Vulcan's Mercy

THE SCANDAL OF A NON-SCANDAL

This flap over the Bush Administration firing eight U.S. attorneys is mind-boggling.  Why?  The mendacity of congressional Democrats who will say anything to manufacture a scandal, and the incompetence of Bush and his minions in letting them get away with it.

U.S. attorneys are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president.  The president can fire any U.S. attorney at any time for any reason.  The only legal restraint upon this power of the president is that the purpose of his dismissal cannot be to obstruct an investigation, prosecution, or civil action.  Even then his purpose has to be malign.  The president has the authority -- indeed, the duty -- to curtail law enforcement actions he thinks are improper, ill-founded, or otherwise not in the public interest.  Because, in the absence of any credible allegations, Bush fired no U.S. attorney to obstruct justice, there was nothing afoul in the law in doing so.

In want of a smoking gun, the Democrats are howling to moon that the firings are political.  Of course they are!  Because U.S. attorneys are political appointees, by definition their coming and going is political.  More than that, it is well within the prerogative of the president to boot a U.S. attorney who is not adhering to his law enforcement priorities.  After all, the president is elected by the people.  That gives political legitimacy to his law enforcement policy and the management of the officials he appoints to execute it.  If the president says, for example, that the prosecution of drug lords is a top priority and one of his U.S. attorneys ignores that directive to pursue inside traders instead, there is nothing improper in the president booting him.

So there is no scandal.  Yet, Bush on down act like they are guilty of something.  Only belatedly and with little force has Bush defended his right to fire the eight U.S. attorneys.  He hems and haws on cooperation with the Senate investigation.  He talks as though he really didn't have much to do with the decision.  He regrets that mistakes were made.  Attorney General Gonzalez follows the same line, while his staff counsel says she'll take the Fifth Amendment in her appearance before the Senate.  While the Democrats fabricate a scandal, the Bushies fabricate a guilty response to it.  This is not just lousy gamesmanship.  It is irresponsible.  We're at war, and Bush doesn't have the luxury of squandering his administration's credibility in sideshow spats with congressional Democrats.

Indeed, Bush is obligated to make the Democrats pay a heavy political price for inventing a scandal when there is deadly serious business to be done.  What he had to do in response the Democrats' ill-willed gambit to undermine his presidency was to call their bluff:  [1] Tell them to go to hell, there will be no cooperation from his administration in a pointless and frivolous congressional investigation; [2] clearly defend to the public his power to fire the U.S. attorneys; [3] articulate the refusal or inability of these appointees to carry out his agenda as the reason for doing so; [4] chastise the Democrats for wasting time over nonsense when the country has a war to fight; and finally [5] put the challenge to them to stop him from running the country to play partisan politics.

That would have put the onus on the Democrats to either drop the matter or escalate it in the face of their likely ultimate failure to accomplish anything concrete.  If they did escalate, they risked appearing like soulless partisans whose only objective is destruction of a political opponent for no reason other than his destruction.  Instead Bush and his administration have waffled for fear of drawing a clear line in the sand between his agenda for the country and the Democrats'.  Why should that be?  I must wonder if the reason is that Bush and his advisors are so confused as to think that drawing a line to marshal a defense against a purely partisan assault is itself a purely partisan ploy.  If so, a president who aspires to be a nice guy would never want to appear so venal.  However, by playing to appearances in this sorry non-scandal, Bush has cast the worst appearance upon himself and his administration.

WHY NICE GUYS MAKE BAD PRESIDENTS

The back-slapping George Bush is often denigrated as a “frat boy” suggesting that he lacks the intellectual seriousness a president requires.  Compared to the men he defeated in two presidential elections, whose grave demeanors were the only heft they supplied to essentially frivolous political posturing, this criticism fails.  Indeed, Bush demonstrated early on that he understood that the West was at a crossroads in meeting the Islamist threat to civilization, the crisis of the day; a fundamental matter that his detractors who label him as a simpleton still don’t get five years after Islamic jihadists slaughtered thousands on American soil.

However, Bush’s back-slapping style is indicative of a major deficiency in his leadership.  He’s a genuinely friendly and gregarious man who likes people and likes to be liked in return.  While there’s nothing wrong with being a nice guy, it is not a quality that makes a man a good president.  Granted, Bush’s ability to inoffensively cajole the Democratic opposition in the Texas legislature during his six years as governor served him well, but Texas Democrats generally don’t suffer from the ideological derangement of leftist Democrats on the national scene who view common human decency as a character defect in the pursuit of power.  Nothing in his experience as governor of Texas prepared Bush for the vileness of politicians like Patrick Leahy, Barbara Boxer, or Jack Murtha.

Fair enough, but how long should it have taken Bush to figure out leftist Democrats, especially when they have been persistently obstructing the war against the jihadists to the point of brooking our defeat?  What other than Bush’s indefatigable desire for collegiality has stopped him from making these obstructionists pay a heavy political price for undermining the pre-emptive defense of our country against an enemy who has the will to attack the “Great Satan” with atomic weapons once they have the means to do so?  Who other than a nice guy pulls his punches to embrace dangerously disloyal politicians as “patriotic Americans”?  This disloyalty runs deeper than the recent passage of a resolution and an emergency appropriation cravenly calculated to frustrate the war against the jihadists without taking accountability for the defeat these bills would countenance.  It is likely that congressional staffers for obstructionist Democrats leaked to the national media information about the Bush Administration’s covert operations against the finances and communications of the Islamic jihadists and jeopardized those effective efforts against the enemy.

Even worse is that Bush the nice guy has not kept his own administration in line when it comes to the serious business of war.  In the wake of the devastation of 9/11, no heads rolled.  Bush held no one accountable for the breakdown in national defense.  With no one brought to heel, the bureaucrats got the message:  Failure is an option, even when it comes to war.  So, for example, the State Department remained wedded to the misbegotten policy of Mideast stability which had perversely fostered Islamic jihadism.  Bush’s secretary of state at the time, Colin Powell, should have put an end to this institutional inertia.  However, Powell had provided the critical counsel a decade earlier in the Gulf War to not topple Saddam Hussein in the name of Mideast stability; bad advice which led to the present Iraq War.  Unwilling to acknowledge his error, Powell never mustered the State Department to gain the cooperation of critical but fair-weather allies, such as Turkey on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Similarly the Central Intelligence Agency had a history of poor performance in the Mideast to polish up and so undercut our intelligence efforts to assess the jihadist threat.  The most notorious incident was when the CIA sabotaged the Bush Administration’s request for confirmation that Iraq was shopping for uranium in Western Africa by sending an ex-ambassador on an amateur spying mission.  When this “agent” later revealed his mission to the media and lied about what he had learned in an attempt to blacken Bush in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, the full weight of the Justice Department didn’t fall on his head but rather a Bush Administration official who tried to discredit the agent with reporters.  An Alice-in-Wonderland outcome that would make for great satire if not for the fact that our premier intelligence agency made bureaucratic infighting a priority over collecting intelligence on the nuclear weapons program of a dangerous regime.

Bush the nice guy seems constitutionally incapable of bringing down the hammer of those who out of venality, perversity, or incompetence obstruct his policy of eliminating the jihadist threat.  As a consequence he has invited unconstitutional intrusions upon the president’s authority as commander-in-chief.  For example, in last year’s Hamdi decision the U.S. Supreme Court claimed the jurisdiction, relying upon international law of all things, to review military tribunals of unlawful combatants waging war against the United States.  Instead of declaring the high court’s decision a dead letter, as his duty to the Constitution required, Bush meekly acceded to its unconstitutional demands and asked Congress for the authority to convene military tribunals of Gitmo detainees.

Likewise, in his current request for an emergency appropriation to fund the “surge” campaign to pacify Baghdad, Bush has tussled with congressional Democrats over additional provisions that would restrict his command of military operations in Iraq as though Congress had the authority to do so.  All Bush would have to do is let the Democrats pass the appropriation laden with those restrictions, sign the bill into law, take the money, and then announce that he is ignoring the restrictions as an unconstitutional encroachment upon his power as commander-in-chief.  No president is obliged to enforce or comply with unconstitutional legislation.  And if Congress finds such defiance outrageous, they have the constitutional prerogative of impeaching the president for his political offenses.  In turn, they can face the voters for doing so.  Instead, Bush helps his congressional opponents, acting in bad faith, maintain the pretense that a legitimate battle over legislation is going on.

Maybe none of this would be so dire if the subversive efforts of congressional Democrats, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Supreme Court, and others had no material affect upon Bush’s war-making against the Islamic jihadists.  However, it is now clear that between a brilliant conquest of Iraq and now only in extremis the current offensive against the jihadists there, Bush stayed his hand for four years hoping that patrols by U.S. forces, as opposed to an active campaign of hunt-and-destroy, would vanquish the enemy.  To avoid offending the obstructionist bureaucrats and politicians at home, the Iraqi factions stumbling towards some semblance of self-governance, and even the Iranians and Syrians arming the jihadists, Bush put our servicemen in harm’s way as cops reactively keeping the peace instead of as soldiers actively pursuing and killing the enemy.  Because Bush wanted to be a nice guy between the conquest four years ago and today's surge, more than two thousand of our servicemen lost their lives in Iraq and several thousand more severely wounded.

As I wrote at the outset, Bush, unlike those who disparage him as a “frat boy”, understands that we are in the midst of an epochal crisis.  He understands that we must meet a threat to our civilization that will not be easily or quickly eliminated.  However, that is not the same thing as having the will to do what is necessary to end that threat.  What is necessary is war.  That much Bush has understood and has had the will to undertake.  However, war, justly and effectively conducted, does not offer the luxury of being conducted inoffensively.  The lines between allies and enemies, loyal and disloyal opposition, dissenters and traitors cannot be blurred to make nice with everyone.  Doing so confuses the rationale for war, allows the just causes for it to be called into disrepute, undermines the popular mandate to carry it out, weakens the will of war leaders to make the hard decisions, escalates the cost in blood and treasure, and delays victory or even brings about defeat.

