The Rostra

The Machiavellian Media

2006-06-09T17:55:00.000-05:00

Observing the news media with regard to the most recent triumph in our war against Islamist terror, I've become upset with the never-satisfied, always nay-saying attitude of the press: Zarqawi is finally dead, a murdering, horrible, evil villain responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people, Iraqi and American. But the media can only speculate about his "martyrdom," and whether his death helps or hinders our cause. This is odd, given that prior to Zarqawi's demise, the media's standard line was to criticize our alleged inability to capture and kill top al Qaeda operatives. Which do they want?

Conclusion: Liberals and the media have decided that this war is wrong, they desire to see the U.S. fail in its policy aims and want our troops out--all in order to validate their opinions and bring their party back into power. For them, it isn't about good and evil, it's about power--their own power, and the sense of power they receive when proven correct. And this is true even if being proven correct includes proving that certain peoples cannot handle democracy, proving that liberty is not a universal value, and proving that American values are no better than those of any other society.

But, I suppose, if one doesn't believe in good and evil to begin with--if one doesn't think some values are more correct than others, it makes no sense to say that American values are better or worse than others' in the first place. If that's true, however, why does the media cry foul at what they perceive as, for example, Republican disregard for the poor, or Republican religious intolerance? Allowing, arguendo, that Republicans do disregard the poor and are intolerant, aren't those "values" equally amoral and OK under liberals ideology? As the reader can see, the liberal viewpoint of cultural and moral relativism is nonsense--it is a mask for an ethical system that values one thing: power. I remember being told of a man from 15th century Florence that thought the same way...

The Egalitarian Quality of Natural Law

2006-04-02T14:42:00.000-05:00

"[S]ays the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." Jer 31:33-34

This passage was read this morning in church--it is one of my favorites. It ties in with my post from yesterday: The natural law is written on our hearts, we know it innately even if we don't (and simply cannot) understand it fully. In this way, even he who disavows the absolute nature of truth senses that certain things are fair and other things unfair.

Another thought occurred to me as I listened to this morning's sermon: The fact that, when we dig as deep as human reason can reach, with our most advanced science and mathematics, we find that we simply cannot understand the mysteries of the universe--that is a very equalizing and egalitarian notion. Not even the most intelligent, most intellectual person can understand the truth. But we all have access to it through belief--it is written on our hearts. Thus the simplest mind and the most complex may be equally in the dark and equally enlightened. And every person, "from the least of them to the greatest," has equal access to truth (and salvation) if they accept that which they know innately to be true.

A Conversation with Friends: Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Truth

2006-04-01T14:46:00.000-06:00

I had a relatively entertaining conversation with a couple of colleagues over tapas and sangria last night (well, at least I was entertained...I'm not entirely sure about my colleagues). We were discussing religion, and I had said something about the mystery of Christ's resurrection, and one of the people I was with, a very good friend of mine, said something like, "Well, we can't really question it like that--we can't understand it. It's beyond our comprehension." I believe I responded with agreement, adding that any religion that you could completely understand couldn't possibly be a true one, because it wouldn't transcend human experience.

I kept thinking about what my friend had said as I walked back to my apartment. What does it mean to know with certainty that you can't know something? If we can't know something, how do we talk about it? What I was thinking about was the nature of truth. In the conversation earlier, I had likened that which blocks our view of truth to clouds in the sky blocking the sun. Many relativists deny the existence of absolute truth by noting that humankind can't agree on many issues and values. That's no argument. On a cloudy day, it would be ludicrous to deny the sun's existence. We never see the truth directly, but we know it is there--we can feel it, and we believe in it. Life is one, long, ever-cloudy day. One could reply that we see the sun on a sunny day and that's why we know it's there on a cloudy day. But really, that's not an argument either--for all we know, on a cloudy day an imposter sun jumps into the real sun's place. We simply choose to believe that the sun is continuously there.

As I was thinking about all this, I thought of Socrates' famous phrase, which I have permanently placed just to the right of this writing space, that true wisdom is knowing that one knows nothing. Earlier, my friends and I had discussed a little about quantum mechanics. With physics we can now show that we can know nothing absolute about what's around us--measuring something changes the object so it isn't the same as what was there before you measured it. Truly, we don't "observe" anything, we merely interact with things and change them in doing so. So Socrates was absolutely right--all we can know is that we know nothing, at least in terms of what we think we observe.

Faith is all we have. Faith, and then our reason, from which we can deduce logical outcomes from precepts that we simply believe in. But that doesn't mean that there isn't absolute truth, either--it simply underscores what my friend had said earlier, that human powers of inquiry are limited. Even the relativist takes positions on issues, speaks of "fairness" or has a feeling about what should be and what shouldn't. That's because there is something innate, there is some natural law, some absolute truth. I can't prove that, but I believe it. And knowing that we can know nothing justifies "belief" and "faith" in general.

At about this point I reached my apartment. I decided to have a cigarette (I know, bad idea), and I sat down and thought some more.

All we have is faith, mind, ideas, and logic, but we can't understand the whole Truth with these tools. Then I remembered a fact that I have always found fascinating: The three greatest "philosophers" in human history, from all cultures, Jesus Christ, Socrates, and Confucius all had two things in common: None of them ever wrote anything--their followers recorded their words--and all of them spoke in analogies and parables. I think each of these people had a better grasp of the Truth than most(and one had an absolutely complete grasp of it), and none of them could simply explain why something was true. They told stories or parables or analogized and hinted at the truth. Their listeners got a "sense" of the truth through those stories and analogies without full comprehension. That's not unlike someone feeling the warmth of the sun on one's skin on a cloudy day, I suppose. And that the Philosophers always spoke, never wrote indicates (besides pointing to the futility of what I'm doing right now) the elusive reality of absolute truth--that it is worth discussing, but not boiling down to anything concrete. That we can use is to posit laws and create policies, even without knowing exactly what it is.

In other words, it is not in a treatise that we find the Truth. Only in conversation and contemplation do we dance around Truth's edges. In conversations like the one I had last night, for instance. And this is comforting: Truth comes from interaction with our fellow humans and in society and in friendships.

How does this play into political philosophy? Those who think they "know" the truth and deny God, write a book (Karl Marx), and then try to implement it (Lenin) end up ruining society. Democracy, on the other hand, is an institution that uses consensus and debate (conversation) as a way of coming up with laws that best approximate and uphold absolute truth (like a telescope, perhaps, trying to get a better view of something far away, or a radio telescope piercing through the clouds to get some semblence of the sun). When a society respects simultaneously the absolute certainty of Truth's existence, and also its elusive, social nature, that society thrives.

Our Values, Faith, and the War

2006-03-31T16:23:00.000-06:00

I have faith that good always prevails over evil and that the values our Nation has always cherished and defended--ordered liberty, democratic institutions, the separation of powers, the dignity of human life, personal autonomy, and the rule of law--will succeed wherever people can come together to support them. So lately I have grown very tired of listening to the interminable anti-war rants of those who claim that these values of ours are not universal, that they are somehow unique to us, and that others around the world aren't capable of handling them or wouldn't select them for themselves if given the chance.

If we don't believe that all men and women around the world deserve freedom, and if we don't believe that democracy is a good way to secure the same, then America stands for nothing. Some things are just True, even if we can't quite figure out the exact contours of the truth: True adherence to the principle of separation of powers always works to block the rise of tyranny. Voting, if properly conducted, always works to check the concentration and abuse of power. Some societies have selected systems of government that are inferior to others in that they don't serve the interests of human dignity and autonomy. We may judge other governments this way, but it is simply not our place to judge whether a society could "handle" liberty and freedom if given the opportunity to try it out. They deserve it ab initio, no matter what.

Personal autonomy flows from the concept of human dignity, which in turn flows from the concept that we are designed and created--and if one truly believes that God did indeed create mankind, the justifiability of any military action to defend liberty wherever liberty is truly threatened is unquestionable. This is true even if the defense must be selective because of limited resources and other important objectives. It is no argument to say that a military action to oust an Adolf Hitler or a Saddam Hussein is not just and correct simply because we do not simultaneously challenge Joseph Stalin or Kim Jung Il in a like manner.

And it is a sign of an utterly superficial understanding of Western history to claim that America is seeking 'empire,' or is 'taking over' other countries just for oil (whatever this ridiculous blanket assertion people toss around even means), or has any desire at all to 'conquer' anyone else. Did we oust the Nazis and establish American empire? Or did we aid the rebuilding countries, help them set up democratic governments, and withdraw (save to the extent they invited us to stay in light of the Soviet threat)? Did we go into Vietnam for any reason other than to stop the (at least) feared spread of a God-hating ideology that is undeniably responsible for the deaths--by famine, purge, and oppression--of over 100 million of our fellow humans? Do we have 50,000 troops in South Korea to maintain our Empire, or to hold back the North, which would subsume and destroy the democracy in the South in a matter of days were we not there, even if only as a nuclear trip-wire?

To those who don't support our mission in the broader Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq, I ask: What is your alternative? Would you allow the Arab world to march further down the path of tyranny, instability and economic ruin, to the point where destitute Muslims have absolutely nothing to live for but a bastardized version of their faith, along with a heartfelt desire to destroy those they believe are responsible for their situation--the infidel West? Would you allow that to happen even as Middle Eastern tyrants and terrorists leaders collude and seek weapons of mass destruction that can kill millions with a single detonation? What would you have America do?

I'd do what the President did and what politicians rarely ever do: Come up with a long-term solution. Long-term solutions are always difficult to implement because of our natural tendency to wish problems away and act the part of the ostrich--the tendency resulting in the so-called "peace" movement (as if peace can be achieved by merely wishing it was so). But the President is more realistic, and he made a tough (and correct choice). He made a choice that honors our American values and the universal idea they represent, the idea of human dignity and autonomy for every man and woman, whatever their faith or creed or nationality.

We are fertilizing two blossoming flowers in the desert--we are arming two democracies that embrace unity, tolerance, and a moderate version of Islam in the Middle East. We are arming them against the terrorists and against the tyrants and against the fundamentalists who, in their heart of hearts, desire destitution in the Middle East because it serves their megalomaniacal purposes and their crazed vision for Islamic Empire (which is really just their own thirst for power).

If we succeed in creating two stable, prosperous, unified democracies in the heart of the Middle East, liberal-leaning Muslims all over the region will have cause to be brave, and fundamentalist governments and terrorists will have lost. That's why our enemy fights so vehemently to stop us in Iraq. Iran and the terrorists are linked arm-in-arm against the greatest threat they've faced yet--the prospect of stable, peaceful, respectful, and moderate, powerful, armed government in their midst. That is real change and a real vision for the future of the Middle East.

So I truly thank God for our President and his courage in the face of uneducated, short-sighted politicians and demagogues, and I thank God for our troops. And, because we are on the side of Good, I have faith we will ultimately prevail.

A Dialogue--Dice, Quantum Mechanics, Morality, and Christianity

2006-03-31T16:09:00.000-06:00

E: Einstein said, "God does not play dice." That was his response to the quantum-mechanics physicists in his day that insisted the universe is all probabilities--that you can't determine he position of any particle with certainty, only predict with a probability. What do you think?

M: I think he was right, but not how he thought he was right. Instead, I say God is dice.

E: OK, I don't think I agree. But let's follow this analogy for a bit. If God is the dice, who rolls them?

M: It is the nature of the dice to roll.

E: Who observes the outcome?

M: God.

E: Ah, but then you admit God is separate from the dice.

M: No, observer and observed are one and the same, two qualities of the same principle. God is dice, and everything is in the dice.

E: Everything is in the dicedo you mean to say that all is probability, or rather that all of reality is situated within God?

M: Both. I don't think the one could be true without the other.

E: But then is God probability?

M: Yes and no. God exists--he cannot not exist--but still, you never know how the dice will roll. There is fixed past but only potential future.

E: Does that mean those within God only have potential future?

M: Yes.

E: And we are within God?

M: I think all creation is, but that is not the same as saying God is all creation.

E: OK, so we all only have potentiality. The dice are real and certain just like the past is certain. But they are also only probability--what they roll in the future is not known, even to God. This is what you are saying?

M: Yes.

E: But the dice are fixed. In the past and the present and the future.

M: Hence the only unchanging quality of God is his existence.

E: Doesn't that admit imperfection?

M: No, it only admits that perfection may change.

E: If perfection may change, how can we guide our lives?

M: As we learn, and God changes and learns about us according to the natural laws that define God and the Universe, the principles become clearer.

E: So you say that there are principles that are immutable and above God.

M: No, there are principles that are immutable and with God--all potentiality is oriented toward them, or should be, and only God can see themthe forms, as Plato called them, I suppose.

E: What of the Dice?

M: No analogy can capture the Truth perfectly, but it is a useful mental aid which we have now surpassed, except to say "that the dice should roll" might be analogous to an immutable principle.

E: Let's get back to the observer and the observed. You say that they are the same.

M: Yes.

E: But I can see you, you are separate, and we are not the same.

M: Not in a way that you can observe--if it is true that observer and observed are the same, then the moment you observe me, we constitute something of a unity, a single "quantum," if you will, that is different slightly from how we were before we interacted.

E: If that is so, one cannot observe or measure anything. And yet I have the sensation of separation.

M: An illusion--our powers of observation are really powers of interaction.

E: Prove it.

M: Quantum Mechanics haswe know that a particle of light is not a particle nor a wave, but rather a localized potentiality wavein normal terms, a paradox, something between a particle and a wave, until it is observedand then when observed it takes on the characteristics of either a particle or a wave. The observer changes it, forces it to choose, so to speak, at least for the time it is being observed. And its movement can only be predicted via potentiality, but not measured because measuring changes it. This is mathematically and experimentally demonstrable.

E: I have heard of this. But if this is true, then how can we know anything for certain?

M: We are constantly interacting with everything around us, so we are "forcing" everything to choose, creating quantum unity, if you will, as we observe, or rather, interact.

E: But you said the dice were certain.

M: Yes, insofar as only probability is certain--probability and how things have come out in the past. The present exists but is fleeting. The future is potentiality. God lays out potentiality.

E: OK, but then as things unfold and change and are in flux, there seems to me there can be no morality--all is changing and relative. In such a universe and with such a conception of God, how can we determine right from wrong?

M: Step back for a moment. In Quantum Mechanics, the only thing that is absolutely true is the mathematical description of the Quantum and the formulas predicting probabilities. The math is incontrovertible and never changes. But the outcomes do. So too in the universe are there immutable principles that govern all and are pure and true like mathematical equations. They are Plato's forms, our unchanging morality, God's definition--he calls us to them, to follow them, but we have free will. There is only probability that we will or will not heed his call, just as there is only probability that a certain electron will be in a certain place at a certain time.

E: Then mind and body are different and separate--you just said principles are separate from the actual existence of things and matter and the way it unfolds.

M: Again, yes and no (sensing a pattern?). Principles exist as God does and all is within them. So there is separateness in them in that they are immutable, just like the fact that the dice exist. But again, the outcomes cannot be predicted, even though the formula or principle does.

E: OK, so you claim to be a Christian. Christians hold that good is separate from evil and that God is beyond all, and all knowing.

M: God knows all the principles. He knows the unifying formula. He knows which way we should go and God calls us to it (as we are lesser, we can't see the formula, the purpose, the aim). But what God does not know is if we will follow his callingthe universe was a risk God took. And God learns about his creation as we make choiceswe are also lesser creators in that our choices solidify our potential futures into a single, immutable past.

E: What of Jesus Christ?

M: Well, he fits right in. The God of the Israelites was different from the God of JesusGod chose to send a part of him to experience human life and make human choices, to join in his creation in a qualitative way--and God suffered. He sacrificed. He experienced humanity. He paid for our sins.

E: Ah, but if he "paid for our sins," then God is subject to an immutable law requiring justice--requiring payment for our debts. He couldn't just declare a general amnesty?

M: Maybe, maybe not. Justice may be a defining principle that should play out but won't necessarily. So God chose to make the world more Just by sending his Son to "pay" for mankind's transgressions. But more importantly, Jesus was God on earth, a way for us to interact with God, a way to feel God's calling and a way for God to encourage us to follow his Ways rather than sinful ways.

E: What of eternal life?

M: We spoke of principles and forms. These exist, but are just formslike a mathematical equation. When we die, I suspect we continue having subjective experience, just on another plane. A plane where, perhaps, we can see the truth of the forms more fully. But only God will ever completely understand the forms. I suspect that we are all contingent on whether God wants us to exist--even after death. If we choose the wrong path, we may just cease to be.

E: Ah, but won't our observing the forms change them?

M: Good point. I misspoke. No one can "see" the forms, no one can interact with them. Can you interact with a mathematical concept? Not really. Only understanding pertains. And only God understands fully. I suspect our understanding will be expanded when we die and our being moves off in a spatial direction we can't see.

E: You are losing me, but I sense truth in this--it seems right that, at the same time, all is potential, but all is still real. So I guess we've covered a lot of ground--Christianity, quantum mechanics, Plato's metaphysics, ethics, the nature of God and eternity.

M: I'm losing me. But that's because our powers of observation--or rather, interaction--limit us. We are not God, though we are within him. See, all those things you list, they are all the same thing, I think. They are the dice.

E: Ah, you mean just because we can't know something doesn't mean it isn't true. And so God is the only being who cannot not know.

