Peace, Commerce & Liberty

In this election season, and probably in most others in the past, we’re told, sometimes directly, sometimes implicitly, that we as citizens must vote. It’s a duty. It’s imperative that we cast our ballots. Democracy depends on it.

Well, this is simply not the case. Suffrage is a right, to be sure. If we are to have a fair election, we all must be allowed the opportunity to vote. But a right, as we know, is not a duty.

If you despise both party-furnished presidential candidates, as I do, don’t settle, don’t compromise, don’t vote for the sake of voting. It is a temptation for many of us to run to the polls or seal our absentee ballots because the act is exciting and empowering. Yet, in the process, in the hoopla, the principles can elude us. We should remember that a vote is a symbol of an individual’s confidence in a candidate and not a show of how fashionable or anti-fashionable your politics are.

When neither the Republican nor the Democrat (nor any of the other clowns) represents your principles, the thing to do is abstain. Abstain proudly. Take a stand and voice your opinion: tell the parties that you won’t allow your principles to be drowned out by a vote of compromise.

Then again, if your principles are like putty, vote away! You probably deserve four years of the swindling fool you plan to vote for!

Race. Ethnicity. Faith. What loaded words these are. And they’re everywhere — in politics, in popular culture, in the academy, and even in the religious realm.

I am writing to address a potentially dangerous assumption about these subjects I’ve encountered more than once on our campus. This past week, I was having a conversation with some friends having to do with the question of whether ethnically/racially organized Bible study groups were a helpful idea. A proponent of such groups (who shall remain nameless, since I never expected to recount this conversation in writing) began by saying, as though this were a universally agreed-upon fact, that students of a particular ethnic/racial minority should have a specific group in which they can be free to express themselves and their faith among others of the same ethnic/racial background. Trying to persuade someone (whom he presumed to be of the same ethnic background) to join such a group, the proponent spoke as though the other person should want, by virtue of her perceived ethnicity, to be a part of the proposed group. She responded somewhat curtly by stating that her true ethnicity was much more complex than a simple one-word identifier and that in fact her ethnicity did not define her identity or her faith. The conversation continued, and it too was much more complex than I’ve described here.

But it occurred to me, as I told them, that this seems to be precisely the problem with how so many of us conceptualize race, ethnicity, and other varieties of inherent or cultural identity. There is sometimes a latent assumption that members of the same race or ethnicity (often merely perceived rather than known certainly) have shared, and do share, in their lives a common experience.

Obviously, this is not a totally unfounded assumption. Definitions of “race” notwithstanding (in the interest of relative brevity), “ethnicity” is typically defined by social scientists as an amalgam of shared traditions and origins (Allison). Can it be said that the newly-arrived Catholic Irish in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century probably shared a more or less common experience? We should resist replying with an automatic yes, but it is probably rather safe to observe that, living in the same place, in the same time, and similarly situated politically, etc., they all did probably share some common experiences. But in a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial reality such as our own, what is shared and what is unique is anything but cut-and-dry, if it ever really was. Could we say without doubt that every Amherst student of some particular broad ethnic/racial affiliation (probably derived from the short, nonspecific checklist appearing on so many forms and applications) has lived a similar life, shared common experiences? Without hesitation, the answer is a resounding no. The Catholic Irish example has geography and temporal considerations on its side, where the scope of the latter example is very different, unconstrained and global.

I mean to say very little more. I mean only to point out that such an assumption — pervasive and ever-present — is very often blind to the reality of the complexities of issues of race, ethnicity, and culture. If we are to voluntarily separate ourselves into groups for whatever purposes, the categories should not be of such a character as to assume common, shared experience where and when there is little to none.

I’d be very interested to hear from others on this subject. It is a difficult topic to write about and discuss for many of us, I suspect. At least it is for me. I argued with myself back and forth, debating whether I should write anything about the conversation and my realization. I decided to err on the side of candor.

Maybe it’ll some day be the hallowed name of a geographical high point in the presidential candidate’s home state, but it’s a bad name for a bad idea for an already-weak candidate. Augment the lefty-loosy McCain ticket with a pro-choice former Bush cabinet member? I knew something was wonky over at the GOP, but this is a bridge too far (or should I say, bridge to nowhere?).

