Fragmentation and Preservation

Only a few short days ago, Tashi Jim Logue, Taika Seiyu Oyata's senior student, passed from this world. It came as something of a surprise. I knew he'd had cancer. I knew he made trips every so often to a cancer-treatment facility (all of which I assumed were to verify that he was still cancer-free). I knew he'd been in the hospital recently. I did not know, and possibly others did not know, that his death from cancer was so imminent.

The whole thing put me in mind of something that I've thought about from time to time: what will happen to Taika Oyata's karate when the inevitable happens and he, too, passes from this world? It is true that Okinawans are the longest-lived people on the planet, on average, and it is true that Taika Oyata's father lived to a very old age, and it is true that Taika Oyata may well live another twenty years. And yet it is also true that he cannot live forever, and eventually, his organization, the RyuTe Renmei, will be headed by someone else. I am sure that that person will be someone of knowledge and integrity. Every person within the RyuTe Renmei with whom I've talked or corresponded has been very dedicated to Taika and his system. They have all been classy people. I have not met any exceptions.

And yet the good folks in the RyuTe Renmei are not the only people Taika has taught. There are a number of people who have studied under Taika and who are no longer with his organization for one reason or another. Do not ask me why. I know none of them and cannot even begin to speculate on why they left or were shown the door. But there are a number of them, some of whom were promoted to fairly high rank before they left. Now, it is true that the art as Taika has taught it has changed somewhat over the years. My own teacher thinks that this is because Taika is still analyzing the art, as he was taught to do by his teachers, still splitting pages within the book, as my teacher might put it, and also because Taika has revealed more of the art as his students have demonstrated themselves capable of understanding and handling it. This should not surprise anyone who has seen a person learn--well, anything, even simple cooking. It is pointless to try to teach a person how to make puff pastry if he has not yet demonstrated the ability to make egg noodles. So it is true that a person who left Taika's organization years ago, despite having attained high rank, would not be teaching exactly the same thing that is being taught in the RyuTe Renmei right now.

And yet, nevertheless, regardless of the circumstances under which they left, and regardless of how long ago they left, each of these people can legitimately claim to have been taught by Taika Oyata and to have been promoted to high rank. And that is nothing to sneeze at! I well remember having first been introduced to what was then called Ryukyu Kempo, back in the eighties (I trained for a while, then dropped out for many years, in case you were wondering. I have not been training continuously since the eighties!). I had been training in Taekwon-do for some little time; my next promotion would have been to black belt. I had trained under two seventh-dans, one sixth-dan, and two third-dans. Not one of those people showed me material as advanced as what my teacher showed me then. Not ONE. Not even close. Nor have I seen the like amongst the local Japanese Goju Ryu crowd (though I have much respect for them and their organization and follow them closely online). In other words, a person might have left Taika's organization fifteen years ago and "missed out" on some of the information he's revealed over the last several years, and he would still, in my opinion, be teaching material vastly better than most people in most "karate" classes around the country are getting.

And that is where I start remembering Yip Man. You may not know about him (I'm sure many do!). He was a very famous kung fu teacher in Hong Kong, a remarkable fellow who'd learned Wing Chun back on mainland China before managing to escape to Hong Kong. Yip Man's kung fu was widely known to be extremely street-effective. He taught a number of people over the years, and last I heard, I believe that there were a minimum of three people claiming to have been his "closed-door" disciple, the only inheritor of the true art of Wing Chun kung fu! And the thing is, each of these people is apparently good enough that you might well believe their claims!

I'm sure there are other cases like this. As a matter of fact, I know there are. Look at the history of the Yagyu Shinkage Ryu in Japan. Apparently, that system didn't survive intact past the death of its founder. If I understand correctly, one of the founder's sons went on to teach the Shogun's family, and another stayed behind in the family village, with the one son eventually deciding that the other son had changed some elements of their father's system, and founding his own sub-system, the Owari Yagyu Shinkage Ryu (Don't quote me on this, I may have the details wrong!). And it went downhill from there!

Look at the history of aikido since Ueshiba Morihei's death.

Come to think of it, since there is a sizeable Japanese Goju Ryu crowd 'round here, look at Goju Ryu! How many different sorts of Goju Ryu can you name? Off the top of my head, there is Goju Ryu as taught by the Jundokan, by Morio Higaonna, Seikichi Toguchi, Peter Urban's Goju USA, Lou Angel's Tenshi Goju, "Chinese" Goju, Gogen Yamaguchi's Goju-Kai, and who knows what else!