M: Now you get it. At least, you sense it.

E: And that's key too: Sense, the qualitative partmusic is beautiful, but I don't know why; a sunset is too, though I can't measure its beauty.

M: Right, you experience it. So, like everything else, there are dual qualities of one thing: the physical, or past, or fixed; and the palpable, unmeasurable, potentiality.

E: I think I know God exists because of this: there is no reason for music to be beautiful.

M: I agree. But maybe that's just because we don't understand the reason. We may someday, either in this life as humans progress, or after we die. But that doesn't refute your point. It affirms it.

E: Yes.

M: Perhaps qualia, the "feeling" part of things, is our impression of potentialities and our limited understanding of the forms--the more something is like the form, the perfect ideal equation, that which only God knows, the more we sense its beauty, its rightness--so beauty and Good are also just facets of the same thing.

E: So a beautiful woman is not just beautiful to me because of the survival instinct and necessity of procreation?

M: That may be one reason, but insofar as that drive corresponds to a proper path for our potentialities, that is beautiful too. But also, the form, the appearance, the symmetry--it may reflect the divine. And we sense that. So too in music--some is more divine, some is less.

E: Sensing. Feeling. That's a lot like believing.

M: Yes, when you consider all is changing and within God, faith is just like reasonor rather, there is no reason not to have faith, and there is no faith that can exist without reason. Our feeling of the beauty of the sunset reflects God, and praising that beauty is praising and having faith in God.

E: Ah. But back to musicyou said some could be "less divine." What would it mean to be "less"?

M: Well, given that there is a path God calls us to, there is another pathlesser, incorrect. That must be true, right?

E: I believe so. So you mean to say it's the baser qualities--pleasure seeking, lack of what we sense are virtues--music that plays to those rather than invoking a sense of beauty and appreciation, that kind of music is less divine.

M: Yes, I think so. Hereto our theory ties into Christianity again--Lucifer made a wrong choice, and fell from God's favor, so he plays his part, leading us astray. Temptation is the ugly made attractive because Satan distorts potentialities for us just as God lays them out for us. But Lucifer is lesser.

E: That's disconcerting--Truth won't conquer in the end? Evil could win?

M: Well, there is a chance. But God is higher, and Lucifer is a lesser creation. So the chance is slim. But then, this makes our morality and the need for it make sensenothing is predetermined, just probability, and so it really matters if we choose rightly or wrongly. God learns and changes as a result of those choices.

E: Could we end up destroying God?

M: No, only his creationus. And the universe, perhaps. That which is within God.

E: So I see now how prayer could work, and meditation, and spirituality--when we interact with each other, we change each other, so we are all linked in a way, at least for a fleeting moment, but we retain some of the change, and the past is solidified. But also, we are separate actors. And how I act really does effect the rest of the creation.

M: Yes. And maybe one of those immutable principles has something to do with "what goes around comes around."

E: Maybe. I better go start making up for my solidified, not-so-stellar past.

M: Me too. And I best get back to work, lest I solidify a forced resignation.

E: OK, we'll pick this up again another time.

I'm Back

2006-03-31T16:07:00.000-06:00

Try to contain your excitement. Really, keep it down. But I am back, and I'll be posting my thoughts on politics and philosophy here as time allows. I've also recovered and reposted the more interesting essays (in my opinion, at least) from 2004 and 2005.

A Final Post

2005-03-08T19:07:00.000-06:00

After much reflection, I have decided that I will stop blogging indefinitely. For now, I don't have the time it takes to write the kind of (hopefully) insightful and interesting posts that justify the blog's existence. I hope you have enjoyed reading my various, sundry thoughts on philosophy and life in general -- I have certainly enjoyed sharing them with you.

More Government by Judiciary

2005-03-01T15:13:00.000-06:00

Today, in a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that executing individuals for murders committed while they were under the age of 18 constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the 8th Amendment. No matter what one thinks about the death penalty, today's decision is flagrant judicial activism and it ups the ante on upcoming court appointments. The decision, Roper v. Simmons was decided 5-4, with Justice Kennedy writing for the majority and Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, and O'Connor dissenting.

To arrive at its absurd result, the majority completely ignores what the framers had intended by banning cruel and unusual punishment -- an inquiry which must look to what was considered cruel and unusual at the time of the adoption of the bill of rights -- and instead looks to whether a 'national consensus' has formed against the juvenile death penalty. Had they investigated the former, they would discover that there is ample evidence that the framers did not find capital punishment, even for juvenile offenders, cruel and unusual (although there was a presumption against forming criminal intent for those under 14). The majority's analysis centers on what it calls 'objective indicia' of a national consensus against the juvenile death penalty, basically that 4 states passing laws against it, and the fact that 47% of the states that permit the death penalty do not permit its use for juvenile offenders. Some consensus. Next, the majority brings in the law of foreign countries as evidence that our own death penalty law is an abberation in terms of international legal norms. How exactly foreign law should somehow trump the will of the people as expressed by state legislatures and our own constitution is beyond me, but it certainly is a nice, flexible way for the justices to justify the imposition of their own will on the rest of us.

Justice Scalia wrote a biting dissent, the introduction to which expresses the problems with today's decision better than I can hope to (citations omitted):

In urging the approval of a constitution that gave life-tenured judges the power to nullify laws enacted by the people's representatives, Alexander Hamilton assured the citizens of New York that there was little risk in this, since "[t]he judiciary...ha[s] neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment." (Federalist No. 78). But Hamilton had in mind a traditional judiciary, "bound by strict rules and precedents which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them." Bound down, indeed. What a mockery today's opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years -- not, mind you, that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed. ... The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards--and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures. Because I do not believe that the meaning of the Eighth Amendment, any more than the meaning of other provisions of our Constitution, should be determined by the subjective views of five Members of this Court and like-minded foreigners, I dissent.

Once again 5 liberal justices -- and the liberals cheering this decision -- have succeeded in supplanting the will of the people with their own, supposedly more enlightned ideas. Once again they put their own policy agenda above the higher law of our land and the principles of democratic rule. If we have much more of this, drastic change, perhaps via impeachment, or systemic change, via constitutional amendment, may be necessary given the malfunctioning of a judiciary meant to judge but bent instead on exercising its will.

Random Thoughts on Music, Beauty, and Creation

2005-02-28T15:08:00.000-06:00

The best proof that there is a Creator and that there is purpose in this world, in my estimation, is the truth of beauty. I was pondering this as I sat down to play the piano a bit yesterday. There is no reason that I should appreciate the interplay of certain frequencies of vibrations passing through the air, and yet the catharsis and emotions I experience as I produce those various vibrations is certainly real and certainly appreciated. It is beautiful. And there is no reason for it -- and that makes it even better. It brings pleasure of a higher sort.

So I got to thinking. There is a lot of other music that can also bring pleasure which I would not necessary call 'beautiful' in the same way I would label, say, choral music beautiful. Much popular music can bring a pleasureable experience, but where is the difference between it and the transcendent nature of human voices joining together in harmony? There must be a difference -- the two listening experiences are hardly comparable.

The answer, I think, lies in the appeal of each, and in the nature of humankind as between God and beast. Humans aspire to the Good. In Christianity, we are made in God's image. But we are also fallen creatures of the earth, and have instincts and desires akin to the animals and less akin to our Creator. We are 'between,' just as this world is something between the absolute joy of the transcendent and the sheer evil of what in Christianity would be termed hell. This is not to say that our baser instincts and desires are necesarily bad -- many are just good in a lesser way than the highest goods, and best when indulged in moderation. For example, the survival instinct and survival itself is a good thing, but it is a lesser good than, say, liberty, and thus arises the situation where someone sacrifices his life to preserve liberty. Likewise, sex is good. But so is beauty. The former relates to survival and our animal nature (here I mean sex in its most basic form -- it obviously can become something much higher) and the latter is an 'unnecessary' attribute. Beauty in its purest form is the divine. Beauty in this world is found in the measure that something (music, a sunset, a beautiful person) reflects that divine, perfect beauty. The interplay between the base and the higher is complex, as we desire both.

Music, too, is beautiful and can be pleasureable in one of two ways -- in its appeal to our more base side (sex) and its appeal to that which mirrors the divine (beauty). I think it safe to say that a popular song, say one of the hiphop variety, with suggestive lyrics, very base-intensive thumping rhythm, and suggestive dancing appeals to the base. A Bach invention doesn't. A Beethoven Sonata certainly appeals to beauty and the divine, but also may evoke emotions relating to the more basic side as well. Most things worth appreciating have a mixture of both aspects.

So too do human relationships. We seek the beauty of the divine in the relationships we form. The highest type of relationship may be the intimate one between man and woman, and this too can come to reflect divine beauty. A bad relationship, following this logic, would be the relationship driven solely by the base and not by the desire to find the beauty of the transcendent.

All of this is also proof that there is something higher -- why else would we appreciate music at all? Why would we appreciate the beautiful artistic design of a sunset? Why would we ever believe that sex and relationships could become something more valuable than the act of procreation and physical pleasure? The fact that we can discern a difference between the beauty of the divine and the lesser goods of this earth points to the reality of the transcendent. And that is a comforting thought to me.

Extreme Liberals: Motivated by Hate

2005-02-14T15:09:00.000-06:00

Howard Dean, speaking at the winter meeting of the Democratic National Committee recently, remarked that he "hate[s] Republicans and everything they stand for." Over the weekend, the media by and large theorized that while Howard Dean is a bit extreme and perhaps a poor candidate, he is well suited to run the behind-the-scenes machinery of the Democratic Party. Really? The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee may do most of his work behind the scenes, but he is also one of the public faces of the party. And, he is where the party faithful look for leadership. Howard Dean has said it himself: he is motivated by hate. That the DNC could elect such a man to its top party post says a lot about the motivation of the party as a whole. It tells us that the party's core is not motivated by any vision for a better America, or a set of core American values (Kerry could not demonstrate any such vision during the last election), but rather is motivated by anger and hatred of the party in power. To the liberal Democrat core, they 'fight' for their own liberal ideology because they hate the fact that Republicans seized control of Congress in 1994 and the White House in 2000. They hate Republicans, and hate being out of power. And they are so blinded by their hatred and liberal ideology that they place regaining power and destroying the policies and preferences of the Republican majority above even sustaining American democracy -- and hence they feel no qualms about utilizing liberal judges to enact law from the bench where their ideas lose in the court of public opinion.

And Happy Valentine's Day!

The election of Howard Dean will force the party further to the left, and force many moderates to leave. I have seen it already -- several of my Democrat friends are now saying they will likely be voting Republican in the midterm elections. They do not like the anti-American feeling of the left-leaning Democrat core. They do not like Ted Kennedy berating our troops in the field. They do not appreciate the naysaying of the left-wing media when it comes to building democracy in the middle east. And they do not want to be a part of a party motivated by hatred first and the desire to regain power second.

This weekend I encountered the hatred of the far-left Democratic party face to face. On one occasion, as a friend and I were purchasing a few bottles of wine at a downtown Minneapolis liquor store, the cashier noticed my friend's Texas driver's license. He disparagingly remarked, "Oh -- Texas. Must be nice to not be down there anymore." I asked why he would say such a thing, and he replied, "you know -- Bush is from there. And there are so many of those weird people who are always calling themselves 'American' down there." By this he meant that he would never refer to himself as an American even though he certainly is an American -- he considers himself a 'global citizen,' and finds love of country and patriotism distasteful and embarassing. I replied simply that I was proud to have voted for Bush. He looked at me as if I had three eyes. We left. His ignorance was not worth our time.

Then, driving home from church on Sunday, a man driving in a car behind our own, perhaps in his mid-thirties, noticed our 'Bush-Cheney' and 'Support our Troops' bumper stickers. He proceeded to pull alongside our vehicle, rolled down his window, and made several obscene gestures and gave us the 'thumbs-down' sign. We, of course, did not dignify his embarassing display with a reply. This enfuriated the hating liberal further. He proceeded to speed up, dangerously cut in front of our car as we were moving down a freeway entrance ramp, and then slowed down to about 5 mph, holding us and about ten cars behind us up as we attempted to enter the freeway. After about 30 seconds of this, he made another obscene gesture, and took off at high speed.

These are the kind of people that could elect Howard Dean, a man who himself declares that he is motivated by 'hatred' of his political opponents, chairman of their party. These are the kind of people that are driving more moderate people out of the Democratic party. And this is why the election of Howard Dean signals many more years, perhaps decades, of electoral defeats for the Democrats.

Utopian Pessimism v. Realistic Optimism

2005-02-02T15:11:00.000-06:00

I have now actually reached a point where I find it very, very difficult to watch the nightly news or read CNN's web page. Prior to the Iraqi elections, I could handle the mainstream media's pessimism, the nay-saying, and the Bush bashing. But now that the Iraqi elections have occurred in a way that exceeded everyone's expectations, the continued inability of many in the mainstream media (with a few notable exceptions) to acknowledge that the Iraqi people have taken a first, large, decisive step toward liberty and self-government has my blood boiling. It is as if many liberals and members of the media never believed that the Iraqi people had the capability, desire, nor the requisite humanity to build a foundation for self-government and to recognize the absolute evil of the insurgency. It is demeaning to the Iraqi people, it is demeaning to our troops supporting them in their cause, and it is demeaning to America's core values, which are, of course, the very values the Iraqi people are fighting for.

So where do we find the roots of the liberals' naysaying? I have come to believe that liberals exist in a state of paradox. They hope for and believe in the ability of a generalized 'peace' to somehow descend down upon the earth (apparently from nowhere as they don't generally recognize the direct impact of the transcendent), but at the same time reject and belittle any incremental, real, human efforts toward the same goal if those efforts involve any amount of pain or hardship or sacrifice. To a liberal ala John Kerry, politicians find solutions in creating institutions and government structures, hierarchies and programs. Individuals are not the problem because liberals do not believe in absolute evil--an individual's bad behavior is a reflection of systemic problems and influences. This is true in all issue areas, from the liberal's belief that the unequal distribution of wealth and unequal bargaining power actually cause poverty and even crime (and thus a welfare program and legal changes will solve the problems of the dependent poor or the criminal), to the extreme liberal's belief that underlying Islamist fundamentalist is an angst resulting from global inequity and the United States' capitalist oppression and domination (and thus a fairer global economic order would diminish Islamism). For the liberal, it is the system that needs fixing, not the individual, because evil isn't real. This is the same kind of Utopianism that infected the French revolution -- heads roll when the creators of Utopia fail and search for a scapegoat, believing that only sabotage could have derailed their perfect, systemic plan.

But modern American liberals combine this kind of ridiculous, relativist utopianism with a strong pessimism that is unrelated to any kind of practical realism. John Kerry grudgingly acknowleges that the Iraqi elections were a success, but concentrates on the difficult road ahead, underscoring the remaining strength of the insurgency and doubting the eventual outcome. Media outlets call attention to suicide bombings on election day. Chris Matthews wonders out loud on Hardball whether the indelible ink used to ensure that each Iraqi votes only once will become a 'marker for death,' a target for insurgent killers. How can such a utopian lot be so pessimistic at the same time?

The answer is relatively simple: They care more about their ideology than they do about what is actually happening to actual people. They value their belief that evil is not really absolute but rather a result of unfairness in the world too much to acknowledge that Bush's strategy of killing the evil-doers and incrementally building democracy is working and leading to real benefits for the Iraqi people. If liberals praise the courage and power of the Iraqi people to recognize and reject the insurgency, they would be admitting that the world is not the almost-utopia-but-for-global-systemic-unfairness they believe in, but rather is a place where absolute evil and good do battle for dominance. They would have to admit that real good can be achieved in the world only through sacrifice, and that war and hardship cannot be eliminated by a committee or a U.N. resolution. In short, their entire Utopian-pessimist worldview, which drives their views regarding things as disparate as welfare and foreign policy, would have to be wrong.

The naysaying and the pessimism of the utopian-liberals sounds utterly ridiculous to a thoughtful, realistic person. After this successful election, the liberal pundits wonder about the future for Iraqis, the strength of the insurgency, and worry about uncertainty. One must ask them: Do you think the oppressed Kurds 'worried' about uncertainty under Saddam? Do you think those filling his torture chambers would have traded their position for ean 'uncertain' democracy? Do you think even his own Baath party members feared purges and feared one day finding themselves on Saddam's bad side? Yes.

This utopian-pessism is not a philosophy without costs. Its pessimism, its naysing, its rejection of the possibility that any good could come from any kind of war has the potential to demoralize our troops and undermine the support of the American people. In fact, this is what the insurgents have been counting on. Luckily, the Iraqi people have stepped up to the plate. The insurgents are everywhere on the run. Good is winning. And President Bush will rally the nation to his realistic optimism (the opposite of utopian-pessism, this is a philosophy that understands the imperfection of the world, understands the necessity of sacrifice and hardship to create good, and believes that good cannot but come if we work at it) tomorrow night in the state of the union address.

Liberty and Democracy in the Middle East

2004-12-27T15:16:00.000-06:00

In the first municipal elections in Palestine since 1976, the militant Hamas party scored gains against the more moderate (in a purely relative sense) Fatah movement. According to a report in The Age, "figures released by the Palestinian Authority's Supreme Council for Local Elections showed Hamas scored victories in nine councils against 16 for Fatah, with the two factions tied for control of one municipality." These results constitute a strong pro-militant message from the Palestinian people to their likely new leader, Abu Mazen (the nome de guerre (war name) of Mahmoud Abbas).

