Thursday, September 23, 2010
The Nature Of Evil Part 4: Manifestations
Once we've defined evil, categorically, as the desire to violate the nature of another creature or creatures. we're confronted with the problem of detecting it. We're capable of recognizing its manifestations -- destruction, suffering, theft, abuse, fraud, and so forth -- because they're objective events that occur where we can see them and measure their effects. A desire to violate others' natures is a bit less susceptible to calibration.
Though there are evil deeds whose object is to inflict suffering on nonhuman creatures, for clarity (and to avoid arguments about "animal rights") I'll confine myself to evil as it pertains to the actions of men among other men. To get properly started on this path, we must reflect for a moment on the nature of Man, shared by all men, and what it means to violate it.
Man is distinct from the lesser orders in his possession of certain features of mind:
- Time-binding: A sense of the passage of time, including the accurate perception of the sequence of events in time.
- Rationality: The ability to form categories and generalizations, and, in combination with our time-binding capacity, to use them to infer cause and effect.
- Volition: Will; the ability to conceive of goals, and actions that would advance toward those goals, and to move purposefully toward them.
- Conscience: A sense, frequently unarticulated, for right and wrong.
Non-sentient and pre-sentient creatures -- i.e., every other order of life we know of -- lack these things. Yet some of those creatures possess bodies and brains as complex as ours, which is support for the thesis that a man is more than just his corporeal envelope. Whatever the case, we are the order of life that perceives events occurring in time, develops theses about cause and effect, elaborates notions of consequence from those theses, and must perforce contemplate moral and ethical boundaries. No lesser creature is equipped to do so.
More than that: to survive and flourish, we must employ those faculties, more or less continuously, and frequently in collaboration with others. We use them to conceive of a project to pursue, and then to pursue it, and finally to assess the results and choose a subsequent course. (Cf. Loren Lomasky, Persons, Rights, and the Moral Community) They are our indispensable survival tools.
Obviously, Man's nature includes his corporeal self, and the set of evil deeds must include suffering inflicted directly on the body of an innocent. But to complete the set, we must include the violation of Man's noncorporeal attributes, without which his life would be as low and brief as any of the animals. So an extensive tabulation of evil as it pertains to men's actions on and among other men would include:
- Aggressive or invasive violence;
- Coercion by intimidation;
- Theft of that which is the property of another;
- Fraud.
The first of these works directly on a man's body; the rest are violations of his mind. Witnessing any of them suggests, albeit non-conclusively, that an evil intent is at work.
It is possible to do evil without intending evil. Any number of evil deeds are done by persons who "mean well" or are "just trying to help." When we conclude that the doer is innocent of the intent to do evil, we tend to treat him more leniently than if we'd concluded the opposite, sometimes even if his deed has caused extensive devastation.
The recent BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico provides a good example. Many persons were affected by that huge spill. A handful died when the Deepwater Horizon rig collapsed; many others suffered economic harms from which they'll be long in recovering. But no one can make a credible case that BP, or those who operated the rig for it, intended to inflict such suffering on the affected persons. BP did not intend to do evil, even though much suffering flowed from the event. So we refrain from prosecuting the company or any of its human agents as criminals, the secular treatment we would accord to an intentional evildoer.
The intentional evildoer is another matter. His actions aren't disconnected pinpricks, nor does he respond to their consequences with contrition and willing remediation. The suffering he causes is purposeful; he intends to enjoy it. For a huge, showy example, consider Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the atrocities of Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001. There can be no question that these men intended the deaths, the agony, and the destruction their minions wrought; they've openly admitted as much. Their cause cannot excuse their deeds. Its employment as an explanation only calls the cause itself -- the advancement of world Islam and the erection of a second Caliphate -- into the dock to answer for its exhortations to its allegiants.
Sadly, cases this obvious are relatively few. Most of the evil done among men is subtler, and the intentions of the doer less certain. The great need of our time is a reliable technique for recognizing the evilly intentioned man before he can work his will upon us.
More anon.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
The Nature Of Evil Part 3: Connections
In the previous essay, I posited that evil resides in the intent...and coyly left off what "the intent" might intend to do. No Gentle Reader has yet to take note of that omission, which implies that the missing phrase must be utterly obvious. But as I've noted so many times before, the Latin roots of obvious mean overlooked.
Few would take issue with the statement that aggressive violence against innocent people is evil. (I say "few" rather than "none" because I've met a man who would take exception to it. A strange fellow; I hope he's learned better since we parted.) Perhaps just as few would object to the assertion that torturing an animal is an evil act. But seldom do we stop to ponder the essential connection between those deeds. The connection is anything but obvious.
Happiness, in the Aristotelian view, is the ultimate end of all human action. Everything any man does is done either to make him happy or to avert unhappiness. Because it's an internal state, and therefore neither objectively verifiable nor mensurable, the closest we can come to defining happiness is to postulate it as the end-state goal of all that we do.
However, though happiness is the end-state goal, there are many intermediate goals, transition-states we hope will lead to happiness, that occupy much of Man's time and attention. Some of these are easily understood and widely shared: sensual pleasure; achievement; triumph over an obstacle; love. Others are less easily grasped and less widely shared: vengeance; the acquisition of power over others; the humiliation of a detested rival. Whatever one's personal array of intermediates, he pursues them because, consciously or not, he expects that they will conduce to his happiness.
What men of good will have the most trouble grasping is the pursuit, by men not of good will, of destruction and suffering. Even those of us who've felt the temptation ourselves find it hard to discern, intellectually, how such things could possibly lead anyone nearer to happiness.
In hope of greater clarity, allow me a couple of fictional citations:
Jimmy Ducati stomped through the forest, pissed to the max. He'd been certain he was going to get laid today. He'd been wrong....It would have surprised everyone who knew him to learn that he kept a diary, or that he wrote in it extensively, every day. A hardened criminologist would have been horrified to read the fantasies he had set down there, and would have been relieved to learn that they were only fantasies, not true stories nor action plans.