Whatever happened to the Spirit of ‘76?It seems a vote for McCain is a vote for continued rule of America by royal blood. Not to mention a vote for a distant cousin of a Bush!

So much for new blood in the White House, eh?

I’ve taken up nightly brisk walks again. Usually these walks lead me in a meandering path through the Auburn University campus, and there have been several occasions on which I’ve been terribly thankful that my cell phone has a built-in camera. I thought I’d post the photographic records of some of these occasions, which I found hilarious at the time (although maybe this is due to my heat-induced mania).

1)  I walked tonight to a distant corner of campus I hadn’t visited before. As I approached this building (below), I was quite impressed by its stature and seeming importance.

And as I approached and got a glimpse of the golden sign inside, my heart leapt, believing it said “Political Science” (you can clearly see “Po…Sc” through the window, below). I was so impressed that a state university would bestow this beautiful building on a political science department. I felt like writing a letter to the State of Alabama right then and there to express my supreme gratitude for such a gift to the social sciences.

Yet as I drew closer — and now I was fairly certain that the humidity had begun to ravage my brain — I saw that this golden sign did not say “Political Science.” No, no, nothing even remotely approaching that! It read: “Poultry Science.” Poultry Science? I was at once both highly disappointed and deeply terrified — I mean, what sorts of grisly and inhumane things must happen to chickens in there? I was thinking. I have to admit, however, that after a few seconds of terror I started to laugh.

Well, film doesn’t lie: after uploading these photos, the golden sign still says what I thought it did. Now, I have nothing against agriculture — I grew up in the sod-growing capital of the world — but I just don’t know how you could keep a straight face while telling someone in an interview that you majored in poultry science. Then again, I’ve never seen a town with more Chick-Fil-A’s per square mile, so maybe Auburnites are just closet henotheists.

2) The other funny occurrence was a couple of weeks ago. At first glance, most readers of this blog will probably cheer at this next photo of a bit of graffiti I discovered on one of my walks. But there’s more to it than meets the eye.

Yes, yes, hurrah hurrah for Obama, right?  Well, I’m not so sure that was the spirit intended here. Or maybe it was, and the “author” of this vandalism simply didn’t know what irony was. In any case, I chuckled at this too, because it was spray painted onto the side of a greasy, grimy trash dumpster! (You can see some of the liquefying waste rolling down onto Barack’s hair. Poor Barack.) Oddly…I have yet to find any McCain graffiti. (What would the caption be for that? “McCain is Able”? “McCain is the Bomb”? Or maybe “Your Much Bigger Brother is Watching”?)

Mr. McCain says the problem is government spending. He thinks he is going to cut that spending. Yet, is this not the man who said he’d support staying in Iraq for 100 years? Is this not the man who has been so excited about a war with Iran (a war which has already been declared de facto, by the way)?He may promise to cut spending on government subsidies of the arts or education, for example, but Mr. McCain will fail miserably to “cut spending” in any significant sense so long as he remains so frighteningly trigger-happy. He seems not to understand that perpetual war in the Middle East will mean a perpetually imbalanced budget back here at home, because the U.S. simply cannot afford the $340-million-per-day price tag for a protracted war and 100-year military occupation six thousand miles around the world (of course, this daily figure would only increase, and probably double or more, when the War in Iran commences in earnest).

And he wants to cut taxes on top of this? He must surely be delirious! You cannot run a clumsy war machine and a burdensome semi-socialist state — already in nearly 10 trillion dollars of debt, much of which is owed to some of the members of the “axis of evil” themselves — and expect economic prosperity and low taxes. The era of a successful military-industrial complex is long past; the long-term destruction has finally begun to surface. It would seem Mr. McCain remains blind to this truth. Perhaps he really is living back in the days of Truman — no doubt his hero.

So much of the political patter of the day, especially on the left, has to do, in some measure at least, with the “ideal” of equality. Equality of gender. Equality of race. Equality of opportunity. Equality of circumstance. Equality of (insert noun here).It’s just assumed — again, typically by the left, although it has recently become a somewhat appropriate topic of discussion even on the right –  that tangible “equality” is indeed a natural ideal and, worse yet, that the founders of the United States believed this to be true.