It is also a reminder to the us in the United States and the West that democracy is not sufficient in and of itself to secure peace and justice. As highlighted by political writers such as Bertrand de Jouvenal, democracy can become a legitimizing principle for the worst kinds of tyranny and injustice -- that is, majoritarian tyranny. When a lonely dictator consolidates power and tyrannizes his subjects, his legitimacy is automatically suspect and it is easy to rightly denounce his actions and rule. However, when a democratically elected majority gives its consent to the same kinds of tyranny and evil, it is much more difficult to denounce those actions because they are clothed with the will of the people. It is especially difficult for us, who live in a country that champions the will of the people, to denounce anything that is selected by a democratic process. In this way, democracy can become one of the most dangerous tools of evil.

Our founders understood this principle full well. Madison in the Federalist papers wrote much of the danger of majoritarian tyranny. His call for an expanded democratic polity such that the multiplicity of interests rendered impotent parochial factionalism was a call to guard against the very evil we see now in Palestine -- faction taking control of the state through democratic processes and fousting evils on its minority members and its neighbors by democratic consent. In a small democracy, or in a relatively homogenous larger democracy, if the majority believes in something objectively evil (like the legitimacy of suicide bombing as a tactic to achieve political ends, for instance) is justified, there is a greater possibility that the democracy will end up endorsing and strengthening that evil.

So it is clear that democracy will not be sufficient to bring peace to the Middle East. Liberals would use such a principle to argue that we ought not be fighting proactively in the Middle East at all. But this is not correct -- we are not fighting there simply for the promotion of democracy, but for a particular kind of democracy. We are fighting for freedom and liberty first and constitutional democracy second as a way to secure the former. Liberals often conflate the concept of liberty with that of democracy. But they are not at all the same -- liberty is a principle that respects man's personal autonomy and individual, inherent value. Democracy also relates to autonomy, but it is not centered on the individual. Rather, it rests on a judgment that government which takes into account individual judgments on matters of political and social importance will lead to more just outcomes. But in order for this judgment to be correct, the democracy must be limited and the shared values of the people must already conform to the Good and to justice. Otherwise, as in Palestine, they will simply use democracy to select evil.

So as we fight for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are also fighting for the ascendancy of the principles of personal autonomy, liberty, and, perhaps most importantly, the principle of religious freedom and toleration. These are values which will be (and must be) enshrined in the Iraqi and Afghan constitutions for our greater goal, establishing a freedom not unlike that we enjoy in the United States in the Middle East, to occur. These values limit democracy, they narrow the range of acceptable options the people may select through majoritarian processes. Some groups disagree with these fundamental principles of autonomy and religious tolerance. To the extent people disagree, those people are insurgents -- they are against the new Iraqi and Afghan order of liberty, peace and tolerance, a new order that will empower a very oppressed people and allow them the happiness and prosperity so long and so unjustly withheld.

China's Authoritarian Push for Hegemony

2004-12-17T15:18:00.000-06:00

Chinese President Hu Jintao, former Vice President and before that extremely repressive Governor of the province of Tibet, seems to want Chinese regional, and perhaps eventually world, hegemony, and he seems to believe that such hegemony cannot be achieved without authoritarian, despotic government at home.

China recently arrested three political dissidents on trumped-up charges. Under China's code of criminal procedure, suspects of criminal activity can be detained indefinitely while the procuratorate 'investigates' charges (in China, the procuratorate and its organs, the body that investigates and prosecutes crimes, has power constitutionally equal to that of the Chinese courts. The highest organ of the procuratorate is equal to the Chinese Supreme Court). If a prisoner is designated political, as is the case here because there are charges of leaking state secrets, the judgments of the Chinese courts are given yet less deference and the Chinese Communist Party can intervene directly -- China's constitution is shadowed by the constitution of the CCP, which will always take precedence where a matter is 'political' (in the sense that it threatens Communist rule).

The arrests of these three intellectuals are part of a broader trend, signaling that President Hu intends to reign in the free speech and dissent that had been until recently beginning to flourish on college campuses and in internet cafes. Fearing political debate brewing in internet cafes, the Chinese government permanently closed 1,600 such cafes between February and November of this year. 18,000 more internet cafes have been temporarily closed for 'rectification.' Dissent is being stamped out in the country's state-run newspapers as well. In November, China banned all reporting on 'outspoken academics,' including all scholars who takes a public position on a political or social issue. Thus, today in China, Chinese citizens receive no news of political dissent or alternative ideas about the direction of Chinese policy, they are fed a steady stream of ideological propaganda through the state-run news and coordinated by the 'Publicity Department,' they cannot utilize the internet to discuss matters of public significance or gain news from foreign sources, and if they dare take public positions contrary to the government, they will be arrested and 'administratively detained.'

At the same time, China is increasing spending on its military and its space program. China is on the verge of fielding a new class of nuclear ballistic missile submarines carrying nuclear weapons capable of striking the United States from very long distances. The increased range makes it more difficult for our attack subs to prevent a sea-based nuclear strike as the Chinese need not venture too close to the United States in order to carry out an attack. And China is changing its tactics as well, pushing the envelope militarily vis-a-vis Japan and the U.S. Just last month, a Chinese Han-class nuclear-powered submarine penetrated Japanese seas and circled Guam as well.

Having lived in Beijing for a period of about six months, I can report that military and space program spending is a vital part of the Chinese propaganda machine. Newspapers read by subway-riders always tout the latest tanks, missiles, ships, and subs being fielded or tested by the Chinese military. Comparisons are made between these new technologies and U.S. military technologies in bold, threatening (at least in the eyes of an American reading over a Chinese reader's shoulder) headlines. These headlines inspire nationalistic pride in the Chinese populace and help them to forget their lack of certain basic liberties like speech and worship. It is even easier to make them forget when the government 'allows' the people to participate in greater economic freedoms that yield greater material wealth and comfort.

This is Hu Jintao and the CCP's new strategy for Chinese hegemony, and insofar as it has been successful up to now, it proves that economic liberties do not necessarily breed political liberties: Stamp out all dissent, deprive the people of forums where dissent can form, and feed the people a steady diet of propaganda, chiefly featuring military successes and expenditures. Having established firm ideological control, continue to encourage the free market and economic growth to increase the peoples' material comforts, tout the marked improvements in Chinese standards of living to win popular support for the regime, and all the while use that economic power to drive military production to achieve eventual parity with the United States. Eventually, the Chinese will test their strength by acting in some fashion with regard to Taiwan, and a new age of war might begin.

This seems to be the direction in which China is moving, and if successful, the China threat may prove more menacing to than the current threat of global terrorism. Luckily, the Bush administration is not blind to the China situation. President Bush's hard push for an anti-ballistic missile shield is a way to neturalize the Chinese nuclear threat, and the modernization of our military to fight the current war on terror will become an asset when and if we find ourselves in conflict with China. But we can do more to head off the conflict. We should be giving dissidents in China support, we should not blindly aid China's economic development. We must give more than moral support to Taiwan, for Taiwan is a vision for an alternative, democratic China.

A conflict with China would be an ideological one, pitting our conceptions of liberty against the Chinese conception of using citizens for the purposes of the state and its power. Taiwan is the proof that our vision can work within the context of Chinese culture and its historical traditions, and we would do well to be more friendly to that regime. We must counter the enemies of freedom and our shared values wherever we find them, be those enemies Islamist terrorists or Chinese communist totalitarians. History proves the adage again and again: eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Christmas in New Ulm

2004-12-07T15:24:00.000-06:00

Christmas -- A Child's birth, the greatest mystery and paradox of all time -- that the infinite complexity of the Divine could become the infinite simplicity of a child. Christmas -- that eternal reminder of our own humility in light of God's grace. We remember at Christman that no matter how complex we might believe our lives to be, if our omnipotent God can take on the simplicity of an infant, so can, and so should, we.

The call to simplicity, the call to the child-like ideal of Christmas, is anathema to much of modern society -- a society that exalts in the superficial and the material, that revels in its complexity and flouts all that which is cosmpolitan. But the real meaning of being is so complex that it is simple, and so simple that it is complex. And it cannot be comprehended by intellect alone. To comprehend paradox, by defitinion, requires faith.

That's why my visit to New Ulm, Minnesota, this past weekend was so refreshing. Strolling down the main street (Minnesota Street) of this town of about 13,000, I noticed the Christmas garlands strung overhead, garlands that included religious symbols -- not just Santa Claus and Reindeer. The town's Glockenspiel, a free-standing bell carrillon, played Christmas songs at noon as it opened a door to reveal a manger scene. Moved by this, I thought, "here is a city where people understand Christmas. Here is a city where the people know how religion can be celebrated, how it can coexist with the state." I think random thoughts like this all the time, but this one really had an impact. Hermann the German, the colloquial name for Arminius, the teutonic leader of the Cherusci tribe who in 9 A.D. drove back three Roman legions, stands more than 100 feet tall, perched on the river bluff overlooking the city. This is also a town that has a sense of its heritage and understands the meaning and value of history, I thought.

It was not presumptuous, not oppressive, not in-your-face; there was no commercialism, no pretense. There was just Christmas. In New Ulm, there was just the message about our call to have the simple faith of the child, to be simple, and to trust in the divine for our salvation -- to not be arrogant, to not mistake the cosmpolitan for the wise.

I thought of an experience in my travels abroad. In China, I met a very elderly man who likely had never left his province, and could only speak the native dialect of Su Zhou, a tongue I could make out only vaguely given my training in Mandarin. The man was a master of Chinese calligraphy, of "shu fa", and after we struggled through conversation for a while, he said he wanted to prepare me a gift. The gift was a scroll he handwrote, the message was aesthetically and intellectually beautiful: "Shu Ye Yan Jin Se" -- "The leaves of the tree from ancient times to modern are the same color." It struck me -- it did not matter that this man had never left China, that he was old, that he knew not of modern ways, his wisdom was wisdom just the same. Just as the leaves of the trees are the same colors throughout time and throughout the world, so too is the nature of wisdom. Worldly experience might make one saavy, but it won't make one wise. Wisdom is too simple and complex. The simple man of rural China could recognize wisdom better than the most cosmpolitan New York lawyer.

And that is the spirit I saw in New Ulm. It was not just the decorations. It was the people. Everywhere I went, the people smiled, were glad to see me, were genuinely glad I was visiting them and their town. From waitresses to tour guides to the wine expert at the local winery, they seemed to grasp innately what many who style themselves more cosmpolitan struggle to understand -- that life's childlike simplicity is its childlike beauty. They are more unknowingly (or knowingly for many, I would guess) complex in their outlook than most who claim to seek enlightenment. In larger cities, in Minneapolis for instance, I see glimpses of these "Christmas"-like attitudes, but they are fewer and farther between. The ACLU and other well-meaning groups divorce religion from the state, drive a wedge between the transcendent and the earthly, exalting the secular at the expense of the transcendent. Overly political churches lose the forest for the trees. Simplicity is demeaned as stupid -- as infantile. But then, we remember, Christ was an infant, and the most complex was the simple. We women and men should rejoice in being simple to the point of being 'useless' -- our highest virtue as humans is not our utility to any particular task, but our existence at the pleasure of God (see my earlier post on the value of uselessness and the nature of love here.

We who live in larger cities would do well to visit our more enlightened friends in cities like New Ulm, to get a dose of their realism, their much closer, actual claim to the meaning of life. I do not want to imply that there is division, city v. rural, us v. them, but I do want to emphasize that people who see the values and virtues of cities like New Ulm perhaps have a better grasp of what really matters than others.

So as the Holidays approach, remember the value of the simplicity of the child, the complexity of simplicity represented by God becoming an infant, and the value of humanity's uselessness. And be thankful for good places like New Ulm.

Religion in a 'Secular' State

2004-12-06T15:24:00.000-06:00

We hear quite a bit these days about America as a 'secular' state. The ACLU and other groups committed to divorcing government from religion want to remove 'God' from our pledge, remove it from our coins, and Sandra Day O'Connor has written of 'not real religion' but 'cermonial religion' -- the religious-seeming ceremonial phrases that we don't 'really mean.' A friend of mine recently remarked that, if it is true that Bush won on the basis of evangelical Christians' support, then we are no better than Iran because religious fanatacism is driving the government here just as it is there.

Statements like these bely the infantile simplicity of the liberal's conception of the intersection of religion and politics: Either we are secular, tolerant, and free, or the government is oppressive and theocratic. But in America, religious freedom means exactly what its name implies: that we are free to exercise whatever religion we care to, and that the federal government will not establish any particular religion as the official true path to enlightenment or heaven or whereever you think religion leads us. It does not mean that religion and government are to be completely separated -- that is not possible, and attempts to effect such a state of existence have always led to horrible consequences.

One cannot divorce a government of laws from laws, one cannot divorce laws from morality, and one cannot divorce morality from religion. Thus, one cannot divorce a government of laws from religion, and attempting to do so debases that government, loosens it from its moorings and causes it to drift in a very dangerous manner. The first premise of the syllogism is self-evidenjt. The second is not. But it is true. Laws and morality both deal with 'oughts' in different ways. The laws of a society, from a speed limit to a health regulation to the criminal code, shape society in a particular way and proscribe certain conduct with the end of reaching what is the minimum acceptable situation in terms of the community's judgments about what ought to be. Those judgments about what ought to be stem from morality, either that of the King, the dictator, or the demos. We in America choose democracy principally because we believe it leads to the best moral outcomes. Put another way, we believe that the collective knowledge of the 'best' of us, our elected representatives, will be able to best approximate what actually should be in their judgments about what the law will be. The same theory holds for a properly philosophic King -- he guides the nation on a course to what he think is the most just and right situation. From the speed limit, with its consideration of the importance of saving human lives, to the prohibition against rape, with its concern for the sanctity and autonomy of each and every human person, every law concerns morality. If we forget why we have rape laws and speed limits, or if we contend that we only have them because the polis desires them, and not because thsoe laws reflect some higher value, they lose power and can be changed as soon as our opinions, or those of those in power, change.

Morality, then, cannot be divorced from religion. Without some metaphysical conception of our being and existence, and howe we came to be, we cannot say that our values and 'oughts' are set in stone -- we must allow for differentiation. And even if a different morality shocks our personal conscience, without some idea of our creation and purpose, we cannot say that that different morality is any less valid than our own. But if we have a conception of creation and divine purpose, those traits and aspirations humans are endowed with take on new meaning because they become part of a grander plan, part of a higher law. Only with some higher law, wheter it be written on our hearts at the moment of creation, or written on all creation in its patterns of development and flourishing, can we say that one thing is wrong and another is right, can we justify our laws at their very base. I am no supporter of the idea of Hugo Grotius, that natural law can be divorced from its creator or the notion of a God -- without those metaphysical underpinnings, upon what would such a law depend and who would its violation transgress? A law is no law if the violation of that law offends no one or no thing. Thus there must be a natural, divine law if our moral laws and values are laws at all.

So, taking the syllogism as a whole, government, without religion, is a loose, dangerous thing. If our only principle is democracy divorced from religion, than democracy is more dangerous than divine-right monarchy because whatever evil the demos endorses is no longer evil and has all the moral force it needs. That is a frightening thought, and one secular liberals would do well to contemplate a bit more deeply.

Uselessness and Politics

2004-11-22T19:30:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's post was not just an exercise in the esoteric -- the idea of the value of uselessness has direct implications for the conservative frame of mind. Liberal secularism disavows the role of the transcendent in political life instead positing that humanity is sufficient in and of itself for the task of ordering society on earth. Without the overarching, architectonic concept of a creative and organizing force, their philosophy 'frees' humans to assume that role themselves, to become the architects of society. This is the highest folly and the worst conceit of mankind -- that we might divorce this world from the next, and assume the role of God here on earth. Thus, according to liberals, humans are not meant to praise or glorify something higher, but to praise and glorify themselves through their 'useful' works. The extreme of this is the godlessness of communism -- atheistic hubris that, even as it exalts the power of man to build design and build utopia on earth, debases the dignity of man by unanchoring humanity from creation metaphysics. The path is thereby opened for the powerful to blame the failures of their grand designs on those charged to implement them, and what results is the 'purging of the saboteurs' -- the deaths of millions of innocents. On a lesser scale, liberalism has the same vain defect here in America -- that that man can utilize power without fearing its corrupting effect as long as the intention is good. It too readily casts away the collective wisdom manifested in our traditions for its mechanistic fixes for acute societal problems. But the cure is often more deadly than the disease.

Conservatism, as opposed to holding the mechanical-utopian view of modern American liberalism, is organic. Life is like a garden, traditions grow and evolve over time. There is an absolute good, the growth and flourishing of the garden, and there is an absolute evil, the weeds that spring up and attempt to choke the light away from the things that grow. Things move slowly and change takes time, but the change that occurs is good and lasting. Incentives, like fertilizer, are chosen over more rash options, and the natural laws governing the life of each plant, written in genetic material, are recognized and allowed to operate, not stymied and blocked. The garden may not be very useful, it may not have a purpose like that of a machine, but it is beautiful. And that's why its valuable.