Jimmy knew his failings, had kept himself under control and out of trouble, and had always been sensible enough not to expect much in the way of female interest. Yet only the previous day, Angela Schellenberg had beckoned him under the high school bleachers, then practically tore his pants off. The radiant blonde cheerleader, as gorgeous a piece of adolescent ass as he'd ever seen, the Holy Grail to his school's horny young men, had worked him into a frenzy with her hands and mouth, then had run off, promising to meet him here. She was more than an hour late and nowhere in sight, but the storm in his groin was not to be bought off with excuses, as if there could be any.
He knew he should placate the Dragon with a quick hand job, right here in the forest, then head home and try to forget it, at least until Monday at school, when the bitch had better have something really clever worked out for an explanation. But this time his better judgment, the self-restraint that had protected the rest of the world from him for seventeen years, failed to contain his hormone-powered fury. He set out to find someone he could hurt. [From On Broken Wings]
That was my attempt to depict a transition from evil fantasy to evil intention: Jimmy seeks to inflict suffering on someone else as a way of lessening his own unhappiness. I have no idea how often such a transition occurs, whether after an abuse such as Jimmy experienced or after other provocation or none. But I'm certain that it does; we have the evidence all around us. Nor is the outcome always limited to a beating or a molestation.
Now for a snippet from the pen of a master, a genius who strained to portray capital-E Evil clearly, that we less gifted ones might grasp its depth and its fell magnetism:
Weston, still clothed but without his pith helmet, was standing about thirty feet away: and as Ransom watched he was tearing a frog -- quietly and almost surgically inserting his forefinger, with its long sharp nail, under the skin behind the creature's head and tearing it open....It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken -- Ransom himself had often spoken -- of a devilish smile. Now he realised that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue. [C. S. Lewis, Perelandra]
In the above, Lewis is plainly writing of a devil, a creature that's descended to a depth of evil more absolute than any human being could attain. Its whole purpose in existence is to inflict suffering on other creatures, the more the better. Trapped for a time in the body of a man, its temporal ability is limited by what that body can do -- but what it can do, it does, to Ransom's horror and revulsion.
But note carefully that the infliction of suffering is the creature's purpose. It, like all else that lives under the veil of Time, has a more remote end. Tormenting helpless animals while it inhabits Weston's body is its way of seeking happiness, an end-state which, if the theologians are correct, is forever denied to the legions of Hell.
An evil deed need not be lethal. The Weston-devil in the Lewis citation doesn't inflict death but suffering; neither is Jimmy Ducati out to kill anyone. Yet we can see the evil intent behind both actions, which suggests that absolute destruction need not be the desire of the evilly minded.
Herein lies another connection, a most important one that opens the mind to the essence of evil. Suffering -- physical pain; great sorrow; the onset of despair -- is given to animate creatures for our protection. It is not intended that we should suffer for its own sake. Suffering is supposed to indicate to us that something has gone wrong with us -- that our natures are being violated -- and that we need to take remedial action. When we're healthy, we seek the cause of the suffering and try to alleviate it, that we might return to a positive state of being in which happiness might yet be achieved.
To inflict suffering is to violate a creature's nature: the gestalt of properties, needs, and drives that dictate its particular ways of seeking happiness and avoiding unhappiness. Thus, evil intent is the desire to violate the nature of another creature or creatures. It connects to the natural order of the universe, as instantiated in the bodies of others, by raging against it and seeking fulfillment in destroying it.
And in this connection we see, most clearly, the reason behind the verdicts our consciences render upon the deeds of evilly-minded men.
More anon.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
The Nature Of Evil Part 2: Deeds And Their Doers
In large part, our problem, if I may call it that, with evil in our time is our reluctance to call a person evil simply because he's committed, or is committing, an evil deed. That reluctance says something good about us; it reveals that we haven't wholly forgotten Christ's decree that we should love our enemies. But it also reveals that we're uncomfortable about the whole subject -- that our reluctance extends not merely to persons but also to their crimes.
Anyone can see the signs of that reluctance. They're plentiful, in our daily perceptions, our routine interactions, and our popular culture. Indeed, to see past the reluctance, one must recur to fictional depictions of evil:
- Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs;
- The Joker in The Dark Knight;
- Sauron in The Lord of the Rings;
- Or, as illustrated in the previous essay, to Allison Garvin and her superiors in Corpse In Armor.
(Even a fiction writer will struggle with the matter. One of the reasons I never finished Shadow Of A Sword, the planned sequel to On Broken Wings, is that its main antagonist is supposed to make Sauron look like a Salvation Army volunteer. That's a tough mindset to explore...well, for a mediocre writer with pretensions to personal decency, anyway.)
When we seek an epitome of evil in the real world, we find ourselves qualifying our judgment almost reflexively. Though we condemn them and what they've done, we're minded to classify Osama bin Laden, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung as promoters of an evil Cause: men gone horribly wrong from an error of comprehension. Though Adolf Hitler's Cause is harder to discern among his many villainies, we nevertheless sense that he had one, and so are reluctant to condemn even that famous mass murderer absolutely. Perhaps the closest we can get to a realized human embodiment of evil is the late Idi Amin Dada, butcher-tyrant of Uganda, who appears to have committed his innumerable, extraordinary vilenesses solely because he enjoyed them.
My intent here isn't to exculpate history's best known villains. It's to separate evil in the abstract from personal character. Men are imperfect creatures, incapable of becoming purely anything. Therefore, just as we cannot be purely good, we cannot be purely evil. As the saying goes, Hitler liked dogs.
All the same, it appears that even if we have a spot of trouble defining evil perfectly, we know it when we see it instantiated in action.
The next difficulty in dealing with evil as an abstraction is the possibility that the consequences of an evil deed might resemble the consequences of a deed well meant, or those of an impersonal event such as a hurricane. That's closely related to our desire to understand the justifications proffered by human evildoers. In an early passage in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter asks FBI trainee Clarice Starling whether she considers him evil. Her response -- "You're destructive. It amounts to the same thing." -- indicates the shallowness of her understanding, both of the human monster she confronts and the metaphysical gulf between true evil and the ruin that can arise from incomprehension or blind chance.