Let us hope that the “surge” campaign is evidence that Bush has found a new will to finally destroy the jihadists in Iraq, end the fomenting of violence in that country by Iran and Syria, and so make it a haven for peace and prosperity in the Mideast.  If not, then we face defeat in Iraq by prematurely withdrawing our forces and inviting new jihadist assaults upon us.  Should that come to pass, it will be proof that nice guys make bad presidents.

THE LEFT'S WAR ON REALITY

Over the years I have become impatient with the Left's war on reality and its partisans' increasingly hysterical screeds against the tyranny of the Bush administration.  I hold no brief for the president.  He has been a profound disappointment.  However, the Left's denunciations of Bush as a schemer who is provoking war to divert attention from his fascist or theocratic designs upon America is lunacy.

Moreover, it demonstrates a moral obtuseness among the sanctimonious sorts who populate the left end of the political spectrum.  Unhinged comparisons of Bush and his administration to the monstrous regimes that plagued the twentieth century is a frivolity devoid of any decent regard for the hundreds of millions who did suffer and die at the hands of real tyrants.  The fact is, despite the corrosiveness of the welfare state, America remains a land of liberty where the Left's war on reality can rage on without fearing any retribution from the government.

It was in this frame of mind I enjoyed columnist Mark Steyn's recent exchange with one of the loony left ...

AMERICA IS SO TOTALLY FASCIST

I was watching you [Mark Steyn] on C-SPAN this morning and you seem to think that this country hasn't fallen into fascism. Let me educate you a little. Here is what Lawrence W. Britt has determined as the fourteen signs of fascism.

1.” Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.” Does "stay the course", you're with us or against us, WMD's etc. ring a bell with you? What about all those little flag pins conservatives are so proud to be wearing at the most shameful era of American history?

2.”Disdain for the importance of human rights.” One need only look back on the drowning people in Hurricane Katrina while our government elected officials refused to cut their vacations short to do anything about  this crisis.

3.”Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.” The axis of evil. We must kill them all.

4. “The supremacy of the military/avid militarism”. One need only look at the budget to see what is spent on military.

5. “Rampant sexism.” Yes, lets criticize Nancy Pelosi for the price of what she wore to the SOTUS. I notice none of the men got the same criticism.

6.”A controlled mass media.” Since the majority of our media is controlled by six major corporations who all want to emulate Fox News, need I say more. The news is biased and unprofessional. Did you know there was a major revolution going on in Oaxaca, Mexico that could directly have an influence on our immigration problem, yet there was hardly a whisper in the news?

7. “Obsession with national security.”  Wiretapping of citizens without a warrant and no habeas corpus anymore and an emerging police state with people already being disappeared, the undocumented workers caught in an INS sting that no one knows where they went.

8.”Religion and ruling elite tied together.” Where do I start. Creationism being taught in public schools. Rev. Moon being crowned the Messiah in a public building in Washington with members of Congress attending. The Terri Schiavo circus led by political conservatives and the President's brother, Jeb Bush.

9. “Power of corporations protected.” Yes, more and more corporate welfare. All those profiting from the present wars at the expense of taxpayers. The prescription drug benefit for the PHARMA industry at the expense of seniors and the taxpayers. The upcoming universal health care plan at the expense of taxpayers and for the benefit of the insurance industry. Boy, you wanna talk about welfare queens in cadillace, how about those guys in corporate jets?

10. “Power of labor suppressed or eliminated.” Union busting started with Reagan and goes on today. Jobs are allowed to be outsourced to third world countries at the expense of middle class working Americans. Expoited document workers at the expense of the domestic work force. Homelessness becoming institutionalized.

11.”Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.” The marginalization of the other voice the liberal voice, since Bush took power in the media and in the mainstream. Anyone who doesn't follow in lockstep is called unpatriotic. Michael Moore being demonized for his opposition to the GOP party line particularly when the Bush administration fell down on the job before the 9/11 attack. Of course emerging evidence would suggest that they liked the attack. It was their Pear Harbor that would give them the green light to conquer the Middle East and bring it's oil under USA and British control.

12. “Obsession with crime and punishment." I only need to say AbuGhraib and Guantanamo. You know that no rules or Geneva conventions were honored in those places not to mention many other lessor known venues of incarceration and torture.

13. "Rampant cronyism and corruption". The Bush administration seems to be staffed by cronies from Reagan and Poppy's administrations. Then there is Brownie, Condi, Karl, Kenny boy and this list just grows and grows.

14. “Fraudulent elections.” It's pretty much been proven that Gore won election 2000 that the Supreme Court, stepping out of its jurisdiction handed over to Bush. There is also emerging evidence that Kerry actually won 2004.

(See here for more on Lawrence Britt.)

Now as a conservative you strike me as a little more clever that the rest of the sycophants supporting this festering administration, well you did until you bold-faced lied about Bush's reading material. Even a third grader knows when a fellow classmate hasn't done his homework. Please stop thinking that the average American is that stupid.

However, my point is your denying that we have descended into fascism and how serious it is since none of us have ever lived in fascists regimes. Isn't this a rather naive statement on your part? Many of us Americans have lived overseas in fascists regimes and many have immigrated here from fascist regimes and we know one when we see one. But I thought I would send you the fourteen signs of fascism just in case you never saw them. I'm sure you have but you are again making the assumption that many conservatives do that all Americans are as dumb as the people you brainwash with your giibberish on a daily basis.

You can dismiss me if you like, but recent polling would suggest that the majority of Americans pretty much know the truth about what is going on and it's not the picture that conservative media people like you would like us to believe. We can't do much about it except to protest and I think noticing the trends these days from those who are disenfranchised at the moment should give you pause before you tell your next lie. You are carrying the water for a rogue party and administration who are globalists only loyal to the corporations they represent. They are unpatriotic and one of these days will be regarded as traitors and war criminals and you and all those who supported them will go down with them too.

Laura Sheehan

STEYN REPLIES:  Hey, thanks for “educating me a little”. For a start, I’m not really interested in what Laurence W Britt has “determined” are the “14 signs of fascism” because I wasn’t aware he had proprietorial rights in the concept. And reading through the “14 signs” they seem to be little more than semantic sleights-of-hand. Whether or not you approve of, say, a creationist school board, in the real world it has no meaningful equivalence with Fascist Italy or the Iron Guard’s Romania. None. Nor do “flag pins”. And let me say again what I said on C-SPAN: there are many people around the world who have lived under Fascist regimes, and every time you apply that word to the Bush Administration or Republican Congressmen you are insulting millions upon millions who know what it really means. You dislike Bush, you disagree with his policies, you think Fox News is biased, star-spangled bumper stickers creep you out. None of that makes America Fascist. It makes it a free country of different viewpoints freely expressed. Grow up.

MILTON FRIEDMAN, R.I.P.

Milton Friedman, world renowned economist and staunch advocate of the free market, died yesterday at the age of 94.  Although I got my first introduction to capitalism as something other than a plutocracy exploiting the downtrodden from Ayn Rand in the late '70s, I acquired a rigorous understanding of economics, hence why capitalism is what happens when people can freely exchange goods and services, from Friedman.  That started with the book he wrote in 1980 with his wife Rose, Free to Choose.  I even mastered his Monetary History of the United States to obtain a sound concept of money, inflation, deflation, and the folly of central banking.  Indeed, my long years in business have only confirmed Friedman's monetarist theory.  I learned a great deal from the man.  At the moment of passing, it is appropriate that I acknowledge my debt to him.

WHEN SCIENCE IS NOT SCIENCE

My wife Bridget and I run a newsite called “The Local Area Watch”.  We provide news and commentary on matters in the Grand Rapids area that the local mainstream media ignores.  A few weeks ago we reported that the Michigan state board of education made a ruling that public schools must not only teach Darwinism in biology classes but that they must teach it as the scientific theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other explanations of how life evolved on Earth.

Young Earthers, Darwinists, and Lysenkoists

We objected to the state school board decision.  We did not oppose their restriction of biology curriculum to established scientific knowledge.  In fact, that makes sense.  There are a lot of strange ideas out there about evolution, starting with the “young Earth” creationists who misread the sacred writings of Genesis as a science text.  They confuse the infallibility of Scripture with literalism and end up with ideas about the paleontology of our planet that are flatly contradicted by the facts of geology and astronomy.  This sort of creationism is not science and has no place in biology instruction.

By the same token, neither does Darwinism.  The state school board’s ukase that Darwinism is not only science, but so well established as science that it constitutes the theory of evolution, is a profound error – and not an innocent one at that.  Their decision was explicitly designed to preclude any mention of Intelligent Design as a possible explanation for the origin and evolution of life.  No doubt the political motivation for this was a weak-kneed reaction to the notorious Kitzmiller decision late last year when a federal judge in Pennsylvania outlawed the instruction of Intelligent Design in public schools.  Whatever one thinks of the merits of Intelligent Design, the ruling should concern all friends of liberty.  First, the judge abused his federal authority to interfere with what is properly a local matter.  Second, his mandate as to what the government will permit to be discussed as science in the public square, in this case a public school classroom, stinks of Lysenkoism.  So, the Michigan state board of education pre-emptively surrendered to the federal judiciary and enshrined Darwinism as the one and only scientific explanation of evolution.

An Epistemology of Science

However, Darwinism doesn’t hack it as science – at least not as a scientific theory of evolution.  Scientific knowledge consists of facts and explanations of the facts.  Those explanations are constrained to what is quantifiable, which distinguishes scientific knowledge from aesthetic knowledge.  (For more on that, click here and here.)  Furthermore, not all scientific explanations are equal.  They are categorized by level of certainty, namely:  Theory, hypothesis, conjecture, and speculation.  A theory is the most certain explanation science has for a given set of facts.  It is an explanation verified by irrefutable observation (of which, experimentation is a highly controlled form of observation).  Einstein’s theory of general relativity is a good example.

