; impeachment for any public official; and judicial review (see revocation of Trump’s first two Shia Muslim bans [24]).
Judicial review is done with a twist: by deliberation of judges not elected, so not directly subject to the people’s popular, often passionate, will. “Indeed,” reports Epstein, “the people’s original intent can even be enforced against their own later inclinations…” [25] Which implies the written Constitution meant something fixed. (Is this support for originalism?) James Madison and James Wilson even proposed a veto power for the Court, but it was defeated on “grounds that it would make statesmen out of judges, corroding their impartiality” and role as interpreters of law. [26]
“The Founders expected the president to defend his power because he is ambitious, not because he understands or loves the Constitution.” [27] Hence, judicial review was not merely another competitor in power, but an enforcer of primary law. Yet again, this technique fails to corner every offense. Presidential powers exist that do not depend on legal guidance or judicial review. “As commander in chief of the armed forces, he could suppress an insurrection…” [28] Those killed have no legal recourse. “Corruption or treachery could be quite consequential in the time before the next election, and he might corruptly contrive his reelection, even his initial election.” [29] For such cases, control by election is after the fact. (Recall, this book was written 28 years ago about insights 202 years before that.) So, impeachment allows an auxiliary precaution against slow and vulnerable elections without resort to “the Right of Revolution,” thus channeling passions of the people with a rational option. [30] Impeachment gains force by focus on one person. He cannot reasonably blame a council (though we’ll expect it). And to avoid a president beholden to a Congress that can impeach the Executive, the Founders divided this process between the House (impeachment), Senate (conviction), and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice presiding.
How would all this be tied together to protect people’s rights in an effort to stabilize unstable humans? Anti-Federalists believed the people’s interests would best be secured by small-republic state institutions to defend against national encroachment. But impotence of the Articles of Confederation showed Federalists that states could not be corralled even to pay their own bills. “By denying states the power to issue paper money, impair the obligation of contracts…and allowing the national judiciary to enforce those prohibitions, the Convention reflected Madison’s view that the nation should protect individual rights against the states.” [31] Not the other way around. Natural rights and resulting stability would serve the purposes of prosperity, once again revealing prosperity’s practical utility. The Founder’s structure would encourage “Public attachment by a train of prosperous events,” gaining the people’s trust and thereby consent to federal powers. [32] The enjoyment of rights and prosperity would be “a valuable crutch for government that protects those rights.” [33]
The Constitution is a blend between two opposing political theories: autonomous small-republic state governments as obstacle to national overreach, and a central authority whose components are checked and balanced in arrangements of a large-republic. Though as Epstein cautions, among many other distortions, the state / federal equilibrium has been imbalanced by the 14th Amendment’s 1868 expansion of federal powers in response to Civil War, and by the 1913 17th Amendment that makes senators popularly elected, edging the Senate closer to the populist House.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked, “What have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?” he replied, “A Republic—if you can keep it.”
Until next time, November 5, 2018.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. According to this George H. W. Bush era 1990 text, “David F. Epstein is a deputy director of net assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has taught political science as a member of the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research, and is the author of The Political Theory of The Federalist..” Beyond that, he appears invisible.
[2] ibid, pg. 128
[3] We see this in our most recent election, amplified by America’s absence of civics education. From political Right-wing vilification of constitutional guarantees to a free press (what Edmond Burke called the Fourth Estate), to cries from the Left for apportionment of Senate seats by population in response to Trump’s cabinet appointments. Regardless of population, each state gets two Senators, tilting in disproportionate favor to small states, diluting the voice of large ones. The Founders tangled with this question, prioritizing the two seat model because it protected the rights of minority states from majority abuse. Isn’t it precisely this idea championed by our modern Left? This Connecticut Compromise was seen by some Founders as protection of minority population states, while others saw it as a “triumph of extortion by the small states.” Ibid., pg. 117
[4] Ben Franklin is credited with founding electrical sciences. Thomas Jefferson was a naturalist and inventor. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Jon Jay enrich their Federalist Papers with good governance analogies to science. John Locke, who from Jefferson inherited the delineated rights for his Declaration, was a chemist.