Within the modern leftist paradigm, still so deeply and proudly colored by a philosophical attachment to the communistic redistributive economics of yesteryear, the ideal society remains one in which the “proletariat” or something resembling it – i.e., everyone but the “successful” and industrious — is raised up by a powerful popular or state apparatus declaring that the wealth and privilege of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes were, and are, unfairly and unjustly attained. Then comes the redistribution, where fairness and justice are supposedly reestablished by wresting the wealth and privilege from the bourgeoisie and the capitalist classes and either spending it on or giving it directly to the proletariat underlings. It’s the Robin Hood ideal, in other words, which regards with a profound suspicion any class hierarchy that develops on the basis of supposedly unequal opportunity (the question being, Why should the King, or the capitalist classes in this case, have a monopoly on privilege?). While this is an over-simplification of the prevailing  leftist egalitarian philosophy,  it should suffice to lay out the basic mindset that the American left has traditionally possessed and to which it still by and large holds fast.

The answer to the question of privilege monopoly, as stated above, is of course to break the monopoly and then create institutions that ward off any future re-monopolization. This process is usually achieved in the modern day by means of state coercion, using taxes, tariffs, and other drains on private means and individual liberty to forcibly destroy privilege monopolies and redistribute the loot to the underclasses. This would seem to be the natural solution to a seemingly unnatural scourge.

Yet what underlies the chivalrous veneer of this scheme is a whole host of untenable assumptions: (1) that privilege can in reality be redistributed, (2) that anyone has the right to undertake such redistribution in the first place, (3) that there is indeed a monopoly on opportunity and privilege, (4) that fairness can be achieved by such theft, and that justice can be achieved by such coercion, (5) that equality is natural and that a free market is unnatural, and (6) that equality and a free market are in fact at odds. (There are many other assumptions that could be enumerated as well.)

There are problems with each of these, and some are not so much wrong as wrongly proved in the leftist argument, but I will attempt to address #6 specifically, since it is really the essence of the critique of a capitalistic society. (There is a vast bibliography dealing with this exact problem — I’d recommend the works of Nozick, Rothbard, Mises, and Hayek as starting places — so I don’t want to merely restate the many theses already advanced on the topic; besides, you’ll find their arguments a great deal more cogent and more eloquently and succinctly expressed than this writer’s own argument in the present note.) In summary, though a crude one at best, the greatest trouble with Marxist political economy and similar conceptions is that an attempt to conquer unfairness by unfairly expropriating the rightful property of some for the benefit of others is quite simply an endeavor doomed to fail. It is impossible, quite frankly, to enlarge freedom and wealth by state coercion. As Mises quipped, government is the negation of liberty. And when the government steps in to intervene in a market, whether for Marxian-egalitarian reasons or otherwise, the ultimate net result will be a negative one, however seemingly positive are the effects in the short term. (Again, reading any of Mises would be helpful in better understanding this principle, as would reading Rothbard, especially his Man, Economy, and State and Power & Market.)

But this does not address the “naturalness” of equality, per se. It is undeniable that among the human race there exist clear inequalities. In gender terms, there is the fact that men and women are biologically unequal: to women alone falls the immense burden of childbirth, for example. This is countered, in traditional social constructs, by a burden falling to men to “earn the bread,” but strictly biologically speaking there is no requirement that males undertake such a responsibility. Thus there is an inequality. Which is not to make a value judgment, of course: Inequality does not translate necessarily into value. The man is not less or more valuable than the woman on account of her burden, or at least I am not making such a judgment, since this would be impossible, and unimportant, given purely biological data. One could easily point to certain ethnic proclivities as well, and to genetic differences that can cause some people to tend toward obesity, for example, or toward slimness. We are not all created equal; it is a fallacy to say so. Some of us are born small, some of us large, some of us with natural abilities to play piano well or to see numerical patterns, others with physical or intellectual disabilities.