A hypothesis is a proposed theory for which verification is, in principle, possible but not yet accomplished.  The Big Bang explanation for our universe is a hypothesis in this sense.  Astronomers and physicists have yet to make all of the necessary observations to verify the Big Bang, but have a clear idea of the further observations required to elevate it to a theory.  Then there is conjecture.  This is an explanation based upon some evidence that can be expressed in terms of falsifiable statements, but lacks any clear means of verifying those statements.  So-called string theory is conjecture.  It offers a fascinating account of what the basic constituents of the universe may be, but there is presently no practical way of testing it.  Finally, there is speculation, which puts forth an explanation uncontradicted by fact but lacking any evidence.  The multiverse concept is an example of speculation about the origin of our universe.

Evolution is Science, Darwinism is Not

So, how does Darwinism fit into this scheme?  Obviously it is not a set of facts.  It is an explanation of facts, specifically the fossil record and the biology of life now present on Earth.  That brings us to what sort of explanation Darwinism is for these facts.  First we need to define evolution.  It is the hypothesis that explains the fossil record and the present forms of life as an unbroken chain of generations which over time changed from simple single-celled creatures into the complex flora and fauna that now populate the biosphere.  Thus, evolution is, in a phrase, common descent with modification.  It is contrasted with serial independent origins of life in which no common ancestor exists for all creatures, past and present, on Earth.  Charles Darwin was one of the first to put forth evolution as an explanation for the fossil record and the present forms of life.  While a sound hypothesis, evolution does not rank as a theory because of the lack of sufficient observation, in either the fossil record or present forms of life, to verify that one species can evolve into another.

Therefore evolution, properly understood, is not controversial.  It is solid science, and there is no good reason why common descent with modification should not be taught in a biology class.  However, Darwin and his successors have made additional claims about evolution to bolster an a priori philosophical naturalism that precludes all supernatural explanation for the existence of life and its multitude of forms over the ages.  By smuggling into these claims a naturalistic metaphysical assumption, the Darwinists depart from science with their account of evolution.  Thus, the restricted claims of evolution keep it within the scope of science, whereas the broad claims of Darwinism boot it into the precincts of philosophy.  To wit, the claims of Darwinism are:  [1] The chemical origin of life (i.e., non-life begat life), [2] generation of all life from that first life down to the present (i.e., common descent), [3] modification of the forms of life during that descent (i.e., speciation), and [4] natural selection as the mechanism of speciation (i.e., survival of the fittest through random mutations).  Evolutionary biologists hotly dispute the details of speciation and natural selection, but these four claims remain the basic principles of Darwinism.

Darwinism is Philosophy

Together these claims go beyond the hypothesis of common descent with modification to state how that occurred.  To that extent, the first claim, the chemical origin of life, is gratuitous.  Furthermore, it is rank speculation for which absolutely no evidence exists and increasingly severe challenges against it do, such as William Dembski’s concept of specified complexity and Michael Behe’s application of that to microbiology called irreducible complexity.  This claim is a part of Darwinism only because of the Darwinists’ prior commitment to philosophical naturalism.  At this point, nothing is known in terms of science about the origin of life, other than it appears to have happened only once, to make the subject part of a public school biology curriculum.

The second and third claims of Darwinism are sound as science for the reasons stated previously.  The problem comes not when Darwinists simply state that common descent and speciation happened, as evidenced by the fossil record and the present forms of life on Earth, but go further afield to state how it happened.  That brings us to the fourth claim of Darwinism, natural selection or any of the permutations of that concept that have developed over the years.  Fundamentally Darwinists claim that speciation was driven by blind forces acting upon random mutations in one generation of life to the next to eliminate some mutated creatures and to favor the survival of others.  In terms of philosophical naturalism, that is an appealing explanation for the mechanism of evolution.  However, in terms of science, it is nothing but a conjecture.  Evidence does exist that is consistent with natural selection.  We observe small-scale changes in real time in species that currently exist.  But we have no scientific basis for extrapolating these observations as proof that small-scale changes result in large-scale speciation.  There is a complete disconnect between the observation of molecular biological phenomena in present species that account for small-scale changes (i.e., microevolution) and the observation in the fossil record of large-scale changes in anatomy marking the extinction of old species and the advent of new ones (i.e., macroevolution).  In short, we cannot verify natural selection by scaling up changes in the chemistry of life into changes of anatomy that define new species.

When Science is Not Science

Consequently, the Michigan state board of education was flat-out wrong to dictate that all biology instruction in public schools must teach natural selection (and its variants) as the one and only mechanism of evolution.  Science has not established it as such.  Natural selection, along with other competing explanations including Intelligent Design, is only conjecture.  It is certainly not the theory of evolution, which itself is only a hypothesis explaining the fossil record.  To demand that the key claim of Darwinism, natural selection, be taught as the truth is to demand acceptance of the metaphysical assumption underlying it.  That assumption is naturalism, which by definition precludes the supernatural from any explanation of our universe, the existence of life, and the nature of man as a rational being.  This, of course, is squarely at odds with orthodox Christian and Jewish belief (and that of other religions too).

The government assaults religion when it mandates instruction in naturalistic beliefs as the truth.  It does so perniciously when it allows naturalistic beliefs to masquerade as the objective knowledge of science.  It erodes our liberty with a perverse establishment of an anti-religion by prohibiting any discussion in the public square of the classroom that is contrary to naturalistic beliefs.  Such is the rotten fruit of science that is not science.

THE CHRISTIAN FIFTH COLUMN

I learned that Leonard Peikoff, the director of the Ayn Rand Institute and the enforcer of orthodoxy among the fractious Objectivist progeny of novelist Ayn Rand, issued a fatwa denouncing all those who either vote for the Republicans or sit out the election next week instead of voting for the Democrats.  Apparently Peikoff is more fearful of the theocracy that Christians want to impose upon America through the Republicans than the socialist multicultural environmentally-pure utopia that the secular progressives want through the Democrats.  It looks like many Objectivists are following the call.  But not all.  Linz Perigo, proprietor of SOLO Passion, thinks Peikoff and his supporters on this issue (Diana Hsieh in particular), are batty for any number of reasons -- the biggest of which is that the threat of a Christian theocracy engulfing America is nonsense.

Well, not so fast.  I thought I had better clue Linz in as to the takeover we subversive Christians have been plotting.  So I posted this revelation about our secret meeting at SOLO Passion ...

Linz threw down the gauntlet to Peikoff and the gang: “Demonstrate that a Christian theocracy is indeed imminent, bar toppling the Republicans now.”

Sorry, Linz. You know I think you’re a swell guy in the war against the Mohammedans and all that, but Peikoff and Diana have got it right. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I suppose there’s no harm in telling you what we Christians have in store for America. In fact, I just got back from a Theocracy Now! planning session. I’m the Vatican representative. (Well, the truth is that I’m subbing for John Kerry, who had to go out on a black op earlier this week to subvert the Democrats.)

Anyway, we’ve been busy hammering out what the new regime will be like. We’ve agreed that all the atheists will have to go to re-education camps, although we aren't certain if that should include the Episcopalians. The Baptists also wanted to send the homosexuals to the camps, but I said, “Whoa! There’s no way we Catholics are going to agree to locking up half of our priests.” Then they got pissy about wine at mass and said grape juice will have to do. The Calvinists stepped in and argued, “Let the papists have their liquor. They’re all predestined to Hell anyway.”

Now everything was about to come to blows, when a Quaker rushed in to stop us crying, “Give peace a chance.”  So, we all beat the hell out of him instead. Boy, we really did a number on him, and we told the Christian Scientist to take the Quaker to the hospital. But he refused because he would have no truck with modern medicine. Well, you can guess where that led us. A long wonky debate on a properly theocratic health care policy. For example, do you cover a snake-handling Pentecostalist when he gets bitten? Yeah, and everybody thinks theocracy is a snap.

So, we’ve got a few bugs to work out yet, Linz. But, believe me, we’re coming!

Regards, Bill

KERRY'S REMARK IS CONTEMPTIBLE, BUT ...

... enough with the demands that he apologize for insulting the troops in Iraq.

On Monday, Sen. John Kerry delivered an address to students at Pasadena City College in California.  He was doing the usual Democratic shtick of demonizing Bush for the war in Iraq.  Then, during the course of his speech, he told the students, "You know, education -- if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well.  If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Clearly Kerry insulted as fools and idiots those young Americans who have chosen to man the wall in defense of our country than spend four or five years getting drunk at college.  Since Monday, instead of coming clean on his insult, Kerry did the usual politician's jig of confessing to everything but the real reason for his gaffe.  Presently the senator from Massachusetts is claiming that it was a mangled joke at Bush's expense.  Yeah, right.

If words mean anything -- and they do -- Kerry's meaning was plain:  Only losers end up enlisting in the armed forces.  It's a condescending opinion of our volunteer soldiers, sailors, and airmen that was fostered during the Vietnam War and became conventional wisdom for a long while with the end of the draft three decades ago.  I know it well, having encountered it personally on numerous occasions when I said to hell with college and volunteered for the Air Force in 1980.  The best decision I ever made (after, of course, marrying the beautiful Bridget).

Plus we can take into account Kerry's history of high profile slanders of U.S. troops, starting in 1971 when he returned from his combat tour in Vietnam and accused his comrades of being murderers and villains at a congressional hearing and, until Monday's "joke", ending last year with his slur that our soldiers in Iraq are terrorizing innocent civilians.  Kerry apparently cannot comprehend why anyone would volunteer to serve in the armed forces, except to fill in a blank on a political resume as he did, if he or she had any other option in life.  But then Kerry is a most uncharitable man and so probably doesn't grasp that it is the virtue of charity (along with a healthy lust for adventure) that motivates many of our best young men and women to join the military.

So, as I said, Kerry's remark is contemptible.  But the demands that he apologize are getting sanctimonious.  After all, only those he insulted, specifically the troops in Iraq, have standing to call upon him to apologize -- and I don't hear that call coming from them.  If our fighting men in Iraq have anything like the attitude that I and my fellow cold warriors had in the '80s for the fashionably leftist disdain for servicemen, I suspect they couldn't care less what a washed-up weasel of a pol in the twilight of his career has to say about them.  They've got better things to do than complain about insults.