Celebrating our Uselessness

2004-11-21T19:25:00.000-06:00

Celebrating our Uselessness
How's that for an odd subject? Read this bit from Plato's Laws:

May we not conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose-which of the two we cannot certainly know? But we do know, that these affections in us are like cords and strings, which pull us different and opposite ways, and to opposite actions; and herein lies the difference between virtue and vice.

Man, says the Athenian stranger, is not necessary, a plaything or a puppet for some purpose, a tool. Knee-jerk secularism, rampant in much of Western society, finds these ideas anathema -- man as a mere puppet? Noble man? To quote Shakespeare's Hamlet,

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

This is the part of the play where Hamlet confronts Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, forcing the two of them to admit that they came to visit because they were summoned by Hamlet's murderous Uncle and not out of pure friendship. Hamlet cannot decide if man is noble or evil, but in his depressed confusion there is the truth of that tension: perhaps man is noble insofar as he is a 'quintessence' of dust; that is to say, to the extent man is unnecesary, he is valuable.

Nonsense? Oxymoron? Not really. It all depends on what the beholder we contemplate is -- man is necessary to whom, good in whose eyes? Certainly men cannot judge for themselves whether or not man is good. Shakespeare's Hamlet is all about our inability to do just that. But what about man's goodness in the eyes of a perfect and all-knowing being, the Gods, God? Think of we humans -- what do we prize more, a tool or a keepsake? The pleasure we derive from a tool is only secondary -- when it performs its function, it allows something else to operate and we derive pleasure from that. A keepsake acts directly on our pleasure. We only keep it for its own sake, and for no other reason. Nostalgia and other emotions are triggered directly. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would have been more valuable to Hamlet had they come on their own volition, and not as the tool of someone else, whether that someone else be good or evil. Their visit would have been more meaningful, more valuable, were the visit, in a sense, unnecessary. So Hamlet's inability to decide the question of whether man is good or evil stems from his nature as a man and our difficulty in understanding the fuller extent of the reality that surrounds and more importantly transcends us. When he forces Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to admit they are a tool of the King, he reveals unwittingly the answer to his confusion: that our nobility is in our uselessness.

This is precisely what Plato is saying: our greatest joy is our being a plaything of the Gods. We should celebrate that we are not tools for our fellow man but a toy for our Creator.

Imagine that we men and women are, for our God, like music, which has no value other than its cathartic value, its ability to replicate our emotions, evince them. Music is beautiful. It is aesthetic. Insofar as beauty and aesthetics are 'useless', they too are more valuable, for earthly beauty, whether it be music or a woman or a landscape, is a partaking in the pure beauty that is God.

The love between a man and a woman is beauty as well, and the sense of wholeness we derive (or yearn for) from a well-matched relationship is really just a fuller sense of being -- separated from our Creator, we find the beauty of Him in each other. And in finding beauty in each other, in enjoying each others' human uselessness, we become more human, we live fuller, less secularly meaningful but more transcendentally meaningful lives. We search for a lifemate with whom to 'grow old' -- and that is because we unconcsciously know that when we inevitably become old and useless, we will still be able to enjoy the wholeness that comes from that pairing of souls precisely because what we derive from relationships transcends usefulness.

So as we approach Thanksgiving, try being thankful for all things useless. And celebrate your own uselessness.

Against Sam Harris

2004-11-17T19:11:00.000-06:00

After writing about our nation’s current battle with the Islamists and their false belief, I chanced across the writings of one Sam Harris, whose first book, entitled “The End of Faith,” is an argument against religion in general, against ‘blind, deaf, dumb and unreasoned’ faith that he claims threatens our very existence. He describes what he calls ‘faith-based unreason’ as an impediment to human progress, and a potentially world-ending force given the development of weapons of mass-destruction. Just reading the excerpts provided on his website, www.samharris.org, I was aghast by Mr. Harris’ utter arrogance, and frightened by the sophistic mastery he displays. However, I was also quite amused by the immense amount of blind faith Mr. Harris puts in human reason in order to critique and undermine the idea of, well, blind faith.

Mr. Harris’ work, however, is dangerous -- the ideas it contains are as noxious and tempting as Marx. It is sophistry of the worst type -- Harris declares war on all types of faith, all the while covering up that what he wars against he also employs in his cause. By selective thought and careful excerpting, Harris’ directs our justified fears of weapons of mass destruction and immoderate ideas in the world against faith in general. But while Mr. Harris’ ideas sound coherent, they are anything but.

One of Mr. Harris’ central critiques of religion is its “insusceptibility to progress.” Mr. Harris explains that, “[i]f religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human necessity then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less [over time.]” (noting how the rest of human knowledge has ‘progressed’ while ideas about faith have remained stagnant). OK, Mr. Harris, that sounds reasonable. We should move forward, progress, and religion seems not to. But his statement is so conclusory it is ridiculous. He does not share with us why religion must concern “present inquiry, not mere iteration of past doctrine.” What if, Mr. Harris, revelational knowledge concerns a different type of knowledge than the stuff of human technical know-how? If that is the case, why does that different kind of knowledge or rather our means for discovering it have to involve present inquiry? Why is it analogous at all to human scientific progress? It is not. No, in fact, revelational knowledge has always concerned things that do not change. By its nature, religion is concerned with the transcendent, and it is concerned with the Good, the measure of all other things and acts. If the Good were to progress and change, it would not be a very good yardstick for conduct and thought. Further, insofar as faith is revealed to us and not developed or discovered by our own skills, our efficiency in attaining such revelational knowledge should not change over time -- if it did, we would have to question the revelational character of the knowledge.

Not only is Mr. Harris’ argument ridiculously conclusory, it is also entirely circular. Why do we call advances in scientific knowledge ‘progress’? Is it because it is good to know more? If so, why is that a good thing? Why isn’t ignorance good as opposed to knowledge? Why do we count it fortunate that have developed life saving medicines and modern conveniences which free us somewhat from the mundane to concentrate on other things (higher things)? As self-evident as the answers to these questions may seem, they point up a fundamental flaw (well masked) in Mr. Harris’ ‘reasoning’ -- progress, even in science, is only praiseworthy because it yields results that support predetermined human goods, things that are good because either (1) because the particular good is revealed to us as good and we take it on faith, or (2) because the particular good is recognized as good because of the natural inclinations of all reasonable human beings. The first category of goods are revelational and based on faith. The second (and larger) category are also linked to the divine -- they are the inclinations written on our hearts when we were created. This must be the case, or else we could have no basis for calling them good. How can we even say human life is valuable in an absolute sense if human life is a mere accident? How can we say that laws should be fair if the inclination toward fairness is a random result of evolution and not something put there by some transcendent power? How can any good we feel to be good be in fact praiseworthy unless that feeling has a created existence? We can’t, and thus Mr. Harris can’t claim that progress is good while denying faith and the transcendent entirely. He cannot use for an argument against the goodness of faith a faith-derived judgment that progress is good. It is circular.

In a political context, Mr. Harris’ sophistry is convincing and dangerous. He emanantizes man to a position above God, and that appeals to the corrupt nature of our souls and our innate thirst for power. Harris ignores the fact that, without faith, we cannot measure our desired ends, our society’s telos -- robbing man of his metaphysical grounding robs the state of its reason for existence. Harris’ ideas (ideas do matter), his blind faith in human reason, would unhinge us from our transcendental grounding. No longer could any God or any tenet stop the demands of the demos, for without God there is no other limit on what a democracy may demand; the people’s ultimate sovereignty is transformed from a reasonable means of seeking the best laws and ascertaining the content of the Good into an unbridled, power-seeking force oriented only to whatever particular passion it elevates to a reason for existence. When so untethered, democracy, given that it legitimizes for a societal end whatever the majority demands, could become the most potent evil we have ever seen -- and given the existence of weapons of mass destruction, that is truly something to be feared.

"Unteachable Ignorance" and Constitutive Values

2004-11-02T19:26:00.000-06:00

Now that the American people have dealt a decise blow against the left's policies of appeasement and cultural laissez-faire, we finally see modern American liberalism's true form -- the form that John Kerry tried desperately to hide from public view.

To understand the left's true belief structure, a word about values and priorities in general is necessary. In America, as in any nation, our beliefs take on different degrees of intensity and commonality. Some are more central to the telos of our society, some are more peripheral. The most common and shared values are reflected in the very constitution and form of our society -- namely, democracy and liberty. I like to call them constitutive values. Non-constitutive values are decided within the structure endorsed and legitimated by our constitutive values.

A sizeable portion of the left has now given up on America's original constitutive values. They subvert the ordering of American values, putting their own views on lesser political issues above the interests of democracy and liberty. The first sign of this has been with us for some time -- the use of activist courts to subvert the will of the people and foist liberal social values on society by fiat. The Massachusetts same-sex marriage decision is a prime example, as are the Texas sodomy case, Roe v. Wade and even Griswold v. Connecticut, the seminal contraception case.

Now that the left has been shown its views are clearly in the minority, they seem to be abandoning our higher value -- the rule of the majority. In explaining their loss, liberals are saying that the moral conservatives of the bible belt drove the election, voting on issues like gay marriage and partial birth abortion. The election showed the world that Democrats' views on these issues are clearly in the minority, and now extreme Democrats are picking up a new mantra which goes something like this: "We liberals are enlightened, and our views on these cultural and moral issues are superior to those of the people populating red states. The fact that red state-types can be so easily swayed by dangerously simplistic religious and moral appeals makes us doubt that we could ever get them to see the truth of our views -- they are too stupid." From this sickeningly elitist stance, the next step is the subversion of democracy by claiming the 'stupid' red state members ought to be disenfranchised. For now, they hope the courts will do that job. But if conservatives continue to dominate court appointments, who know to what mechanism liberals will turn.

To see the truth of liberals' deeply disturbing exaltation of their own moral ideas above the constitutive values of our nation, consider this exerpt from Jane Smiley in Slate:

The reason the Democrats have lost five of the last seven presidential elections is simple: A generation ago, the big capitalists, who have no morals, as we know, decided to make use of the religious right in their class war against the middle class and against the regulations that were protecting those whom they considered to be their rightful prey—workers and consumers. The architects of this strategy knew perfectly well that they were exploiting, among other unsavory qualities, a long American habit of virulent racism, but they did it anyway, and we see the outcome now—Cheney is the capitalist arm and Bush is the religious arm. They know no boundaries or rules. They are predatory and resentful, amoral, avaricious, and arrogant. Lots of Americans like and admire them because lots of Americans, even those who don't share those same qualities, don't know which end is up. Can the Democrats appeal to such voters? Do they want to? The Republicans have sold their souls for power. Must everyone?

Who is really 'selling their souls for power'? Republicans were in the minority on social values issues for decades -- did we advocate the subversion of democracy on the basis that liberals are 'too stupid' to understand our positions? No. Smiley subtitles her piece "The unteachable ignorance of the red states." She has clearly written off the majority of Americans as not worth talking to, not intelligent enough to partricipate in her kind of 'democracy'.

It is frightening, but reflect on its truth: as soon as your opponent stops talking to you on the sole ground that you are not worth trying to persuade, they do not count you as a human being of equal dignity. They exalt themselves above you in worth and demote you to the level of mere beast. Consider the words of Socrates at the end of his conversation with Callicles in the Gorgias, foretelling his own death at the hands of Athens using the metaphor of a physician on trial for allegedly poisoning children:

I think that I am the only or almost the only Athenian living who practises the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time. Now, seeing that when I speak my words are not uttered with any view of gaining favour, and that I look to what is best and not to what is most pleasant, having no mind to use those arts and graces which you recommend, I shall have nothing to say in the justice court. And you might argue with me, as I was arguing with Polus: I shall be tried just as a physician would be tried in a court of little boys at the indictment of the cook. What Would he reply under such circumstances, if some one were to accuse him, saying, "O my boys, many evil things has this man done to you: he is the death of you, especially of the younger ones among you, cutting and burning and starving and suffocating you, until you know not what to do; he gives you the bitterest potions, and compels you to hunger and thirst. How unlike the variety of meats and sweets on which I feasted you!" What do you suppose that the physician would be able to reply when he found himself in such a predicament? If he told the truth he could only say, "All these evil things, my boys, I did for your health," and then would there not just be a clamour among a jury like that? How they would cry out!

Consider how this compares with the words of Jane Smiley, who we might analogize to the cook-prosecutor in Socrates' parable. Smiley claims that Republicans employ a strategy of class warfare, utilizing the tools of racism and religious appeals to tempt weak minds into adherence to their cause. The physician-defendant, George Bush or conservatism in general, is accused of especially affecting the 'younger ones among you', the least intelligent and most gullible. Just as the prosecutor-cook lies and misrepresents the necessary but foul-tasting remedies of the physician as opposed to his sweets, so do Smiley and her ilk demonize and mischaracterize conservative values and policies by constructing a story of oppression and class warfare. Just as the jury clamours against the doctor when he claims his harsh remedies are for the best, so too do the liberals laugh and mock when conservatives prioritize their core moral values above material egalitarianism.

In the end, it boils down to a fundamental difference in the way liberals view the end of human life. Liberals reject one of the main teachings of Socrates: that it is better to suffer evil than to do it, or rather, that the only true evil is moral evil.

If the new mentality of the extreme left is typified by Jane Smiley, then America is in trouble. This new mentality is a plan concocted with one goal: delegitimating conservative values not by truly debating the issues or discussing differences, but by mocking conservatives themselves. This is dehumanizing, subversive and anti-democratic. It is intellectually dishonest, and it is dangerous. Luckily for us, Jane Smiley's brand of divisive demagoguery will only cause America to further shun her views and her party. While election of President Bush has shown us liberals' true colors, it should also bring us solace: We now know that there truly is a moral majority in America.

Proud to Be a Neo-conservative

2004-10-17T19:22:00.000-05:00

"Mr. Cheney enters tonight's debate with Mr. Edwards widely regarded as one of the most influential vice presidents in history, if not the most influential...Mr. Cheney is regarded now as the heavyweight in the Bush inner circle of neoconservatives that is defending the war in Iraq."

-Jules Witcover, Baltimore Sun, Oct. 5, 2004

Liberals and the mainstream media have for the past year been labelling the Bush administration 'neoconservative.' Demonstrating their collective ignorance, the media portrays neoconservatism as primarily a foreign policy paradigm or ideology. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story on May 3 of last year describing neoconservatives as 'hawkish defense intellectuals.' They repeat the word with a tone and in a context that implies neoconservatives are inherently suspect, shadowy figures -- members of a secret society that has 'taken over' or 'dominated' the White House. When at a loss for words or arguments, liberal pundits will often resort to employing the label as if it is a counterargument in itself against anything the labelled person might believe or espouse.

First of all, one can't argue merely by fixing labels on your opponent's thoughts. But such an exercise is even more ridiculous when one doesn't even understand the meaning of the label you seek to apply.

Neoconservatism is a term coined by Irving Kristol, often considered the founder of the movement (although he would probably not call it a movement). To the surprise of many on the left, it has its origins in the left -- the far left. Most founding neoconservatives were reformed Troskyites -- communists. Many lived in communist or fascist countries before emigrating West once they became thoroughly disillusioned with the direction Marxism was taking in the former Soviet Union. Irving Kristol was a member of the Communist Fourth International. Many were Jewish intellectuals, like Leo Strauss who left Nazi Germany for France, then emigrated to England, and finally became a U.S. citizen in the mid-1940s. Thus neoconservatism began as an anti-communist movement headed by ex-communists, and this is likely why many modern pundits incorrectly assume neoconservatism is primarily a foreign policy paradigm. Indeed, insofar as neoconservatives advocated active resistance to Communism in the world and saw the United States as the best chance to stop it, neoconservatism had initially a lot to say about foreign policy. But neoconservatism is about much more than foreign policy, and it is not an ideology. In fact, it is an anti-ideology, a set of attitudes and beliefs about the nature of mankind that is skeptical of any grand scheme of ideas regarding human progress or projects to build utopia. Thus its aversion to communism and the notion that history is a series of struggles culminating in some ultimate, man-made egalitarian society. The neoconservatives identified this trend in human thinking -- men are tempted to eliminate the transcendent and instead attempt to construct the eternal city in the world of the mortal, but such projects always fail. When they fail, the arrogance of the original idea in which the leaders have become so invested causes those leaders to search for saboteurs rather than to admit the falsity of their original premise -- and then purge the saboteurs. Thus, when knowledge of the mass failures of communal agriculture and industry in China finally reached the top levels of government, the response was not reform, but rather a massive push against the 'counterrevolutionaries' -- against the sabateurs whose refusal to be reeducated into the modern ideology and prevented the system from working properly, so the thinking went. That 'cultural revolution' led to the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese either directly in purges or via starvation, plus the exile, torture, and persecution of tens of millions more. The same kind of story can be told about Stalin's Soviet Union. Neoconservatism thus rejects ideology in its strictest sense while it recognizes explicitly the power of ideas and the corruptability of men -- and the need to fight against men who become corrupted by the worst, most hypnotic ideas (hence the distinction between Islam, the religion, and Islamism, a dogmatic, hateful ideology). Neoconservatives believe in the absolute nature of truth as well as the difficulty men have discerning what the truth is, and call on statesmen to take a tough stance against the wrongest ideas. Democracy and freedom are championed -- these are concepts not so dogmatic as to be dangerously ideological. Rather, democracy and liberty are basic values that allow a framework for a state to choose amongst lesser values and attempt to discern the truth.