Yet the leftist would counter this observation by saying that, well, he means equality of rights, of an accordance of fairness, etc.  He may in fact mean that sort of equality, the sort Jefferson spoke of in his Declaration, but the leftist’s chosen policy of egalitarianism aims not at inherent, natural-rights equality, but at material equality, whether he admits it or not. Redistribution, whether by forced, outright expropriation or by taxes and other involuntary commitments, has as its goal an equalization of material wealth and material goods. As the great theorists I mentioned above have proved, it is only a free market that can secure true fairness and justice, and material equality is not a matter of either nor is it in fact a good idea. If everyone had the same things, the same wealth, the exact same opportunities, etc., can you guess what sort of society would result? Ultimately the exchange of goods would halt, because no one would need anything from anyone else, and there would certainly never be any innovation or progress — nebulous terms in and of themselves, I realize — and the society would eventually and inevitably collapse. One need only to look at the enduring example of the profound failure of Soviet society to begin to understand what American leftists often advocate here at home in the name of “equality.”

I could go on. To be honest, the subject requires a much more lengthy treatment than I’m willing to provide at the moment. Perhaps I’ll continue at a later date.

Let me summarize: (1) the leftist conception of “equality” has fundamentally nothing to do with the phrase “All men are created equal,” (2) material equality is neither possible nor preferable, (3) material equality is not natural, and neither is its pursuit, (4) “fairness” at the expense of justice is hardly fair.

I am a bibliophiliac. Or is it bibliophile? What’s the difference, I wonder. . .
Yes, this is my confession, and you, the reader, I presume to be the absolver of this petty wrong of infatuation — or at least a worthy, patient listener.

Perhaps I should be ashamed of this affliction — as I am of my Wiki addiction, previously described –  but I have to say that I am most certainly not. I am unabashedly proud, in fact: I’d wear a ribbon or a colorful armband if one existed (and yes, this is a call to arms — no pun intended there — to all creative people to produce such a thing for me and my fellow biblios at the earliest convenience).

I would be content to live out my life in a wood-paneled study or cool, stone library, deprived of all but books. If I were to be sentenced to such a life, I would grin with that child-like contentment that most every little boy sent to his room of toys and playthings exhibits. I would have the upper hand; I would be locked up with all that I desire. I could never be bored in a jail cell of books.

Allow me to explain. It’s not merely that books provide entertainment of some sort, which they of course do. I like to read, true enough; but the real excitement, the greatest ecstasy of bibliophilia, is in the hunt. I am an avid, albeit not unlimited, collector of books. The motivation is not to find the book containing the most profound insight or novel contribution, but the book of the best binding, handsomest inscription, smoothest paper, and most robust and comely type. By virtue of these essentials of book collecting, most modern books are thus excluded from my eye and interest: they are, for the lack of a better word, cheap. For the raisons d’être for any collector are in the beauty of the thing, the elegance of the book itself. It may also happen to be a good read, a classic, a masterpiece of literature — but these considerations are far beyond my criteria. I’d seek out a book of Trotsky’s favorite borscht recipes if it were fair, in the Old-English, aesthetic sense of the word (as in fair maiden, not as in fair and balanced).

Wikipedia (my old friend) puts it this way: “Most bibliomaniacs, then, are compulsive hoarders, identifiable by the fact that the number of unread books in their possession is continually increasing relative to the total number of books they possess and read.” Very true indeed. As a result of our desire to own the most beauteous of books, we often collect many that we will never read — sadly. I have many falling into that category: books that leap into my arms from their shelves in those ancient, dusty book shops that can be found only in the deepest, darkest, morbid urban crannies. I suppose it would be entirely accurate, in fact, to admit that this kind of book collecting indulges in that most hated cliché: judging a book by its cover. It’s a bit inaccurate, I guess, since there are many important factors for a collector lying within the two covers, like the relative handsomeness of the typeface and frontispiece (although they inform me this latter word is obsolete — why I should care what they say, I’ve not been made aware), but the cliché generally holds true, all things considered (they say that this last phrase too is similarly out of common usage, and that I shouldn’t use it; I respectfully reject their forced evisceration of the English language; see entries for lexical pillager, lingual looter, and Strunk & White).

