Fourth Quote from Liberty and Tyranny

Man is more than a physical creature. As Edmund Burke argued, each individual is created as a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience and is bound to a transcendent moral order established by Divine Providence and uncovered through observation and experience over the ages. "There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity--the law of nature and of nations." This is Natural Law that penetrates man's being and which the Founding Fathers adopted as the principle around which civilized American society would be organized.

The Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." It provides further, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

[snip]

Some resist the idea of Natural Law's relationship to Divine Providence, for they fear it leads to intolerance or even theocracy. They have that backwards. If man is "endowed by [the] Creator with certain unalienable rights," he is endowed with these rights no matter his religion or whether he has allegiance to any religion. It is Natural Law, divined by God and discoverable by reason, that prescribes the inalienability of the most fundamental and eternal human rights--rights that are not conferred on man by man, and, therefore, cannot legitimately be denied to man by man. It is the Divine nature of natural Law that makes permanent man's right to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

You'll note a certain similarity between what Mr. Levin says here and what I've said about a bajillion times. Order the book here.

Conservative Anti-Capitalists?

I have to admit that when I clicked on Carl Horowitz's column, "The Anti-Capitalist Impulse on the Right" I had a vague presentiment of what was to come, but I did not quite anticipate some of the detail that he threw in.

There are some who might be a little surprised to find that there are conservatives who have a certain distrust of capitalism. This may seem absurd on its face; how can a political philosophy that, almost without exception as far as I can tell, champions the right to property distrust capitalism? And the answer seems to be that so highly do some people value hierarchy, tradition, and moral structure that they look on the opportunities for license and indulgence afforded to the masses in a capitalist society with horror, so much so that they seem to think that the answer to the situation is government intervention. As Mr. Horowitz writes:

Traditionalists generally find this infuriating. For them, the exercise of personal freedom is tantamount to its misuse. A healthy culture, in their minds, must prevent adults from attending immoral concerts, watching immoral TV programs, and reading immoral magazines (or allowing their offspring to do likewise)...As licentious appetites must be whetted in today’s carnival of consumption, they argue, authorities should restrain people from indulging those appetites. Capitalism, while more efficient than socialism, undermines virtue. New sumptuary laws, of a sort, are needed...As long as people such as Hugh Hefner are permitted to run profitable enterprises, Kristol argued, capitalists would be the gravediggers of capitalism.

Mr. Horowitz argues strongly against this point of view, and I recommend you read the column, bearing in mind that I have points of difference with him, some of which may not be immediately apparent, so make no assumptions, please!

For my part, I pretty much always default to liberty. I have an almost total distrust of government's capacity to execute anything successfully, even its legitimate, God-ordained functions, let alone what you might think of as governmental extracurriculars, such as legislating morals. And yet I would agree totally that in a "healthy culture" people do not attend immoral concerts, watch immoral TV programs, read immoral magazines and the like (and I am by no means contending that I have been without sin in my life when I say that). So you might legitimately wonder how I say that the good society is a capitalist society, where people have both liberty and property rights and yet also a society that rejects the libertinism fueled by the rise in personal prosperity that capitalism affords. The answer is to be found in an old quote from Edmund Burke:

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

What actually happens in the world is this, and I think you can see the process happening around you right now: you can have freedom, liberty, and property rights, the having of which necessarily entails the possibility of doing immoral things with them, and if enough people persistently do those immoral things, eventually the building blocks of society break down, and so much societal chaos ensues that people begin to clamor for order at any price, even the price of the liberty that they formerly cherished. The only way around this is for the members of a society, a culture, to regulate their own behavior, to, as Burke puts it, "put moral chains on their own appetites," that is, though they may have the means and the liberty to run around on their spouses and drink themselves into the gutter, they do not have the inclination. The most effective way of accomplishing such a state of affairs is through the thorough Christianization of a society, which means, ultimately, that the maintenance of liberty and property rights rest on the foundation of the preaching, teaching, and living out of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and where the church fails in this, in the long haul, society suffers collapse, tyranny enters--sometimes swiftly, sometimes by degrees--and the abuse of liberty brings about its own downfall.