Neoconservatives call for a more classical view of the state that is not slavishly addicted to the idea of social progress, but rather allows individuals to flourish and drive the democracy. As Irving Kristol has noted in past essays, classical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle would be confused by the unique strangeness of our modern polity's tendency to concentrate almost single-mindedly on how the state can improve our lives and material situation. But neoconservatism does not fear strong government -- it recognizes the role of the state in the habituation of virtue insofar as virtuous people make a strong and vibrant people. Neoconservatives are not libertarians who believe that a morality-free approach to government makes morality more praiseworthy when someone manages to attain it on their own. Rather, neoconservatives embrace the concept of a democratic, ordered liberty, a liberty within the constraints of basic morality and civic responsibility -- something much akin to the liberty envisioned by America's founders and classical thinkers alike.

Libertarians often accuse old stlye, paleo-conservatives of self-contradiction: They ask, how can you so adamantly advocate laissez-faire economic principles while simultaneously advocating a heavier hand of the state when it comes to culture and morality? Neoconservatism addresses this problem. It is the concept of economic growth, something that tames the historically explosive divisiveness of class struggle and allows for a stable nation with both haves and have-nots, that demands economic policies that do not hinder the enlargement of the pie, so to speak.

Neoconservatism, then, is not "hawkish defense intellectualism." The media has little idea of what they speak. Neoconservatism is a nuanced (real nuance, as opposed to Kerry's contradictions) philosophy or set of attitudes -- a 'persuasion,' as Irving Kristol puts it. It is a tradition with beginnings in a real struggle between a Godless ideology on the one hand and liberty on the other. It is a label the bearer of which should proudly display.

An Epochal Struggle

2004-09-28T19:16:00.000-05:00

History is a series of wars. Some are minor, like those concerning border disputes or something material like land or wealth, and some are major, like those concerning ideas or principles. Of the major wars, some are yet more significant -- they are epochal, marking significant changes in the way human civilization is organized and the course of the international debate over mankind's proper ends. In the cold war, the forces of ideological communism fought those of liberty and democracy, and the superior organizing philosophy won the day. In World Wars I and II, we faced a choice between fascism and democracy. The American Revolutionary War, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars sounded the death knell for divine right monarchy and ushered in a revival of Republican ideals like those of early Rome. Each major conflict had at its heart an idea, and each war saw an idea gain dominance or die.

We are now in another epochal struggle, one that has been brewing for quite some time. It is at once ideological and religious, a clash of cultures. The West made its choice between Republican ideals and divine right dictatorship -- it took two centuries of warfare and millions of lives, but we chose freedom. Islam has not yet made a firm choice between Islamist zealotry and some other, more peaceful vision for the future of the Islamic world. This current struggle is epochal for both ourselves and the Islamic world because we supply the alternative to Islamist dogma: Republican ideals and liberty. And the enemy, Islamist extremism, has adopted tactics and seeks WMDs which, for the first time in three centuries, put them on a more level playing field with the vastly powerful West. They seek victory by exploiting what they believe is the relative weakness of the West's values. Just as communists believed that Western parliamentarism would eventually collapse in on itself, Islamists believe that our republican ideals will eventually undermine our will to fight and prove to the world the superiority of their dogma.

Because it is epochal, the winner of this struggle will determine the course of human civilization for a long time to come. If we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, give up on planting democracy in the heart of the middle east, and cower behind what will inevitably prove inadequate border security, they will feed on our weakness. They will recruit millions to their cause by showcasing their strength -- they who forced back the mighty United States, torch-bearer of Western Civilization. Terror attacks will increase, WMDs will be deployed against us, Islam will fall to its worst variant, and our world will enter a very dark age. If we win, we have a chance of cementing the dominance of liberty and republicanism over yet another set of wrong and hateful ideas. A new era of prosperity and peace could begin for the most troubled region of the world as democratic reformers gain moral courage and the Islamists lose recruits to the cause of liberty.

But the picture is not all rosy. History is a series of wars, and there is no reason to believe millenia of conflict will cease after this particular struggle. More epochal wars will come. More ideological enemies will rise up against liberty and republican government. The best we can hope for in this imperfect world is to keep fighting and keep winning the peace, to assure the dominance of our ideas and the security of our way of life. China presents a possible future threat as it grows in power but fails to liberalize, threatening the democracy on Taiwan. Europe itself, as it unites, may become a rival, advocating a very different kind of democracy than our own. But we must concentrate on the here and now: The goal for us should be to win this battle so that we survive to fight the next enemy. We must never give up in the cause of freedom.

Iran Must Be Denied Even Peaceful Nuclear Technologies

2004-09-17T19:18:00.000-05:00

The United States and European negotiators have agreed on text for a resolution demanding that Iran cease its nuclear enrichment acitities and halt its pursuit of 'dual use' nuclear technologies. The resolution, however, does not go far enough. According to an AP story, the text, at the insistence of the ever-hesitant Europeans, "recognize[s] the right of countries to the peaceful use of nuclear energy," leaving Tehran a lot of "wiggle room" and setting the stage for further confrontation against the U.S. when the resolution's deadline comes to pass in November. Iran, of course, insists that it must be allowed to possess nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes. Hossein Mousavian, Tehran's chief delegate to the IAEA meeting, has already seized on the language of the resolution as recognition of the country's "right" to possess the technology:

"For us two or three months of (continued) suspension is not the issue," he told the AP. "For us, the recognition of the right to Iran" to possess technology for nonmilitary use "is the most important issue."

Mousavian's comment reveals the danger in taking anything but a hard line on this issue -- any softness is immediately prodded, tested, and used to Iranian's greatest advantage.

Returning to the theme of my post from yesterday, we absolutely must make moral determinations regarding the nations of the world. President Bush did just this regarding Iran, labelling it part of the infamous axis of evil. Iran has sponsored terrorism in the past and and is clearly supporting the insurgency in Iraq at the present. The Islamist bent of the highest authorities of their government allies them with the sentiments of Al Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror groups. Given the awful power of nuclear weapons and the ill motives and actions of the Iranians, we must deny them dual use technologies that they might give to terrorists, use to attack Israel, or use to upset the fledgling democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have no right to use nuclear technologies for peaceful purposes -- they forfeited that right by their misdeeds past and present. We cannot trust to their good will the security of the region or our homeland, and we need not be forced to so trust them because they claim it is their 'right' as a sovereign nation to possess such dangerous technologies. The twin realities of the new post-cold war age, those of evil, hate-filled terrorists and proliferating WMD technologies, demand that we act preemptively to stop the two from coming together. That means both ranking regimes according to their demonstrated goodness, and acting more preemptively with regard to nations at the bottom of the list of good regimes.

Schwarzenegger Speaks of Freedom's Power and Price

2004-08-31T18:58:00.000-05:00

Schwarzenegger Speaks of Freedom's Power and Price
"No matter in what labor camp they slave..they hear our call, they see our light and they feel the pull of freedom."

Arnold Schwarzenegger's immigrant roots lended validity and real power to his superbly delivered speech. It is always those who have felt the boot of oppression that rally to the cause of freedom. America once felt the boot of King George, the birth of our nation was out of oppression. It is sad to see that many Americans have lost that sense of the value and price of freedom that the first Americans felt -- the sense of freedom's value that has been renewed by successive wars against tyrants and evil men. It is truly amazing that so many Americans continue to take their freedom for granted and refuse to sacrifice for the cause of liberty in the world even after the horrible events of September 11th. They forget that nothing short of eternal vigilance can secure our liberty, peace, and prosperity.

Those who have lived under oppressive regimes know better. My mother-in-law was born in Malaysia in an American missionary hospital. She recalls the oppression of non-muslims by the muslim Malaysian government, she remembers the punishment of political dissidents, the lack of freedom to criticize the government, the unwarranted, indefinite arrests and summary prosecutions. She says that her entire generation had nothing but the greatest respect for America, gratitude for the aid and hospitals provided by Americans, for American protection from the spread of communism, and for the ideal that America represented. And now she supports the war and President Bush, understanding the awesome transformative power of freedom just as she understands the cost of securing it.

Even I have witnessed tyranny. When living in China, more than once did I see a truck of armed soldiers drive up to a restaurant or a barber shop or a home, grab a man inside, throw him in the truck, and drive off. These men were not formally charged, had no lawyer, were not tried -- rather, they were subject to 'administrative detention' for however many years the government chose to detain them.

Schwarzenegger said, "America remains the great idea that inspires the world." For the women formerly under the Taliban, for the people of Iraq, for the dissidents in Iran, for the democratic reformers in China, and for the starving masses in North Korea, we must never waiver in our defense of freedom, we must never show the slightest weakness in our fight against tyranny and dogmatic ideology.

UPDATE: Ratings for Schwarzenegger's speech are very high -- so high that more people may have viewed his speech than John Kerry's acceptance speech!

Protesters Cheapen Our Soldiers' Sacrifice

2004-08-30T19:06:00.000-05:00

As the Republican convention opens and protesters take the streets, it strikes me how very selfish and myopic these extreme-left wing radicals are. There is a certain disconcerting irony to it, if not hypocrisy, that those protesters themselves either intentionally ignore in order that their consciences might not be troubled, or rather are too unintelligent to grasp. They have a right to march, to protest, they have the freedom to voice their opinions, to lambast our President, to compare him to Adolf Hitler and call him the anti-Christ. They have that right, and yet they are completely and totally unwilling to make any sacrifice to extend that right to others in other societies who do not enjoy it. And they would have us deny others who are less selfish than they to choose such a sacrifice, being uncomfortable with the idea of people who take real action for their beliefs. They prefer to sacrifice nothing but their time and bear no burden but the weight of the ridiculous symbols and signs they carry above their heads. They carry flag-draped mock coffins through New York's streets to protest our casualties in the war, unwilling to recognize their righteous sacrifice, unwilling to acknowledge that those men and women who have died undertook the risk of battle and were willing, on the whole, to die for their nation's security and for the values our nation shares and holds dear. They died believing in freedom, believing that democracy and liberty have the power to tap into the aspirations all humans share, that such such power might transform a troubled part of the world from a cruel, brutish place into a place of opportunity and hope. Those soldiers' noble selflessness stands in stark contrast to the protesters in New York -- protesters who use those honorable soldiers' sacrfices for their selfish purpose, to exaggerate the cost of the war, to confuse the American public, denigrating the inherent goodness of our values by making this war political. The protesters dishonor our fighting men and women by refusing to acknowledge the value of dying for a righteous cause, of fighting intolerance and hatred, of standing up for one's beliefs by pledging one's life and fortune. They praise cowardice, they call for a myopic turning inward, a return to the false confidence and strength that plagued us for eight years under Bill Clinton. But evil is real, whether they like it or not, and it must be fought, we must praise those of us who choose to stand up and fight it, and celebrate the glory of those who give their lives defending us from it.

McCain: We Must Love Our Freedom

2004-08-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

John McCain hit it out of the park, capturing precisely why this election is so crucial -- we understand, as McCain said, that "what our enemies seek to destroy is beyond their reach, it cannot be taken from us, it can only be surrendurred. ... We have to love [our freedom] as much as the heroic Americans who defend us at the risk of the cost of their lives." I remember standing five blocks from the United States Capitol on September 11, looking up at the sky filled with smoke, knowing that the Pentagon, less than a quarter mile from my apartment in Virginia, had been savagely attacked. I remember thinking that everything had changed, that the complacency and happy ignorance of our lives up to that point was gone forever. I remember praying for our country and for our President. But that smoke lingering in the air for days over the Potomac cleared, and the Pentagon is now fully repaired. We will win this fight unless we forget that day, unless we forget that there never was, in the words of John McCain, a choice "between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war." As long as we remember the absolute goodness of our cause and the reality of those who hate us for it, we will win this fight. We will win it because our cause now is the same cause that has motivated our nation since its inception, the same cause that has lead us to victory so many times before: liberty and justice for all -- for Americans, and now for Iraqis and Afghanis as well.

McCain-Feingold: The End of Political Free Speech and the Erosion of the Rule of Law

2004-08-25T19:09:00.000-05:00

Of all of the types of speech implicated by the first amendment, political speech has always been deemed the most important. Our right to criticize the government, to call into question the policies, actions, and even character of our leaders, incumbent candidates, and political challengers ought to be the most cherished part of the freedoms that the first amendment attempts to protect. Even if Madison’s initial opposition to the bill of rights had been successful, freedom of political speech would still be implicit in the structures of our government as laid out in the constitution, structures that, in the absence of free speech, could not properly function.

But now the warning of Justice Scalia in his McConnell dissent has been proven all too true: in our zealousness to achieve equality and fairness on playing field of politics, we have dealt serious blows to that most critical institution, our freedom to criticize our government. We have allowed those in office, those who have the most vested, parochial interest in regulating the course of our political discourse, to shape and limit it. And, as Scalia also points out, now that the Court has announced that preventing circumvention of campaign finance laws is a valid justification for promulgating new, more restrictive campaign finance laws, no logical principle remains to prevent Congress from regulating political free speech into total oblivion.

That government may not mute or muffle the voice of one so as to allow another to be heard has always been a primary principle of the first amendment. Liberty is the end, not equality. Liberty, a substantive value respecting the dignity and autonomy of man, as opposed to equality, a mere measurement or comparison that cannot justify anything without reference to some other value, has always been the core of first amendment jurisprudence. Just as it would be ludicrous to put irons on the athlete born naturally quick in order to foster equality, just as it would be ridiculous to limit the speeches of those born eloquent, it is equally abhorrent when the government attempts to limit the amount of money an individual may spend on communicating his political message such that others with less resources may be heard.

But this is where we are. Money is not speech, said the Supreme Court in McConnell, and therefore it may be regulated. But, as Justice Scalia pointed out, how is saying that money is not speech any different from saying that paper is not speech, and then passing an act that all paper must bear a stamp indicating that tax has been payed? How is saying that money is not speech any different from saying that book binding and publishing is not speech, and then regulating who may and may not bind and publish books? There is no difference.

The idiotic complexity of our campaign finance law, born of the reality that we cannot remove money from politics without stifling political speech entirely but attempting to do just that anyway, is so monstrous that we are at the point where no citizen can truly know if the expenditures he makes to voice his opinion are legal or not. Reference to the law is no help without the aid of a team of expensive attorneys. And so a system of laws so incoherent and dense as to at least temporarily befuddle even the most astute lawyer has become a political tool, a weapon wielded only by those with huge resources, to force the political discourse in the direction the person with the best lawyers and advisers hopes to move it. Aristotle had a name for such a regime: Not democracy, but oligarchy.

An oligarchy of the lawyers and the wealthy, of the Kerrys and the Edwardses, of the sophists. When citizens were free to spend their money on expressing their opinions, to pool it as they see fit in the forms they so desired, we were virtually guaranteed that there would be wealthy contributors on all sides of every issue -- if there were not, perhaps that said something about the argument being made. Thus, a certain natural equality was born of that liberty of political expression. Now, I am hard pressed even to tell my mother whether she may distribute a leaflet to churchgoers mentioning a candidate for federal office with impunity, and to the extent I can, it is only because I am trained in the law already. Now, John Kerry can make wild claims that the President is violating campaign finance laws, and the average citizen has no way of checking the veracity of Kerry’s assertion -- the campaign finance laws might as well be written in ancient Etruscan. And Kerry depends on that forced ignorance of the law to garner support and demonize the President.

The rule of law, that eminent principle which we so cherish because it secures for us our liberty, is undermined when the demos cannot understand the law. Freedom is in name only when the laws that govern us are unknowable to us. When that unknowable law is one governing our political speech, our very system is in jeopardy. We might as well be living under the hand of a dictator that punishes political speech by his will -- the difference between that and being punished for violating a law the average person has no means of understanding is frighteningly small.

We must reverse course, we must not be fooled into thinking that fairness and equality in political speech can justify putting irons on the eloquent and wealthy. If we do not, we may end up fighting for liberty and freedom abroad even as we let it slip away at home.

A Dialogue: The Good, Part I

2004-08-04T19:14:00.000-05:00

A Dialogue: The Good, Part I
A person challenged me the other day as to whether or not good and evil actually exist. This person explained that he was a moral skeptic and cultural relativist. What follows is a loose adaptation of our conversation -- I'll call this fellow Relativius ("R"), and I'll be Marius ("M"):

R: You write much assuming that there is such a thing as good and such a thing as evil, and that we can tell them apart. Without that assumption, your arguments fail. I don't think we can be so sure. What is good to me may not be good to you and what is right in one cultural context may not be in another. Granted, there are things that are repugnant to most humans, but that might just be some sort of survival instinct kicking in, a feeling that were that behavior universalized, the practice would threaten all of mankind including the one having the feeling.

M: Would you at least agree that good and evil, if they exist in an absolute sense, are related?

R: Yes, they would seem to be.

M: So the good is the opposite of evil and vice versa.

R: I suppose, if they exist at all that is.

M: And evil is an absence of good.

R: Yes.

