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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What I Believe About Non-Believers

Since the subject comes up from time to time, here it is.

I know some will find this ridiculously offensive. I honestly don't mean to be so. But on the other hand, this is exactly what I think. It'll be in the sidebar under "Popular and/or Important Posts," so casual passers-through won't have to search too hard.

There are many other verses along these lines, but these are enough to tell you what I think.

Psalm 14:1

...The fool says in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds, there is none who does good.
14:2 The LORD looks down from heaven on the children of man, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.
14:3 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is none who does good, not even one.

This is the natural state of man since the Fall. Even what he thinks is good is corrupted, and no one, on his own, seeks out God. The fool goes even further, saying to himself that there is no God. You can easily see, then, that when I hear someone say that there is no God, I immediately think that he is a fool. I may not say so out loud, but that is exactly what is going through my head.

Being a fool, in this sense, does not imply real stupidity, that is, mental retardation. The Scripture is not saying that that people who do not believe there is a God are suffering from a deficiency of gray matter. I have known highly intelligent atheists, and read of many more. But high intelligence does not prevent a man from believing and doing many, many foolish things, as most highly intelligent people can testify from personal experience.

Psalm 92:6

The stupid man cannot know; the fool cannot understand this:
92:7 that though the wicked sprout like grass and all evildoers flourish, they are doomed to destruction forever;
92:8 but you, O LORD, are on high forever.

Again, this is not to say that the atheist is suffering a deficiency of gray matter. The idea here is that he is so blinded by his rejection of God that effectively he cannot know anything about Him. You can talk and talk and talk to such people, and you will never, on your own, get anywhere.

Luke 16:23

...and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side.
16:24 And he called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.'
16:25 But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.
16:26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.'
16:27 And he said, 'Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house--
16:28 for I have five brothers--so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.'
16:29 But Abraham said, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.'
16:30 And he said, 'No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.'
16:31 He said to him, 'If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.'"

As an aside, I have to mention that I can no longer read these verses without thinking of a discussion I had with another Christian blogger who stated that torture is never right. If it's never right, what was this fellow doing in torment? But I digress.

The atheist--I am not speaking here of the agnostic, or of people who say they're atheists because they think it's intellectually fashionable but actually are still wondering--is not, despite what he will tell you, open to being convinced by the evidence. Nothing on this planet will convince him, not even if someone rose from the dead before his eyes. He will try to explain away the evidence of his own eyes instead.

Knowing this, having been fully convinced of its validity through much experience, I have pretty much quit arguing with atheists on evidential grounds--on any grounds, period, actually. They simply don't care. The only reason they will ask you for evidence or argumentation is so they can reject it--often grossly contradicting themselves in the process--and then pretend to themselves that they are fair-minded.

Romans 1:19

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
1:20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.
1:21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
1:22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,
1:23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
1:24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,
1:25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
1:26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature;
1:27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
1:28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.
1:29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips,
1:30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
1:31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
1:32 Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

There's all kinds of stuff here, obviously, but what's important for this post is that I believe that atheists do, somewhere in the core of their beings, know that there is a God. They could hardly do otherwise. It is dreadfully obvious, so obvious that it requires willful blindness not to believe it. They simply hate Him, and do everything in their power to convince themselves that what they know to be true simply isn't.

These people are on a level with the fellow who will stand in a puddle and claim that he doesn't know that the water is making his feet wet. You can argue the nature of the evidence with them if you want, but it is pretty much a waste of time. The Bible describes such people as mockers and scoffers. They are, as I said in another post, less interested in real argumentation than they are in hooting out their derision in the streets and chucking feces at the church windows. If evidence was the only issue, they'd believe. Again, the words are:

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.

Evidence isn't the issue. They see the evidence, know exactly what it points to, and make a deliberate decision to reject and suppress it.

How, exactly, a person goes from being a non-believer under those circumstances to being a believer is a topic for another post, but it starts in John 6:44:

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him...

No one comes to God simply because he figures things out. It may seem that way to him, but that is not actually what happens. Unless and until the Father draws that person, rather than figuring out the way to God, he will figure out his way from God. That's the real problem.

Now, then, that is what I believe about non-believers. Offensive as all get-out, I know, but now you know what I think.

A Brief Stop in Barnsdall

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to be in Barnsdall, Oklahoma. I had a little time to snap a few pictures. I love rural Oklahoma. One of the reasons I can tolerate Tulsa is that you only have to drive about fifteen, twenty miles in any given direction, and you're in rural Oklahoma. Shoot, there are neighborhoods in Tulsa where you wouldn't know that you weren't in rural Oklahoma if it weren't for the fact that you drive out of that neighborhood to go to work every day.

If the post seems a little unrelated to the blog's overall purpose--well, I don't know. It seems to me that it does, though perhaps not so much in a didactic sort of way.

You can get bigger images if you click on the pictures.

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This is just a thoroughly bucolic scene on the way into Barnsdall. Gotta love the scenery.