And so do those politicians and pundits demanding an apology from Kerry.  It's not theirs to ask for.  By all means criticize, even eviscerate, the man for his blueblood contempt of the regular Joes who volunteer for the armed forces.  Of course, show that his statement about the intelligence of our troops is false.  Make the case that Kerry is saying what too many liberal politicians think about the military and so we cannot trust them with political power.  But don't play our fighting men, who have chosen to risk life and limb in foreign lands to safeguard our freedom here at home, for victims by arguing that they need an apology.  It's the flip side of the same coin Kerry minted when he reduced our troops to victims of the military.  If our warriors want an apology, let them call for it.  But I doubt they will.  They've got better things to do.

APPARENTLY IT'S NOT A JOKE

I thought I was being over the top in skewering the multiculturalists by calling yesterday's holiday "Genocidal Maniac Day".  As it turns out, at least one of their crowd does call Columbus Day that and is serious about it.  Click here for the rant by this seriously confused fellow.

HAPPY GENOCIDAL MANIAC DAY ...

... or, as the more even-tempered among us call it, Columbus Day.

A half a millennium ago Christopher Columbus discovered the New World.  To say that, I know that I have sinned against multiculturalism, for I am viewing that event from the parochial perspective of Western Civilization.  Indeed I am and I do so gladly, because that perspective is the one that best informs me of what is true.  All cultures are not equal, and none are the equal of the West with its mighty foundation upon ancient Athens and Jerusalem.

With that in mind, we need not whitewash the conflict and strife that ensued after Columbus opened up the Americas to Europeans.  American Indians suffered greatly.  Often from the evil of conquest, mass-murder, and slavery that Europeans, especially the Spanish, inflicted upon them.  More often from the unavoidable consequences of disease and dislocation arising from the clash of isolated Stone Age cultures with an advanced cosmopolitan one.

While we should regret the loss of life, we need not regret the loss of Indian culture.  The pre-Columbian societies of the New World were generally brutal.  There were no Rousseauvian utopias of noble savages.  The mightiest civilizations built by the Indians, the empires of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas, were totalitarian states sustained by subjugation, fatalism, and human sacrifice.  The advance of Western Civilization across the Americas ultimately freed the Indians from this tyranny (albeit imperfectly as evidenced in many parts of Latin America today).

More important, however, is that in the Americas, especially along the Altantic coast of North America, Western Civilization found fertile soil to flourish as haven for millions and millions, including those Indians who joined this new society.  The ideals of the West, the seeds of the rule of law, individual liberty, and private enterprise, bloomed in that soil and were most fully realized with the audacious founding of continental-scale republic when the Founding Fathers hammered out the Constitution of the United States of America.  In the two centuries since, what they created has been a beacon of hope for the oppressed, the ambitious, and most of all the ordinary who want nothing more than the freedom to live a good life by their own means.

We can celebrate the hope that America brings to all mankind as a great achievement of Western Civilization, and so we can celebrate today the man who turned the corner of history to make it possible.

THE "CHRISTIAN DARK AGE" MYTH

At the SOLO Passion forum I had the following exchange with James Valliant, a prosecutor and the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics.  Valliant is an atheist and an Objectivist who is working on a new book about the New Testament.

It's been my experience that Objectivists generally subscribe to an atheist narrative of history that consigns the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance to a dark age fomented by the rise of Christianity.  It's a myth that first got traction with Edward Gibbon's seminal work The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and was further developed by the anti-Christian polemics of Robert Green Ingersoll and the debunked A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White.  (If you are curious why so many atheists are in accord about the history of Christianity and Western civilization, these are their textbooks.)

In light of the book Valliant is working on, I was interested in discussing a little history with him.  I wondered if he believed the "Christian Dark Age" myth fostered by Gibbon, Ingersoll, and White.  Here is what we had to say ...

I wrote:

James,

You said:  "What's happening with Christianity has the same kind of motivations behind it, but a very different effect. Over time, as more benevolent ethical and political ideas have become current, they have been integrated into Christian thought."

That puts the cart before the horse. Judeo-Christian thought is responsible for the amelioration of Western society over the past two and half millennia, starting with the ancient Israelites' war against idolatry that eventually dethroned man and his works as god and created the political space for the supremacy of law in government.

Regards, Bill

Valliant responded:

No, Bill, I'm afraid "Judeo-Christian thought" helped to destroy the classical world and create a true Dark Age. The recent attempt at revisionism by certain Christian historians, such as Rodney Stark (The Victory of Reason), ignores so much data that it is surprising how seriously it is being taken. But, no, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment are all well-named phenomena.

The ideas of Darwin and Copernicus had to fight up hill against religion. Just ask Galileo, Bruno, etc. And, before that, science moved, shall we say, at much slower pace -- burning heretics at the stake did not encourage creative thought and neither faith nor hope advance science one bit.

So much was lost with the fall of the classical world! Those ideas of evolution and a sun-centered solar system were published and known to the ancient Greeks -- in the centuries before Christ. Archimedes had a form of calculus. The Romans built multistoried buildings made out of concrete --and with glass windows. Roman cities were more sanitary and had more clean water than any cities of the world before the industrial revolution. But this did not last. Rome's population fell by about 90% during the very century the Roman popes were consolidating their own authority there and over Western Christianity.

Even the great gothic cathedrals and castles were not built until the savage Christians of western Europe were exposed to Muslim and Byzantine engineering through their travels during the crusades. Observational science emerged only at this time, too, but really didn't get off and running until the rediscovery of the Ionian and Hellenistic philosophy and science of pre-Christian pagans -- which, thank goodness, the Muslims had preserved. (Possessing a copy of Aristotle before the 13th century would have got you and the book burned, btw...)

The ideas of the New Testament are mystical and, frankly, primitive. It is the work of those who looked elsewhere, e.g., the Platonist, Augustine, the Aristotelian, Aquinas, that gave Christianity any real substance -- even as a philosophy. And this "classing-up" took a long, long time indeed.

Christianity did topple man from a certain "throne." It's taken a while to put man back on his rightful throne, and we are not quite there yet... but give us more time.

I replied (at length):

James,

I grant that history involves some interpretation, but facts still matter.

The “classical” Roman Empire collapsed in the third century A.D. after a century of militarism and inflation fostered by its lack of economic productivity.  There was little creation of wealth beyond agriculture.  For all the glory of Rome that Gibbon waxed about, it was a brutal society based upon slavery and theft.  The aristocracy seized existing wealth through conquest.  When conquest failed, they seized it from ordinary Romans, including their farms.  And so the Roman Empire fed upon itself as the booty dried up.

This decay climaxed with the anarchy of the mid-third century.  Diocletian’s attempts to resuscitate the empire as a constitutional monarchy was too little, too late.  None of this can be blamed upon the Christians or their religion.  Indeed, Diocletian’s rabid persecution of Christians, who unlike atheist myth were not otherworldly lay-abouts but the core of the empire’s productive class, doomed whatever hope his reforms had.  Over the next generation, the perennial ills of the Roman Empire returned with a vengeance.

Only Constantine’s re-founding of the Roman Empire in Byzantium as a Christian society revitalized it in the fourth century.  Upon that foundation, the Roman Empire endured for more than a millennium as the Byzantine Empire until Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453.  During that time the new empire was more prosperous, commercial, urban, literate, and cosmopolitan than the old empire ever had been.  All the while it was the nearest thing in history to a Christian theocracy of any significant scale.  (Perhaps that is why atheists always seem to overlook the small fact of how the Roman Empire endured to the modern era as a Christian society.)

Of course, the western provinces fell to the Germanic tribes by the middle of the fifth century as the Roman Empire consolidated its frontiers around the wealthier eastern provinces.  Again, how Christians or their religion were responsible for this is not evident.  The rot and corruption of the third century could not be overcome, and so the Roman Empire had to carry on upon a smaller but sturdier foundation in the east.  But then the so-called Dark Ages that followed were hardly so dark.  From the fall of the empire in the west until the Carolingian Renaissance three centuries later, Roman law and culture followed the cross as civilization, albeit agrarian not urban, spread across northern Europe.  The windmill and the plow improved agricultural productivity and little by little wealth began to be accumulated again during the Dark Ages, in no small part because a confiscatory imperial bureaucracy no longer existed there.

As for the loss of knowledge during the Dark Ages, it had never been that widespread in the old Roman Empire.  You can credit the Muslims if want for preserving the ancient texts of Greece and Rome, but there were no Muslims until the seventh century and it was quite some time after that before they had a tradition of scholarship.  So who do you think preserved those texts during the intervening centuries?  The Christian church, of course.  They were never lost and were always a part of Christian scholarship.  Moreover, the university, which from its very beginnings encouraged open inquiry, was a Christian invention of the eleventh century rooted in the parish schools founded by Charlemagne three centuries earlier.

The university is just the best example of the intellectual and economic ferment of the Medieval era.  Western civilization expanded to Greenland and Scandanavia and Russia.  Parliaments were established in England and France.  Elsewhere republican government flourished in Germany, Italy, and Russia.  International trade thrived, and modern banking took root.  The professions of the law and medicine were established.  The inquisition (the beginnings of our current judicial system) supplanted the accusation and ordeal in justice.  And under the umbrella of the Universal Church, friars and monks traveled freely across Europe to spread academic and technical knowledge from one part of the continent to another.

Medieval Europe was not paradise, of course.  It was a hard place, but there was progress.  It was a world that was wealthier and more cultured than ancient Rome had been.  However, the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century spelled the downfall of this world, along with the growing corruption of the Church which had embroiled itself in the pursuit of temporal power.  A great deal of what had been accomplished during the Medieval era was lost over the course of a couple generations.  Contrary to atheist myth, the fifteenth-century Renaissance was mired in superstitution and mysticism as its now-forgotten literature attests.  (Other than Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, what endures today?)  A belief in witches became widespread.  Astrology and alchemy were enshrined as sciences.  And monsters ruled where traders, sailors, and travelers had ventured in Medieval times.  To the extent that the men of the Renaissance re-discovered the texts of the ancient era, they only re-discovered that which had been neglected in the wake of the Black Death.