M: Now, if we are assuming that they actually exist then we are saying that one of them, at least, has actual substance such that the other can be defined as the lack of the first, and that lacking or that taking away is also a definite kind of existence.

R: Yes, certainly -- that is obvious.

M: So which would most likely be the one with real substance, assuming it actually exists?

R: It is difficult to say, but I would like to say the Good.

M: Indeed, so would any reasonable person. Your inclination to say so is indicative of a fact about the reality of the Good. But I digress. We are working now with assumptions, trying to figure out where the substance must be if Good and evil do indeed actually exist. What kinds things strike you as 'Good' according to your instincts?

R: Well, things I suppose such as fair laws, happy relationships and the like.

M: OK, how about beauty? The beauty of a cherry tree blossoming in spring? How about a mother giving birth to healthy children?

R: Yes, those strike most people as good, but then again, that's all relative.

M: Yes, but at least for now, from our perspectives, these things strike us as partaking in some measure of the Good, if there is such a thing.

R: Yes.

M: Would you say that these things, trees blossoming, relationships developing, mothers birthing, and governments promulgating fair laws are acts of creation?

R: Yes, I suppose if you mean as opposed to acts that destroy.

M: Exactly. Evil does not create, does it?

R: It can I think -- look at Adolf Hitler. He was on his way to 'creating' a Third Reich and 'room to live' for his arian race. If anything is evil, that would be, if there is such a thing as evil, right? And I'm not admitting there is, but it seems like that evil was an evil of 'creating'.

M: But to get to the desired end point, he created nothing but tools employed in destroying lives, destroying relationships, and destroying entire communities. He created nothing, but rather destroyed to implement his twisted vision of a new society.

R: Well, that is true beyond a doubt.

M: So the Good is found in acts of creation, like the forming of relationships, or the birth of a child, while it would seem evil is found in acts of destruction or of preventing those acts of creation.

R: It would seem, again assuming that good and evil even exist, which I still do not think is the case.

M: Very well, but as the Good is found in acts of creation, it must be the one with substance, correct?

R: It would seem so.

M: And evil is a lack or a destruction of that which is good.

R: Yes.

M: Evil must then be linked to chaos and loneliness, and, ultimately, nothingness.

R: Why?

M: What does one who plots destruction of things that are good have in mind when he does it?

R: I suppose he must think of some end he desires above those things he is destroying.

M: And what would be the ultimate evil end?

R: Destroying everything, I suppose.

M: And once everything is destroyed, the evildoer would be utterly alone, having even destroyed those who may have assisted him in the earlier phases of destruction.

R: I suppose.

M: There can be no point to that, as he has cut himself off from all possible forms of the Good -- he cannot even exercise power, as there is nothing to exercise it over. It is chaotic, meaningless destuction that he has engaged in, and he is absolutely alone onceit is over.

R: Yes.

M: What then? The final act of destruction, the only person he can exercise power over is himself, and having finished that final act, nothing would remain.

R: Indeed. So ultimate evil is linked to the opposite of creation -- it is absolute nothingness.

M: And the good is the one of the two, therefore, with substance -- it is creation.

R: It would seem.

M: So which then must precede? Things in general, and by that I mean being itself, or the Good? Evil cannot precede because it exists as an absence of Good.

R: Well, didn't we just say they are the same thing?

M: Yes, and no. Acts of creation take a measure of the Good, if the Good has actual existence. That is why we can call a certain act good or not. If it creates, if it is not of chaos but of order, then it partakes of the Good.

R: Well, then I guess Good must come first.

M: Yes. Were that not the case, we could not call the very first act good or bad.

R: Yes.

M: And the Good then cannot have been created, but preexists creation.

R: OK, so I'll concede that if Good and Evil actually exist, then the Good must be the one that has actual substance, evil does not, and the Good must precede being.

M: Yes -- the Good is like light, and evil is the shadow cast when something acts to block the light.

R: Yes, yes, but we still haven't said anything about whether good or evil do exist or not. I still maintain they do not. But the day is getting late -- perhaps we can continue another time.

M: Certainly.

Book Review: A Liberal's Search for a New International Order

2004-08-02T19:12:00.000-05:00

As we enter a new phase of international politics, one in which states cannot be assumed to have equal moral authority, in which sovereignty is decentralizing and changing, in which the stakes are raised because of proliferation, old institutions such as the United Nations have become outmoded, and a new framework for international law is required. As conservatives launch upon an overtly moral, aggressive, and power-politically astute framework centering on ‘coalitions of the willing’ as a basis for a new, precedent-driven international law, liberals struggle to find a place in our unstable world for their utopian ideals (witness John Kerry’s total lack of a coherent foreign policy). Anne Marie Slaughter’s A New World Order is a liberal’s attempt to describe precisely that -- an emerging, different kind of society of states along with a new and different idea of sovereignty. It is a book emblematic of liberals’ search for a new take on international law and politics. Having finished reading it, and it being thoroughly timely, I thought I might write a review.

At the core of Slaughter’s analysis iss the concept of the transgovernmental network -- collections of legislators, judges, or regulators performing the same role in each of their respective domestic polities collaborating together and sharing information. It is her hope that this diffuse institution will replace the more formal international institutions such as the U.N. that have proven their inefficacy, much to the chagrin of liberals. Slaughter’s ‘networks’ can have very positive effects from a practical standpoint. A ‘network’ can be, however, one of any of a large number of very different looking entities, with different purposes, sizes, forms, and styles. Some achieve their goals efficiently, others fail. Slaughter’s analysis brings a lot of deserved attention to this new phenomenon of governance, but her attempt to piece together an entire ‘new world order’ from this theoretically lower-level tool of governance leaves a lot to be desired.

Slaughter does highlight important things that networks already do and highlights possibilities for increasing their utility in the future. She divides networks generally into three types: enforcement, information, and harmonization. Networks of enforcement seek to efficiently enforce domestic rules where their targets are spilling over national borders. Information networks share their experience, best practices, and other information, allowing for collaboration and the development of useful dialogue between network members and efficient practices in their respective countries. Harmonization networks seek to harmonize rules and regulations, again with efficiency as a goal. Slaughter highlights several examples, including that of the Basle committee, which has harmonized capital adequacy standards in its member countries. Networks of regulators such as these, Slaughter points out, are not ‘organizations’ in the traditional sense. They are not created by treaty, and do not have traditional legal standing. Rather, through agreement amongst the regulator-members themselves, such networks act via ‘soft power,’ adopting informal agreements and setting standards amongst themselves. When the regulators return home, they use their domestic ‘hard power’ to enact that which they agreed on, thereby translating the ‘soft’ will of the network into ‘hard’ law. Such networks can thus promote regulatory efficiency and harmonization of practices and standards, ‘under the radar’ of the traditional framework of the state.

Slaughter has clearly highlighted an important phenomenon which is creating real change in the way states are governed and in the international system. She makes a mistake, however, when she moves from highlighting and evaluating these important developments to envisioning them as the core of a new international system of governance. Any theory which attempts to describe and advocate an emerging world order must do a number of important things if it is to be successful. First, any discussion of the international order must attempt to understand the nature of states individually. This means assessing states’ purposes and ends, their bases for legitimacy, their claims to power, and their areas of sovereign competence. Only by first investigating these things can one hope to envision how these entities might interact and create law amongst themselves.

Slaughter does not explicitly discuss any of these things. Her starting point seems to be a vision of the state as it has existed in the twentieth century. From there, she claims that there will be a ‘disaggregation’ of sovereignty as various transgovernmental networks become empowered to do things over which the sovereign state previously had monopoly control. She seems to assume that the ends of states and the society of states in general will continue to be those things that the nation-states of the twentieth century have pursued, the only change being that those ends will be more efficiently pursued via networks.

Slaughter does lay out an ideological conception of a ‘just world order,’ the realization of which she claims networks will help bring about. Her ‘just world order’, however, is a purely normative, specific set of Western liberal values, entirely disconnected from her discussion of the nature of the world order. Her set of ‘ends’ for the world order, most of which is widely accepted by the West as inherently good, includes respect for the dignity of the human person, liberty, and democracy. It also includes things like vigorous environmental protection and social justice. How can she posit such a set of values and advocate an entire world order of structures to aid in those values’ promotion without discussing the universal claim to truth and the good of this set of values, and its relationship to the nature of the individual states that make up the world order? She cannot and still maintain a coherent theory. Instead, she assumes the inherent choiceworthiness of her values without actually advocating them directly, and then sets out describing the world and its structures around them (a typical liberal move, one which attempts to obfuscate any kind of value judgment). Because of this move, her vision takes on a utopian character and she loses the sense of reality present in her purely descriptive discussions of networks.

Slaughter’s willingness to gloss over important distinctions and theoretical concepts in order to get more quickly to her overarching vision is apparent in her descriptions of the utility of networks. For example, in her description of regulatory harmonization networks, such as the Basle committee, she recognizes that there is tension between such harmonization and domestic authority structures that normally might control banking policy. Harmonization occurs by the network’s use of soft power, and domestic authorities are frustrated by this seeming intrusion on domestic sovereignty. This, to Slaughter, is evidence of a trend. She advocates the disaggregation of sovereignty, and envisions that in the future such networks will be given actual sovereignty. Their role will be more formal and recognized as legitimate by the community of states. This is a typical example of her (and liberals’) leap from description to utopian, value-laden vision. One could argue that the criticisms made by domestic political authorities are misplaced -- they are not so much criticizing the existence of networks as they are the model of the administrative state that allows such networks to develop. If a transgovernmental network can develop and harmonize capital adequacy standards like the Basle committee has, there has been a large delegation of power -- perhaps too large, and in the U.S. context, perhaps unconstitutionally legislative. Such a network can only exist where individual states have chosen to delegate very large amounts of power to regulators, and have selected similar policy goals. The individual sovereign states create the possibility of the network, and to the extent they feel they have given up too much, are likely to take away that possibility.

The trend Slaughter sees towards networks is thus only present in those few areas where powerful governments have already chosen to delegate large amounts authority to lower level bureaucrats and have adopted similar policy goals to begin with. When looked at this way, the trend does not seem so large and inevitable. Rather, to the extent networks are useful tools to achieve the preexisting goals of the individual member states, networks will be actively pursued and utilized. Groups of powerful states may even see networks as a way of spreading their own values and practices in their own national interest. They might utilize them, with carrot and stick, to encourage other states to behave in ways beneficial to the group. However, to the extent states see networks as aggrandizing themselves and moving away from the values and policy goals of the member states, they will be actively fought, and the discretion that allows the networks to translate their soft power into hard power will be removed. As soon as a network is no longer a useful tool for the state, it will be abandoned. Networks cannot, therefore, form the basis for a world order -- they are tools of the creatures of the world order.

While Slaughter is to be applauded for drawing attention to and analyzing transgovernmental networks, her grandiose and theoretically unsound description of an emerging world order based on them borders on dangerous. Slaughter nearly completely ignores the negative side of networks. She does pay lip service to common criticisms, such as their lack of democratic accountability and their tendency to be technocratic, and the difficulty the publics they serve may have in seeing them. In her solutions to these problems she merely restates her case for healthy networks -- that they be open, that they should have websites, that they work within existing political structures. She does not address the core of these concerns -- that networks, in their very efficiency and efficacy, are dangerous. Just as Slaughter neglects to discuss the nature of the state and the nature of states’ legitimacy, she neglects to discuss the attributes of human nature that create the need for states and governments in the first place. She fails to describe how networks can govern -- how they can deal with the inherent human qualities that governments are designed to either counterbalance or enhance. She, like many liberals, seems to assume that governments are created merely to solve peoples’ problems in an efficient matter. This is why she is so ready to replace talk of ‘government’ with ‘governance,’ which seems to merely be a loose, problem-solving, efficiency-based vision of regulation. Networks, she argues, can be very efficient and will solve many problems. Even though she recognizes that our government in particular is designed to be inefficient, she does not go further and address the core of such concerns even as she advocates the disaggregation of sovereignty and the empowerment of networks. She does not address the costs of networks’ efficient problem-solving, costs that may be difficult to see because they are not immediate.

It is an axiom of human nature that persons in positions of power will try to aggrandize their position’s power vis-à-vis the system of which they form a part. Networks, if they are empowered as Slaughter suggests, will provide fertile soil for such corruption. Individual members of networks, Slaughter notes, can use networks to improve their own position in their domestic governments. As networks do not have democratic input and are relatively technocratic, they provide cover for such aggrandizing movements of power. Members might eventually be able to combine significant amounts of legislative and executive power, the perfect prescription for tyranny. Such networks would destabilize political governments, create new, undemocratic and unchecked centers of power quite unconnected with any particular community’s shared values, thereby disrupting one of the primary purposes of states: to promote the shared morality and of a community, and its particular vision of the common good. Slaughter, in that she does not even suggest any theory concerning the nature of states and the purposes of government, cannot adequately respond to such criticisms. Although such fears may seem vague and unfounded, entire systems of government have been designed to combat them. A survey of history would confirm those fears, but history is also notably lacking from Slaughter’s account.

In the end, Slaughter’s work is a liberal's idealistic attempt to replace the outdated post-World War II international system with a system that is less violent and less morality-driven than that which the current battle-of-ideas-meets-WMDs is forging for us. As is typical, her attempt disregards the reality of our imperfect human condition. Luckily, the visionary, normative portions of her work are not nearly persuasive enough to be dangerous, although it is a small step in a dangerous direction. An analysis of how networks function best might bring about more efficient government problem-solving in a much more limited, controlled way than Slaughter envisions. The discussion, however, should be centered on how networks can be used as tools of governance within existing political frameworks, understanding their limited purposes and their potential for abuse. It should not stray into dangerous, utopian visions of a new world order. It cannot be liberals’ new archetype for a new international legal system, no matter how good their intentions for it are.

Faith: Bulwark Against Power

2004-07-25T15:26:00.000-05:00

As I daydreamed a bit this morning, pondering our current battle against Islamist ideological terror and the presidential race, it struck me that two concepts more than any others clearly identify the inherent incorrectness of the Islamist (not Islamic) ideology and simultaneously counsel the reelection of the President. These two ideas or forces are, on a certain level, why we have governments in the first place -- one because we must erect bulwarks against our own flawed nature with respect to it, the other because we must organize society to encourage and facilitate it, for it leads to human flourshing. Respectively, they are Power (or more precisely, corrupting human greed for it) and Faith.

Both of these concepts also concern the hierarchy of being in this world we know, and in the world of the divine of which our knowledge is not direct. In accordance with Plato's Forms, that hierarchy we establish here amongst ourselves and between ourselves, animals, and God, is a mere shadow, or an imperfect reflection. Faith is our bridge to the divine. We can have a participation in that more eternal knowledge of the inherent rightness of God's ordering and its relation to our imperfect orderings in this world through faith -- and thus faith is the best and perhaps only possible weapon man has against the corruption and tempation of Power in this world, as Power is a corrupt human desire to become something 'higher' than human and therefore to alter the hierarchy of being. The temptation of Power apparently extends beyond this world -- for Christians, Lucifer fell prey to it. Thus, perhaps true salvation belongs to the souls which, when faced with the light of ultimate and final truth after walking over man's final threshold, can know and fully participate in the proper divine order, whatever it may be. Faith in life is indicative of that ability, knowing Truth and God when revealed. But returning to the more mundane, these thoughts counsel that our structural bulwarks against the rise of Power and its corruption may only slow the inevitable, act as a brake on the decline of Democracy into Tyranny that both Plato and Aristotle predicted and that history has proven.

Applying these ideas to the issues of the day, we can see that Islamism (not necessarily Islam) is not a true faith. True faith is a bulwark against Power, not a tool to achieve it. True faith lifts ones sight to higher things, transplants higher values into the places material, earthly values fill. True faith is confidence that God's ordering will come, that seeking Power on earth for one's self is futile silliness in light of the more perfect, divine order of being. Islamism, on the other hand, is nothing but a tool for power. It expressly aims to destroy human goods and usurp all earthly power for itself and its dogma. Its belief does not conform to reason, but flies against it, asking men to do things reasonable people know from the natural law written on their hearts are wrong. And the promised reward, even its purportedly divine component, is inherently selfish -- virgins in heaven, pleasure and power. We must stridently oppose such a corrupt 'faith' (or more properly, dogma).

Second, men of faith being our best bulwark against Power and corruption, they can best lead the charge against corrupt Islamist ideology. While we can never trust ourselves to a rule of men, placing such faithful men in our positions of power reinforces the structures of our government and assists them in their central task, preventing the decline of democracy into tyranny. Men of faith, however, are men that both have faith and act in conformity with it. They are men whose faith supplements reason and leads to fuller knowledge and a more complete morality. These leaders must follow the guidance of their conscience when crafting and executing our laws.

John Kerry refuses to apply his faith to his consideration of laws, and in so doing he renders whatever faith he has impotent, unable to translate higher values into our societal structure, and ineffectual against the corruption of Power. Demonstrating that he is not a man of faith in the way our President is, Mr. Kerry invokes his faith for political gain -- he claims to be against abortion because of his Catholic faith (trying to keep Catholics on his side), but then refuses to act on his conviction for fear of 'imposing' his beliefs on others (such that his pro-choice base is not threatened by his statement to appeal to the Catholic vote). If Kerry is not above using his faith as a political tool, we must question whether his initiatives and policies are primarily aimed at the public good, or his own good -- his own quest for Power. That is not true leadership. And it is certainly not what we need when we face an enemy convinced that the faiths and values of the West must be wiped from the earth.