History and human nature being what they are, then, I find myself wondering how many of Taika's former students will someday be claiming to have been shown the real, true art of karate, of Ryukyu Kempo, to have been Taika's secret disciple. Will any of them have the cheek to claim that that they have it right and the RyuTe Renmei has it wrong? It sounds absurd, but--again, human nature being what it is--I would bet you dollars to donuts that that is exactly what happens.

I'd love to be able to say that I know how to prevent this, but I haven't a clue. And it will be a darn shame when it happens.

Tashi Logue's death also put me in mind of the vital necessity of teaching what you know whilst you have the chance. You never know just how much time you have. Tashi Logue certainly set the example in this case. He worked hard to share his knowledge.

The reality is that each of these systems--I am talking about the older, more classical martial systems--is, at any given time, but one generation away from extinction (the same has often been noted of Christianity, by the way). It is not possible to learn it all from a book or video and there are never enough people practicing them. They are not the same as systems like Taekwon-do or Shotokan or Japanese Goju Ryu or Aikido or Judo or Kendo, which have millions of practitioners throughout the world. I would not be at all surprised to find that there are fewer than five thousand RyuTe students worldwide. The majority of those, of course, are not yet qualified to be teachers. While I do not know, have never tried to make a count, it would not at all surprise me if the depressing reality is that there are really very few members of the Renmei ranked fourth dan or above. Or perhaps there is a high percentage of people ranked at that level, but a high percentage of a small number is still a small number.

This is very sad in a way, yet it is also completely amazing that there is a RyuTe Renmei at all. You can put it down to divine providence or sheer dumb luck as you prefer, but if I understand what I've read and been told correctly, the content Taika Oyata learned from his first two teachers might well have perished with them had he not encountered them. I have certainly not seen anything quite like what my own teacher has shown me anywhere else. That is significant. Over the decades, I have acquired what has to be, I think, as solid a martial-arts library as can be had in English. I have works on aikido, on jujutsu, on judo, on karate, on pressure points, acupuncture, and chin na. I have watched way too many hours of video online. And I am serious, as serious as a heart attack, when I say that what Taika Oyata has revealed, as passed on to me by my own teacher, is different. Not that you can't find similar techniques in those other martial arts. More than once my teacher has said things like, "This is how they do it in aikido. We just do this little (fill in the blank) to (fill in the blank)." There are techniques that look a lot like what we do in RyuTe, but in RyuTe there is always something, something that changes the results of the technique from the "oh-crap-that-hurts" or the "oh-crap-where-did-my-balance-go?" elicited by other systems to the "OHCRAPWHERETHE****DIDTHATCOMEFROM?" that you get with RyuTe. It is just not like anything else, and it was almost lost. As my own teacher has told me repeatedly, Taika's teachers were not, per se, teachers, they were upper-class fighting men, nobles. As far as I can tell from what I've read and been told, Taika Oyata was not simply their premier student, he was their only student, and had he not been there at the right time, huge chunks of the real Okinawan martial traditions would simply have vanished, lost to time. More, the world would not have even known it! The world would have gone right on assuming that what they were being shown in the dojo of modern karate systems was all that there was (as a matter of fact, I have read some fairly amusing stuff fairly obviously premised on the idea that modern karate is all that there is--that is, there are still a pretty fair number of people who simply will not admit to themselves that there is more to the kata or to vital point striking or to karate's grappling than Funakoshi revealed in Karate-Do Kyohan.)

But because Taika Oyata was there, and because he, in turn, has been willing to teach, those centuries-old skills are largely in the hands of middle-class Americans. I sometimes wonder if people fully appreciate what a huge leap he has made in choosing to entrust us with this art. I hope that we do not fail him--and in a larger sense, our neighbors--by failing to pass it on. I think he has certainly done everything humanly possible to make sure that the knowledge is not altogether lost, even if no one else of his capabilities arises for a long time to come. I hope also that everyone realizes that preserving that body of knowledge is going to have to be something of a team effort--have to be, I say, and I am quite sure I am not the first person to have thought along these lines! You see, as far as I know, the weapons knowledge--nunchaku, sai, bo, jo, and so forth--is split up, kind of as though there are, shall we say, "subject matter experts." My own teacher knows the jo very well, and also can teach sai--but although he has nunchaku and tanbo in the weapons racks, he does not know the kata for those weapons and wouldn't venture teaching more than the most basic movements. I am given to understand that this situation is not uncommon--that there are people that know nunchaku pretty well, but not chizikunbo, or vice versa, and so on.