At least, that's how I see it.

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Afterthought: After reading Dave's question (see the comments), I thought, "Now, that's the problem with doing everything in one draft: occasionally, you're going to lack consistency." In this case, having said in one part of a sentence, "The most effective way...," which, obviously, means that there are other ways, I gave the impression in rest of the sentence that there wasn't another way.

Not the most consistent writing in the world. I amend the sentence thusly, new material in bold:

The most effective way of accomplishing such a state of affairs is through the thorough Christianization of a society, which means, ultimately, that the maintenance of liberty and property rights is best founded on the preaching, teaching, and living out of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and where the church fails in this, in the long haul, society is far more likely to suffer collapse; tyranny enters--sometimes swiftly, sometimes by degrees--and the abuse of liberty brings about its own downfall.

I chose to make the change here, rather than in the body of the post as originally written because had I done otherwise, Dave's question wouldn't have made sense to later readers.

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Edmund Burke Quote # 5

From "Speech Before the House of Commons in Support of Mr. Rose Fuller's Motion that the Commons Move to a Committee of the Whole in Order to Discuss the Threepence Tax on Tea":

...among vices, there is none which the House abhors in the same degree with obstinacy. Obstinacy, Sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues, constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness, are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so just an abhorrence, and, in their excess, all these virtues very easily fall into it.

One of the most amazing, and yet utterly unsurprising, aspects of political discourse in this age is the degree to which people are loyal to ideas that have absolutely no track record of actually producing the benefits which they were supposed to produce.

I'm never one hundred percent sure whether it's idiocy, ignorance, willful blindness, lying in shameless pursuit of power, obstinacy--as Burke suggests here--or some hideous combination of all of them.

Probably it's the hideous-combination-thing. Yeah, that's it.

Edmund Burke Quote # 4

From "Speech Before the House of Commons in Support of Mr. Rose Fuller's Motion that the Commons Move to a Committee of the Whole in Order to Discuss the Threepence Tax on Tea":

Could anything be a subject of more just alarm to America than to see you go out of the plain highroad of finance, and give up your most certain revenues and your clearest interests, merely for the sake of insulting your colonies? No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of threepence. But no commodity will bear threepence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated and two millions of people are resolved not to pay. The feelings of the colonies were formerly the feelings of Great Britain. Theirs were formerly the feelings of Mr. Hampden when called upon for the payment of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined Mr. Hampden's fortune? No; but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would have made him a slave. It is the weight of that preamble, of which you are so fond, and not the weight of the duty that the Americans are unable and unwilling to bear.

Some taxes are more than just a means of raising revenue for legitimate governmental tasks. Some taxes are also means of insulting people, or of punishing certain people, or of communicating to them that they have no rights the government is obligated to respect. Eventually, people get tired of being disrespected, insulted, and unjustly punished, and they begin to seek means of avoiding such taxes. The amount of the tax might be almost immaterial. It is the reason why it is demanded that is the primary issue.

Edmund Burke Quote # 3

From "Speech Introducing a Motion for an Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Disorders in America":

Is the folly of laying duties on your own manufactures a new discovery?

One of the things that constantly amazes me when people begin discussion of tax policy is that they so often approach the subject as though it were merely a matter of theory, as though tax policies have existed only since the introduction of the Sixteenth Amendment, as though differing policies have not a lengthy track record by which we may evaluate them.

"Free Trade"--it occurs to me that some people may not entirely understand what I mean by "free trade," and may be thinking that I am about to talk about "free markets." I am not. "Free Trade" and "free markets" are two entirely different animals. "Free Trade" is the policy of eliminating tariffs--taxes--on imported goods, especially manufactured goods, or lowering them to the point of being nearly non-existent. It has a track record. It is largely a track record of exporting manufacturing industries and the high-paying jobs and economic and military strength that go with them to countries with an abundance of human capital (which they often don't mind abusing) and a willingness to foul their own environment to the point of near-unlivability. It also has a track record of creating, in a way, confiscatory income taxes--it is basically always a choice between "tax consumption" (usually imports) or "tax income"--and big, intrusive government (the federal behemoth we now live with did not exist when the feds had to live with income from tariffs).

