| Monday,
January 12, 2009 We're headed for home this morning, so there
probably won't be much here until tonight.
There was a lot of important mail over the weekend on both Saturday and
Sunday. Be sure to have a look.
================
Commenting on my observations on Atlas
Shrugged:
Ayn Rand was not an anarchist, or someone who
believed in no government at all.
Her views on government can be found here:
http://www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/lss/2nature_of_govt.pdf
The discussion on business regulations should not
be an all-or-nothing proposition. To state that a 600-lb. deep ocean
diving suit is inappropriate garb for a successful ballet dancer is not
the same thing as saying that she should dance naked. At present, the
regulatory load on American businesses is a lot closer to the former
than the latter.
Tom Brosz
I suspect I know more about the views held by Miss Rand than most. I even
met her once. What she never could explain is the basis for law. No one else
can, really, either; as Burnham points out in The Machiavellians, a book
well worth the time to seek out and read, there is no more compelling reason
to assume that a government selected by 50% plus one of the male, or male
and female, population is legitimate than to assume legitimacy for a
monarchy ("Your fathers swore to my father, and you to me") or a social
class (rule of the best). Aristotle noted many forms of government, some
good, some bad, and nearly all changing one to another, republics becoming
democracies which quickly degenerated into the many plundering the
productive leading to anarchy leading to some form of tyranny, which if they
were lucky would become monarchy, which would --- but you get the notion.
John Stewart Mill said that "Liberty, as a principle, has no application to
any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of
being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing
for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so
fortunate as to find one." He did not contemplate a state -- such as the
England he lived in -- preferring "diversity" to liberty, and abandoning
liberty when they had achieved the maturity necessary for a liberal
republic. It never seems to have occurred to him that nations could, in H
Beam Piper's phrase, from Space Vikings, decivilize. I suspect that if he
lived today he would reexamine his assumptions.
A stable and reasonably rational government is a gift from God or from
the gods, and fortunate are the people who have such a gift. Of course they
will one day spurn it. One Greek republic (a city state) required anyone
proposing a change to the constitution to do so with a noose around his
neck; if the proposal was rejected, the winning faction pulled hard on the
rope. Whether this ever happened isn't known, but the people of the city
assured Aristotle's graduate students (who were investigating the
constitutions of all the known city states) that the provision of their law
was true, and they thanked the gods for it.
We are busily destroying the basis for our consensus of right and wrong
in favor of some kind of pluralism and diversity. Not in favor of rational
discussion; indeed, that is suppressed in the name of preventing hate
speech.
Of course the federal structure of the nation was intended to
accomplish something like diversity while preserving the union: by leaving
as much as possible to the states, the largest possible numbers would live
under governments they had assented to. In addition, by leaving most
economic matters to the states, there would be competition: competition to
have lower death taxes thus luring the wealthy to move there before they
died. Competition to have lower sales and business taxes to lure the
enterprising to come live in the state. (California seems to be going in the
opposite direction, trying hard to see how many of the productive it can
drive out of the state, and it's doing very well at it.) Alas the temptation
to meddle in other people's affairs has never abated.
There was a time when states had residency requirements. You had to live
in California for a year to be eligible for any kind of state welfare. New
York, which gave welfare support to anyone who had been in the state for an
hour, sued, and Lo! the Supreme Court held that residency requirements were
unconstitutional. There followed == well, it's pretty obvious what followed.
The courts did what Congress could not do. Now courts and Congress work
together to destroy the Judeo-Christian basis of society in favor of The
Drama of Atheist Humanism. (There's a very good book by that name, and it's
worth finding, as is The Pursuit of the Millennium; read together they give
an interesting picture.)
Of course once you admit that the Federal Government has power over some
area of human endeavor, sooner or later it will create a bureaucracy to
assert that power, and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy will take over,
assuring that the area of endeavor will be choked by rules, all well meant.
Congress Shall Make No Law becomes something less than an absolute
restriction, and Congress hands out doles and earmarked funds but only if
the states adopt whatever it is Congress thinks will be best for everyone,
and meanwhile the courts hold that window washers are engaged in interstate
commerce because they might be washing windows for an office suite that has
someone working in it who is importing goods from another state, and
suddenly federal minimum wage laws, are valid, and soon Congress will be
able to say that a union goon can intimidate you into signing a card so they
don't have to have a secret ballot election to make you join the union to
keep your job. Welcome to freedom tempered by good intentions.
But make no mistake about it. To secure real rights, governments are
necessary. We can agree on that without deciding how to choose a government.
Both Heaven and Hell are rumored to be absolute monarchies with a hierarchy
of officials...
If men were angels, would government be needed? Apparently even then:
Lucifer didn't demand that everyone worship him, only that their obeisance
to God be directed through him. The Framers wisely left matters of religion
to the states. We moderns in our infinite wisdom have seen fit to change
that. Precisely what we will replace it with as a means of securing the
loyalties of the citizens has yet to be seen: I haven't seen many willing to
fight and die for diversity, but perhaps it will be so in future.
Enough. It's late, I have to get to bed so I can get up in the morning.