And what did they do with the words of the ancient Greeks and Romans?  Like Rome, republics gave way to princes and absolute monarchs reduced parliaments to ciphers.  Dictators would be the bane of Christian civilization until the Enlightenment.  Nevertheless, the Renaissance closed with an explosion of painting and sculpture, the discovery of the New World, that Catholic priest Copernicus sparking the scientific revolution, the incipient rise of the middle class, and the Protestant Reformation, the tyranny and carnage from which forced the Western world to make a political virtue of tolerance.  Thus, the progress of the Medieval era resumed after the one-step-backward-and-two-steps-forward of the Renaissance.

So, James, the facts don’t support dismissing the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance as a dark age, especially one brought about by Christianity.  It’s a myth first fashioned by Edward Gibbon and given further currency by Robert Ingersoll and Andrew Dickson White.  What I find remarkable is how atheists have consistently recycled the fictions of Ingersoll and White to this very day, oblivious not only to what has always been known about the Roman Empire, the Medieval era, and the Renaissance, but the century of scholarship since that has grounded the “Christian dark age” myth into dust.

Regards, Bill

WISDOM AT THE GATES OF VIENNA

Thanks to the Maverick Philosopher, I discovered this piece of political wisdom by the Baron at the Gates of Vienna.  The Baron offers five reasons why we cannot be conciliatory to Muslim jihadists, and he's quite right the history shows us the disaster that will result.  (Actually the third and fourth reason are basically the same, but I quibble.)  I hope you find this as tidy an argument as I have against confusing decency with conciliation and appeasement.

THE MAVERICK, SOUND AS POUND AS USUAL

Recently Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has been addressing the threat fanatical Muslims pose to liberal society.  His article discussing the value of toleration is an excellent argument for why we must be intolerant of the jihadists.  Enjoy.

HOBBES GOT IT RIGHT

You recall Hobbes.  He's the early modern English philosopher who remarked that a man in the state of nature enjoys a life that is brutish, nasty, and short -- which gives us that wonderful adjective "Hobbesian" to describe the charms of dystopia.   So Hobbes thought civilization was a good thing and reconciled himself to the necessity of government as the only way we humans have figured out to keep civilization from decaying back into the state of nature.

As to government Hobbes thought that no matter how it is constructed, it always collapses into a supreme authority.  We hubristic Americans with our 200-year-old constitution that divides governmental power into three independent branches might chuckle about that.  The Founding Fathers did in fact devise a structure of government that is, in principle, capable through its checks and balances of forestalling its reduction to a supreme authority.  However, Hobbes was taking human nature into account, and yesterday's decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case shows that Hobbes got it right.

Actually, to call what the Supreme Court did a "decision" is to be much too clinical about what occurred.  It is the latest and most egregious assault by the federal judiciary upon the consitutional framework of our government.  It is the next advance in the march toward judicial supremacy, a state of affairs in which the judiciary secures the supreme authority, to the exclusion of the executive and the legislature, to dictate what is and is not the law in every nook and cranny of these United States (and Gitmo, too).  The Hamdan decision makes the judiciary's grab for power plain, although the trend of the past six decades of jurisprudence in this country hasn't left much doubt of this.

In Hamdan a 5-3 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration did not have the authority to conduct military tribunals of the detainess at the Guantanamo Bay facility who have been captured during our campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.  The hook for this ruling was the application of the Geneva Convention to these detainees by means of a mendacious misreading of the treaty, which prohibits tribunals of prisoners of war.  Of course, by any objective standard the Gitmo detainees flouted all of the rules of war laid down by the Geneva Convention and so forfeited its protections.  But facts didn't matter to the high court.  The lust for power did.

Thus the Supreme Court tore up the U.S. Constitution which clearly gives the president, as commander-in-chief, the power to determine the disposition of captured combatants; dismissed as non-existent the statute the U.S. Congress passed last year that gave the president the explicit authority to carry out military tribunals of the Gitmo detainees; and flushed down the memory hole its own past ruling that no matter what obligations the U.S. government has a signatory of the Geneva Convention, the judiciary has no authority to assign from it rights to individuals (e.g., Gitmo detainees).  Today's high court knows no restraint in its usurpation of executive and legislative branch powers.

But then, why should it in light of the pusillanimous reaction of the Bush administration and the Congress to the Hamdan decision?  Bush says he'll work with the court's ruling and Republican leaders in Congress say they'll recraft last year's legislation to comply with the court.  What neither did was defend the prerogatives of their institutions as independent and equal branches of government to interpret and implement the Constitution as they see proper.  The Supreme Court is not the supreme authority of the land.  It does not have the last word on what is or is not the law.  Bush has no obligation to conform to the high court's unconstitutional ruling.  However, he does have the obligation as the executive to defend the Constitution and declare the Hamdan decision a dead letter.

Acting upon that obligation does not put Bush on a slipperly slope to dictatorship.  We can thank the genius of the Founding Fathers for that when they gave the Congress the authority to impeach a president who would imperiously defy legitimate rulings of the Supreme Court.  The checks and balances are there, but they only work if we have politicians with the courage to use them and, most importantly, voters who will hold their feet to the fire if they don't.  Unfortunately, this has not been the case for a long, long time, and so the judiciary has run amok absent any significant restraint by the executive or legislature.  At the end of the day, we the voters have only ourselves to blame for letting the marvel of the Founding Fathers, the government designed by the U.S. Constitution, collapse into the dictatorship of a supreme authority that Hobbes predicted every government must.

Hobbes got it right, because he got human nature right.

MY OTHER SOAPBOX

[Note:  I don't post here as much as I might, because I have other websites I contribute content to.  One in particular is "The Local Area Watch", which is a journal for news and commentary on the misfeasance, malfeasance, and incompetence of public institutions in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, area.  Because I provide a prominent link to the L.A.W. site, I haven't until now bothered to make any mention of my contributions there.  However, today I posted an article for L.A.W. on a matter I am passionate about, which I think my growing audience here at "Vulcan's Mercy" will find interesting.  It is reprinted below in its entirety.]

When will it stop?

When enough people of goodwill refuse to be intimidated by baseless accusations of racism and call out the racemongers as the evildoers who refuse to allow the wounds of bigotry, racial oppression, and segregation to heal.  I'm referring, of course, to the incessant refrain from so-called black leaders who decry as racist every public decision that doesn't cater to their special interests.

The latest example is a gang led by retired advertising executive Bob Crawford and, no surprise, Kent County Commissioner Paul Mayhue, who have vilified as bigots the Grand Rapids Board of Education for not selecting their choice, a black-owned firm, to supervise the school district's substitute teachers.  According to the Grand Rapids Press, Crawford was "absolutely appalled" by the board's decision as appearing "very racist in nature" and typical of a "white power structure [that] leaves us out of most of the governmental and business decisions in mainstream Grand Rapids".

What is actually typical of these disputes is that Crawford's charges are a calumny.  He and his group of activists offer no evidence of racism.  They simply cite the fact that the board didn't hire the black-owned firm they preferred.  Instead the board hired the same firm as seventeen other area school districts because the choice saved the taxpayers the most money.  That's it.  Zero facts to support the ugly charge of racism.  It is for this reason I cannot reasonably conclude that Crawford and Mayhue and their cohorts are acting in good faith.

I would like to think otherwise, especially because I have made common cause with Mayhue in the past on an important issue.  But accusing people of calculated bigotry is a serious matter, and I would be ashamed of myself to do so without a shred of evidence.  Could it have truly escaped the conscience of both Crawford and Mayhue that they are tarring the reputations of people without good cause?  I suspect they are so free with their strident denunciations of the Grand Rapids school board, because they don't honestly believe their own accusations and don't expect anyone of consequence to take them seriously either.  Not doubt there is also a healthy amount of end-justifying-the-means sanctimony in that mix, too.

If so, what they are doing is particularly reprehensible.

That's because, if for no other reason, Crawford, Mayhue, and company are refusing to let the wrongs of the past slip into history by stirring distrust and paranoia in the generation raised since the collapse of government-enforced segregation that is now coming into power.  They are poisoning the well of comity and exhausting the goodwill of those who have learned the lessons of the civil rights era.  I have already explained how this is so here and here, so I won't reiterate those points now.  Suffice it to say that I am not giving up on the ideal of a colorblind society and will continue to call out those who would derail us from that destination, even if that means I will be perversely labeled as bigoted or heartless or ignorant for doing so.

WHAT IS PRIVACY? PART II

Yesterday I made the point that there is no right to privacy.  What each of us has instead are the Lockean rights of life, liberty, and property which are sufficient to secure privacy, if it is desired.  In other words if I protect information from public disclosure on my person or on my property (which includes entrusting it to another person, like a lawyer or a doctor, who has committed to safeguarding that information), no one can lawfully assault me or trespass upon property to obtain that information.  However, if I leave the blueprint to my latest invention out on the street, no one who finds the information is obligated to keep it secret for me.  I have no right of privacy independent of the sanctity of my person and property.

A question arises as to how far must I go to protect information as private?  Securing it on my property sounds reasonable in principle, but the reality is that my neighbor can without any physical trespass see and hear things I am doing on my property.  If he can learn something about me I want private without taking any active measures to do so, other than being within view or earshot of what I'm doing on my property, he has not committed any assault or trespass against me.  So it would seem that the mere fact that I have kept a matter on my property does not secure its privacy.

And it shouldn't.  Privacy exists only if I take effective measures to secure information from public disclosure short of assault, trespass, and fraud (which is a species of assault or trespass accomplished by deceit rather than physical force).  It is in this context that my spotlight example from yesterday is salient.  My neighbor cannot shine a spotlight into my unilluminated bedroom to see what I am doing there at night.  That is trespass.  However, if I turn the light on while the curtains are open, I no (legal) complaint against my neighbor if he sees what I have exposed to him and then reports that to others.  (It would be unethical of him to do so, unless I am plainly reckless in my exposure -- that is, if I don't care about my privacy, why should he?)