Jeffrey Dahmer, as close to a real-life Hannibal Lecter as we can come, was an evildoer. One who innocently errs in designing a bridge that subsequently collapses and kills a thousand people -- far more than Dahmer ever did -- is not.
Evil resides in the intent.
He who intends harm to innocent others, whether for his own gain or in service to some Cause, intends evil. Of course, there are greater and lesser evil deeds and plans, at least as we measure the magnitude of the intended destruction, but the quality of the evil intent is not mensurable. Differences of degree pertain to objective facts and events, perceptible to all. Intent, which is metaphysically insulated from our direct examination and made manifest only in action, cannot be measured in a like fashion.
One of the oldest and best known approaches to evil is that it consists in treating other persons as means to one's own ends, without regard for their status as ends-seekers in their own right. By that formulation, he who treats others as mere instruments or ingredients with which to shape events has entered the realm of evil. However, that approach runs into difficulties when we stop to consider the sociopath, who is inherently incapable of seeing other persons as equal, moral entities. Though we condemn his deeds, we balk at attributing evil intent to him; we tend to say "he can't help it," and mitigate our treatment of him on that basis.
Whether or not we articulate it to ourselves consciously and clearly, we base our judgments of evil on our opinions of the evildoer's intent. Sometimes an evil person will confirm such a verdict by open proclamation, though not often. More often, such a person will take refuge in his Cause, which he has allowed to become supreme over all his decisions. And of course, there are some who "were just following orders," though that defense has a spotty record of success.
Whether our response to an evildoer should be conditioned upon our assessment of his intent, and to what extent, is one of the great questions of justice, both moral and practical. There are two extreme positions:
- Many persons will argue that only intent -- the mens rea in judicial language -- is really punishable, and that an evil deed done for good or well-meant reasons should be excused. This attitude is mostly confined to the political Left.
- Many persons will argue that, as the point of a justice system is to protect the innocent, intent does not matter at all; evil deeds should be punished uniformly according to the degree of harm done, regardless of the intent of the doers.
Innumerable positions, with rationales of varying quality, have been staked out between those poles. However, the poles draw the great crowds, and there can never be a compromise between them.
More anon.
Instead of holding terrorist trials, Democrats prefer holding Salem Witch Trials.
I love it. Every time Obama’s crook connections are brought up, everyone from more-large-fries Bob Beckel to Bobby Gibbs, to the latest Democratic scuzball, moral slob du jour screams another Howard Deanesque vocal rendition of “guilt by association”. Or is it guilt through close twenty year relationship?
When Jerkemy Wright of the Trinity hate whites Church puts President Yobama in a bad light after the brown eyed handsome socialist pewed at his knees for twenty years, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, yells, “guilt by association.” Same, of course is true for 101 other bomb throwing, admitted Marxist Czar types and political hacks and political whores lurking in the halls of The House That Freedom Built that Obama is trying to tear down brick by brick, value by value, right by right. Trojan horse style, Barack brought in dregs of mankind, professional America haters plotting as I write to rock honest, representative government to its foundations, while crapping on its ideals every chance they get.
It’s so easy to call them hypocrites because that’s the word that sticks to them like glue. Traitors, crooks and seditious pukes don’t quite describe the turds like the hypocrite word.
So when they discovered with the joy of a little boy who finds out water and dirt mixes well to make mud that Delaware Republican Senate nominee, Christine O’Donnell, knew kids in high school who involved themselves in witchcraft, they were tickled to death.
Didn’t seem at all concerned about guilt by association.
Well, perhaps slightly worried. Maybe they’re going a little ape over Christine O’Donnell because they’re afraid she’ll cast a spell on Obama using a lock of his hair she might snip from his head as he leans over to wash his balls at the 18th hole at Pebble Beach.
But before Barack developed that cute little girl golf swing, didn’t he, years ago back in high school, participate in cocaine parties and other forms of high school diversion? Gee, maybe we made a mistake electing an admitted druggy President.
I guess the Democratic mud throwers conveniently forgot about those drug taking high school days. After all, what you do in high school doesn’t seem very relevant. Does it? I guess it does to the Democratic mud machine. Because they’re working double shifts. Trying to shift the focus from how the Democrats are spending us to death to more important issues. Like the satanic color of Christine O’Donnell’s high school prom dress. Well, you know what I say to that? Dems, get your hands as dirty as you want.
Because if Delaware gets a chance to elect somebody who’s wants to make the country solvent, not bankrupt, they won’t blow it. In fact, I think they’ll say no, hell no, to the professional pickpocket of the American taxpayer, Chris Coons, admitted Marxist, ObamaCare enthusiast, and Obama human rubber stamp-spend-us-into-oblivion-so-the-comrades-can-take-over-America-Saul Alinsky poster boy.
Let’s see, do I want to elect someone who’ll drop another cool trillion into a bottomless big government pit or someone who’ll have none of it. Christine has pledged to bash the deficit out of existence. To me, she’s talking love potion number nine. Rachel’s personal favorite.
But let’s not stop there. Let’s see, do I want to vote for someone who jumps whole hog at every ObamaCare spending scheme while killing the best medical care system in the world?
Or do I vote for Christine, someone who’ll vote to repeal socialized medicine? Oh, wait, you say Christine had tax problems and problems paying her mortgage? Democrats say that disqualifies her from public office. Well, that should make half of Obama’s team walk out in disgrace.
Moreover, I think it disqualifies her opponent, Mrs. Coons boy, who wants to run up the debt another trillion which weakens the economy and raises unemployment. Oh, wait, Coons also wants to raise taxes and pass the Cap and Trade bill which makes it impossible for me to sell my home unless the government says I’ve brought it up to an energy efficiency code through work only an Obama approved labor union thug can do? That sounds like black economic magic.
Let’s see, Coons or O’Donnell. Pure marxist or pure conservative?