Why This Election Matters: Demagoguery, Tyranny, and Integrity

2004-07-22T15:47:00.000-05:00

"Whether it is a matter of art, music or politics, it is only the ‘best men’ who are capable of true judgement. The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. Nothing must compel him to hand down a verdict that belies his own convictions." Plato, The Laws 659a

Plato understood that some men are more fit to judge and to lead than are others. Some, in their integrity, their commitment to the virtues, and their philosophic nature (i.e., their access to the true form of the Good), will make more just judgments in the role of judge, and will better guide the polis in the role of politician. Although this may sound slightly elitist, America, in its shared democratic values, agrees with Plato -- we have selected the vehicle of elections as the best way to choose those who are more fit to govern and entrust them with positions of power. Elected officials are not just conduits for the views of the people -- they are also filters, chosen because of their integrity and conscientiousness to apply those qualities to their own judgments.

Edmund Burke, in his Speech to the Electors of Bristol discusses the nature of representation. The representative’s
unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you [constituents], to any man, or any man living...They are a trust from Providence. ... [G]overnment and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion...?

Burke echoes Plato, that it is the natural conscience of a man that ought guide him in governance, for he has been selected by his fellow citizens because his conscience is particularly 'enlightened.' To ignore that God-given conscience for political considerations or in deference to a realization that others may not agree with you is a violation of the trust of the people governed and the trust of our Creator. When a political leader rejects his conscience and instead applies political judgments alone, he moves from true political leader to demagogue.

Plato's analysis of the natural decline of democracy into tyranny reflects the conversion of the politician into the demagogue. Plato feared not the demos itself, but the demagogue. It is the demagogue who, in a situation where the state faces unrest due to perceived unfairness and enmity between haves and have-nots, uses that unrest as a vehicle to emerge as a popular hero, promising redistribution of wealth or cancellation of debts to the poor. See The Republic at 564c-66d. The demagogue puts the political above conscience, rallies support by appealing to humanity's natural greed. The tyrant emerges as a champion of the people, much like Hitler, but is soon revealed to be something else entirely, something evil.

In a modern democracy, something Plato could not have envisioned but to which his principles are equally applicable (for as Madison asked in Federalist 51, "What is government but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"), elections and representative government are a principle check designed to prevent Plato's feared decline to tyranny. The rise of demagoguery, however, distorts the policy behind holding election. Elections move from being a means of selecting the 'best' men of integrity and conscience to lead, and rather become a means of discovering which candidate's promises of entitlements, gifts, and redistribution are more substantial and appealing to the wants of the people. The more such demagoguery continues unquestioned, the more it is entrenched, and the less useful elections become. With demagogues in position of power, citizens' ideas about government become more and more distorted and the proper ideal of government is lost, destroying the power of representation to act as a bulwark against the decline of democracy into tyranny.

Thus, the current election is absolutely crucial. John Kerry and John Edwards' demagoguery is unabashed. While Edwards intentionally employs class warfare rhetoric to drive a wedge between rich and poor, appealing to human greed and superficial notions of fairness, John Kerry admits that he refuses to apply the convictions of his conscience as regards abortion to the law of abortion in deference to the beliefs of others (but truly in deference to political considerations). George Bush, on the other hand, is unapologetic about his beliefs and everyone knows precisely where he stands. His leadership, which always follows the dictates of his conscience, embodies integrity. In a time where an external evil attempts to overwhelm our culture and kill as many innocents associated with it as possible, we need true leadership and real integrity. That Kerry and Edwards resort to demagoguery in such a time, that they seem unable to explain a principled reason for the virtue of their plans for government other than hatred of the other electoral choice, demonstrates convincingly their lack of the integrity our times demand, that they care only for their own power. At this critical juncture, will America choose demagoguery or integrity? Will our system remain a bulwark against the rise of tyranny? Or will greed overpower reason? Only time will tell. I believe in America, and I believe we will make the right choice -- despite the appeal of the demagogue, Americans can sense virtue when it confronts them. In George W. Bush we have a powerful and unique example of true integrity. Thankful for strong leadership in difficult times, America will reelect the President.

Platonic Conservatism and the War

2004-07-02T15:27:00.000-05:00

I have written quite a bit in this space regarding the political ideas of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle is generally rational and deliberate, concentrating on politics and government as central the habituation of virtue and the development of opportunities for human flourishing. Man is a political animal, and as such requires a well-ordered community and political setting in order to individually develop into something more akin to what he or she should be. Plato in this respect says something similar: that there is such are such things as Ideas, that Good is real and absolute, and that in our lives we should all individually attempt to become more like that which we should be. However, this superficial analysis hides very deep divergences in the two great philosophers' thought. Plato, as emphasized in his cave analogy in The Republic, sees human goods as mere 'shadows' of what truly matters. Indeed, our competition for human goods, our desire for scientific knowledge, all of this is a degree removed from some true reality the average person does not ever come to know. When the man breaks his shackles and leaves the cave, ascending to the light above, he is blinded by the brightness of the sun, the Good, and cannot at first contemplate it. After his eyes adjust, he returns below to share his new knowledge with his colleagues still living amongst the shadows. They are startled and try to kill him, as he upsets their system of values based on the shadows they see before them on the wall. This discovery of the ultimate Good, which can be likened to the salvation of the soul, or perhaps redemption by faith in the Christian condition, seems unrelated to the skill with which the cave dweller identifies the shadows on the wall. Thus, Plato seems to be telling us that the shadows of this world are only related to the Good insofar as they have the same ultimate source -- light, the symbol for the Good, casts the shadows on the wall. But we all need to 'turn around' away from the shadows to really see the source of the light. Better yet, we need to come out of the cave. In a way, the more successful the shadow-makers are their business of creating a system of shadow-based values, the less people would ever come to know the source of the light of the Good. In order to avoid strife (recall that the person who leaves the cave and returns is threatened with violence), the shadows and that system of living is key. But it should also be the duty of those who run that shadow show to allow somehow for those who are prepared for it to turn around, see the light, and to leave the cave.

Analogizing to a system of government, the government which governs best seems to be the one which maintains an orderly 'shadow-show,' that is, promotes the more mundane human virtue and their practice, i.e., courage, moderation, consideration for others, etc. These lesser virtues are virtues in and of themselves, and they relate to the Good. Ultimate Good, however, salvation, must not be stymied by such a system. It seems that the practicing of the virtues cannot bring one to that salvation, that 'turning around' to see the true source of the light, even though to practice them is a good thing in and of itself. But government cannot be allowed to promote the shadows above what they are -- just shadows of what really is. And thus we must realize that government is a facilitator of something higher. While providing for order and earthly goods, it must facilitate and allow philosophy and revealed truth to bring souls to that higher Good. It must not kill the philosopher, kill Socrates or Christ. And it must not put other things in the place of the philosopher, or of Christ (as an aside, it was perhaps one of the most intelligent statements of a politician of our times when President Bush called Christ his most admired political philosopher). In our democracy, the government, promoting an entitlement mentality amongst the people, has come dangerously close to placing material well-being and an ideology of egalitarianism into that place which ought to be reserved for higher things. In extremist Islamist societies, the dogma of a particular interpretation of the Koran as the ungrounded and never bending will of a not necessarily logical god takes the place of true philosophy. Both are dangerous. While religion is clearly a path to that higher good, dogma cannot be, and the state must leave that arena open for the individual. Freedom of religion and to philosophize is crucial even as our modern first amendment jurisprudence which borders on enforcing a total freedom from religion is precisely the kind of evil I am describing. Thus in the philosophy of Plato we see the roots of those values which modern American conservatism cherishes: freedom to be religious, freedom to philosophize, and the need to combat evil, to combat those at home and, more pertinently now, those abroad who would through their dogma would kill a modern day Socrates and reverse the proper ordering of beings and of the Good.

As a final note, I was struck watching Saddam Hussein being brought before the investigative Iraqi judge yesterday by one of his comments. After asserting that he was still the President of Iraq and chosen by the people, he challenged the law under which he was being brought to trial. After the judge attempted to put Hussein in his proper place, Hussein did something very interesting -- he, as a last resort in an argument he was losing by any measure of logic, appealed to something illogical, to the Koran, specifically making an appeal to it as the only true source of law, a source of law which, Saddam implied, makes the laws of the infidel Coalition and those who cooperate with them not law but rather anathema. This is a fascinating example both of the increasing tendency Saddam had been showing of his willingness to use Islamism as a driving doctrine and tool for his regime of terror, but also now after his defeat, to use it as a battle call to rally insurgents and fundamentalists to his cause. Remember that these are the terrorists and radicals that, according to the press, are not in any way connected to Hussein and never were nor could have been. Thus, as usual, by refusing to be philosophical and failing to look past their own ideology, the American left and the press miss the greater intellectual currents that tie the dictator to the terrorists, and entirely miss the philosophical foundations of the current war. Wolf Blitzer and company should reread their Plato.

Classism and Materialism

2004-06-28T15:32:00.000-05:00

A relatively random thought for Friday. A couple days ago, a friend remarked to me that, despite his upper-middle class income, his 'sympathies' truly lie with the 'working class.' I let the remark pass, but thought immediately to myself, "Why do you insist on viewing people as members of groups arranged according to peoples' socioeconomic status?" This led me to think, "Would your sympathies no longer be with a person if he or she adopted a new career path, was promoted, or otherwise did something that increased his or her income, thereby lifting him or her out of the so-called 'working class'? Does your care for a person terminate when they help themselves out of a financially difficult situation?" This then led me to think, "Why do you base your 'sympathies' on a person's material wealth at all? Is a wealthy person truly any happier than a poor person? Is concern for the economic well-being of the poor such a noble thing? Shouldn't we be happier that a person is poor yet living a virtuous life than if they were rich and yet living a life of vice and excess?" Of course, my friend, like many left-wingers, fixates on the mundane and worldly, the material, presuming that the goal of government is to build the 'perfect' city here on earth, while those of us who are both a bit more practical and bit more interested in the transcedent know that such a goal is the ultimate folly.

Iraq and Plato's Laws: Building the Second Best City

2004-06-27T15:29:00.000-05:00

"Anyone who uses reason and experience will recognize that a second-best city is to be constructed %85 That city and that constitution are first, and the laws are best, where the old proverb holds as much as possible throughout the whole city: it is said that the things of friends really are in common." (Plato, Laws 739A3-740C3)

In this famous passage, the Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws informs his partners in dialogue that they are exploring and describing how to create not the ideal city, but the second-best city, for that is what they should do in building their new city on Crete. Those who are not blinded by ideology, those who can use reason and have experience can plainly see that the ideal city is not possible given the failings of human nature; indeed to attempt the construction of the first-best city will lead to corruptions and great evils. The first, best city, the Athenian says, is that where throughout the entire polis property is held communally. While ideal, this is foolish and impossible -- something best left to the imagination, or perhaps reserved for the transcendent city. It is the arrangement of property contrived in The Republic (at least as to the first two classes of citizens), a discussion where Socrates (and significantly not the Athenian Stranger) was embarking on a different kind of mission from that in the Laws: Socrates was searching for the meaning of justice for men individually through the analogy of the city, justice writ large. From comparing the ideal arrangements of the Republic's polis, justice was to be found and then reduced to guide the individual conscience. Thus the Republic was never really meant to be attempted -- the best possible city that can actually be brought intexistencece, at least in our mundane sphere, is the second-best, that in the Laws.

Thus in the Laws, Plato, through the Athenian, expresses what has become the dominant theme of modern American conservatism: that pragmatic, anti-ideological point of view which sees Utopia as dangerous and knows the place of men as against gods and devils. It is the anti-communist impulse that recognizes the danger in promoting man to a divine position, or promoting nature and lesser creations above man. It is a recognition of our own limits, and our own temptation to corruption. It is the realization that government's greatest goal is to do no harm while encouraging virtue to flourish. Plato saw all of this nearly 2,400 years ago, nothing has really changed save the deadliness of our weapons and therefore the scale of danger presented by refusing to understand our own human flaws.

Liberals would do well to remember these teachings of Plato, and try not to fall pray to the temptation to believe too much in our progression beyond the moral state of classical man. We have done a fair job of constructing that best truly possible but second-best city here in America, and we are currently attempting to do the same for a foreign people, a task not totally unlike that of the Athenian stranger. For while the men of Crete and Athens there had different cultures and different nationalities, they shared what all of us share, the reality of the Good and of Justice, realities that do not change. They shared the same human drives and failings, and thus the best and second-best city for an Athenian was the same at some level as for those who hailed from Crete. There is hope in Iraq if transcendent Good is allowed to cut through dogma enough to shine on that part of the Iraqi people which yearns for the same things we do, values the same things all men do. Even while evil exists and attempts to thwart us in our task, we should be heartened by the desperation evil men currently show, the gravitation to Iraq of every brand of evildoer and fanatic, for they come to fight us because they see us cutting through their dogma, letting Good shine through. They know that if we succeed in building the second-best city, they and their plans for the region are doomed to failure.

Islamo-Sophist Tyranny

2004-06-25T15:30:00.000-05:00

Can Western political philosophy contemplate Islamism (the ideological-extremist brand of Islam preached by Islamic radicals)? Can it understand Islamism or address the Islamist ideologue-politician? Simply put, the answer is no. And in that answer lies the reason we fight.

To unpack these questions, one must first understand what political philosophy is and is not in the Western sense. Political philosophy is the address of the philosopher to the politician. Here, I use 'philosopher' as a normatively loaded term as one who exposes realities outside politics to the test of truth. The philosopher is he who seeks the truth of things in conversation with others with that same end, and seeks that truth for its own sake. The philosopher, like Aristotle, believes in truth and therefore concerns himself with metaphysics, the study of being. This, of course, is the opposite of the ideologue, he who entertains a theory, basing it on yet more theories, and ultimately ignores the truth of things, even to the point of rejecting the possibility of truth. The ideologue is the sophist who uses words to convince rather than to explore, he is Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, versus the uncorrupted youth who wills to know rather than knowing to will.

The political philosopher is the philosopher as he addresses the politician. In his most proper role, the political philosopher coaxes the politician away from tyranny, away from suppressing philosophy. The politicians killed Socrates, and the politicians killed Christ. Such were failures of political philosophy. Dangers arise when ideologue-sophists take up the role of the political philosopher. The politicians killed Socrates, but it is the sophist who prepared the politician to so act. The sophist as political philosopher (ignoring the oxymoron), like Machiavelli, coaxes the politician to tyranny rather than vice versa. The ideologue provides a theory for the politician to seize in his pursuit of his own ends. The classic tyrant, the ruler who rules only for the good of himself, the ruler who suppresses philosophy, uses ideology as a tool.

Now, however, we see a new, more menacing form of would-be tyrant. The philosopher-politician, like Plato's philosopher-king, in a world not corrupted like our own, would be the ideal benevolent ruler. Instead, in our mundane existence, the philosopher-politician is more likely to be the sophist-politician, the corrupted philosopher become king. Such a man adheres to an ideology, rejects truth save for what his ideology reveals, ignores contradictions with that which is, and seeks remorselessly to universalize the ideology. He is the root and bringer of evil, as evil begins with mistakes in thought and theory put into action and perpetuated.

In our era, this is the Islamist militant, seeking nothing but the universalization of his own religious ideology and ignoring truth and justice. The Islamist-sophist-politician makes a plea to the most base and diabolical in an impoverished people, promising heavenly reward, with the end of making the state a tool of the ideology. To this end he emphasizes the ungrounded and total will of Allah, detached from considerations of truth and reason, placing this will above that which is. In putting will before reason, revealed truth before metaphysics, the Islamist creates a vehicle for mobilizing men that cannot converse with or even contemplate a worldview based on philosophy and the truth of things, a national telos devoted to the truth of a core of values as fundamentally Good, Western political philosophy. There is a total disconnect -- the two can only fight.

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant of the more classic type, but he was learning more and more to use Islamism as a tool, to befriend it and equip it. Witness his addition of Allahu Akhbar to the Iraqi flag. He was a ruler with resources and weaponry, coming more and more to envision himself at the head of an Islamic superstate, and thus he was too dangerous to ignore. Zarqawi and bin Laden are the sophist-politicians, ideologues in the worst sense of the word. With them there is no reasoning, there is no ability for discourse. To even attempt such is folly. Islamist sophist-tyranny is too dangerous to merely appease and too different for co-existence. It must be stamped out and Islam must rid itself of it, or it must destroy us.

Appeasement and Evil

2004-06-23T15:31:00.000-05:00

The nausea-inducing Ted Rall recently posted on his weblog regarding the recent beheadings in the Middle East:

Obviously the murderers are first and foremost to blame. But a share of the responsibility also lies at the feet of those who have made America so despised throughout the world: presidents, policymakers and spooks past and present. They made "American" a dirty word. They made Americans targets.