[5] Scientific thinking engaged in by the Founders is now rare in politics. While science and its technology are the basis of wealth creation, science is a frequent annoyance to business when it finds negative outcomes of various products, processes, etc. Excluding Trump and Bush-2, the EPA is an example of science obstructing the dollar’s desire for profit over environment.
[6] Bloom, pg. 78
[7] ibid., pg. 78
[8] Federalist 51
[9] Bloom, pg. 84
[10] ibid., pg. 84
[11] ibid., pg. 96
[12] ibid., pg. 96
[13] ibid., pg. 97
[14] ibid., pg. 93
[15] Further examples can be found in actions of Senate Democratic Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, when in 2013 he and the Democrat majority reduced confirmation requirements from 60% to a mere majority. Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky now confirms Trump loyalists without check from Democrats. Mitch McConnell and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa also violated their oaths to the Constitution by their denial of confirmation proceedings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Merck Garland in 2016 because it was a “contentious election year.”
[16] ibid., pg. 97
[17] ibid., pg. 94
[18] Bloom, pg. 98
[19] ibid., pg. 98
[20] ibid., pg. 98
[21] Federalist 72
[22] Bloom, pg. 106
[23] John Locke, Second Treatise, Peter Laslett Ed., revised edition, New American Library, 1965, pg. 410
[24] Note that Trump’s so called “Muslim ban” was in fact a Shia Muslim ban. Only Shia countries were on his list. No Sunni countries were included. Trump established 8 new businesses in Saudi Arabia during his campaign, has a golf course and resort in UAE, and does business in Lebanon, all home to 9/11 hijackers that killed almost 3000 people in the US. No Shia countries have killed Americans on US soil.
[25] Bloom, pg. 109
[26] ibid., pg. 110
[27] ibid., pg. 110
[28] ibid., pg. 110
[29] ibid., pg. 111
[30] Wikipedia on Right of Revolution .
[31] Bloom, pg. 120
[32] ibid., pg. 100
[33] ibid., pg. 100
In creating a governmental structure populated with unstable humans in service to unstable humans, the Founders set out to use human nature for and against itself in proper measure for each office and their arrangement. While a marvelous balancing act, Epstein warns that without reference to underlying principles, Constitutional institutions can easily be debased, vilified, or disposed of. [3]
Recall, these men were scientists or heavily influenced by European Enlightenment on the heels of Isaac Newton’s scientific revolution. [4] Their philosophic differences were devoted to reason, not tribe. Each had good and bad ideas, but their quest for truth produced practical solutions that satisfied their purpose in the end. It’s informative to note their kind of thinking is practiced today almost exclusively by science, engineering, and the practical arts of medicine and law, not politics. [5]
Epstein delineates this logic when it could still apply to politics, though as history teaches of their hostilities, far from always. He begins with the abstract and not entirely accurate “state of nature” hypothesis of self-preservation, where each person takes the law into their own hands. (Notice how America's new Stand Your Ground laws return to this.) Hence, in the state of nature are social instabilities of “dissensions and animosities.” [6] But if self-preservation is of primary importance, the necessity for order and control makes a need for governance obvious. With the Declaration’s enunciation of equality for all men and their inalienable rights, government’s purpose is then “to secure these rights.” [7] Foundational to all of it is the source of government’s legitimacy as just powers derived from the consent of the governed. But as James Madison put it in the 1787 debates, “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” [8]
But before that, they had to pay for it. If individuals were going to form a new society, surrendering a portion of their liberty once employed to defend themselves, this society’s government, as an enforcer of their rights would need tools to secure them. Laws created, enforced by police, decided by courts all cost money, and that means taxes. “The necessity of taxation alone,” writes Epstein, “means the right to property is not immune to political decision [imposed upon it].” [9] (Take that, conservatives.) And since taxes mean there must to be something to tax, the Founders sought prosperity for all through protection of rights to “honest industry,” not to coddle the wealthy. [10] (Take that, liberals.)
Once paid for, the problem was not only to select but attract meritorious individuals to office. Provide opportunity and motive by catering to human nature but be careful about it. One motive was the ambition that loves office or honor. Despite this salute to the ancient virtue of honor, “Even Montesquieu suggested virtuous men do not entirely forget themselves.” [11] And as Madison said, “If [patriotism] be the only inducement, you will find a great indifferency in filling your legislative body.” [12] More likely “the love of fame… would prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit…” [13] To control that love of fame, “the Constitution,” says Epstein, “not only grants powers [to those recruits] but arranges offices so as to encourage those powers to be used well.” [14] The Founders wanted virtue but didn’t count on it, preferring to manage self-interest instead.