Of course, if Christine O’Donnell had the rich, politically connected family that got her into the best schools, maybe she’d be smarter. Imagine, what if she’d gone to Harvard Law School. Oh golly oh wow.
If she had an Obama education, I wonder if Christine would be ObamaSmart. Smart enough to jam socialized medicine down America’s throat?
ObamaSmart enough to name Eric Holder, extreme left and ethically filthy, attorney general, who got Obama to drop the Black Panther voter intimidation case when the government had the Panthers dead to rights.
ObamaSmart enough to begin executing a spread the wealth strategy right out of the communist manifesto with a huge helping of Saul Alinsky philosophy.
ObamaSmart enough to breaking the no earmarks promise he made during the primaries when Stimulus I became law, a law replete with 900 earmarks worth billions.
ObamaSmart enough to, without any facts, call Sgt. Crowley a stupid racist for arresting Obama buddy, Hank Gates when gates fired racial slur after slur at Crowley and resisted arrest.
ObamaSmart enough to nominate an admitted bigot (”hispanic women are intellectually superior to white males”) to the supreme court after Solomayor also refused to promote white Boston firefighters who outscored blacks on a firefighter’s proficiency test, which was a grossly racist act.
ObamaSmart enough to try the 911 terrorists under civilian rather than military law.
ObamaSmart enough to spend money on lawyers defending terrorists rather than on new weapons systems to kill terrorists.
ObamaSmart enough not to realize that decency and sensitivity matter when deciding whether a victory mosque should be plopped on hallowed ground zero.
It’s true, Christine O’Donnell doesn’t have the social standing and the education and the corrupt connections of a Barack Obama or a Chris Coons, admitted marxist and Obama puppet.
But lil’ ole’ blond haired blue eyed Rachel Peepers is supporting Ms. O’Donnell anyway.
To tell you the truth. I think every bit of the Obama magic is gone. The curtain’s been drawn back. Standing behind it are just a bunch of bums from the neighborhood. If anybody’s demonic, those slugs
really are.
Monday, September 20, 2010
M1: I Was Wrong
I am very sorry to do this, but when one has made a serious mistake in public, one must make a public admission. M2 has grown, in addition to M1:
It is only growing from a much larger base, so that proportionally the change is smaller and I did not notice it on casual inspection. I should have been more careful.
What does this mean? What it means is that the monetary aggregates are increasing because of new lending. The accumulating bank reserves which have caused so much consternation are finally being lent out.
To most people, this will be a hopeful sign. It means that markets are returning to ‘normal.’ To me, this is a scary sign—that inflation may have finally made its return. But I suspect we’ll all be scared by the prospect of ‘recovery’ in due time.
Several other recent developments support this conclusion: gold has hit a new all-time high, and interest rates have finally turned around in recent weeks. The NBER announced an end to the recession and the onset of recovery as well.
The moment of truth may have come, and we will find out who was right in the debate of the deflationists vs. the inflationists. The deflationists predicted that the banking system would not be able to increase the money supply because the FED would be ‘pushing on a string’ by increasing the monetary base, unable to increase bank lending in a market that wanted no more debt. Meanwhile, debt paydown would shrink the money supply irrespective of the efforts of the central bank. Until this point, that assertion had looked credible to some people, however, this development definitively contradicts it, supposing it continues.
The downturn in the monetary base may be signifying that the FED is attempting to sell assets to prevent the inflation from becoming excessive. The problem is that it has already created so many reserves that even with a major decrease in the BASE, inflation could still continue apace. I and other inflationists have predicted that it would be unable to contract the monetary base effectively because many of its assets are now so devalued. Of course, the FED now has another tool to discourage new lending—increasing the interest paid on reserves. But shrinking the money supply itself will be difficult.
What does this mean for markets? If it indeed continues, it means an end to ‘muddle, muddle, toil and trouble’ and the beginning of the ‘inflationary period of reckoning.’ I was hoping for a longer period of ‘muddle,’ but that may not be in the cards. We’ll have to see how the FED responds, but I suspect that if it really wants, it can put an end to this and send us back into ‘muddle,’ or it can allow it to continue. The FED is setting the monetary agenda, and we’ll just have to wait and watch what it does.
Again, I apologize for the confusion and contradictions. And, of course, the uncertainty. It’s a tough business.
-----Update-----
And just let me add: I do not know what is going to happen in the short to medium term. The flat monetary base suggests a market correction, rising money supplies suggest the opposite. The fact is we are in uncharted waters, and though normally I would go confidently with the monetary base as it is most indicative of what the FED is trying to accomplish, reserves are so high that there is a great deal of wiggle room. I am still hedging that the FED is competent enough to engineer a correction, and that looks to be what it is trying to do, but there is just too much uncertainty to be sure.
The Nature Of Evil Part 1: Beginning At The End
Possibly the most provocative thing one can say in this age of Man is that there exists an absolute standard of any sort, independent of the preferences, perceptions, and aspirations of any particular observer.
The gospel of our era is relativism in all things: cultural, moral, logical, even scientific. Claims of absolute truth are sneered aside as conclusively refuted without trial. Feminist author Sandra Harding referred to Isaac Newton's three laws of mechanics as "Newton's Rape Manual," nor is there any reason to believe she was being facetious. Physicist Alan Sokal revealed the extent to which relativists will descend with a facetious article our cultural glitterati took quite literally.
So those of us who, with Samuel Johnson, kick a stone and proclaim "I refute it thus" are in a distinct minority. In consequence, a debate that requires that one's interlocutor accept the existence of evil, a concept relativists categorically reject, is problematic from the start.
Which doesn't mean there's no such thing as evil.
Regard well the following: a snippet of dialogue from a recent, great novel. Ryan Schell, an undercover operative in an anti-terrorism organization, is exchanging blows with Allison Garvin. Miss Garvin is a Marxist-Stalinist who managed to become a deputy chief of staff to the president and has been found complicit in the planning of a terrorist mass murder. She has just informed Ryan that her group can make use of Islamists as agents because "Islamic violence is a response to the decay of the bourgeois West," which her people can exploit to "get history moving again in accordance with the science of socialism."