We pack up and leave before Noon lest we be trapped in traffic coming home.
Forgive my late night rambles. I too understand the temptations of that
small party who clustered around John Galt. I also understand Miss Rand's
joy in creating a world in which the Earth's most powerful and competent men
rush to her aid when she is in need, despite large incentives for them not
to do that. And I never did understand the moral and ethical position of
Ragnar the Pirate. He seems to have been acting benevolently because he
wanted to, but what he was doing wasn't charity, and he hated Robin Hood;
why would he want to act benevolently, and where did he get his notions of
benevolence in the first place? Ragnar was a great righter of wrongs as he
saw them, but why one would do that while believing in Rand's philosophy
isn't clear, and why his crew would remain fanatically loyal to him as he
risked their lives so that he could right wrongs is even less so; but then
personal relationships, particularly between unequals, is always a problem
for Rand. She understood -- or at least admired -- leaders a lot more than
she understood followers, for whom she always had a certain disdain.
If I seem hostile to Miss Rand, I am not. My mother was very much an
individualist and encouraged me to be such. Rand was a prodigiously
intelligent and complex woman, with many views worth study and respect. That
she could never reconcile the gap between knowing what is and knowing what
ought to be (and how to prove you know what ought to be) is not astonishing
: no one else has ever done so without resorting to some form of revelation.
Her admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas was real and her reasons for that
admiration are worth knowing.
I didn't much like her the time I met her, but perhaps we were both
having a bad day. We parted on friendly enough terms. I never met her
husband (they were married for some fifty years), who must have been a
remarkable man in his own right. I will say that I doubt anyone who ever met
her, no matter how briefly, ever forgot the experience.
There was one really galling paragraph in Atlas Shrugged: the
judge who has retreated to Galt's hideaway at one point says that he has
written a book on law that would save the Earth, but he isn't going to
publish it. I will leave it as an exercise for the readers to discern why
this so upset me when I read it that it pretty well spoiled the rest of the
novel. Miss Rand did not want to comment on that paragraph, which she
remembered as soon as I brought it up; I have often wondered if it bothered
her as much as it disturbed me. I confess I did not dare ask her why Ragnar
the pirate would be so eager to rush to her rescue; but then having met her,
I didn't need to ask.
And enough. It really is time for bed.
==========================
0900 San Diego:
The President is having a press conference. He is worried about
protectionism.
The only way the US can afford not to have protectionism is to make the
schools work again. That will require doing something about teachers unions
which exist to protect incompetent teachers at the expense of the students.
It will require enforcement of civility and discipline in the classrooms so
that those who can be motivated to learn are not at the mercy of the
barbarians who despise learning and those who want to learn. It will require us to
get the lawyers out of the school system and go back to real authority and
civility. It will require giving more control of the schools to those with
experience in teaching, and taking much of the gatekeeper function from
education professors who know lots of theory and never taught anyone except
college students. It will require understanding that this is not Lake
Wobegon and no matter how hard you try, no matter how much you want
it to happen, half the children will not become proficient in algebra. Half
the children will not and should not go to college, and get nothing from a
university prep high school education -- and the attempt to see that every
child gets a world class university prep education is a great way to insure
that no child gets a world class university prep education.
If we are going to insist on national control of the schools, and state
control of what is left, leaving almost no control to the locals; if we are
going to continue to have state finance of local schools thus removing
fiscal responsibility from local control; if we don't put in place
mechanisms that give at least a small chance of reforming the schools so
that they work: then we will need heavy protective tariffs to allow some
recovery and rebuilding of vital industries. We have exported many jobs
overseas, making our economy depend on transportation costs which we can't
control.
Enough. The press conference ended and on CNN the first thing we heard
was a whiny voice complaining in the usual manner of the American elites. I
thought it was an interesting press conference, but it was utterly ruined by
the entirely predictable whiny voice. The President wishes the incoming
President well. We have a high drama, the replacement of a chief of state
without turmoil, with hopes for tranquility and a bit of unity; and the
first thing to follow is that whiny voice shouting about lies and Katrina.
Perhaps it's what we deserve.
We sow the wind.
==============
Home safe. I have a reader who believes you ought to be informed that The
Drama of Atheist Humanism was written in 1943 by a Jesuit. I suppose I
should say also that The Pursuit of the Millennium was written by Norm Cohn,
who was not a Jesuit (he was an academic from a mixed Catholic-Jewish
family). It was not by accident that I mention the two books together. There
may be better histories of the attempts to find the final answers to
questions of morality, but I know of none which give a better grounding on
the major aspects of the subject in fairly short books.
Ayn Rand intended to show there was an "objective" foundation to
morality, and that she had found it; that proper study would take ethics and
morals from being subjective beliefs to an objective science. Similar claims
have been made by advocates of natural law. On the other side of the picture
is Revelation. Alas, different belief systems lead to different choices of
what is good.
C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man argued that oddly enough there was
more agreement on what was moral and ethical than on the validity of the
sources of that knowledge. More another time. Anyway we are back home, and
Sable wants us to take her out.
================
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