But how should these representatives be chosen? Should they be the highest achievers selected via indirect elections by knowledgeable electors - at the risk of cabals and horse trading? Or direct elections by frequently ignorant masses, and selected from a more accurate representation of the people?The solution was a mix. The House as unrefined populist representatives as witnessed today, and the Senate, which used to be distinguished, though more debased with time. [15]
For the Congress and Executive our Founders believed the people could better control by reward and punishment the personal motives of representatives through elections, rather than hope to “elevate men who do not think of themselves at all.” [16] Though as one Anti-Federalist observed, most elected representatives will be complete strangers to electors. Only those locally familiar in small republics (states) can be properly judged. But Federalists, and ultimately the Constitution, argued otherwise. Resemblance between representative and represented is not so important as the represented being able to choose, second-guess, and depose their representatives. Better that power be in the hands of those likely to be jealous rather than friendly with those elected.
What the people could do was limited as well. While they would choose from these recruits and judge the outcome of their polices, the people would not create policies. “A noteworthy feature of the new Constitution was its total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity for any share in government [in its direct creation of laws].” [17] That’s the representative’s job and leaves the people alone to pursue their productive interests.
“The Founders did not bend much effort to conform the principles, morals, and manners of citizens to our republican form of government,” writes Epstein. [18] Because they built one to accommodate “human nature in a rawer, purer form,” one more enduring than what was strived for in strict virtuous republics of old. [19] “Virtue, they judged, was too corruptible to be the main foundation [of government].” [20] Elections were the most obvious way of interesting representatives in preserving the rights of the people.
Though elections could not secure the people in every instance. Corrupt representatives might engage in “harvest as abundant as it was transitory,” [21] employ “concocted deceptions that an inattentive people fail to detect,” [22] or baldly usurp powers. And as John Locke puts it, “for the same Persons who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they exempt themselves from Obedience…is contrary to the end of Society and Government.” [23] So the rule of law would be divided in its execution among the 3-branches of Congress, Executive, and Judiciary.
But even this can be abused by the encroaching nature of power. Witness America’s Executive today as it lauds over a compliant legislature betraying their Constitutional oath to check the president. Hence, the Founders added supplemental separations: the bicameral legislature (each house checks the other); Executive veto over Congress, which can fail if Congress is united enough; impeachment for any public official; and judicial review (see revocation of Trump’s first two Shia Muslim bans [24]).
Judicial review is done with a twist: by deliberation of judges not elected, so not directly subject to the people’s popular, often passionate, will. “Indeed,” reports Epstein, “the people’s original intent can even be enforced against their own later inclinations…” [25] Which implies the written Constitution meant something fixed. (Is this support for originalism?) James Madison and James Wilson even proposed a veto power for the Court, but it was defeated on “grounds that it would make statesmen out of judges, corroding their impartiality” and role as interpreters of law. [26]
“The Founders expected the president to defend his power because he is ambitious, not because he understands or loves the Constitution.” [27] Hence, judicial review was not merely another competitor in power, but an enforcer of primary law. Yet again, this technique fails to corner every offense. Presidential powers exist that do not depend on legal guidance or judicial review. “As commander in chief of the armed forces, he could suppress an insurrection…” [28] Those killed have no legal recourse. “Corruption or treachery could be quite consequential in the time before the next election, and he might corruptly contrive his reelection, even his initial election.” [29] For such cases, control by election is after the fact. (Recall, this book was written 28 years ago about insights 202 years before that.) So, impeachment allows an auxiliary precaution against slow and vulnerable elections without resort to “the Right of Revolution,” thus channeling passions of the people with a rational option. [30] Impeachment gains force by focus on one person. He cannot reasonably blame a council (though we’ll expect it). And to avoid a president beholden to a Congress that can impeach the Executive, the Founders divided this process between the House (impeachment), Senate (conviction), and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice presiding.