This body of martial knowledge doesn't reside in one man--other than Taika Oyata--but in a body of men, in the RyuTe Renmei and especially in Shin Shu Ho. Part of me wonders if Taika Oyata didn't set it up that way deliberately, so that they would have to stay united.

I won't be in a position to teach much of anything for another couple of years. At that time, I hope to begin teaching on a modest scale, under my own teacher's direction. I particularly hope to spread RyuTe amongst the local homeschooling community. They--homeschoolers and RyuTe--seem natural fits for one another. And I hope that in a modest way, I can thereby contribute to keeping this system alive amongst people who truly need it. And I hope that when the inevitable occurs, I hope that it can be said of me that I played my part in keeping this knowledge available for others.

Mouse ----! You Understand Mouse ----? or Thoughts on Cussing

Over the years, I have seen a few blogposts dealing with the subject of cussing, or foul language, mostly from Christian perspective. As a matter of fact, I can't recall any post on the subject that wasn't trying to approach it from a Christian perspective.

I have to tell you right up front that I was in the United States Marine Corps Reserve for five years, and at one time, I possessed the usual unmitigated fluency in cussing common to most U.S. Marines. It is, however, very rare that I cuss these days. Cussing events are mostly of the I-hit-my-thumb-with-the-hammer sort. That may color your opinion of what I have to say or it may not, but at least you know.

I have thought about writing this post a million times, I think. Just about every time, a memory has come to my mind, a conversation I once had with a sanitarian, or "health inspector," as you may call them. Y'see, I was in the fast-food business for about fourteen years, and was on friendly terms with several of the city's sanitarians. One time, one of them was explaining some of the difficulties that they occasionally had with ethnic residents. He gave me the example of a time that he found mouse droppings in one Asian-style restaurant, a place where the staff was all from overseas and had a very limited command of English.

"You have mice. You need to call the exterminator."

"What?"

"You have mice. Look, you see? Mouse droppings."

"What?"

"Mouse droppings. Mouse dung."

"What?"

"You know--feces."

"What?"

"Poop?"

"What?"

"MOUSE ----! You understand MOUSE ----?!"

The man did indeed understand, "mouse ----," as it turns out.

My question for you is: was the sanitarian cussing? Or communicating?

I don't think the difference is always quite so cut-and-dried as some people like to think.

Usually, when the question of cussing or foul language comes up in Christian circles, people opposed to cussing--that would be most Christians I've met--will cite Paul's admonitions to avoid "filthy talking" or "coarse jesting."

And let me make something clear before I go on: I regard the Bible, including Paul's letters, as the word of Almighty God. I absolutely will tell you that Paul said exactly what God intended him to say, and that it means what it says.

On the other hand, I've read multiple translations of the Bible, and I have yet to find any one of them that gives me a crystal-clear definition of what "filthy talking" and "coarse jesting" are. We have Ephesians 4: 29, which says, in the NKJV, "Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth, but what is good for necessary edification, that it may impart grace to the hearers." The NET Bible renders it, "Let no unwholesome word..." The ESV, my favorite translation, has, "...corrupting talk..." Then there is Colossians 3:8, which reads, in the NKJV, "But now you yourselves are to put off all these: anger, malice, blasphemy, filthy language out of your mouth." The NET Bible renders it, "...abusive language from your mouth." The ESV has, "...obscene talk..."

What exactly is a "corrupt word" or an "unwholesome word" or "corrupting talk?" What exactly is "filthy talking" or "abusive language" or "obscene talk?"There are a lot of people who seem to think it's the content of George Carlin's infamous list of the words you can't say on TV. I don't think it's quite that simple.

It's fairly obvious that when writing in Greek, Paul wasn't spending a lot of time thinking about Anglo-Saxonisms that hadn't yet been invented.

It's fairly obvious that it's not the objective meaning of the words that is being referred to. You can say, for example, "manure" without anyone in the world accusing you of cussing, right?