Mr. Rall obviously hates America and what it stands for. The presidents and policymakers he speaks of acted in the interests of America and in the interests of those values America stands for. They are the presidents that defended freedom and democracy in World War II, that fought off the godless menace of communism, and that most recently liberated a people from the grip of a ruthless, murderous dictator. If that makes "American" a dirty word and makes us targets, it is not because what we have done and what we defend is wrong or blameworthy. No, it is because the people that target us and believe that we and our values are 'dirty' have evil in their souls. They target us because we wish to make men free, because we fight for what we believe in, and because we threaten their fanatical dreams of domination and oppression. Given that those who target us are so evil, in a way we should rejoice that they target us (even as we lament that evil men exist), for it proves our own goodness. If evil men were to befriend us, we should worry for our own souls.

Ted Rall goes on to blame President Bush:

As we consider these gruesome murders, we should consider them on par with the gruesome murders of 800+ American servicemen and women and close to 100,000 Iraqi and Afghan civilians and soldiers killed during Bush's two wars. Bush's hands are dripping with their blood, just as surely as the men who drew the knives across Berg and Johnson's throats.

Again, Rall demonstrates his inability to distinguish between good and evil. When soldiers sacrifice their lives for the good of their comrades and a foreign people with whom they have no ties, their acts of selflessness ought to receive our highest praise. Instead, Rall forgets the worthy motives of the soldiers and the end of national security, and writes as if the President, motivated by nothing but hatred, killed our own men himself. That he can equate President Bush, one in that line of Presidents standing up for our core beliefs and fighting to protect our homeland and ways of living, with Islamist terrorists thirsty for the blood of the infidel and motivated by nothing but murderous religious zeal makes plain Mr. Rall's own moral depravity. His words are an affront to all those men and women and their families who have sacrificed so much over the last two hundred years for the cause of liberty and democracy.

Abortion and Naturalness

2004-06-22T15:44:00.000-05:00

We have all heard the standard arguments on both sides of the abortion issue: the claim of the privacy interest in one's own body versus the plea for the life of a pure innocent. Once you get an abortion proponent to admit that there is no difference between a fully-developed fetus prior to labor and a fetus just born, and once you get them to admit that, given changing technology, viability is not a defensible reference for determining the moral value of an innocent human life, potential or in being, they turn to the famous 'violinist.' Yes, abortion may be the taking of innocent human life, but it is justified: it is like self defense. Imagine, they say, a violinist that is dying and is hooked up to a person during the night, staying alive by relying on that person's organs and bodily functions. Come the morning, the victim could disconnect the violinist even though he is innocent of the crime as one cannot demand the co-option of another's body for any purpose.

Brilliant, right? Not really. Besides being a ludicrous, unreal hypothetical, there are key differences between it and a pregnancy. First, the woman chooses to undertake the risk of becoming pregnant whereas the sleeping person in the example certainly did not go to bed understanding the risk of being hooked up to a dying violinist during the night. That difference is crucial and distinguishes the violinist example from any pregnancy save one resulting from rape. Second, the example overlooks the naturalness of the process of pregnancy and childbearing. The woman's body is not designed to be hooked up to a dying violinist. It is designed, however, to bear offspring. To this a pro-choice advocate no doubt will reply, as Laurence Tribe has, that what is natural is irrelevant; it cannot be an excuse for 'co-opting' a woman's body for nine months and inflicting hardships upon her only because she happens to be female and thus is saddled unequally vis-a-vis men with the risks involved in sexual intercourse. Such a response, besides being derogatory of one of the highest human functions and of the Creator's design, contradicts itself. The no doubt liberal abortion proponent that makes this response is arguing that because something is 'natural,' it is not therefore 'moral' or 'choiceworthy.' To conclude thusly is arbitrary, says the pro-choice proponent. Rather, it is 'unfair' to so saddle woman unequally. So the abortion proponent is arguing from a point of fairness and equality. But where does one get such a starting point for argument? Every argument, once the many layers are removed, comes down to a point of belief or faith, just as does every law. A speed limit law boils down to a concern for the sanctity of human life. One cannot prove that human life is sacred, and one cannot prove that 'fairness' is choiceworthy. Instead, these bases for argument are taken on faith and more importantly are generally derived from our natural human inclinations -- the laws written on our hearts. We seek fairness for no other reason (unless for a purely religious reason) than we naturally feel that we should seek to be fair. So an argument from fairness and equality is also an argument from that which is natural, and to use the concept of fairness to declare 'naturalness' (fairness's own root) arbitrary is paradoxical. It is like the total skeptic affirming the truth of the unknowability of things. If fairness is choiceworthy, so is anything else written into the design of the human being, including the function of childbirth.

Al Qaeda-Iraq Links

2004-06-21T15:32:00.000-05:00

New evidence came to light yesterday regarding a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime (full story available here.) Apparently, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a high-placed lieutenant colonel in the Fedayeen Saddam (Hussein's highly trained irregular warfare volunteer special forces), was also a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda and attended a planning meeting for the September 11th attacks held in Kuala Lampur in January of 2000.

This new bit of evidence is helpful in terms of proving after the fact the need to go to war, but it is not necessary or helpful to be thinking in such retrospective terms, nor is the press' skepticism of the war and the reasoning behind it a healthy one. Whatever may have been said publicly by the Administration, we went to war knowing two realities, first, that there is a large group of Middle Easterners fanatically dedicated to the destruction of Israel, America, and everything the West stands for, even to the point of sacrificing their own lives and those of their friends. Second, there was a rogue dictator who had proved his militarism in the past, was bent on developing weapons of mass destruction, and was harboring delusions of territorial expansion. These two menaces not only shared the same enemy, but the same culture, faith, and region of the world. Their mere proximity to each other was too dangerous to be allowed to continue given the reality of weapons that can kill thousands or even millions in one strike, and the reality of Islamists who have already demonstrated that they dream of martyrdom in the slaughter of innocent Americans. That there were no overt ties between Al Qaeda and Iraq was and is irrelevant -- what is more crucial is that there could have been, and there likely would have been in the future. That is, after all, what preemption is all about, stopping something before it can develop.

But the press and liberal Democrats do not understand the concept of preemption and apparently cannot see, even after September 11th, the dangers we face. The press is already attempting to downplay the new evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. In his article for the UPI, Shaun Waterman quotes an army of liberal pundits. Peter Bergen says that "Shakir is a pretty common name," and that "perhaps al-Qaida had penetrated Saddam's security apparatus." Why would Al Qaeda want to 'penetrate' Saddam's Fedayeen, a paramilitary force trained in guerilla tactics? If Al Qaeda wanted to gather intelligence on Saddam and his regime, that would not be the place to do it. Waterman also downplays the significance of the Fedayeen Saddam, saying "the Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare," and quoting Michael Eisenstadt to the effect that the Fedayeen were merely a group of "thugs and bumpkins." This is the same Fedayeen Saddam that the press a little over a year ago described as Saddam's crack paramilitary security apparatus, the loyalists still intact after the topple of Saddam's regime that could prevent the emergence of a stable Iraq. Then, the Fedayeen were a tool the press used to attack the President's policy and predict a negative outcome for the President's war. Now that an al-Qaeda link has been found in the Fedayeen, the press attempts to distance the group from Saddam and downplay its importance so as to undercut the significance of the link. The Fedayeen is suddenly a group of 'bumpkins' that received only a 'basic training' in guerilla tactics. It is as if the press hates George Bush more than it hopes for victory for America and the Iraqi people.

John Kerry, in the meantime, demands that the President give "a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose it now turns out is not supported by the facts." Neither, apparently, does John Kerry understand the concept of preemption. In a world of evil men and horrible weapons, we can't afford to wait for clear and concrete evidence to come to light before we take action, but rather we must act to stop such a combination before it is even contemplated. Once there is clear evidence, it is too late. This is not a law enforcement action, but a war. We are not trying to punish criminals, we are trying to stop an evil menace from devouring the very souls of an entire region of peoples and taking the lives of innocent Americans en masse. This is a war of survival, and 'clear evidence' is a luxury we can't afford.

The World Market and Sovereignty

2004-06-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

Just a quick additional thought to add to yesterday's post on sovereignty. Just as the rise of global telecommunications, new and faster shipping methods, harmonized trade law regimes and the like threaten nations' cultural identities requiring stronger moral leadership to keep a country unified, it also makes the welfare state less and less defensible. As blockages to global markets erode and international trade increases, the principle of comparative economic advantage becomes all the more important as the world comes to more approximate the ideal of economics. No longer can nations afford to concentrate their economic policies on maintaining or encouraging economic equality and ensuring the welfare of all, but rather they must concentrate on allowing individuals the greatest opportunities to participate in the global economy. Protectionist or welfare-oriented economic plans and policies will be washed over by the greater international economic forces, but the currents and eddies those blockages, or inefficiencies, stir up, the greater the harm to the well-being of that nation as a whole. To now in the face of a global economy insist on bottling up labor and capital in less relatively productive economic sectors for the sake of the few unfortunate workers who face hardships is to do two things: 1) To ignore the fact that we cannot create a perfect utopia here on earth, and 2) to condemn the national economy to relative decline as the inefficient industries consume resources on the dole of the government while preventing new areas of economic advantage from developing. Other nations will pass us up as we fall behind, and as our desire to maintain certain industries keeps us from developing, so too will we become more dependent on those industries as the price of retooling the economy becomes ever greater. The vicious cycle would indeed be difficult to break. As an additional note, we would also be denying poorer countries the jobs that their economies need to begin down the path of development, hoarding them for ourselves to our own detriment. We would do this in spite of the fact that sometimes a very poor country's poverty is its only true economic advantage and its only step stool to climb from that poverty. And yet this is what the 'compassionate' Kerry and his liberal colleagues would have us do.

So putting yesterday's thoughts together with today's, we see that global changes require that a state and a leader be more vocal and strong in his advocacy of values and the nation's cultural identity, but should also step back from economic regulation and insist all the more on allowing the global markets to work. Liberals would do just the opposite on both counts.

A New Sovereignty

2004-06-16T15:34:00.000-05:00

Liberals often remark that President Bush's 'unilateral' (i.e., without unified socialist Western European support) policy of preemptive defense has disrupted the international system's framework for maintaining order. They lament the affront the Bush Doctrine makes to the United Nations and to the idea that international institutions foster peace amongst nation-states with equal right to be at the table where decisions are made. As usual, their utopian dreams delude them, make them miss some of the cruder realities of the world.

If ever that ideal liberals strive to maintain did exist or made sense, it does no longer. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the conflict between capitalist democracy and communism, Islamism has re-entered the scene. Weapons technology and WMDs, loosed from the controlling bonds of the cold war, seem to the terrorists a more attainable means. At the same time, global telecommunications, the internet, mass media, and air travel have all developed to make the world a much smaller place. What does all of this mean for sovereignty and the international system? First, it means that the role of nation-states in the world and consequently of their leaders is changing. Communications, the internet, travel technology and cross border migrations have all served to dilute distinct cultures and threaten nations' distinctness and shared cultural values. In response, leaders must more vocally and forcefully champion their nations' identities and purposes, couching their policy pronouncements in terms of their countries' telos or ends. Given the rise of Islamism and terrorism, it is also clear that not all nations can claim their particular motives, ends, and animating principles to take an equal measure of goodness and justice as do others'. As we saw with the dysfunctionality of the United Nations with the cold war, it makes little sense to hope that bargaining and discussion with an enemy ideology will lead to peace. It therefore also makes no sense to accord each nation-state moral equivalence in terms of its right to act with sovereignty within its borders, and its right to interact with other sovereigns on the world stage. Couple this insight with the awesome power and reality of WMDs, and we see that it is very dangerous to so assume.

Given a world where values and justice must be championed so as not to be drowned out by the tempting relativism made attractive by cross-cultural communication, given a world where evil is readily apparent in the form of an ideology vying to attract fighters to its cause, and given the reality of WMDs, the old, utopian-liberal ideal of nations sitting down around a table to bring peace to the world by judging the legality of international acts is unworkable. Instead, international acts must become legal in common law fashion: We have set wonderful precedent in this new arena of international common law by getting together a group of like-minded nations to combat and preempt the dangers of a rogue, evil regime bent on obtaining WMDs and willing to harbor terrorists. We have with decisive action delimited the sphere of proper motives for sovereigns acting on the world stage. We have sent a message which, over time, may come to have the force of law -- not that might makes right, but rather that might can and should make right when called to do so. Given the dual reality of evil in the world and man's ability to discern it from that which is just, this is a good compromise.

An Aristotelean View of the New Iraq

2004-06-15T15:35:00.000-05:00

What makes a state what it is? Aristotle called the state the 'final natural political association,' coming after and flowing from the smaller natural associations of community or town, family, and the association within each individual man. The state is the final natural association because the people have shared common values and in those a shared telos or end. This is what gives the state its cohesiveness and allows it to move forward and grow with a sense of purpose and place in the larger international community. For diverse society like America, that 'glue' is our shared belief in ordered liberty, religious tolerance, and republican governance. For a country like England or France, the 'glue' is more related to ethnicity and a long, shared cultural tradition. Without such shared values and ends, a state cannot long survive at peace with itself.

Hence, the problems in the Middle East. Not passing judgment on motives, the Middle East and the Iraq we know were created by fiat where no shared values existed. In their absence, the soil was fertile for tyranny, as where there is chaos, the demand for order makes strict rule more palatable, and that rule will grow and corrupt itself. In any such situation, pretenders to the status of 'national telos' also sprout up, providing ideological ammunition for radicals desiring to take advantage of the unstable situation. Thus, in the Middle East and in Iraq in particular, we saw radical Islamism, the lowest common denominator between the radicals in each Islamic faction, claiming to be a shared system of values with the end of a tyrannical ideological superstate, pitted against would-be fascist dictators interested in power pure and simple.

Such a situation proved to be explosive, a threat to itself, its neighbors, and its ideological enemies. For our own self-defense, America had to intervene. And to fix the situation, we must attempt to supply the lacking element that created the situation in the first place: some sort of framework of shared values and beliefs, namely, our own values of ordered liberty, religious tolerance, and republican, federal government.

We Americans believe, and quite rightly, that the set of values we cherish, those things that bind our nation together and make it a more or less 'natural' pseudo-Aristotelean state, are absolutely just and praiseworthy, moreso than those of many other states. We believe that our values of liberty and religious tolerance appeal to man's desire to be free, while democracy and republican government appeal to man's desire to have a hand in the direction and formation of his greater political community, and thus they have real, transformative power. Not only that, but as all men have these inclinations, our values, at their most basic level, can bring that transformative power to bare in any society, so long as it is made up of men and women. As Julius Caesar noted in book three of his Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, "[A]ll men, by nature love liberty and hate the condition of slavery." Thus a new Iraqi government and a new creed of freedom and democracy may be able to eventually take root and similarly provide the Aristotelean 'glue' for that diverse society just as they do our own.

Liberals, unfortunately, seem not to believe that liberty and freedom have universal applicability, they do not seem to take pride in the exultation of the ideas America stands for, and they deny that our ways have cross-cultural appeal. Day in and day out, the press seems almost to hope for America's failure, to hope that America's values cannot transform the Middle East into a peaceful place. This should not surprise us, of course, as it is an echo of liberals' historic theme. It is Jimmy Carter and his call for America to be content with having past its peak, its 'malaise.' It is the notion that to strive for the best is somehow offensive to those who do not similarly strive, or who come up a little bit shorter. It is the idea that mediocrity is acceptable and even desireable. It is the same reason that liberals sought reconciliation with Soviet Communism.

Luckily for America, we have as President a man who, like Ronald Reagan, does not settle for the mediocre and will continue to champion our values as absolutely good and prasieworthy. We have a President who, like Ronald Reagan, is optimistic about America, its way of life, and the power of our values to change the Middle East and the world. In George W. Bush, we have a true, Aristotelean, American leader.

Welcome to the Rostra

2004-06-14T15:35:00.000-05:00

First, a bit of history with which you may well be familiar. The Rostra is the latin term for the speaker's platform that sat in the ancient forum romanum, the Forum of the ancient city of Rome. The name 'Rostra' is the plural form of 'Rostrum,' which was the name for the heavy, oak beak on the bow of war galleys used to ram other ships. In 338 B.C., the consul Gaius Maenius defeated the Volscian fleet in the harbor at Antium, and mounted the rostra of the captured enemy ships on the wall of the speaker's platform in the forum. From then on, the platform was known as 'the Rostra.' From the rostra, interested members of the various Roman orders, consulars, senators, and businessmen-knights gathered to listen to Rome's best orators and discuss matters of public business. From the Rostra politicians' careers were made or broken, while in the Forum public opinion was influenced and formed. Frequenters to the Forum waited to hear the pronouncements of the Senate read from the Rostra, public debate and discussion to follow. News of military victory or defeat, the results of elections, and news of the health of the grain supply all echoed through the Forum from the Rostra. Greats from Marcus Tullius Cicero to Gaius Julius Caesar spoke from that platform. It was the center of public deliberation, and the center of the Roman Republic.

Holding no such pretentions but in that same spirit do I begin this weblog.

Current events will be highlighted and discussed with a view to exposing error and bringing out truth. Through the dual lenses of history and political philosophy, and with a firm belief in the concepts of Truth and the Good (two things too often lacking in modern political dialogue), I hope to get my readers thinking about what really is, and how it differs from what ought to be. For wherever there is an 'is', there is an 'ought'. I hope you enjoy this space, and please spread the word!