How would all this be tied together to protect people’s rights in an effort to stabilize unstable humans? Anti-Federalists believed the people’s interests would best be secured by small-republic state institutions to defend against national encroachment. But impotence of the Articles of Confederation showed Federalists that states could not be corralled even to pay their own bills. “By denying states the power to issue paper money, impair the obligation of contracts…and allowing the national judiciary to enforce those prohibitions, the Convention reflected Madison’s view that the nation should protect individual rights against the states.” [31] Not the other way around. Natural rights and resulting stability would serve the purposes of prosperity, once again revealing prosperity’s practical utility. The Founder’s structure would encourage “Public attachment by a train of prosperous events,” gaining the people’s trust and thereby consent to federal powers. [32] The enjoyment of rights and prosperity would be “a valuable crutch for government that protects those rights.” [33]
The Constitution is a blend between two opposing political theories: autonomous small-republic state governments as obstacle to national overreach, and a central authority whose components are checked and balanced in arrangements of a large-republic. Though as Epstein cautions, among many other distortions, the state / federal equilibrium has been imbalanced by the 14th Amendment’s 1868 expansion of federal powers in response to Civil War, and by the 1913 17th Amendment that makes senators popularly elected, edging the Senate closer to the populist House.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked, “What have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?” he replied, “A Republic—if you can keep it.”
Until next time, November 5, 2018.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed., Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. According to this George H. W. Bush era 1990 text, “David F. Epstein is a deputy director of net assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense. He has taught political science as a member of the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research, and is the author of The Political Theory of The Federalist..” Beyond that, he appears invisible.
[2] ibid, pg. 128
[3] We see this in our most recent election, amplified by America’s absence of civics education. From political Right-wing vilification of constitutional guarantees to a free press (what Edmond Burke called the Fourth Estate), to cries from the Left for apportionment of Senate seats by population in response to Trump’s cabinet appointments. Regardless of population, each state gets two Senators, tilting in disproportionate favor to small states, diluting the voice of large ones. The Founders tangled with this question, prioritizing the two seat model because it protected the rights of minority states from majority abuse. Isn’t it precisely this idea championed by our modern Left? This Connecticut Compromise was seen by some Founders as protection of minority population states, while others saw it as a “triumph of extortion by the small states.” Ibid., pg. 117
[4] Ben Franklin is credited with founding electrical sciences. Thomas Jefferson was a naturalist and inventor. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Jon Jay enrich their Federalist Papers with good governance analogies to science. John Locke, who from Jefferson inherited the delineated rights for his Declaration, was a chemist.
[5] Scientific thinking engaged in by the Founders is now rare in politics. While science and its technology are the basis of wealth creation, science is a frequent annoyance to business when it finds negative outcomes of various products, processes, etc. Excluding Trump and Bush-2, the EPA is an example of science obstructing the dollar’s desire for profit over environment.
[6] Bloom, pg. 78
[7] ibid., pg. 78
[8] Federalist 51
[9] Bloom, pg. 84
[10] ibid., pg. 84
[11] ibid., pg. 96
[12] ibid., pg. 96
[13] ibid., pg. 97
[14] ibid., pg. 93
[15] Further examples can be found in actions of Senate Democratic Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, when in 2013 he and the Democrat majority reduced confirmation requirements from 60% to a mere majority. Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky now confirms Trump loyalists without check from Democrats. Mitch McConnell and Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa also violated their oaths to the Constitution by their denial of confirmation proceedings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Merck Garland in 2016 because it was a “contentious election year.”
[16] ibid., pg. 97
[17] ibid., pg. 94
[18] Bloom, pg. 98
[19] ibid., pg. 98
[20] ibid., pg. 98
[21] Federalist 72
[22] Bloom, pg. 106
[23] John Locke, Second Treatise, Peter Laslett Ed., revised edition, New American Library, 1965, pg. 410
[24] Note that Trump’s so called “Muslim ban” was in fact a Shia Muslim ban. Only Shia countries were on his list. No Sunni countries were included. Trump established 8 new businesses in Saudi Arabia during his campaign, has a golf course and resort in UAE, and does business in Lebanon, all home to 9/11 hijackers that killed almost 3000 people in the US. No Shia countries have killed Americans on US soil.
[25] Bloom, pg. 109
[26] ibid., pg. 110
[27] ibid., pg. 110
[28] ibid., pg. 110
[29] ibid., pg. 111
[30] Wikipedia on Right of Revolution .
