Sowing Wind and Reaping the Whirlwind

"Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth,"
by J. M. W. Turner. 1842 

I've lately begun noticing what the Bible doesn't say, and what was left unwritten impresses me just as much as what was put down. There's something smacking of divine inspiration when a man could write Romans 13 after suffering what he had at the hands of the Romans. Why not come right out and condemn things like the Roman Empire, emperor-worship or slavery? God's Word is the complete and authoritative guide to everything in existence, and yet there are things it doesn't directly address. This is because if everything was spelled out for us, there wouldn't be room for our faith and reason, and God created us to exercise free will.

Constitutions operate under a similar principle. Like the Bible, the Constitution of the United States is also notable for what it doesn't say, and these things it doesn't say are an important recognition of our God-given freedom. At only 7,200 words long, the Constitution is very short. Its brevity is a reflection of its wisdom. It recognizes that rights are preexisting in nature and in the states, and thus, instead of spelling out all our rights, it limits itself mainly to telling the federal government what it cannot do. "Congress shall make no law respecting..." The conception of rights found in the Constitution is one of "negative rights," meaning that it prevents the government from infringing on all the rights we as citizens are already understood to possess. Even though a right to pursue education or employment isn't found within the document, its only because its understood that human beings possess them intrinsically. The Tenth Amendment makes this point vividly: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The E.U.'s constitution, on the other hand, totals about 78,000 words. Why so long? For one thing, because it's fundamentally based on humanistic assumptions. There is no God, therefore mankind isn't made in his image and doesn't have rights intrinsically - they're concessions from the state. Thus, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (the equivalent of our Bill of Rights) is obligated to give a comprehensive list of all the rights its citizens may want or need. The long, dreary litany includes such things as the right to education, the right to affordable housing and the right of the handicapped to have accessibility to buildings, etc. etc. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, if a citizen of the EU can't find a right within his constitution, well, too bad. The state hasn't decided that he has that right.

Notice how insidious this can be. A right to healthcare? A right to education? Rights become entitlements under this kind of "positive rights" system - a system where people have the right to have a specific good or service. Now, don't get me wrong. All the "rights" I just listed are good things in and of themselves. People should have the right to be educated and to be able to buy a house. Here in the United States we have the same rights - even though they're not included in our Constitution, . We have the right to pursue affordable housing and education, but we're not entitled to them.

Why is Europe facing the most daunting fiscal crisis that's ever beset the modern world? Because the EU's humanism has created an entitlement culture of unprecedented size and scope. Since education, healthcare and many other things have become fundamental "rights," the state is now obligated to make sure every citizen has them. To this end, it's had to take over from the private sector the job of supplying education, insurance, food, clothing, housing and many other commodities. Think about the costs involved in that. We've all seen how inept government is at stimulus projects and the like, so how much worse must it be when it's effectively running whole swathes of the economy? No amount of taxes that an average citizen pays in can possible finance the individual entitlements he has to a "free" education, healthcare or social services. The only answer, then, is debt and inflation. In their quest to have all the benefits of civilization without recognizing its Author, nations of the European Union have sown nothing but wind, and now they are reaping the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

A Tale of Two Philosophies in the Civil Rights Movement

 

Ecclesiastes 9:11: “The race is not to the swift - It is not by swiftness, nor by strength and valor, that races are gained and battles won.” The Bible teaches that “races” are won by humble virtues like perseverance, excellence and diligence. Christianity’s spread across the ancient Mediterranean world was due in large part to Christians’ persistence in doing good –from saving unwanted babies to caring for the poor and orphaned on Rome’s streets- even under the enormous pressure of persecution. Christianity didn’t conquer the ancient world by overturning the Roman state. No doubt there were those who resented Rome and wanted to fight fire with fire, like the Jewish zealots before them. But this was not to be. Christians chose the plan laid out in the Bible. It was doubtless far harder in the short run, but it guaranteed a lasting victory. Christianity won through sheer perseverance, beating an overconfident but napping Rome at its own game. As the Emperor Julian said, “Nothing has contributed to the progress of the superstition of the Christians so much as their charity to strangers… the impious Galileans provide not only for their own poor, but for ours as well.”