"Your certainty is impressive," Ryan said. "It allows you to justify your faith in mass murder."
"It's not murder," she said, "when the violence is justified by the revolution. The bourgeois regime being attacked is criminal and inhuman and all who are obedient to it are complicit in its interminable violence. In acts of revolutionary violence against the enemy anyone complicit with the enemy who is killed is guilty of the crime of the enemy. It is not murder."
"So riding a subway train to work," Ryan said, "is a criminal act punishable by death?"
"When seen in its true historical context, it certainly is," she said confidently.
"Everyone on the subway is equally guilty," Ryan suggested.
"No, not if you go person by person, a maid or janitor is not carrying the same level of guilt as a stockbroker or corporate executive, but revolutionary violence sweeps with an inclusive broom. The statement it makes is bold and absolute and is a warning to all...."
"And what do you believe in, soldier boy? Gawd?"
"In the individual and his liberty," Ryan said, rising to the bait."
"Oh dear, an American. You people are so charming, so quaint," she said, "always the perpetual football players running onto the field to the roar of the crowd and the bouncing breasts of the cheerleaders."
"You're an American, aren't you, Ms. Garvin?" he asked.
"Ah, no," she said. "I stopped thinking of myself as that, as an American when I was a teenager. That's what we call 'the normal maturation process' these days, soldier boy. Sorry you missed it."
"So you're not an American," Ryan said. "What are you?"
"I'm a citizen of the world," she said.
"That's a big concept," Ryan said.
"It's basic," she said. "You must have missed it while you were attending your ROTC meetings."
"I guess I did," Ryan said. "That would explain why I'm still just an American with a silly belief in freedom."
Garvin laughed.
"Freedom? You think this America is free? You've got ninety percent of the people glued to their couches gazing like zombies into their televisions and eating non-stop. And then they jump off their couches for five minutes of history when a couple of tall buildings are knocked down in New York. That's the America I see. That's the America the revolution sees. This freedom thing you believe in, soldier boy, is a fairy tale, just like Gawd. History is unfolding right before your eyes and you're running in the opposite direction after the fairies of freedom and the goblins of terrorism. You should run in the direction of revolutionary violence, all of you should, get out in front of it, get off this America thing, because it is dead, a thing of the past. America no longer exists. You just haven't realized it. None of you have...."
"What you people refuse to understand," Garvin said, jumping into the silence that had fallen over the room, "is that this freedom of yours is no more than pitiful self-indulgence at the expense of others. What the revolution does is take the anger and frustration of those who hunger for justice in the world and shape that into purposeful violence. You try to deny that by calling it 'senseless violence' and "mass murder,' but I'm looking at your faces now and I can see those old defenses and the lies that support them draining out of you. You all look like children who have just been told that there is no Santa Claus, and you had really known that all along. You just needed an adult to make it official for you. Well, here I am, kids, giving it to you straight, what you already knew."[From Corpse In Armor, Copyright © 2010 by Martin McPhillips. Used by permission.]
I dare anyone to come up with a proclamation more absolute than Allison Garvin's statements above -- and I dare anyone to come within arm's length of me and state that her notions are not evil. Yet there are many people who, rather than concede that Garvin's tirade is a defense of absolute evil, would attempt to justify her allegiances and intentions as "valid from her perspective," or some such. I've exchanged fire with a few myself -- and not always just in words.
Through an evolution that would require a large history to delineate, Americans have been led away from the understanding of absolute truth. We've been treated to elaborate, amphigorical explanations of why "the cat sat on the mat" should not be taken as a statement of unchallengeable fact, even if we can see Kitty sitting on the damned thing with our own eyes. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and the rest of their tribe literally made careers out of the campaign to destroy even the possibility that language, our vehicle for thought and for interaction with one another, can express truth. But without a trustworthy, serviceable conception of truth, there can be no knowledge, including knowledge of Man's nature. Since the understanding of Man's nature is the key to reasoning about right and wrong, without truth we can make no approach to moral and ethical standards.
Without truth, evil becomes not merely undefined, but undefinable.
Yet we are required by our consciences and the densely woven texture of our society to make moral choices every day. Only a hermit in the middle of a vast desert, never approached by any other human being, could avoid such choices. If we must do so without standards of absolute right and wrong, absolute good and evil, by which to evaluate our choices, what chance have we? How likely is it that our society will continue and flourish?
It's my intention in this series to explore evil all the way from its metaphysical roots to its manifestations in daily life. But this essay will begin at the end, with the depiction of what must follow if evil is permitted to take root in soil stripped of truth and the standards of right and wrong truth makes possible:
The door to the building opened and the General came in. He was by himself and he looked as if he had been watching the whole thing. I noticed that he was carrying a nine millimeter in his hand, hanging at his side, and I thought he was going to threaten Garvin with it, possibly because he'd found a problem with her statements about Beers and Spencer.
His mouth was tight, and he shot only a quick glance Ryan's way, not looking at the rest of us. He walked straight to Garvin and she looked up at him.
"You," she said, with shock in her eyes.
"Yes, me," the General said. "Let me shape some purposeful violence for you."
He raised his nine millimeter about three feet from Garvin's head and pulled the trigger. The bullet entered above her left eye and exploded out the back of her head.[From Corpse In Armor.]
More anon.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
For the Longest Time Voter Apathy
WAS ONE OF THOSE leftist shibboleths that was supposed to demonstrate how concerned progressives were for the health of democracy as a general concept. Cross the notion of voter apathy with progressives’ fascist impulses and you get mandatory voting—a head-spinning, cartoon-sound-effected ::wobbita wobbita wobbita wobbita wobbita wobbita wobbita wobbita:: if there ever was one.
About the first time I ever heard of voter apathy (trust me: it was long before you were born), I also heard of the little-known fact that local tax levies go down to defeat far more often than mere chance or a few brazilian coin flips might yield as a probability of such a thing happening.