Some folks--including some for whose opinions I generally have very high regard--make an argument that basically amounts to this: Every culture has a list of words that are commonly accepted as being foul. We all know what they are and what they are used for, and it is to this list, at least in part, that Paul refers. Therefore, Christians shouldn't use the words on the list. And to a degree, I agree. There are indeed words that are commonly accepted as foul, the recognized use of which for many, maybe even most people, is to express displeasure, anger, hatred, bitterness, and so forth, precisely the things listed in Col. 3:8. But I do have a small problem with this idea: the list isn't universal, not even within the same country. It changes. It changes over time--I can easily think of words that were completely unacceptable 20 years ago that I now hear on family tv and radio. It changes with age--there are some words that I would never have gotten away with when I was five that nobody would bat an eye at were I to use them as an adult. It changes with your company--please believe me, Marines routinely use words that most people would consider foul with no hostile or foul intent whatsoever, considering them merely, as Spongebob might say, "spicy sentence enhancers." It changes with your education and level of knowledge--as shown in the sanitarian's example given above. And it changes with your personal background--I know more than a few people from rural backgrounds that think nothing of talking of pig ---- or cow ----, etc. To them, it is simply something you shovel out of the barn.

Personally, I think that to get a good sense of what "a corrupt word," "corrupting talk," "unwholesome words," "filthy language," "abusive language," and "obscene talk" are, you have to look to the context of the Scripture. To my mind, that sort of language is language that corrupts a person, imparts nothing good, expresses (perhaps especially intentionally) anger, malice, and so forth. It is language that is intended to hurt or to degrade, and while people may and often do use words on "the list" to do these things, it is not a word's presence on "the list" that makes it foul, but the way it is used.

Having said all that, I still avoid the words on the list. I do that because so many people, hearing them, automatically assume less than wholesome intent on the part of the speaker, and I don't wish to unnecessarily upset anyone. But I have a hard time, a very hard time indeed, coming down on anyone just for using words on the list.

Before I do that, I need to know if they're cussing or if they're communicating. Are they trying to abuse or degrade or offend me, or is that simply the way the people around them talk?

You savvy?

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And don't get me started on "minced oaths." When people not only don't want you to use the words on the list-of-words-that-we-as-a-culture-have-agreed-are-foul, but don't wish you to use words on the list-of-words-that-we-as-a-culture-have-agreed-are-socially-acceptable-substitutes, it seems to me that a double standard is being exposed.

Just my two cents, y'know?

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The American Thinker on the Danger to American Civilization

I'll just let this stand by itself:

The barbarians we need to fear aren't just bearded monsters from the Middle East. The biggest threat to our civilization comes from our own elite universities that once preserved and extended it. The insane siege engine they've built is a rickety contraption of lies, distortions, and manipulations that tirelessly assaults our foundations with myths and superstitions.

Paul's Valley, OK, the Broken Arrow of my Childhood, and the Culture War

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The notes for this post were written a few months ago, just before the end of October, I think. Almost forgot about them.

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I was in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma today, and found myself, as I went through their downtown, which is very attractively paved with brick, wishing that I had allowed enough time to take pictures. It is really quite a picturesque little downtown, very much like so many of the small-town downtowns I've seen all over Oklahoma, filled with buildings, many nicely maintained, that are clearly eighty, ninety, even a hundred years old.

As I drove through the town and gradually became aware that it was somewhat larger than I had first thought, something began to tug at my memory. A little while later, as I passed Stevenson's BBQ and got a good whiff of one of God's finest gifts, hickory smoke, I realized what it was.

"This," I thought, "is about what Broken Arrow was like when I was a kid."

And then I immediately thought of A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and then I felt a little sad.

I will explain.

I am 47 years old, born in 1962. I was born, to my everlasting regret and embarrassment, in an Arkansas military hospital, and then spent about the first year of my life in Paris, France. We spent a short time in Wisconsin, then came back to Oklahoma, where my family--on both sides--has lived since before The War of Northern Aggression. First, in a little green house, then in a red brick one, the address of which, believe it or not, I can still remember. Both were in Broken Arrow. I have memories of going to school in Broken Arrow, and of playing there, from the time I was about five 'til I was about eleven or twelve. I have a few vague memories of going to a Baptist church.

This was all 35-40 years ago, one biblical generation.

I remember playing all over the neighborhood, quite unsupervised, for hours on end. My mother sometimes wouldn't see me for hours. Everyone did that. Nobody thought anything of it. There was no fear.

I remember trick-or-treating. Yes, my parents checked the candy, but I don't think they really expected to find anything wrong.

I remember that you might see an occasional schoolyard fight, but nobody worried about weapons being used.

Everyone spoke English. You never heard anything else.

Most people--or at least a lot more people than now--went to church.

This was before LBJ's Great Society programs had time to create a permanent--and apparently permanently resentful--underclass, before our government managed to effectively destroy the black family as an institution.

This was before the Supreme Court manufactured a right to murder the unborn out of the "emanations and penumbras" of the Constitution.