This classic conflict between power and humility, speed and patience, self-confidence and endurance has been played out many times in history. A more recent example can be found in the civil rights movement. The man who was in many ways the father of the movement was Booker T. Washington. He had been born in slavery, the illegitimate son of a white landowner. After his family was freed following the Civil War, Washington had to pull himself up by the bootstraps through working grueling jobs like tending a salt furnace and mining coal. He then worked himself through a secondary education and was appointed as the head of the Tuskegee Institute, a new school for freedmen. Over the years, Washington created a vast network of entrepreneurs, philanthropists (many of them white) and charitable organizations to fund schools and vocational opportunities for African-Americans throughout the South. Although he also worked to end Jim Crow laws and supported civil rights initiatives, his philosophy was not primarily one of setting blacks’ political power against whites’. He believed that any enduring victory won by African-Americans would have to rest on a more solid foundation than ballot-boxes and legal jargon on paper. Just like Christians’ victory in ancient Rome, this would have to be a victory over the hearts, minds and pocket books of the enemy. Better to overcome mistreatment and discrimination by showing how baseless they were than by wresting power and winning a legal victory only. The key was "…industry, thrift, intelligence and property." Washington encouraged African-Americans to become the very best in whatever field they worked. This far-sighted and conciliatory attitude is made even more remarkable when one recalls the difficult circumstances of Washington’s early life and all the reasons he had to harbor bitterness.

But it made him enemies, including a fellow black intellectual named W.E.B. Dubois. Dubois had tremendous talent, the result of an innate gifting helped along by both an upbringing in relative wealth and a Harvard education. Understandably, he was tired of African-Americans plodding along at a snail’s pace towards freedom and acceptance. But this impatience and frustration with discrimination in attitudes and laws - though he had not experienced them the same way Booker T. had – pushed him to advocate for a faster solution. Dubois viewed education and power as the only way to achieve true equality, and he vocally opposed Washington’s strategy, even going so far as to give him the nickname “the Great Compromiser." Through attaining positions of influence in the government, the legal system and academia, African-Americans would be able to shape society to win full equality. Eventually this emphasis on a top-down approach to equality led Dubois and the organization he helped found, the NAACP, to embrace socialism. According to this view, the slow, steady methods of Washington were tantamount to treason

Dubois’ desire to see his race achieve equality in his lifetime was certainly a noble intention, but noble intentions can be hijacked by impatience. If that impatience is allowed to define beliefs, it can lead to embracing the gravely erroneous notion that the “ends justify the means.” Booker T. Washington’s ideas promised no immediate change and may not have not had as much appeal at the time for that reason, but they’ve been vindicated in retrospect. Regardless of the political power wielded by African-Americans, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s would have been impossible to win long-term without the support of whites nationwide. That support was gained between the 40s and 60s largely because African-Americans had (knowingly or not) followed Washington’s advice: they became the very best at whatever they did. African-Americans’ skill as sports heroes (like Jackie Robinson and Mohammed Ali), singers and musicians (Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, the Supremes and the Temptations) defined the popular consciousness of the entire nation during the 1960s. Every teenager listened to Doo-Wop, Rock and Roll, Soul and Motown – all genres that had their beginnings in African-American music. Through television and radio, African-American stars found their way into every home and car. A whole generation grew up seeing that the other race was every bit as capable of innovation as their own. African-Americans had won the battle of the mind and heart, therefore ensuring victory in the political battle that Martin Luther King Jr. would lead.

Booker T. Washington’s capitalistic and individualistic philosophy was thus vindicated, making it all the more unfortunate that fifty years later it’s in danger of being thrown away. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, people mistook the culmination of the civil rights movement for its cause. They seized the opportunity to invoke Dubois and use the state as a sort of “savior” for African-Americans. This has since become the prevailing philosophy in talks about equality between the races. It has created endemic dependency on government, poverty. It has also fostered a bitterness and victim mentality that had no place in the life of the one who began the movement - one who had actually known the horrors of life as a slave. Washington would be appalled. In eschewing power and instead stressing industry, excellence, patience and winning the war of the mind, he recognized that it was folly to exchange aristocratic Southern masters for a whole government of far more powerful masters.