Which brings us to another common law concept, nuisance.  Do I invade my neighbor's privacy if I commit acts upon my property that either he cannot reasonably ignore?  For example, I'm a night owl and blast rap music into the ether at three o'clock in the morning.  Again this is not a matter of privacy.  It is a matter of property.  My neighbor has a right to quiet enjoyment of his property.  I cannot lawfully interfere with that right.  I do so if I pollute his property with loud noise, especially at a time when people normally sleep.  If I do so, I have created a nuisance.

This is how the common law prohibitions against assault, trespass, and nuisance protect privacy without creating a right to privacy that would unilaterally impose legal obligations upon the public to protect the confidentiality of an individual's information.  Trade secret law contrasted with patent law is an excellent example of how these common law principles work best to secure privacy without expanding the role of the state.

WHAT IS PRIVACY?

Checking out at a number of websites during lunch, the boys and girls over at Diana Hsieh's Noodle Food raised a interesting subject about which they are confused.  What is privacy, and how should the law protect it?

I'm not sure there is much the law should do to protect a person's privacy per se.  Privacy is essentially secrecy.  It is the control of information and the restriction of its dissemination to preclude public disclosure.  It is incumbent upon a person who wants to keep a matter private to take the necessary measures to prevent it from becoming public.  This is because once information enters the public domain, nothing but an assault upon free speech can stop anyone from learning about it.

Therefore privacy, at bottom, does not exist except for the physical effort a person makes to keep information confidential.  Once a person fails in this effort, privacy is gone.  Once lost, it is forever lost.  As dire as that fact may be, no one is obliged maintain a person's privacy (absent a commitment to do so, such as the person's lawyer or a doctor with whom he has a fiduciary relationship).  In other words, a person has no right of privacy that the public at large is required to respect.

However, this does not mean that others can interfere with a person's effort to keep a matter private.  For example, no one has a right to flip through my checkbook register if I leave open on top of my desk.  If I keep personal information secure through either my personal control or on my property, then that information is rightly private because nothing short of assault or trespass can disclose it to another.  And that's where the wrong lies if someone violates my privacy -- a transgression against my person or my property had to occur first.  If I then suffer loss because of the public disclosure of a private matter, then that is at least part of the measure of the damage the assault or trespass caused me.

This is also why my neighbor cannot use a spotlight to illuminate my bedroom at night to see what I'm doing there.  However, if I turn the light on while my curtains are open, then I can't complain if my neighbor sees what I have exposed to him.  This, in a thumbnail, is how the common law prohibitions against assault and trespass safeguard privacy without recognizing a right to privacy.

Next, nuisance and privacy ...

HISTORY REPEATS OR WHAT THE VICTORIANS, FASCISTS, AND THE NEW DEAL HAVE IN COMMON

History does repeat itself.  Not in a fatalistic cycle.  Each of us is a master of his own destiny.  But there is a spirit of the times that over the course of decades yields to a new spirit, which in turn yields to yet another spirit, and so on until this cycling of zeitgeists repeats itself.  This spirit is a widely shared attitude towards the political, religious, and cultural institutions that embody the core values of a society as expressed through changing fashion, style, customs, and manners in all aspects of human endeavor, especially among the elites.  Over time the form of the spirit acquires substance as it is institutionalized by reformation of the organs of society, thus sparking a new spirit among people.

William Strauss and Neil Howe, authors of “Generations”, have, I believe, correctly identified the engine of this cycle (if not its application to American history) on the smallest scale of the passing of one 20- to 25-year-long generation to the next.  Because of the familial and social intimacy of generations – e.g., grandfather to father to son, teacher to student, pastor to parish – there is not a revolution every couple of decades.  There is nevertheless a generational shift in attitudes that is cumulative to the point of provoking substantive changes in institutions upon the completion of one of Strauss and Howe’s four-generation cycles, about every 85 years.  This would be why the turning points of American history have occurred at 85-year intervals:  The colonization of the eastern seaboard circa 1605, the Glorious Revolution in 1690, the American Revolution in 1775, the U.S. Civil War in 1860, and the civil rights revolution beginning in 1945.

Each of these 85-year periods of shifting generational spirits has its own “meta-spirit” and a complete cycling of these zeitgeists every four periods.  This is what I mean by history repeating itself.  Every three and a half centuries Western Civilization (maybe Indian and Chinese civilizations too, but I haven’t studied them enough to form an opinion) undergoes a changing of spirit from revolution to normalcy to dissent to polarization.  I think this four-phase shift in attitude is the product of nothing more remarkable than the fact that after 85-years all living memory of the impetus for a given zeitgeist is extinguished.  Yet, human nature remains the same, so the long-term the yielding of one zeitgeist to another also remains the same.

So, let’s take a little closer look at this grand cycle of history.  It begins with revolution:  Commitment to the institutions of society is severed making possible their radical reform, abandonment, or even destruction.  In the examination of our own era, we can see that the Enlightenment marks a period of revolution, 1690 to 1775.  The West is exhausted by religious wars, and pragmatism dictates a modus vivendi of tolerance.  The Enlightenment enshrines this tolerance, even equality, of citizens of differing religious beliefs.  The forces for political liberty are unleashed.  At the western extreme of the European civilization, constitutionalism prevailed.  The Glorious Revolution opens this era, and the American Revolution closes it.  The revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment were so powerful that even the tyrants at the eastern extreme of European civilization, the Russian rulers from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great, strived to be enlightened despots.  Similarly, the enthusiasm for slavery in America and serfdom in Russia was at an ebb.

Revolution then yields to normalcy.  The institutionalization of the revolutionary ideals takes place.  Peace and prosperity often reign.  This is a period marked by a spirit of renaissance.  There is a shift of focus from public spiritedness to personal improvement.  The Industrial Revolution from 1775 to 1860 is an example of this period of normalcy.  In the U.S. the forging of the Constitution preserved the ideals of the Declaration of Independence while quenching the fires of revolution.  The subsequent ascendancy of the Hamiltonian commercial republic illustrates this.  The last conflicts of the revolutionary period are resolved in 1815 with the end of the Napoleonic wars and the War of 1812.  Peace and prosperity follow as great wealth begins to be generated in Great Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere through manufacturing.  However, the focus is not exclusively material.  A second Great Awakening convulses the U.S. and Great Britain and the Vatican, released from Napoleon’s yoke, begins the long process of reconciling the Enlightenment with Catholicism. 

In time dissent against this normalcy gains sufficient momentum to effect change.  This dissent is not a wholesale rejection of the ideals of the revolution.  Instead it is opposition to either the excesses of the revolution or the failure of the revolution to go further.  A good example of this is the misunderstood totalitarian reaction to the Enlightenment from 1860 to 1945.  Rooted in Malthusianism, Victorians deformed the ideal of Enlightenment religious tolerance into an idolatry of Reason, which fed an enthusiasm for a wide variety of rationalistic reductions of the human condition to one big idea.  This incipient totalitarian dissent was intellectually propelled by Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.  This provided the cultural moment to displace the Church, still at a nadir from the assault upon it by the proto-fascist Napoleon, with the State as the primary object of the ordinary person’s loyalty – as evidenced by the anti-clericalism of the era, including Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.  Thus, millions of young men dutifully submitted, in the name of king and country, to the carnage of World War I.  In the wake of the destruction of that brutal conflict, fascist regimes came to power in Germany, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe, in Russia (in its Marxian variant, of course), and even in faraway China and Japan.  Thus, the stage was set for World War II which closed this most recent period of dissent in unprecedented bloodshed and violence.

To understand the period of polarization that follows, we should look to home.  The U.S. was not immune to the totalitarian reaction to the Enlightenment, especially its fascist manifestations, if we recall a few things:  The surrender of a free-market control of the U.S. money supply to the “scientific” management of the Federal Reserve system, the respectability we gave to eugenics and the pseudo-science of race, and the deference we accorded to our own “maximum leader” FDR as he extra-legally amended the Constitution with the New Deal.  So totalitarian dissent from the Enlightenment was pervasive, and it was not eradicated with the destruction of the Nietzschean regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1945.  The Marxist and Darwinist strains remain virulent, obviously in the form of communism in the East and secularization in the West.  Indeed, even fascism found new life with the Arab nationalists and has been buttressed by the totalitarian Islamists.  After World War II, the totalitarian dissenters in the West harnessed themselves, when not acting as apologists for Communist tyrants, to newly respectable causes, such as the campaign against racial segregation, political and legal equality for woman, and conservation.  This is why multiculturalism, feminism, and environmentalism bear the hallmarks of totalitarianism and there is an increasing polarization between the left and the right in the U.S., as all the blue state/red state punditry reflects.

So, using the periods of the current cycle as an example, that’s the gist of how history repeats itself in a pattern of revolution, normalcy, dissent, and polarization.  A cursory survey of the history of Western Civilization reveals this pattern going back to the seventh century B.C. if we follow the path of the geographic center of the West as it moved from Greece to Rome to Byzantium to central Europe to Great Britain and, finally, to the U.S.  If nothing else, the following provides an objective periodization of history to facilitate an understanding of it:

Peloponnesian Era (690-350 B.C.):  Rise of the Philosophers(revolution), Athens-Spartan Hegemony (normalcy), Persian Challenge (dissent), Peloponnesian Wars (polarization).

Hellenic Era (350-10 B.C.):  Alexandrian Revolution, Hellenic Renaissance, Roman Eclipse, Fall of the Republic.

Roman Era (10 B.C.-A.D. 330):  Augustan Revolution, Pax Romana, Militaristic Anarchy, Division of the Empire.

Byzantine Era (330-670):  Constantinian Revolution, Eastern Restoration, Byzantine Retreat, the Islamic Threat.

Early Medieval Era (670-1010):  Rise of the West, Carolingian Renaissance, Feudal Reaction, Norman Conflict.

Late Medieval Era (1010-1350):  Medieval Reformation, the Universal Church, Academic Reaction, Via Moderna.

Early Western Era (1350-1690):  Rise of Modernity, the Renaissance, Protestant Revolt, Wars of Religion.