[31] Bloom, pg. 120
[32] ibid., pg. 100
[33] ibid., pg. 100
July 2, 2018
July 2, 2018: Confronting the Constitution. Part 1: Did the Founders get it wrong?
Around about 1980, Robert Goldwin and Walter Berns persuaded a group of philosophers to celebrate the US Constitution’s bicentennial through an examination of its philosophical origins and eventual detractors. With Allan Bloom as editor of the project, the result was 16 chapters, each with a different author and perspective for one book as Confronting the Constitution. [1] As Bloom puts it, “The Framers challenged the world to meet them on the field of reason. To test their conviction is to honor them.” And so, for that and the thrill of learning, this new-themed series of blogs is based.
The book begins with the chapter, “Philosophic Understandings of Human Nature Informing the Constitution” by Thomas L. Pangle. [2] He reveals that 17th century Enlightenment philosophy was obsessed with governance. After millennia of trial and error civilizations, finally, the idea of human dignity, potentially for all, coalesced as the purpose of society. Pangle examines the hierarchy of political philosophy that emerged from this realization. Starting with the simple but critical question, What is a human being? What are its motivations, needs, requirements? In short, what is human nature? Once defined, successive levels in the hierarchy are addressed. How do these creatures live as individuals? What is the best way for them to live in groups? How should a state be organized? In what way should a nation be governed? Each answer up the ladder depends on the last one. Since the definition of the human being is the most fundamental, it’s also the most important because from this will rise the hierarchy of social machinery.
Like the mathematical definition of a machine, if you get that definition wrong, whatever you build from it, no matter how carefully, won’t work, at least not well. Consider the sixty-year experiment in Berlin, one side capitalist, the other communist. Despite its careful planning, communism was such a mismatch for the human psyche they had to build a wall to keep people in. Marx’s “alienation” turned out to be more like “incentive.”
With Europe’s Enlightenment, the human definition got a new answer just in time for America’s Founding. A human being is, philosophers claimed, a creature that seeks first and foremost to preserve itself from death. Self-preservation is the central human interest. Humans are thus creatures with vital interests. From this emerged human rights to protect those interests for a just society in service to human dignity. “A fundamentally different character from the various sorts of local, traditional, and divinely revealed rights men invoked since time immemorial,” writes Pangle. [3]
From this philosophical foundation America’s Founders determined the Constitution would not be a covenant of devotion and obedience to a tribal god of a chosen people. Pleas to supernatural powers for justice fall outside the realm of reason. Gods are fickle, who knows what they’ll do? And while people worship different gods, they all have a common capacity for reason. Reason became the tool for society building, in Aristotelian terms, because of what it could do verifiably in the here and now material world. Leave that other personally stabilizing force of religion, and a right to it, up to the individual, but don’t run a country with it. History was replete with this folly on national scales, hence the need for separation of church and state. [4] By granting a right to religious freedom, without state sponsorship, our Founders reduced religion from fact to opinion. In doing so they sought to defang consequences of the converse.
Likewise, in tailoring our social fabric, the Constitution would not endorse the classical Greek notion of a small republic. The ancients believed only small republics could hope to keep every citizen like-minded and virtuous enough to maintain cohesion. It didn’t work. America was already large by comparison and expected to get larger. But without state religion or patriotic virtue, how could stability be maintained in a large country?
Using the right to interests, Madison would embrace a large republic over the small. Different environments spread over an expansive country would generate different interests. Farmers of the land have different interests from fishers of the sea. Different factions spawned from these different interests would then check and balance each other to stabilize the whole.
Furthermore, this idea of interests formed the basis for David Hume’s remark that “modern political economy [showed] natural ends of humanity require active promotion of avarice, private commerce, and extensive manufacture.” [5] “Trade was never esteemed an affair of the state till the last century…” [6] Suddenly economics as an expression of interests would support dignity and become part of the philosophy of reason. Economics became a route to social justice. Private vice became public virtue.