Go ahead. Work it out. I’ll wait for you to catch up.
And, being the mule-headed, contrary syncretician that I am, I put two and three together and came up with eight.
Perhaps people can’t be bothered to vote because they really can’t see any point in it. They have eyes. They’re not stupid. They know that self-embiggened people get up themselves and show no concern for The Little People or for The Rules That Only Apply To The Little People. They know that the fix is in, in other words, and they see no hope in registering their protests in tiny numbers that will have no effect.
Fools like Rick Moran and the Inside the Beltway Crowd—left or right—assert that what are, in the end, mainstream American values of liberty, individualism, integrity, and fair play won’t sell in the more-sophisticated districts (read: the so-called “blue” states) of the country. “Voters won’t elect a conservative in [Delaware|Connecticut|Massachusetts],” they assert and aver. Because there are none of that political stripe In Our Town, they claim. So the Establishment in those regions refuse to support true Americans, preferring European Lite varietals. I ask you: if a product is never available on a grocery store shelf, will you buy it? Is it therefore reasonable to assume that, because it doesn’t sell (How can you buy what’s not available?), nobody wants it?
Wouldn’t that be whatcha call yer basic self-fulfilling prophecy?
Meanwhile, those deluded romantics, those wild-eyed dreamers who actually believe in a consensual self-government model and bestir themselves to vote, look around themselves, realize that not only are they overtaxed, but that everybody is—that the government leech is sucking so much of the life out of the nation that it threatens its own survival. AND, since the government is our one guarantor of our rights, that’s not on. (Don’t kid yourself: you wouldn’t last five seconds in that anarchy you so long for; you need government. What is up for discussion is what’s the irreducible minimum.) So, in protest, they vote against the only taxes within reach—local levies and bond issues.
And then one day, one snowflake lands on top of a pile of like-minded flakes and they start an avalance. Rick Sanchez rants on a cable news show. A housewife Out In The Boondocks decides she’s had enough. And a thousand-million points of light become the blinding flash of a supernova, and hope is kindled in the desperate hearts of the formerly apathetic.
Applying—perhaps only subconsciously—the lessons of markets, the Internet, and the wisdom of crowds, a movement is born and coalesces around some simple, fundamental principles. They are, in fact, principles all Americans can—or should—agree on. They are at the core of what it takes to be an American. Failure to apprehend and appropriate them is a failing that many exhibit in the Northeast Establishment Media Bubble.
Reacting to Christine O’Donnell’s win in Delaware, Rachel Maddow (I so wanted to type MadCow, but I stay my hand), called the views of the Tea Party “extreme.” Journalists around Europe—clearer-eyed, perhaps, than our own homegrown breed—still insist that the movement is far, far to the Right of things.
As Tolkien put it, to crooked eyes, the truth must wear a wry face. The only reason the Tea Party of America (and, I suspect, around the world, as they grow like Topsy) appear—scorn quotes—“extreme” to those of the sinister persuasion is because they sit so far out on the Left wing as to be past the navigation lights. In reality, though, the views that informed the Founding of the Republic are still the mainstream. And when political candidates voice those views and values in a full-throated roar, We the Little People rally around them. This is a truth that Rush has observed for lo, these twenty-plus years: conservatism* wins every time it’s tried.
This is what you are participating in when you go to Tea Party rallies, when you work at a phone bank for a primary challenger to a RINO incumbent, when you blog about liberty and prosperity—not only for all Americans, but for all of humanity, (for THAT is the dream). It won’t end in November. Evil is not so much a physical presence as it is a force of nature. Those too weak to resist its siren song will be with us for all time and will require our resistance. But now—unlike those apathetic days of yore—now you have Hope that you may prevail.
Hope and Change. New and improved.
*You may argue that the Tea Party is not really conservative. Far from it, you might say, it is very radical—in the sense of radishes being roots and the Latin radix being the root of the word radical, the Tea Party folk want America to get back to its liberty-loving, small-government-wanting, low-tax-paying roots. True enough. For the moment, that is both radical and conservative. The genius of the movement is that it focusses only on those matters which ought to be public and ignores those which ought to be private. Which is as it ought to be.
A version of this post appeared previously at BabyTrollBlog.
It’s a bird, it’s a Kate
Well well well, if it isn’t that pretentious “too good for us” college child who occasionally pops in, shoots a Jesus torpedo, and leaves.
yes, it’s that time again!
also the concept of a “Jesus torpedo” is really funny, right?
First off - happy Staphiversary! What’s a Staphiversary?
I am so glad you asked!
Last year at exactly this time I was going through my first real “hey I’m in pain and I think I might be dying and nobody knows what’s wrong” experience. I was twenty years old. (That means if you do really careful addition you can figure out how old I am now.) At any rate, I spent nine days total over two separate trips and ~70 grand at the University of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor. I had a random, freak, mysterious deep tissue MSSA staph infection in my sacroiliacus muscle/joint. It was pressing on my sciatic nerve and giving me a fever, which were literally the only two external symptoms I had.
I am not joking. Dear God I wish I was.
Am I any better?
Well, I’m not on my death bed, but I am still on narcotic pain killers every day. After my latest MRI (which was number three for the year) we have determined - yet again- that I have no staphy staph left, but clearly I am still in pain and now nobody really knows why. The ortho people told me that it might be 1) some degenerate-looking stuff in my left lower back/SI joint area (which I’m putting my money on) or 2) an ovarian cyst on the left side of my body which might be pressing a nerve and giving me referral pains. Regardless, I have two appointments with two separate specialists to try and figure out what my freaking problem is on October 19.
I hate dealing with doctors. I hate taking pain medications. I hate both of those things in tandem a whole hell of a lot.
However, I hate being in pain even more, and this is saying something significant. It’s not that I’m a wimp; I ran middle/long distances in high school and I grew up on a farm, so I’m used to being uncomfortable/borderline miserable. But this isn’t that. This version of physical agony is not stepping on a thorn or getting stung by a bee or being at the 2 mile marker. Usually. Unless you’re allergic to bees, and then it legitimately might be, but I’m not so never mind.