Late Western Era (1690-present):  The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Fascist Reaction, Eastern Conflict.

JUDGES GONE WILD

Over dinner last night, the beautiful Bridget and I discussed the day's news.  She mentioned that she had watched an interview on Fox of the defense attorney for the sexual predator who repeatedly raped two youngs boys and was released on probation by a judge in Columbus, Ohio.  She noted that the attorney persistently evaded the interviewer's questions about the true nature of his client's crimes.  Bridget said she shared the interviewer's obvious disgust of the attorney's refusal to damn his client.

I had a different take.  I'm a little queasy about the grandstanding of TV commentators like Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace about the criminal justice system.  They decry the defense attorneys, the compromising prosecutors, and the hapless trial court judges who operate the system.  Yeah, there's a lot of blame to go around.  We are entitled to expect better of the men and women on the front lines of our criminal justice system.  But should anyone really be surprised when defense attorneys exploit the rules favoring defendants, when prosecutors deal to avoid the labrythine those rules create to hamper conviction, and when so many trial court judges are political hacks who go-along to get-along with the local bar?

The system is rotten.  The justice our courts often deny victims of horrible crimes is real.  We have let the courts make a the fetish of maintaining the pettifogging bulwark of criminal rights.  I say "criminal" instead of "defendant", because the fetish is entirely procedural and devoid of substance.  By that I mean there seldom is serious doubt as to a defendant's guilt -- the defense attorney, the prosecutor, the judge, everyone knows he is a criminal -- when the court reflexively makes him the beneficiary of a procedural misstep.  This is not say procedure is not important.  The power of the state must be checked.  That's why we have a Bill of Rights.  But procedure is not the holy grail of justice.  It literally just a means to an end.  When proceduralism routinely trumps justice, we have a serious problem.

So focusing our ire upon the cogs who rotate as the wheels of justice (as presently rigged) dictate may -- and I emphasize MAY -- root out some of the worst defense attorneys, prosecutors, and trial judges.  But it does nothing to change a system that delivers a thousand small injustices to the victims of crimes for every big one making the headlines.  The rottenness of the system carries on.  Only until we strike at the root of the problem, this fetish with procedure, will there be genuine reform of our criminal justice system.

That root is the appellate judiciary of this country that has taken upon itself, with the acquiescence of our elected representatives, a supreme power to determine what constitutes the law of the land.  Appellate judges seized the high ground in the wake of World War II to bring down the regime racial segregation that denied so many American citizens their civil rights.  That was a revolution our country needed to renew itself.  Unfortunately, these judges flush with a righteous victory began to aggrandize their role in American politics.  They usurped the role of our legislators to dictate the law that would rule us, first and foremost in the realm of criminal justice.

Several decades later, our appellate judges have become quite comfortable as the Hobbesian supreme authority in our government.  Thus, judicial supremacy is a perversion of our constitutional order which recognizes that the people are sovereign and therefore the final authority (as delegated to Congress) as to what is the law.  So, picking better appellate judges to operate our dysfunctional courts really isn't much of a solution.  That's because such judges can only stop further excesses; they can't, except under exceptional circumstances, undo the aggrandizement that has already occurred.  The solution lies with electing congressmen, senators, and president who will act to not only constrain appellate judges but entirely reform the judiciary back to the limited role originally designed for it under the Constitution.

But so long as we prefer to cheer on grandstanders like O'Reilly and Grace than demand that our elected representatives enact a wholesale reform of the judiciary, appellate judges will continue to go wild and usurp more and more authority to rule us.

THE 36-YEAR POLITICAL CYCLE

As I read the post mortems of the 2004 election, I got the sense that many observers felt that it represented a fundamental shift in American politics, even though the raw vote totals for Bush and Kerry didn't appear to indicate such.  I thought there might be something to this, so I did a little noodling on the subject.

It appears to me that the history of American electoral politics is marked by a 36-year cycle.  At the end of each cycle is a major shift in the coalitions making up the major parties.  Last year marked the completion of the latest cycle.  Let's take a look at this history.

2004:  The latest election marked the completion of the ideological re-alignment of the Republican and Democratic parties.  Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are now oxymorons.  Among ordinary voters the welfare state ethos of the Great Society is discredited and the ghost of Vietnam is exorcised.  Another important shift has also been played out:  At the beginning of this cycle, the Republican party greatly benefited by absorbing the racialist (if not racist) Wallace bloc.  The rise of the Buckleyite conservatives during the 1970's effectively purged the Republican party of this taint by 2004.  (Of course, that hasn't stopped the pandering of the race-mongers, which is whole 'nother story.)

1968:  The Democratic New Deal coalition lost for good the Solid South.  Since the nation embraced racial integration in the wake of World War II, the states of the Deep South had become increasingly undependable for Democrats in presidential elections.  In 1968 George Wallace's third party run took the presidential election away from Democrat Hubert Humphrey and gave it to Republican Richard Nixon.  After that the Solid South was Republican, at first just at the top of electoral pyramid, but by 2004 all the way down to local offices.

1932:  The election of FDR is the birth of the New Deal coalition.  The Democrats stripped the Republicans of the progressive vote.  Labor became firmly esconced as a member of the Democratic coalition, and blacks began moving to the Democratic Party from the Republican Party in significant numbers.  By the end of this cycle, the Republicans had lost almost all of the black vote.  In opposition, the Republicans had become reactionary and finally acquiescent to the New Deal revolution in federal government.

1896:  McKinley's election marked the end of the post-Civil War coalitions.  The Democratic coalition split into "gold" and "silver" factions.  The limited-government, hard money Gold Democrats moved into the Republican camp, while under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan the free-silver populists took over the Democratic Party.  Thus, the modern core of each party was formed.

1860:  On the eve of the Civil War, the most spectacular re-alignment in American political history took place.  For the first and only time, a third party, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, won not only the presidency, but control of Congress.  The existing major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, were shattered by sectionalism.  The Republicans absorbed the Whigs and the Democrats carried on after Reconstruction from their newfound and unshakable base in the Solid South.  The Republicans became the party of industrial America (representing both blue-collar workers and manufacturers), emancipated blacks, the nation-state, temperance and social do-goodery, and a Whiggish penchant for public works.  The Democrats became the party of agriculture, immigrants in competition with black labor, state's rights, libertarianism, and limited government.

1824:  The Era of Good Feelings ended as the party of Jefferson (variously known as the Republicans or Democratic-Republicans) split into two major factions.  The "National Republicans" organized under John Quincy Adams who would win the presidential election of that year, while the "Democrats" organized under Andrew Jackson.  The National Republicans, based in the East, inherited many of the elements of the defunct Federalist Party and would become the nucleus of the Whig Party a decade later.  The Democrats became the party of the West, Manifest Destiny, and a populist localism in opposition to the centralizing policies of the National Republicans/Whigs.  Because of these general tendencies, the Whigs became increasingly strong in the industrializing free states, whereas the Democrats began to strongly align themselves with the interests of the agricultural slave states. 

1788:  Actually 1789, which was the first year federal elections were held under the Constitution.  When it became apparent that factions would organize into political parties to compete for the control of the federal government, the party of Washington became the Federalists while the anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution formed the core of the Democratic-Republicans.  As the nation first began to develop its institutions, the Federalists were primarily a northern party committed to the creation of a genuine nation, whereas the Democratic-Republicans were stronger in the slave south which did not benefit as much from strong national institutions.  However, once the foundation of federal government was in place, the Democratic-Republicans readily took control of its machinery to hold the presidency for twenty-four years, during which the rationale for the Federalist Party disappeared.

Cycles are relatively easy things to conjure up, but this is one that has hit the American political scene like clockwork to produce truly significant shifts in voter blocs.  I'm sure that the passing of generations within the rigid schedule of federal elections accounts for the cycle, though I haven't done enough study to definitively cite that as the cause.  Another interesting thing to consider is what appears to be an 85-year cultural cycle in America (to wit, 1605, 1690, 1775, 1860, and 1945).  How that entwines itself with this 36-year cycle is another question worth looking into.

Assuming that this 36-cycle exists, what are the implications for the major parties as we embark upon a new cycle?  A topic for another day ...

As I read the post mortems of the 2004 election, I got the sense that many observers felt that it represented a fundamental shift in American politics, even though the raw vote totals for Bush and Kerry didn't appear to indicate such.  I thought there might be something to this, so I did a little noodling on the subject.

It appears to me that the history of American electoral politics is marked by a 36-year cycle.  At the end of each cycle is a major shift in the coalitions making up the major parties.  Last year marked the completion of the latest cycle.  Let's take a look at this history.

2004:  The latest election marked the completion of the ideological re-alignment of the Republican and Democratic parties.  Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats are now oxymorons.  Among ordinary voters the welfare state ethos of the Great Society is discredited and the ghost of Vietnam is exorcised.  Another important shift has also been played out:  At the beginning of this cycle, the Republican party greatly benefited by absorbing the racialist (if not racist) Wallace bloc.  The rise of the Buckleyite conservatives during the 1970's effectively purged the Republican party of this taint by 2004.  (Of course, that hasn't stopped the pandering of the race-mongers, which is whole 'nother story.)

1968:  The Democratic New Deal coalition lost for good the Solid South.  Since the nation embraced racial integration in the wake of World War II, the states of the Deep South had become increasingly undependable for Democrats in presidential elections.  In 1968 George Wallace's third party run took the presidential election away from Democrat Hubert Humphrey and gave it to Republican Richard Nixon.  After that the Solid South was Republican, at first just at the top of electoral pyramid, but by 2004 all the way down to local offices.

1932:  The election of FDR is the birth of the New Deal coalition.  The Democrats stripped the Republicans of the progressive vote.  Labor became firmly esconced as a member of the Democratic coalition, and blacks began moving to the Democratic Party from the Republican Party in significant numbers.  By the end of this cycle, the Republicans had lost almost all of the black vote.  In opposition, the Republicans had become reactionary and finally acquiescent to the New Deal revolution in federal government.