This was before a radically changed immigration policy, a wide-open border, multiculturalist propaganda, and an almost continual assault on the idea of American exceptionalism combined to so erode and denigrate the country's common cultural basis as to bring it to the brink of balkanization and fill it with millions of illegal aliens, many of whom have no interest in assimilating into the dominant American culture.

This was before judges decided that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." actually meant that high-school valedictorians couldn't offer up graduation prayers in the name of Jesus.

This was when a TV Christmas special could actually quote Scripture saying that Christ is "Lord," and climax with a hymn that decares that through Him, God and sinners are reconciled.

This was before policies of "free trade" and profligate spending stagnated working Americans' real wages.

In short, the Broken Arrow of my childhood looked much like the America portrayed in those two Charlie Brown TV specials. No, it wasn't perfect. Yes, it needed to change some things. Overall, though, it was a pretty good place.

Some of you disparage the idea of a "culture war."' Perhaps that's because you don't quite get or are too young to remember just how massively different this country was only a generation ago (A biblical generation, that is, generally held to be about forty years). I think there is a culture war. I don't see how anyone could doubt it, not when they've witnessed, over three or four decades, their culture gradually becoming a casualty. I still don't see what the dickens was so bad about it, that some people felt the need to do their best to bust it all to pieces.

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Just as an aside, I can't help but repeat a few of Ted Kennedy's quotes vis-a-vis that now long-ago immigration act:

First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.... It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.

Sure, Ted. Sure.

And now that I've noted that, I have to include my standard disclaimer: No, I do not have anything against immigrants, not from anywhere in the world, as long as they come here legally and desire to become Americans.

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To Answer Mr. Buchanan's Question

Well, actually, I'm pretty sure that he knows the answer, but here's the question:

There is no American Melting Pot anymore. It was discarded by our elites as an instrument of cultural genocide. Now we celebrate America as the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural country on earth, the Universal Nation of Ben Wattenberg's warblings.

And, yet, we are surprised by ethnic espionage in our midst, the cursing of America from mosques in our cities, the news that Somali immigrants are going home to fight our Somali allies, and that illegal aliens march under Mexican flags to demand American citizenship.

Eisenhower's America was a nation of 160 million with a Euro-Christian core and a culture all its own. We were a people then. And when we have become, in 2050, a stew of 435 millions, of every creed, culture, color and country of Earth, what holds us together then?

The answer is, of course, an idea. I, at least, think of it as the idea fundamental to America, though it was not born in America. You can quite easily trace elements of it back--at least in terms of formal political statements--to Rutherford's Lex, Rex. It is the idea that men are created in the image of God, that they have, as part of their nature and as gifts of God, certain rights that, having not been given by men or their institutions, cannot be legitimately denied by men or their institutions, and that the role of government is to protect those rights. The idea is that law is king, not that the king (government) is law.

Government's role is not to serve as an instrument of plunder, but to protect its citizens from being plundered. Government may not legitimately do whatsoever those who hold the reigns of power wish it to do. It is kept within bounds by its obligation to protect man's God-given rights.

It is, of course, an idea that follows inexorably from the pages of the Bible. It is a Christian, or at the very least, a Judeo-Christian idea. It is a very powerful idea, so powerful that I am quite sure (partly on the basis of personal experience) that it can unify a country made up of people from diverse backgrounds.

Of course, we don't teach it anymore. The worldview on which it is based is widely disparaged and ridiculed, and we attempt, now, to talk about having "rights" without having any sort of basis for them other than the authority of the majority--that is, we now act on the idea that man has the rights that society says he has, which is, ultimately, a recipe for either dictatorship or mob rule.

I can't tell you the number of times I've heard perfectly well-meaning people say, in effect, "Hey, this is America! Majority rules, right?"

Wrong. The whole point of being a republic instead of a democracy is to avoid being at the mercy of the majority, to avoid having one's inalienable rights being subject to the will of the mob. When we lose this concept, the question rapidly becomes: just how long, under those circumstances, will it take America to balkanize?

Book Review: The Mystery of Capital

It was probably a couple of years ago--word, how time flies!--that a particularly well-known radio talk-show host recommended Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital on his show. I don't recall where, but I heard of the book from at least one other source in the same general time frame, and eventually, I got 'round to borrowing it from the library. I have since purchased a copy for my personal library and I am confident that I will refer to it with some frequency in the coming years.