Tariffs also have a track record--and before someone weighs in with, "Yeah, Smoot-Hawley caused/prolonged the Great Depression!," let me note that this is in much dispute; no less an economic mind than Milton Friedman disputes it, and he is not alone. If you are interested in more, please read the relevant chapter in Patrick Buchanan's The Great Betrayal. It was during the time that the federal government was financed principally by tariffs and duties on imported goods that manufacturing in this country flourished, and the country rose to become an economic and industrial colossus recognized the world over.

It is partly because of this history, this track record, that I support the Fair Tax. It is a consumption tax, and amongst the elements of it I like are that it creates a tremendous tax advantage to manufacturing in this country--as, obviously, do tariffs. History gives every indication that a consumption tax that creates such a tax advantage will stimulate our economy far more than attempting to squeeze the so-called "rich" (always remember: to those consumed with envy, "rich" means only that you have a dollar more than they think you ought to have) ever will.

So why don't our leaders favor this idea? At bottom, I think that it's because for too many of them, tax policy has become far less about what will or will not work and far more about whom they can and cannot reward. With the Fair Tax, you cannot buy votes as easily as you can with a graduated income tax. And ultimately, buying votes with public money seems to be what it's all about.

And that, in a way, is the answer to Burke's question: they--lawmakers, that is--know full well how stupid some of their tax ideas are. They just don't give a rip unless it suits their own ends.

Edmund Burke Quote # 2

A series of quotes, actually, all from "Speech Introducing a Motion for an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Disorders in America," May 9, 1770:

...there is no right that may not terminate in a wrong, if it is not guided by discretion.

[snip]

...it behoved you, before you committed the government to a measure which you could not easily recede from, to provide against the consequences.

[snip]

You are not to commit the government to any measure unless you are sure you can carry it through.

Of the things that appall the conservative, recklessly experimental government has to be near the top of the list. I do not mean that new ideas can never be tried; that would be foolish. But it is also foolish to commit your government to policies and/or actions that have neither a track record of working in the past nor any indication that they are based on the realities of human nature, economics, the physical world, etc. It is foolish to commit your government to actions or policies without, like the good chess player, trying to look several moves ahead to see what might go wrong, and provide against it. It is foolish to commit your government to doing something on the basis of no more than a faint hope that you might be able to make it work, the sheer desire that people might, given your sterling leadership, behave differently than they have over the last several millennia. To govern in this way is to commit your country to great risks with no recourse should something go wrong--and, as the plumber in Moonstruck said all those years ago, "Something always goes wrong."

In this world, there are people who are utterly convinced that if only the smart people--who are invariably the ones that agree with them, of course--were in charge, that all would be well. The reality is that even to think such a thing is to show yourself ignorant of the realities and limitations of human nature, and to set yourself up for disaster. Wiser minds proceed cautiously rather than precipitously, ever mindful of the human race's endless capacity to get things Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition.

Edmund Burke Quote #1

From "Speech Before the House of Commons in Support of William Dowdeswell's Amendment to the Address of Thanks," November 18, 1768:

There is no such thing as governing the whole body of the people, contrary to their inclinations. It is not votes and resolutions, it is not arms that govern a people.

If this is true--and I certainly am inclined to believe it--then we may think of the political history of the last fifty years or so as symptomatic. For too long, many of us have operated on the assumption that most Americans remember and cherish the United States as we long for it to be, as a constitutional republic under God, designed with the objective of protecting man's God-given rights. But if Burke is right, the gradual slide leftward has not been something done entirely against the will of the majority of the people in this country. It may have been done, perhaps, with a sly nod, weasel-words, and a wink, but not "contrary to the inclinations of the whole body of the people."

The task now before conservatives is to change the inclinations of our people, to recreate the state of the heart and spirit and the attitude of mind that prevailed in this country at the time of the Revolution and the Constitutional Convention, that resulted in what has been the greatest country this world has ever known. This means that we are going to have to have, if not another Great Awakening, more success in evangelism and discipleship.