This new social model was a practical one. Needs of the body came first. Ego second. Character was no longer explicitly part of the plan. But while the government was expected to be morally neutral in private matters, no one expected the people themselves to be morally neutral. With no state faith, George Washington warned, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” [7] Unfortunately, Enlightenment philosophers had not found a reasoned argument for people to be moral. At least not as compelling as an ever-watching God with promises of heaven or hell. They also knew the watchful eye of communities could yield to individualism’s trajectory. The best they could do was the Golden Rule which began at least with ancient Egypt and was implied in the “social contract” (which isn’t social [8]). The Founders realized that the new definition and government structure to accommodate it put civilization on fragile footing, just not as fragile as the ancients.
As Pangle notes, Enlightenment’s vision of the human was based on what they called “a state of nature.” A non-historical abstraction as a place to start the study. [9] But since the machinery of civilization emerges from this—from what defines human beings, to interests, to rights, all the way to the structure of nations—are we certain we got the right definition to begin with? What if it’s wrong, or incomplete, or incapable of addressing unforeseen change in the future?
It was the inventor Thomas Jefferson who received from John Locke the chemist his definition of the human being, as well as Locke’s rights to life, liberty and property, which Jefferson converted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (He didn’t say amusement.) But what happens when the right to property threatens the right to life for those on the other side of the planet? What happens to rights in support of interests when the 600 million humans alive in 1700 approach 8 billion in 2018? Interests require resources. A simple fact of nature is that there is no infinite material anything. [10] For the industrialized world, self-preservation is no longer threatened by scarcity, but abundance. Are rights narrowed by fundamental facts and changes to them that are external to human nature? Does this require modification of the human definition in terms of what’s emphasized and included?
Like the machine defined by math above, what Enlightenment defined as human was necessarily an approximation. In mathematics there’s something called a “series.” The first term in a series is most important. Successive terms have diminishing impact, but as each one is included, their inclusion makes whatever the series describes come closer to reality. Did Enlightenment philosophers fail to include enough terms in their series description of human nature? [11] Could it be the first-things-first material perspective should have included our ethical, communal, and spiritual aspects?
If Enlightenment’s description was truncated, after three centuries of social experiment shouldn’t we see the effects? It's difficult but doable to isolate cause in physical phenomena by laboratory experiments, much harder to provide more than inference when it comes to human society. The infinity of human foibles suggests cause and effect are not linear, often not even sensible.
That said, if a society is built on self-interest, demoting morality and religion that once promoted it, at least according to Washington, might we expect an eventual excess, even perversion of self-interest? [12] While not universal, examples are abundant in Washington DC, corporate America, and Wall Street, and there are masses who seek to emulate them. But can it really be traced to Enlightenment’s definition? The ancients had despots, abuse, and corruption too.
Enlightenment was a remarkable moral leap forward. But every human measure creates new problems requiring countermeasures to compensate. Does the old definition of humanity need an upgrade? In future posts we’ll ponder an extended series approximation of human nature.
Until next time, September 3, 2018.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed, Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. Robert Goldwin (1922 - 2011), Walter Berns (1919 – 2015, Allan Bloom (1930 – 1992).
[2] Thomas Pangle .
[3] ibid, pg. 10, italics added
[4] “We’ve believed a lie for so long that the church and the state be separated,” said Pastor Elias Lorera of Fresno’s Christian Temple Assemblies of God. In “The Christian Right Adopts a 50 State Strategy,” NYTimes, June 20, 2018. As Trump’s GOPP tries to unify religion and politics.
[5] ibid, pg. 19 David Hume (1711 – 1776)
[6] ibid, pg. 19
[7] George Washington’s Farewell Address
[8] The social contract is not social, as are the formation of true communities of like-minded people with common sentiments with the purpose of continuing their way of life in perpetuity. The social contract is an agreement people are born into, then conform to without express agreement; a practical arrangement made for strangers; a requirement for large populations.
[9] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 71
[10] Technology expands the carrying capacity of nature. In 1940, average US bushels of corn per acre was 40. Today it’s 150, at the expense of the Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone, and the Great American Prairie. Once 370 million acres of natural habitat and its inhabitants, now 370 million acres of biodiversity desert. North America’s Serengeti lost in the length of one lifetime. Factory floor of an agri-planet and the greatest transformation of our natural world by mankind anywhere on earth. (I’m going to enjoy some of its produce for lunch today.) Like the physical limit to the number of transistors on a circuit chip, there’s a limit to how many bushels an acre can be forced to produce.