Civilization's Prodigal Generation

"The Course of Empire: Consummation," by Thomas Cole, 1836

Hatred of “civilization” is back in vogue. The storm clouds have been gathering for generations, but until recently they were a mere speckling on the horizon, confined to whimsical people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul Gauguin or Margaret Mead – people who could afford to wile away their lifetimes turning their angst into fashionable theories. Few men and women had that privilege. That changed when the Industrial Revolution radically improved living standards all around the world (but particularly the Western world). Not surprisingly, as each succeeding generation saw their parents do things once thought impossible, they began to see the world in new ways. Their sense of mastery grew. With freedom from economic and governmental constraints came a longing for freedom from morality. Evolution wasn’t new (indeed, the essential tenets would have been familiar to all students of Greek philosophy) but the intellectual climate was. Darwin’s theory would have been universally rejected even fifty years before, but now the academia who ruled the Enlightened world jumped at the thought of boarding their ships like Tolkien’s Numenoreans and taking their grievances to the very shores of God’s country.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re still dealing with the fallout. If there is no Creator, then truth is relative, good and evil are mere conventions and life is meaningless. This new understanding of the world has been behind a relentless degrading of civilization, including the institutions, religion and arts that sustain it. It wasn’t so very long ago that Western Civilization courses were considered one of the brightest ornaments of a liberal education. Now there's an extensive campaign to mitigate them where they aren't discarded entirely. Multiculturalism reigns supreme, imposing its fluency in Ebonics, minority history courses, feminist, gay and lesbian studies on impressionable minds. Whether or not there's any intrinsic worth in such subjects, what's galling is that they're passed off as equally important as the humanities or Greek, Roman and American history. We’re essentially told nowadays that the art, architecture and culture of past civilizations, still magnificent to travelers even in ruin, are really no more remarkable than native huts and whittling. It just depends on how you look at it (And parents and teachers wonder why children are underachievers). Triumphs of science and technology that launched revolutions of the human condition are, by extension of this relativistic worldview, fruitless and vain. Thinkers, philosophers and conquering heroes represent oppression, not innovation. Consequently, where real oppression does happen, like to women in Muslim countries, we can’t be morally indignant because that would be insensitive to the culture or circumstances that produced it.

We must be quite a spectacle. Awash in wealth -even in what’s apparently the fiercest economic downturn since the Great Depression- with hardly a care in the world, yet hating every moment of it. Or is this self-loathing only a pretentious front put up to soothe our guilty consciences? If popular culture of the Avatar sort is the slightest indication, the American is to style himself a sort of Citizen Kane. This time disenchantment in Xanadu isn't confined to doubting whether the love of money can satisfy. It extends to doubting the morality of money and money-making themselves. And "Rosebud" is even more elusive. The neo-hippies of the self-sufficiency variety, the entertainment industry and Occupy Wall Street are all panting for a return to some fantastical, pre-Industrial state. Not that this ever existed, but the idea is that everyone farmed (but wasn’t a serf), ate only their own food (but didn’t die of malnutrition), made everything they needed themselves (including mining, smelting and forging all metal implements, presumably) had no need for society’s institutions (but was perfectly safe from theft, war and other myths), money (that cardinal token of vice whereby people are inspired to make things others want to buy) or banks or loans, and yet had plenty of time leftover for self-expression and writing free verse poetry (with homemade paper and ink?). If our familiarity with civilization has bred contempt, then our unfamiliarity with the lack of it has bred fantasies.

The Schism in Modern Political Thought

“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” It’s better to be consistent - to be hot or cold. Even a man who sells his sword to the wrong cause, but fights like the Devil in defense of it, wins honor and respect from his enemies. In the same way, if a man believes something false, but believes it with all his heart, he earns a kind of honor by his sheer dedication. He weighed the sides of the controversy and chose one to throw his whole weight behind. But a man who's weak, inconsistent or illogical is not only wrong; he’s contemptible.