I hope we're up to it. It's going to take a while. And frankly, it seems to me that way too many conservatives act as though evangelism and discipleship are the preacher's job.

About the Mastheads

Well, as of this writing, there are two mastheads. There will be more. I have only recently started fooling around with GIMP and have no clue what I am doing yet.

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First, there is the original masthead, to which the following comments pertain:

These are just a few, a very few, of the many people who have contributed to the development, defense, and preservation of the West. From the upper left and going clockwise:

Samuel Rutherford, author of Lex, Rex and disseminator of many ideas crucial to founding of the United States; Aristotle, who did the tough sledding in formulating the rules of logic; Martin Luther, the great reformer; John Calvin, another great reformer; Thomas Reid, noted thinker of the Scottish Enlightenment and developer of what was once the dominant philosophical school in the United States and England, Common Sense Realism; Paul, the apostle to the gentiles; Adam Smith, the theoretician of capitalism; William Shakespeare, arguably the single greatest dramatist in Western history; Taika Seiyu Oyata, the founder of Ryu Te; Francis Schaeffer, probably the foremost (and most intellectual) Christian apologist of the twentieth century; Edmund Burke, the Irishman generally conceded to be the first of what we now call conservatives; Cicero, the defender of Roman republicanism; and Moses, the great prophet.

Many have been left out for lack of space. More could be said about each of those shown, and will be, as time goes on. For now, two brief words of explanation:

I chose not to include the most important person in all of history, Jesus Christ, both to avoid any hint of idolatry and because every artist's depiction I have seen of Him shows Him, frankly, as a somewhat milquetoast individual, not at all in accord with the way He's described in Scripture.

Now, about Taika...

You've got to be wondering why there's a picture of an Okinawan karate master on the masthead of a blog that is principally about the West. It's so striking that I feel compelled to explain. I'm sure that some will say that I included him solely because of my interest in martial arts, and because he is the founder and head of the system I study, RyuTe, and no doubt there is a little truth to the charge. But there is a little more to it than that.

Consider who this man is, and what he has done. He is descended from a noble family on Okinawa, and is one of the last people to have been trained directly by the old Okinawan bushi who actually had a role in protecting the Okinawan king. He has spent his life researching the old Okinawan martial arts and is quite probably the single most knowledgeable person in the Western hemisphere, if not the world, upon that subject.

He was slated to be a kamikaze just before the end of World War II. His death certificate had already been sent to his parents. And yet, when he opened up his own dojo on Okinawa, not only did he teach Americans, he taught them the real Okinawan karate when not every teacher did so. Eventually, he emigrated to America and was the first, as far as I can tell, to make the subjects of tuite (karate's corpus of close-quarter grappling techniques) and kyusho-jitsu (vital point striking) available to the American public.

I don't know if some people realize how huge this was. For many, many years, hardly anyone was willing to teach Americans the Asian martial arts at all, or if they did, they didn't teach everything they knew. Taika is in the company of people like Henry S. Okazaki and Ark Y. Wong, who made very deliberate decisions to teach what they knew to people of all backgrounds even if not everyone of Asian descent approved. Other people may have followed, and started teaching chin na and cavity press, but as far as I can tell, Taika was the first, he opened up the way, and no one, to my knowledge, has demonstrated greater knowledge on these subjects than he. It is very possible that were it not for Taika Oyata, hardly anyone in the Western Hemisphere would be more than marginally familiar with these subjects.

Taika left his family, his country of birth, and made his home with Americans, and (according to my instructor) converted to Christianity. He teaches his arts as life protection arts, implicitly acknowledging several cardinal Western values in so doing. The time will come, if it isn't already here, that more than a few people of the West will need such life protection skills. It is for the role that he and his teachings have had, and will have, in preserving the individual lives of those who will uphold the values of Western Civilization that he is included.

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Then there is Masthead 2, which is the result of my very first efforts with GIMP. It's just a shot of the famous Lewis Chessmen with the blog title on it.

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And then we have Masthead 3, which is the one with the go board, or goban. Yes, I am fully aware that go is an oriental game. I still find that playing go has a way of enhancing life and stimulating the mind. It's a welcome addition to intellectual life of the West.

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