To top it all off, I have refused to stop living my life. I lived on a reservation in South Dakota for three months, which is not exactly a bastion of quality health care, went to Iowa for a few days, flew to glorious glorious glorious Long Island for a week and stayed with Fran & Co. (/the dog tackled me), spent another week in Iowa, and now I’m back at Hillsdale College for my senior year.
This vagabond lifestyle is not exactly conducive to getting healthcare. But! Now I’m in Michigan and back to a reasonable distance from the UM hospital again, and so I will be doing anything and everything through them because the health care in Hillsdale is shockingly horrible. Like, I’m not even kidding you guys. It’s amazingly bad. Is there stuff I could do locally that they also offer at UM? Yes. Would I ever just go down the street instead? Not unless I was quite literally bleeding out and couldn’t make the trip to Ann Arbor. Seriously. I might as well just burn my money because I’d probably get a better diagnosis from reading the smoke signals.
In better/other news, school’s going well! I’m taking Greek again. I had to drop it last year because I was put on morpheme, and all of a sudden I couldn’t translate anything. I’m also taking Old Testament (requ’d for my major), Intro. to Eastern Religions (ditto), and U.S. Constitution (requ’d to graduate from H-dale). All are going swimmingly thus far. Additionally I’m writing a thesis about the eunuch logion in Matthew 19 and I have an unbelievably awesome internship through my church. Plus, y’know, college stuff like pep band and Scottish drumming and music fraternity things. Oh, and friends.
details.
I realize this is more a personal narrative than political commentary, but whatevs. Think of it as breaking up the usual conversation with something different. Right?
Or just skip down to discussion about elections and things. That works also.
<3
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Midterm-o-Rama
Primary season is finally over with. We laughed, we cried, we quit our party to run as the Democrats we always were… really, for the political junkie there has scarcely been more fun than this year’s surprising primary contents. Now that it’s over, it’s possible to take step back and look at some of the more surprising events and take some guesses about what they mean.
1. O’Donnell mania?
We’ll start with the most recent. On Tuesday night, the Tea Party backed challenger Christine O’Donnell beat longtime Republican representative Mike Castle in a rather astonishing result. It was only a day or so before the primary that polls seriously suggested O’Donnell could win, and it was obvious from the reactions her performance caught Castle and the NRSC totally off guard. There are a few takeaways from Delaware.
- Mike Castle ran like it was 2004 or 2002. He treated O’Donnell with contempt and ran mostly on the Bob Dole campaign slogan: “I deserve it.” He seemed not to have heard of the fates of his similarly positioned colleagues Lisa Murkowski, Charlie Crist, Arlen Specter, and Bob Bennett in their primaries.
- The elites vs. rank-and-file dynamic is stronger in the GOP than it is in the Democratic party. That’s a little odd to say given the parties’ respective histories, but the left of the Democratic party has not had nearly the same success in taking out incumbents who failed to toe their line.
- GOP voters seem to be pretty homogeneous from state to state. Northeastern Republicans have been moderates for decades due to the high concentration of Democratic voters in their states, but the conventional wisdom has also attributed their moderation to Northeastern GOP voters. The Republican electorate in Delaware just said not so.
O’Donnell’s nomination does weaken the chances of taking Joe Biden’s old seat, but not as much as many have indicated. Castle was out-polling Democratic nominee Chris Coons but was below 50%, the danger zone for a long-time incumbent. The first Rasmussen poll following the primary put her down about 10 points, but she was only garnering 71% of the Republican vote and had an 8-point lead with independents. These are not disastrous internals. Much will hinge on O’Donnell’s political skills in uniting the fractured GOP base and winning independent vote at rates similar to Scott Brown and Chris Christie.
I am agnostic about this race. The personal attacks against O’Donnell were over the top, but I have some fears about whether she is sincerely committed to the conservative cause, as she is a perennial candidate for office who only caught fire with the Tea Party in this unusual year. Still, she’ll be better than the self-proclaimed “bearded Marxist” Chris Coons.
2. The surprising power of Sarah Palin
A lot of us mourned the political martyrdom of Sarah Palin last year when she resigned the governorship of Alaska. I wondered, however, if her resignation might actually lead to growing influence within the Republican Party and among conservative voters. It seems that it has.
Sarah Palin is a woman whose political instincts have been underrated throughout her career. It is easy to forget, but she first attained the governorship by defeating Alaska fixture Frank Murkowski in a primary. The Murkowskis had wielded enough political power in Alaska that Frank’s appointment of his daughter Lisa to his own Senate seat after he won the governorship, while controversial, did not result in any real political ramifications. I wouldn’t necessarily call them the Kennedy’s of Alaska, but the Murkowskis had established their own base of power and a kind of political machine on the frontier.
With the defeat of Lisa Murkowski by Palin disciple Joe Miller, Palin’s destruction of the old guard in the Alaskan GOP is nearly complete. Besides that, 25 of the 36 candidates she endorsed in the primaries eventually won, including statewide candidates Miller, Rand Paul, Kelly Ayotte, Christine O’Donnell, and Carly Fiorina. Not all of her choices were the most conservative options in the race, but that is a lot of incoming senators who will owe her and Jim DeMint (R-SC) favors.
Our pundits of course will continue to speculate whether this means Palin will seek the presidency in 2012. She might, but in a way she is already like the president, whose formal powers are limited but whose informal powers are vast. In fact, were she to attain the presidency she might actually lose influence!
3. The Tea Parties are organized
One fear about the Tea Party movement was that the energy of the various spontaneous demonstrations wouldn’t translate to political results. That fear has thankfully turned out to be unfounded. If it is hard to remember a year when GOP party politics felt so fresh and energized, that is because this year is the first since 1930 that more voters have voted in GOP primaries than Democratic primaries.