The book is subtitled "Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else"--which may seem a rather dismal assessment at first glance, but when you think about it, where, except in the West, and those countries in the East, such as Japan, that have made a deliberate effort to mimic certain aspects of the West, has capitalism been a roaring success? De Soto notes that capitalism's failure to thrive outside the West is often put down to flaws in non-Western peoples. As a matter of fact, it was De Soto's discussion of this in the first chapter that served as the first of several "light-bulb" moments. Emphasis, where present, is mine:

When these remedies fail, Westerners all too often respond not by questioning the adequacy of the remedies but by blamingThird World peoples for their lack of entrepreneurial spirit or market orientation. If they have failed to prosper despite all the excellent advice, it is because something is the matter with them: They missed the Protestant Reformation, or they are crippled by the disabling legacy of colonial Europe, or their IQ's are too low. But the suggestion that it is culture that explains the success of such diverse places as Japan, Switzerland, and California, and culture again that explains the relative poverty of such diverse places as China, Estonia, and Baja California, is worse than inhumane; it is unconvincing. The disparity of wealth between the West and the rest of the world is far too great to be explained by culture alone. Most people want the fruits of capital--so much so that many, from the children of Sanchez to Kruschev's son, are flocking to Western nations.

...But if people in countries making the transition to capitalism are not pitiful beggars, are not helplessly trapped in obsolete ways, and are not the uncritical prisoners of dysfunctional cultures, what is it that prevents capitalism from delivering to them the same wealth it has delivered to the West? Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a bell jar?

Nor is capitalism's failure in non-Western countries due to lack of assets and resources. De Soto notes, still in the first chapter:

...I will also show...that most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense--forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam. In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the total assets of the poor are more than one hundred fifty times greater than all the foreign investment received since Haiti's independence from France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations--0.7 percent of national income--it would take the richest country on earth more than 150 years to transfer to the world's poor resources equal to those they already possess.

It is important to note that De Soto is not pulling these figures out of thin air; he and his team spent several years researching them, and traveling much of the world to verify them. Indeed, due to the poor property documentation discussed extensively in the book, extensive travel and personal, on-the-ground investigation were essential to gaining the knowledge they sought.

Read De Soto's last paragraph again. It was fascinating to me. All that money--yet the people in those countries have not a fraction of the material comforts and provision we have in this country. Why? De Soto answers:

...but they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment.

In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital.

Third World and former communist nations do not have this representational process.

In chapter two, De Soto continues:

Imagine a country where nobody can identify who owns what, addresses cannot be easily verified, people cannot be made to pay their debts, resources cannot conveniently be turned into money, ownership cannot be divided into shares, descriptions of assets are not standardized and cannot be easily compared, and the rules that govern property vary from neighborhood to neighborhood or even from street to street. You have just put yourself into the life of a developing country or former communist nation; more precisely, you have imagined life for 80 percent of its population, which is marked off as sharply from its Westernized elite as black and white South Africans were once separated by apartheid.

I had never considered the problem in quite this way before. Maybe you haven't, either. As De Soto explains, the "representational process" that so greatly enhances Western concepts of property grew up around us gradually. We tend not to notice its importance to us and how the lack of it in other countries inhibits their success because it is part of our environment. It simply tends not to occur to us. But as soon as De Soto started outlining the problem, I thought, Of course. It only makes sense. These people have money--at least some--but no capital! How on earth could we expect capitalism to work for them?

Of particular interest is chapter five, The Missing Lessons of U.S. History. De Soto "camps out" in the United States for a while, describing how at various points the United States resembled Third World and former communist countries in the way it dealt with formal property concepts.

Also very interesting are chapters four and six, which deal with how to change the situation in Third World and former communist countries so that capitalism--which is, really, pretty much the only game in town, the only economic system capable of generating wealth for a great many people--can succeed there. De Soto is not drawing upon abstractions at this point: he is a significant advisor to the Peruvian government and his ideas are already bearing much fruit there.

While I can't totally dismiss the role that culture plays in economics--I can't help but think that culture has to underly respect for the "representational process"--there is no denying that De Soto has hit on something. Capitalism will not thrive around the world until the "representational process", until "formal property", is available to rich and poor alike everywhere, and I do not think truly effective foreign policy can be made without taking De Soto's concepts into account.

I recommend this book highly; it will greatly enhance your understanding of the problems the world's poor face, and how we can effectively help.

Also, I couldn't help but note how foundational formal property concepts are to successful capitalism, and how we damage those concepts--as in the infamous Kelo decision--at great risk to our continued prosperity and ability to help others.