The occasion of the present confession is a timely one. A short prologue might be necessary: I am a visiting fellow this summer at a research institute in whose libraries can be found the remnants of the personal library of Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian polymath. On account of my research, I was reading today my new copy of Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty — a simply superb book — and in a footnote relating to a paragraph in which I was particularly interested there was a reference to a book by Lord Acton. So, entering the library, I found the title and grabbed the decrepit book from off the shelf. As I turned to the page that Rothbard had indicated in his footnote, I was met with scribblings and seemingly random lines in pencil scrawled all across the page, some even extending onto the page before as if connecting paragraphs across normally-uncrossable dimensions. After some squinting and turning of the book, I finally could make out some of the words on the page, barely decipherable by the unaided, non-toddler eye. And then I had the eureka moment — a moment that should have been accompanied by small firecrackers crackling in the sky and salutary musket shots. I realized that I was holding the very copy of Lord Acton’s book that Rothbard himself had owned and used in writing The Ethics of Liberty! If the outward celebration did not occur as I had hoped, I certainly reveled in my own inward bibliophilic festivities, which I suppose now culminate with the typing of this sentence.

The episode caused me to slightly reconsider the book collecting standards I’ve held heretofore. Perhaps in being preoccupied with gilted leather covers and colorful frontispieces (yes, this second usage of the word has elevated what was my minor stylistic skirmish with the Strunk-&-Whiters to all-out lexical war), I ignored the many books of humbler beauty, the books like those containing Rothbard’s grotesque-yet-fascinating scribbled notes. Perhaps I was wrong to overlook these books of historic importance. Perhaps judging a book by its cover (and its frontispiece — A third time! Take that!) is a policy not as rewarding as I once thought.

I was once a fan of Fox News. Every young conservative is, I think. With thirty minutes of Fox each morning, you’re prepared, ready to fight the good fight, equipped with all the truth you need to crusade for conservatism!But, needless to say, my sentiments have changed. Fox News has not. It is still the same old cable network, with a snazzy and credibility-simulating news ticker at the bottom of the screen, the dashing and sharp anchors who have their inside jokes and crooked smiles, and all the rest. But these things do not make Fox unique in the least: CNN and MSNBC possess these same distinctive marks of cable news.

No, what makes Fox unique is its profound determination to remain abjectly partisan even in the face of the innumerable political failures on the establishment-Republican side of the aisle in the past eight years. I can only faintly remember what Fox was like pre-empire (that is, pre-2001), but I doubt it was half as bold in declaring its “reportage” “fair and balanced.” Now Fox blares its cheerful and non-objective Iraq message louder and clearer and more journalistically distastefully than ever before.

Today, sitting in a McDonald’s in downtown Auburn, Ala., I caught a glimpse–or, rather, about 30 minutes–of a Fox News broadcast, mostly about the “pregnancy pact” nonsense up in our glorious Socialist Republic of Massachusetts. But in the last minutes of my meal, the news turned quickly to the less-than-rousing speech Senator “Alex Hamilton” McCain was giving in Fresno at the moment. My stomach churned with uneasiness, as much a product of the mealworm burger I’d just ingested–only out of the greatest and bravest necessity, let me assure you–as of the uncomely spectacle I was watching on the TV, narrated by the two anchors with the gumdrop gaiety that only Fox can furnish. As McCain left the stage of his “townhall meeting,” the Fox camera trained in on his podium and the “Reform.Prosperity.Peace.” sign pasted to the front (the bewildering paradoxes of which seemed to have been lost even on McCain).

Then they quickly turned to something they called “The Deeper Insight,” or some bogus “news analysis” term they employ to signal that their normal propagandizing will be ratcheted up for a while. And with the help of yes-men guests who robotically nodded to every leading question thrown to them by the Fox anchors, they explored the “amazing boost” in foreign investment in Iraq recently. Could this be, dare they extrapolate, confirmation that the war was going well, that the surge had been successful? “Why, certainly! Why else would we bring it up, dumbo!” they seemed to answer my silent question in their five-minute segment. Their quick conclusion–characteristically stretched–was far from sound. Theirs was a question that required serious scholarly treatment for a true answer, not just some unfounded commentary from a couple of razzle-dazzle news anchors and some “Fox contributing retired adjunct quasi-intellectual analyst” from the hallowed halls of Who-Knows-Where Institute.