More than that, there is a bumper crop of ordinary citizens who have been put into a position to win House seats this fall; House seats will be stepping stones to higher office for many Tea Party-backed candidates. On the Senate side, a surprising number of powerful GOP incumbents have been driven out by the rank-and-file: Charlie Crist, Arlen Specter, Lisa Murkowski, Tray Grayson, Bob Bennett, and Mike Castle all come immediately to mind. Except for Delaware, all of the challengers in those races are in a great position to win. Because of that, the incoming Senate will not only be more Republican, but more conservative.
4. The future looks sunnier for constitutional governance
Standing up to an opposition president and repealing his core agenda will be tough no matter how good the next Congress is. Still, because the presidency’s powers are mainly informal, they do wax and wane with the president’s approval rating. Obama’s terrible numbers do not look to perk up much anytime soon. They are driven by features that are now hard-coded into the system: a poor economy, support for tax increases, wild spending that he will not be able to rein in, and of course Obamacare.
Having a severely weakened president in office means the GOP congress will be given a chance to do more agenda-setting than it otherwise would in less auspicious years. In fact, that will probably be true even if they do fall short of majorities. Some kind of new “Contract with America,” most likely formulated after the midterm elections, would give them an upper hand in going on offense against Obama by setting some principles around which the caucus could organize.
There are many structural problems with America’s economy and society that are not going to be overcome in a single election. Obama has greatly amplified the damage, but it has been accruing for quite some time. Structural change to entitlements, government spending, and even the currency is probably on its way. I would much rather have constitutionally-minded representatives in government to manage that change than the neo-Fascists currently polluting their offices.
Fifth Columnists And Quislings
Our historical memory is weak. Indeed, it’s been deliberately weakened by the deliberate efforts of persons well placed in the media and the educracy. In consequence, far too many are unacquainted with the meaning of the term "fifth column" and the reason for the odium attached to the name of "Quisling."
It's time for a refresher.
When the great George Orwell, himself a "micro-socialist" philosophically at odds with much of Twentieth-Century capitalism, confronted during World War II the phenomenon of British activist pacifism, he called it "objectively pro-Fascist," and with ample reason:
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.
At another time, Orwell called this a nationalistic illusion: "PACIFISM: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf."
Contemporary American pacifists are cut from a somewhat different pattern. In the main, they oppose America's expeditionary wars, in which the nation exports its armed might to overthrow some distant regime or influence the outcome of some conflict in progress. At times, they have sound arguments for their positions; at any rate, theirs is a stance with foundations in the history of national warfare, albeit somewhat detached from its current practice.
But not all the folks who shout "Peace! Peace! We are for peace!" at us are sincerely pacifists. Some are fifth columnists, actively working for the defeat of the nation in a war for its very survival:
A remarkably dishonest and self-pitying interview from the Muslim Brotherhood's favorite Congressman. "Rep. Keith Ellison Talks About Beating the Anti-Islam Industry,'" by Seth Freed Wessler in ColorLines, September 16 (thanks to all who sent this in):[...] Commenting on the controversy surrounding the Park 51 Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan, NYC Mayor Bloomberg recently said, "This whole issue, I think, will go away right after the next election." Do you think that these attacks are going to go away after elections?I do think it'll die down but I don't think it will go away.
Why Not?
Because the people who are struck by fear and who are creating a climate of fear with the thought of this Islamic center are not going away. Yes, it's going to have a tougher time catching the public mind and it is going to have a tougher time getting any news. But you have to understand that there are some people who make their living trying to say, "The Muslims are coming, the Muslims are coming." It's important to bear in mind that these folks are not going to stop and pack it in just because the elections are over. ... They are just going to find something else to make a big deal about.
I don't think it's completely separate from elections either. Certainly certain people like Rick Lazio will try to exploit the upsurge in anti-Islamic ideas to their political advantage. But I don't think it's rooted in the election cycle. I think it's rooted in the idea that there are urges in society from time to time based on a multitude of factors that make some people want to scapegoat others.
In the early 1960s, you had people scapegoating Catholics, saying we can't have Kennedy be the president because then the pope will running the country. Of course we have a long history of scapegoating Jews as well. And we have a long history of racial discrimination and scapegoating. We've seen conservatives and people who want to keep America for people who have traditionally benefited. We've seen these elements scapegoat. We remember Reagan talking about welfare queens. He scapegoated single moms who are poor and tried to say that America's problems are because of them. And then George Bush said, "Well no, the problems are not because of them, but because of black men like Willie Horton and liberals like Dukakis, who let these guys run around." And then we went from there to, "Well the problem is with the gays, they're the problem. They're trying to get married and they're causing the problem." And then it's because of the Latinos, they're taking our jobs.
There is always a scapegoat de jour when fearful people blame the problems of society on a distinct groups that usually does not have much political power. [...]
So in the Gospel according to Ellison, American bigotry, "scapegoating," and "conservatives and people who want to keep America for people who have traditionally benefited" are the only reason we can't see the beauty of peaceful, tolerant Islam. We who seek to alert the nation to the danger from this violent, imperialist creed are just doing what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Keith Ellison took his oath of office on a copy of the Koran, a book that commands Muslims to infiltrate and deceive the "unbeliever" as a tactic for his eventual subjugation. As the highest Muslim in the federal government, he is the point man for Islamic theofascism, the Twenty-First Century inheritor of Vidkun Quisling. The many thousands of pseudo-Americans, comfortably ensconced in organizations such as CAIR and ISNA, who insist that Islam and its sharia law code are entirely compatible with our Constitution, are the fifth column he seeks to lead.
I make no pretense: I despise the vile doctrine that calls itself "the religion of peace." I cannot and will not trust anyone who professes allegiance to it, nor anyone who defends its "essentially peaceful and tolerant character" against fourteen hundred years of evidence to the contrary. Islam is inherently fascistic, and anyone who seeks to suppress the truth about its nature, or soothe us into accepting it as "just another Abrahamic religion," or even just close his eyes to the Islamic agenda and how it's being advanced, is objectively pro-fascist: a fifth columnist assisting world Islam in the destruction of the finest country in human history.
In this contest, for a decent and patriotic American, there is only one side.