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Here's the Barnsdall police station. That's the ideal: things are supposed to be under sufficient control, due to a thoroughly Christianized population, that your lone police officer is bored to tears.

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I like this. Every town ought to have some old artillery pieces, or an old tank, or something of the like. It's a good way to remember and honor those who've given their lives for their country.

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I love this building. Only God knows how old it is. I just love the appearance, the stonework. There are old buildings like this all over the state, and I love them all.

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This is about how I eventually want my own Bronco II to look. Gotta love the somewhat simple and easy-to-maintain coloring, and the cow-catcher up front. I would probably add a winch up front; not that I've ever actually needed a winch,mind you, but it's one of those things that seems to find a need once you get one.

I'm not really a vehicle snob. I will, if driven by economic necessity, drive almost anything. But given my druthers, I'd much rather drive an old four-wheel-drive or pickup truck than anything else. And truth to tell, I'm not sure I really understand how anyone in Oklahoma gets along with anything else. It almost seems unnatural to me to see Oklahomans in things like a Prius. And God forbid you should see one in a "smart car." It's weird, know what I mean?

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I have only passed this place--it's Victory Baptist

--two or three times, but everytime I do, it provokes the wildest ideas in my head. I don't know what it is about the place. I wrote about it once before. As best I can recall, it was that a whole flood of images came into my mind. I pictured it as a church where, on Sunday mornings, the Gospel was preached, the text of Scripture was expounded, and Christ exalted. Then there'd be a potluck lunch, and maybe a softball game, or maybe some indoor games (chess or go, anyone?). Then everyone'd go home for a nap, and come back at night for more preaching, teaching, and prayer, maybe followed by some sandwiches.

Monday night'd be visitation. Not like most churches, where "visitation" means visiting people who should've been removed from the rolls years before, or visiting people that brought their kids to the "Fall Festival" five years in a row, but visiting, first, the members who couldn't be at church due to illness or frailty, those who are having a hard time in one way or another, and then just going door-to-door, asking people how we could pray for them, and sharing the Gospel where the Lord opens the door.

Tuesday nights, the karate club'd meet. I picture an energetic, sweaty class, where the emphasis is on health and self-defense, not fighting, not aggression, with maybe just enough free-sparring thrown in to satisfy those that want to compete in an occasional tournament.

Maybe some other clubs'd meet, too--whatever people were interested in. Maybe Praisemoves for some.

Wednesday nights'd be for discipleship training. Classes on all sorts of stuff, from in-depth study of various books of the Bible, to home economics (we all need to know how to stretch a dollar, folks), to New Testament Greek. Maybe a homeschooling support group (Everyone'd be homeschooling, of course). Classes'd be preceded by a potluck meal and followed by a prayer session.

Thursdays, the karate club and Praisemoves'd meet again.

Fridays and Saturdays, you'd have "off," so to speak. You gotta cut the grass sometime, y'know?

If that sounds like I'd like pretty much my entire social life to revolve around the church, like I'd like to spend my time around God's people, especially when they share some of my other interests, like I'd prefer them to all others in the world, well--

Yeah. You just about got it. I think that's the way church oughta be. That's what, in part, I'm working on for the future. I may die before I see it fully realized. But that's the direction I'm headed.

I don't know why Victory--I'm not really sure whether it's considered to be in Prue or Barnsdall, or somewhere in between--puts these images in my head. But man, the place is gorgeous, and gorgeously countrified. I think it used to be a school once, a long time ago. I just have these mental images of classroom after classroom, all just begging to be used by someone in the church.

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In Barnsdall, proper, we have First Christian. Gorgeous little building. Many times I think the ideal is to have a little church like this in every neighborhood, with the social life of the whole neighborhood revolving around it. I'm about half-convinced that when we got to the point where you had to drive to church instead of walk (or ride your horse), it allowed us to be too darn selective about who we'd associate with.

You see, it doesn't take long to figure out that I'm never, ever going to find the ideal church, the way I've described my "visions of Victory" above. No one ever will find the "ideal" church. The church, the ekklesia, has people of all stripes in it, people with widely disparate interests, whose only common interest, quite often, is the work and person of Jesus Christ. And we're supposed to love one another in spite of those differences. The one huge thing we have in common is supposed to be of such moment that all our differences don't prevent us from loving to spend time around one another. Being able to drive--I've run across people that drive thirty or more miles to church, folks--well, it seems to me that it makes it easier to ignore the people who are right around us, in favor of people that we find it easier to love. Is that really the way Christian brotherhood is supposed to work?

I Really Liked the Way She Put This

Kat at "Cathouse Chat," in the midst of an excellent discussion of the Gospel, wrote:

...He has paid for our sins, and also clothed us in His perfection. He has kept the Law perfectly in our place, and so it is no longer an anvil and a curse hanging over us to crush us, but rather the instruction manual to teach us how we can live to please the God who loves us so much.

Very nicely put. The whole thing's well worth reading. Go do it. I'll wait.

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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