I am not one of those people who believes that the press ought to be completely objective. First, I think that’s an impossible end. Second, I don’t believe it’s useful to pursue impossible ends. And third, never in history has the press been dedicated to such an end, the wiser scribes of the past knowing that their purpose was to both present and persuade, since if “brute facts” were the only aim then there would be need of only one press and one newspaper, and that can only last so long before itself devolving into a certain subjectivity.

Thus I am not at all condemning Fox on account of its lack of objectivity. It doesn’t bother me any more than CNN’s similar problem, or The New York Times’, or any blog’s, for that matter. What does irk me–what gets my goat on a persistent and chronic basis–is that Fox News stays in business. What bothers me is that there are Americans, and masses of them, who will watch Fox–or any news program–and swallow it down without even the slightest reflex of scrutiny. I know these masses because not so many years ago I proudly counted myself among them: in watching Fox alone, I liked to think of myself as purified, refined, purged of the blasphemies and lies told elsewhere, as if I were “beating the system,” “dodging the CNN bullets,” keeping myself above the mere propaganda, and indulging in the real, down-to-earth truth. I know better now. I think it was John Adams who said that he didn’t read any newspapers and felt all the better for it. I feel the same way about TV news, and it’s my policy to avoid watching it at all costs–and, in fact, I do feel a lot better, and my blood pressure’s been on a healthy decline since I first implemented it.

It is the duty of the fortunate educated to combat, and not to encourage, such media as Fox News, CNN,  et al. We have been given a sense of reason and rationality, of balance and sensibility, and I believe it’s a very sad waste of that fortune to support, or even swallow ourselves, this kind of one-sided, unintelligent nonsense (pardon the redundancy). For those of you out there who want “change” and “hope” and “reform” and “prosperity” and “peace” in this country, you should be prepared to divorce yourselves and your respective campaigns from the clutches of the entrenched, militant rhetoric machines that thrive on our misfortunes and wars and corruptions.

I am a fellow of strange interests. I’ll be the first to admit it. I really do wish I were more interested in normal things, like baseball or guitars or the TV show “House”. But I’m not–well, not in the real world anyway.Instead, I find myself in cyberspace spending hours reading up on bizarre and outlandish subjects. Today was agrarianism, Jefferson, and the Luddites, then Ronald L. McDonald, the restauranteur. Yesterday was in-depth research on the life story of Henriette Strobel, an erstwhile German disco star. Two days ago it was national high school rankings and how they’re performed. Tomorrow, no doubt, will find me spending countless hours on the Internet seeking out information on something like the history of dictionaries or the biography of Barry Goldwater or the etymology of the word “the”. I can’t seem to stop. It’s an obsession. And I think I know how it all began…

Now, I could venture many diagnoses for this extreme and voracious (and frightening) curiosity, ranging from the psychological to the biological, and I might attribute it, in part, to my moderate OCD. But I suspect that this is a problem that, while perhaps having its origin in my mind, has been duly enabled by one particular culprit, well-known to us all: Wikipedia.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I discovered the Wiki realm, but I’d say it was probably during my junior year of high school. I waded in cautiously (rather than jumping in Mary Katherine Gallagher-style), but soon I was thoroughly, and irrevocably, submersed in its incredible breadth. Google had suddenly become the manual typewriter of the Internet, a terribly strenuous tool requiring me to actually know what I wanted to look up before initiating my search. With Wikipedia, I needed only navigate to its homepage to find some interesting fact whose hyperlinked tags could take me in a million different directions afterward. And take those paths I did. For hours and hours, days and days.

Not much has changed. I have been a Wikiaddict for three years now, and it continues to eat up my hours of free (and not so free) time without any foreseeable end. I’m finally willing to admit that I have a problem–probably because it’s finals, and I’m discovering that my Wiki-ing is, dangerously, taking away from my study time. But if I stop, if I promise to go cold-turkey for the rest of the week, how will I be able to live? What will I do with all my efficiency? And my focus? And all that time?Well, I guess I might just get my paper finished before it’s due, which seems so utterly unnecessary. Then again, I can use the extra time for Wikip…I mean, for packing.

Am I alone? Or are there others with this awful affliction?