Perhaps this is why the philosophies of two men continue to inspire so much respect. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton could not have been farther apart on the political spectrum of 18th century America. Where Jefferson trusted “the people” to order their affairs better than someone in Washington could, Hamilton excoriated them as slaves to the “impulse of passion.” Jefferson wanted low taxes and the self-reliance of local governments; Hamilton wanted high taxes and a policy of easy credit for industries, roads, canals and bridges. Distribution and decentralization of government, the Jeffersonian ideal, stood in stark contrast to Hamilton’s desire for a “common, directing power.” The differences extended into foreign policy as well. The gentleman from Virginia wanted the policy of limited government he advocated on American soil to be equally as limited abroad: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.” The New York lawyer had his heart set not only on establishing a European-style government, but an army and navy imperial enough to win battles, glory and overseas possessions. Despite all these differences, these two men had one thing in common: the beliefs of each formed a logical, reasoned whole.

Regardless of which man history vindicated, both have an unimpeachable record of intellectual honesty. Both were consistent. They understood that beliefs filter through one’s whole worldview to form an integral whole; beliefs can’t be mixed and matched according to preference. They can't be pawned to win votes or do what’s politically expedient without shaking the whole foundation on which they rest. Hamilton knew and admitted that an aggressive foreign policy required a complex, bureaucratic state at home. Jefferson knew that power corrupted. This led him to the conclusion that small government at home was meaningless if a powerful military establishment tempted the young republic into wars and empire-building. As his friend James Madison said, "War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few." Republicans today have rebuked their heritage as the party of humble foreign policy and instead embraced a massive military-industrial complex – as if this can be maintained with the low taxes and small government they trumpet. Democrats are no better. How can a welfare state of crony capitalism and exploding government hope to preserve the liberties the party professes such attachment to? Today's administration and its rivals insult our intelligence. Hamilton –whatever else one might say of him- would have known better.

In Praise of Myth

Before God was declared dead in 1882, the European elite had lost their willingness to believe. Nietzsche’s famous statement simply reflected the grave error of thinking that the intelligentsia’s lack of faith had nullified God’s faithfulness. Years before, European academia as a whole, stretched and stressed between rationalism and pantheism for decades, had made the fatal decision to play it safe and discard faith for reason. These Deists, blind to anything but what they could stare at past their own noses, promptly found that the next logical thing to do was to throw out the object of their faith, too.

Yet despite the relentless march of over a century-and-a-half of “progress,” the rocks still haven’t had to cry out (it must be frustrating to be a secular visionary). It seems that faith in something is as fundamentally needed in the human condition - even in its fallen-ness- as breathing. Think about it. It doesn't matter what archaeologists' spades do or don't uncover deep in the English loam. King Arthur held court in Camelot, surrounded by a troop of gallant knights. In the same way, the story of Robin Hood emerging from the shadowy eves of Sherwood Forest to secure justice for the oppressed is every bit as real in our mind's eyes as if he had existed just as the tales say he did. 

Decades of stressing objectivity, empiricism and rationalism in our schools have failed to erase these pictures, these “forms” that lie somewhere in the back of our minds in a place reason can’t reach. In the process of trying to snuff them out and preach only what we can know with absolute certainty, we've reduced history to a jumble of numbers and equations and proofs. Endless pages of quantitative statistics are needed to establish causality – and even then scientists accept that, at best, we can only know “probabilistic” truth. We've bumped up against the same wall through reason for which we through faith out the window.

And here we are, unable to teach Arthur or Robin Hood in history courses; unable to incorporate our highest aspirations and fears – in short, anything resembling a purposeful story – into scholarship. But why? Are these impressions false? Do they pervert our sense of history simply because they can’t be corroborated by a rock some farmer's plow caught upon by chance? Quite obviously, in the search for absolute meaning, it’s a zero-sum game: science has come up just as short as “myth.” I’m not saying legends should be taught as fact, but I am saying that they would not have been believed in the first place unless they contained a grain of truth. More importantly, in their essence they convey more truth than ten thousand pages of quantitative analysis. Arthur embodied for the Welsh the same kind of hope in a temporal redemption that they had in a spiritual one. Robin Hood will always be a lesson of compassion and justice conquering in the face of unjust rulers. In the words of Winston Churchill, "It is all true, or it ought to be." Which is safer? To accept things that we can't know beyond the shadow of a doubt and risk being wrong once in a while, or to acknowledge that we can't know anything?