[11] See the remarkable and useful Taylor Series.
[12] Michael Shermer disagrees with Washington. In his Moral Arc he makes a case for religion producing the opposite of moral action. Scientific thinking and the Enlightenment, he claims, deserve most of the credit for advances in morality and justice, at least since they arrived.
The book begins with the chapter, “Philosophic Understandings of Human Nature Informing the Constitution” by Thomas L. Pangle. [2] He reveals that 17th century Enlightenment philosophy was obsessed with governance. After millennia of trial and error civilizations, finally, the idea of human dignity, potentially for all, coalesced as the purpose of society. Pangle examines the hierarchy of political philosophy that emerged from this realization. Starting with the simple but critical question, What is a human being? What are its motivations, needs, requirements? In short, what is human nature? Once defined, successive levels in the hierarchy are addressed. How do these creatures live as individuals? What is the best way for them to live in groups? How should a state be organized? In what way should a nation be governed? Each answer up the ladder depends on the last one. Since the definition of the human being is the most fundamental, it’s also the most important because from this will rise the hierarchy of social machinery.
Like the mathematical definition of a machine, if you get that definition wrong, whatever you build from it, no matter how carefully, won’t work, at least not well. Consider the sixty-year experiment in Berlin, one side capitalist, the other communist. Despite its careful planning, communism was such a mismatch for the human psyche they had to build a wall to keep people in. Marx’s “alienation” turned out to be more like “incentive.”
With Europe’s Enlightenment, the human definition got a new answer just in time for America’s Founding. A human being is, philosophers claimed, a creature that seeks first and foremost to preserve itself from death. Self-preservation is the central human interest. Humans are thus creatures with vital interests. From this emerged human rights to protect those interests for a just society in service to human dignity. “A fundamentally different character from the various sorts of local, traditional, and divinely revealed rights men invoked since time immemorial,” writes Pangle. [3]
From this philosophical foundation America’s Founders determined the Constitution would not be a covenant of devotion and obedience to a tribal god of a chosen people. Pleas to supernatural powers for justice fall outside the realm of reason. Gods are fickle, who knows what they’ll do? And while people worship different gods, they all have a common capacity for reason. Reason became the tool for society building, in Aristotelian terms, because of what it could do verifiably in the here and now material world. Leave that other personally stabilizing force of religion, and a right to it, up to the individual, but don’t run a country with it. History was replete with this folly on national scales, hence the need for separation of church and state. [4] By granting a right to religious freedom, without state sponsorship, our Founders reduced religion from fact to opinion. In doing so they sought to defang consequences of the converse.
Likewise, in tailoring our social fabric, the Constitution would not endorse the classical Greek notion of a small republic. The ancients believed only small republics could hope to keep every citizen like-minded and virtuous enough to maintain cohesion. It didn’t work. America was already large by comparison and expected to get larger. But without state religion or patriotic virtue, how could stability be maintained in a large country?
Using the right to interests, Madison would embrace a large republic over the small. Different environments spread over an expansive country would generate different interests. Farmers of the land have different interests from fishers of the sea. Different factions spawned from these different interests would then check and balance each other to stabilize the whole.
Furthermore, this idea of interests formed the basis for David Hume’s remark that “modern political economy [showed] natural ends of humanity require active promotion of avarice, private commerce, and extensive manufacture.” [5] “Trade was never esteemed an affair of the state till the last century…” [6] Suddenly economics as an expression of interests would support dignity and become part of the philosophy of reason. Economics became a route to social justice. Private vice became public virtue.
This new social model was a practical one. Needs of the body came first. Ego second. Character was no longer explicitly part of the plan. But while the government was expected to be morally neutral in private matters, no one expected the people themselves to be morally neutral. With no state faith, George Washington warned, “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.” [7] Unfortunately, Enlightenment philosophers had not found a reasoned argument for people to be moral. At least not as compelling as an ever-watching God with promises of heaven or hell. They also knew the watchful eye of communities could yield to individualism’s trajectory. The best they could do was the Golden Rule which began at least with ancient Egypt and was implied in the “social contract” (which isn’t social [8]). The Founders realized that the new definition and government structure to accommodate it put civilization on fragile footing, just not as fragile as the ancients.