1896:  McKinley's election marked the end of the post-Civil War coalitions.  The Democratic coalition split into "gold" and "silver" factions.  The limited-government, hard money Gold Democrats moved into the Republican camp, while under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan the free-silver populists took over the Democratic Party.  Thus, the modern core of each party was formed.

1860:  On the eve of the Civil War, the most spectacular re-alignment in American political history took place.  For the first and only time, a third party, the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, won not only the presidency, but control of Congress.  The existing major parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, were shattered by sectionalism.  The Republicans absorbed the Whigs and the Democrats carried on after Reconstruction from their newfound and unshakable base in the Solid South.  The Republicans became the party of industrial America (representing both blue-collar workers and manufacturers), emancipated blacks, the nation-state, temperance and social do-goodery, and a Whiggish penchant for public works.  The Democrats became the party of agriculture, immigrants in competition with black labor, state's rights, libertarianism, and limited government.

1824:  The Era of Good Feelings ended as the party of Jefferson (variously known as the Republicans or Democratic-Republicans) split into two major factions.  The "National Republicans" organized under John Quincy Adams who would win the presidential election of that year, while the "Democrats" organized under Andrew Jackson.  The National Republicans, based in the East, inherited many of the elements of the defunct Federalist Party and would become the nucleus of the Whig Party a decade later.  The Democrats became the party of the West, Manifest Destiny, and a populist localism in opposition to the centralizing policies of the National Republicans/Whigs.  Because of these general tendencies, the Whigs became increasingly strong in the industrializing free states, whereas the Democrats began to strongly align themselves with the interests of the agricultural slave states. 

1788:  Actually 1789, which was the first year federal elections were held under the Constitution.  When it became apparent that factions would organize into political parties to compete for the control of the federal government, the party of Washington became the Federalists while the anti-federalist opponents of the Constitution formed the core of the Democratic-Republicans.  As the nation first began to develop its institutions, the Federalists were primarily a northern party committed to the creation of a genuine nation, whereas the Democratic-Republicans were stronger in the slave south which did not benefit as much from strong national institutions.  However, once the foundation of federal government was in place, the Democratic-Republicans readily took control of its machinery to hold the presidency for twenty-four years, during which the rationale for the Federalist Party disappeared.

Cycles are relatively easy things to conjure up, but this is one that has hit the American political scene like clockwork to produce truly significant shifts in voter blocs.  I'm sure that the passing of generations within the rigid schedule of federal elections accounts for the cycle, though I haven't done enough study to definitively cite that as the cause.  Another interesting thing to consider is what appears to be an 85-year cultural cycle in America (to wit, 1605, 1690, 1775, 1860, and 1945).  How that entwines itself with this 36-year cycle is another question worth looking into.

Assuming that this 36-cycle exists, what are the implications for the major parties as we embark upon a new cycle?  A topic for another day ...

GO WEST!

After high school I traveled quite a bit courtesy of the United States Air Force.  First I had the opportunity to journey back and forth from my home in Michigan to the West Coast a number of times over a period of a couple years.  Then I went east, and eventually across the Atlantic to England, where I was stationed for three years.  From there, I visited the Continent and my missions took me to even more exotic locations.  After that I spent awhile stationed near Washington D.C. and traveled up and down the East Coast.  Back to civilian life, business and fishing expeditions took me to other nooks and crannies of North America.  And most recently my wife and I spent a pleasant two weeks rambling along the backroads of France.

However, it was my first great journey from home to the wild wild West that made the deepest impression upon me, especially in contrast to my life soon after that in England.  It taught me both the importance of conservation while completely disabusing me of the urgency of environmentalism.   In other words, I learned that the wild spaces of the West and elsewhere would be best preserved by the evolution of our culture instead of the sledgehammer of our politics.  Let me explain.

Saguaro Forests and Sandstorms

Like many born and bred in the tamer precincts east of the Mississippi, I pictured the West as the New Land.  It was the place that remained wild on a grand scale and in spectacular form.  When I finally made it out West, I was not disappointed.  Indeed, I think one of the most exotic places in the world is the saguaro "forest" of central Arizona.  That cactus-studded desert, empty of man but brimming with life, luscious to the eye but painful to the touch, is otherworldly.

Lonely, dangerous, and beautiful is the West.  Nothing more captured these themes for me than when I blundered into a sandstorm in southern New Mexico.  Soaking up the quiet desert heat of White Sands, I looked over my shoulder to see a boiling red cloud descending from the eastern slopes of the San Andres Mountains.  Ignorantly complacent until a few minutes later when I was trapped in the bowels of a furnace of sand, it was a hellish quarter of an hour during which all my senses were denied to me by sheer overload.  But it was exciting!  Chalk it up to being too young and stupid to know that getting caught in the open in a sandstorm could be unhealthy; but other than being in dire need of shower, I got through it in fine shape.

Of course, there are more peaceful enjoyments in the West.  One of those was Pinnacles National Monument of the Galiban Range in central California.  Crawling through the caves that riddled the shattered remnants of a volcano provided some healthy exercise.  More important was the prize at the end:  A great panorama of primeval solitude where one could hope to spy that Pleistocene relic, the California condor, soaring through the hard blue sky.  Never did see one, but that didn't diminish the lure of Pinnacles.

Then there are the sights that are ho-hum to the natives that grip the Easterner.  The monkey puzzle trees of Pacific Grove writhing in orange and black that marks the annual invasion of the monarch butterfly; chilling in a way, with so much life so different from us massed together.  Snow piled up thirty feet deep come April in the high passes of the Sierra Nevada or unexpectedly short of breath at over 11,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies while barreling over Monarch Pass.  The eerie emptiness of west Texas, where the hand of man has platted the land with roads and fences, but seldom is a soul to be seen.  The roly-poly wheat-covered hills of southeastern Washington, sculpted in the course of a few days by a flood of Biblical proportions let loose by a retreating ice cap.  The one hundred shades of blue that compose the hazy vista of the Great Salt Lake.  And so many more.

My time in the West was a soulful one.  As a boy who loved maps and always wanted to know what those flat colored spaces actually looked like, the West was my first chance to see a land truly different from home and learn what those dots, lines, and symbols really were in space and time.  That experience sparked in me my first consciousness of the importance of conservation.  What a shame if others who came after me could not get the same easy access to the wild that I did.

A Thoroughly Used Land

But it was my experience immediately after the West that put the importance of conservation into perspective for me.  After two years of living in the western United States, I spent the next three years living in England.  To my mind these two places at the extremes of an east-west axis formed a spectrum of man's domination of the landscape which dissipated as one headed westward.

After several millennia the British Isles, on the eastern extreme of that axis, have been thoroughly used by man.  Sure there remain a few wild fringes where barren rock is slapped mercilessly by the sea.  And then there are the restoration attempts in the highlands of Scotland and Wales where the government has planted odd-looking pine forests in Euclidean patterns of orthographic rigidity.  Otherwise there are no patches of land that have not been used, used, and used again, especially since the last frontiers fell three centuries ago.  Even the lovely moors - and they are lovely - are crisscrossed by paths leading to this pasture or that.

Even so, especially after my soulful journey through the empty West, I was not disturbed by what the heavy hand of man had wrought upon these isles.  The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, its forests laid low and its hills bored out to fuel the machines of commerce, was a pleasant land that fell softly upon the senses.  A patchwork of idiosyncratic corners welded together by the weight of population, it was nonetheless a place where - outside the cities, of course - the intensity of human endeavor molded rather than destroyed nature.  Traveling the land from Dover to Dublin, from Land's End to John o'Groats, I found many redoubts of solitude and raw nature that replicated the peace I found in the West.

My favorite redoubt is the beach at St. Bees in December.  Nothing very special I suppose.  A few hundred yards of rocky beach between a pair of undramatic bluffs where the Irish Sea laps lazily at its shore.  But the Gulf Stream is vital enough to take the chill out of the air, the stillness of the sea muffles the hub-bub of the village behind the bluffs, and the time of the year keeps the bathers away.  Sinking into the soft comfort of the place, one is enveloped in its timelessness.  The sights, sounds, and smells are no different from that of previous millennia.  The hand of man disappears and one focuses upon the forces of nature.  In fact around the neck of my wife hangs mounted in silver a little flat shard of green slate rounded by the waves that I fished out of the Irish Sea there.

The False Alarm

And so it was my experience in the British Isles that put conservation into perspective for me.  It is important that we preserve sufficiently large areas of wilderness that permit robust habitat, because we really cannot replicate nature.  However, it is not so urgent that we do so that we cut corners of our liberties and use the brute force of politics to make people submit to utopian ideals of the environmentalists.

The arithmetic makes this plain.  In the British Isles a population nearly one-quarter that of the United States is crammed into a space only three percent of ours - and the devastation of the land has NOT been the result.  And even if we do not want to broach the intensity of land use found in Britain and Ireland (and we don't), the United States would have to grow to a population of nearly TWO BILLION people before we got there.  This is not going to happen.

So, there is no environmental crisis.  There is a problem, which reached the public consciousness about three decades ago, and much has been done to solve it.  Work remains, but this is the work of cultivating a conservation ethic in the American psyche.  Changing the culture is the only long-term solution that ensures what we value now will be valued in the future.  On the other hand, unreliable politics change from election to election.

The time will come when the environmental bureaucracy will be dismantled or neutered, and so the goals of conservation will no longer be sustained by force of the government.  Without a change in the culture in the meantime, there will be no consensus for conservation.  At that point, the best that we can hope for is benign neglect of the remaining wilderness.  Worse, it is easy to imagine that the power we permitted the government to protect the land will be transmuted into power to use the land as the government sees fit.

It is because I think conservation is important that I object to the false urgency of environmentalists who demand that the power of government, despite its  dismal record of perverse results and failures, protect the wilderness.  I am particularly concerned that one of those perverse results will be the permanent dimunition of our liberties in exchange for creating a federal land-use behemoth.  Politics are for intellectually lazy jaw-jackers who enjoy the fight more than accomplishing anything permanent.  Changing the culture is for serious people who don't mind dirtying their hands to get real results.