As Pangle notes, Enlightenment’s vision of the human was based on what they called “a state of nature.” A non-historical abstraction as a place to start the study. [9] But since the machinery of civilization emerges from this—from what defines human beings, to interests, to rights, all the way to the structure of nations—are we certain we got the right definition to begin with? What if it’s wrong, or incomplete, or incapable of addressing unforeseen change in the future?
It was the inventor Thomas Jefferson who received from John Locke the chemist his definition of the human being, as well as Locke’s rights to life, liberty and property, which Jefferson converted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (He didn’t say amusement.) But what happens when the right to property threatens the right to life for those on the other side of the planet? What happens to rights in support of interests when the 600 million humans alive in 1700 approach 8 billion in 2018? Interests require resources. A simple fact of nature is that there is no infinite material anything. [10] For the industrialized world, self-preservation is no longer threatened by scarcity, but abundance. Are rights narrowed by fundamental facts and changes to them that are external to human nature? Does this require modification of the human definition in terms of what’s emphasized and included?
Like the machine defined by math above, what Enlightenment defined as human was necessarily an approximation. In mathematics there’s something called a “series.” The first term in a series is most important. Successive terms have diminishing impact, but as each one is included, their inclusion makes whatever the series describes come closer to reality. Did Enlightenment philosophers fail to include enough terms in their series description of human nature? [11] Could it be the first-things-first material perspective should have included our ethical, communal, and spiritual aspects?
If Enlightenment’s description was truncated, after three centuries of social experiment shouldn’t we see the effects? It's difficult but doable to isolate cause in physical phenomena by laboratory experiments, much harder to provide more than inference when it comes to human society. The infinity of human foibles suggests cause and effect are not linear, often not even sensible.
That said, if a society is built on self-interest, demoting morality and religion that once promoted it, at least according to Washington, might we expect an eventual excess, even perversion of self-interest? [12] While not universal, examples are abundant in Washington DC, corporate America, and Wall Street, and there are masses who seek to emulate them. But can it really be traced to Enlightenment’s definition? The ancients had despots, abuse, and corruption too.
Enlightenment was a remarkable moral leap forward. But every human measure creates new problems requiring countermeasures to compensate. Does the old definition of humanity need an upgrade? In future posts we’ll ponder an extended series approximation of human nature.
Until next time, September 3, 2018.
[1] Allan Bloom Ed, Confronting the Constitution, AEI Press, 1990. Robert Goldwin (1922 - 2011), Walter Berns (1919 – 2015, Allan Bloom (1930 – 1992).
[2] Thomas Pangle .
[3] ibid, pg. 10, italics added
[4] “We’ve believed a lie for so long that the church and the state be separated,” said Pastor Elias Lorera of Fresno’s Christian Temple Assemblies of God. In “The Christian Right Adopts a 50 State Strategy,” NYTimes, June 20, 2018. As Trump’s GOPP tries to unify religion and politics.
[5] ibid, pg. 19 David Hume (1711 – 1776)
[6] ibid, pg. 19
[7] George Washington’s Farewell Address
[8] The social contract is not social, as are the formation of true communities of like-minded people with common sentiments with the purpose of continuing their way of life in perpetuity. The social contract is an agreement people are born into, then conform to without express agreement; a practical arrangement made for strangers; a requirement for large populations.
[9] Confronting the Constitution, pg. 71
[10] Technology expands the carrying capacity of nature. In 1940, average US bushels of corn per acre was 40. Today it’s 150, at the expense of the Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone, and the Great American Prairie. Once 370 million acres of natural habitat and its inhabitants, now 370 million acres of biodiversity desert. North America’s Serengeti lost in the length of one lifetime. Factory floor of an agri-planet and the greatest transformation of our natural world by mankind anywhere on earth. (I’m going to enjoy some of its produce for lunch today.) Like the physical limit to the number of transistors on a circuit chip, there’s a limit to how many bushels an acre can be forced to produce.
[11] See the remarkable and useful Taylor Series.
[12] Michael Shermer disagrees with Washington. In his Moral Arc he makes a case for religion producing the opposite of moral action. Scientific thinking and the Enlightenment, he claims, deserve most of the credit for advances in morality and justice, at least since they arrived.
