Horrific Doctrines: Being a Cartoon Libertarian and Accepting Jesus as My Savior

Let me first state that I think Markets Without Limits by Jason Brennan and Peter M. Jaworski is a fantastic book. Their argument that anything you can do for free you should also be allowed to do for money offers a useful means of talking about market morality within the general society. The price that they pay for this argument is that this is not a libertarian book. The authors, to their credit, make a point in avoiding the argument that anything consensual should be considered moral or legal. For example, they would morally oppose me posting nude pictures of my children on the internet regardless of whether we were paid for them. This has the virtue of not only being intellectually honest but also avoids allowing their argument to become confused with the non-aggression principle and rejected by the people who do not accept it. 

That being said, I was bothered by a passage that stated: "we did not write that book because neither of us agree with libertarian political morality. We have classical liberal sympathies, but we are not cartoon libertarians." (23) Obviously, Brennan and Jaworski do not have to accept libertarian political morality and, as I will argue later on, there are good reasons to reject it. My problem is that they seem to equate libertarian political morality with being a cartoon libertarian as if that was a bad thing. It is almost as if they are saying that it is ok to be a libertarian as long as you do not take libertarianism too seriously to the extent that it defines your political morality. Anyone who does that is a cartoon and not to be taken seriously. In that spirit, I wish to defend being a "cartoon libertarian;" you know that person who seems to reduce all politics to government is force and taxation is theft.  

I readily acknowledge that there are some serious limitations to running around saying "taxation is theft" a lot. For one thing, that is not enough to be a libertarian. One cannot theorize a full libertarian philosophy, let alone any kind of well-thought-out public policy proposals, merely by trying to proceed logically from that one premise. Furthermore, saying "taxation is theft" is likely to alienate people, including many libertarians. It is a horrific doctrine. Most people in government really mean well and some of them even honestly do good things. It is monstrous to truly believe that a politician standing up and saying that he has a plan to help sick children and the elderly get badly needed medical care is really the moral equivalent of a masked gunman who robs a hospital. Is it morally ok to shoot the politician? (In principle yes, even if it is unlikely to ever be practical.) If you are not bothered by this claim, you have either not properly thought it through or you are a sociopath, not someone who can be accepted as a member of the liberty family in good standing. That being said, I do defend the notion that taxation is theft and that it is important to be very open about it, even if it will forever banish us to the political margins. The reason for this is that, without the belief that taxation is theft, no libertarian movement will survive long in a meaningful sense as libertarians will all too easily be co-opted by other movements.

To understand this, it might be useful to consider the example of Christianity. At the heart of Orthodox Christianity is the belief that Jesus is the savior of the world. As I think even most Christians would agree, this is a horrific doctrine. (In its Calvinist form, it descends to Lovecraftian levels of horror.) I like to think of myself as a good person. I try really hard and I usually do the right thing. I need Jesus, because without him, no matter how hard I try and no matter my good intentions, I will never make myself right with God. No matter how many good deeds I might perform, I am not truly better than Hitler. Both Hitler and I are depraved sinners and deserve to burn in Hell. The only thing that might save me, in the end, is that Christ died on the cross as atonement. Even if no honestly decent person were sent to Hell, this would still be a horrific doctrine as it denies the possibility of personal righteousness so critical to how most people live their lives.   

Now, as a Jew, I might be tempted to look down on Christians for their "unenlightened" views and I think there is something to be said for how Jewish parochialism, in practice, is far more universalistic than Christianity. (The fact that Judaism is about God's relationship with a particular group of people opens the door to recognizing that God has all kinds of relationships with people that have nothing to do with Judaism. The fact that Judaism was never designed as a universalistic religion allows it not to be and for us to respect other people for being the righteous non-Jews, who are still right with God, that they are.) I suspect that even most practicing Christians would agree with me. (Please do not write to me to tell me that you are a Christian, but do not believe that I need to accept Jesus to avoid burning in Hell. You may be right, but that is beside the point.) That being said, Christianity would not be better off if only it took a more "ecumenical" view. On the contrary, such a Christianity would not long survive. It would simply be too easy for such a Christianity to be chopped up for parts. If you are on the political left, "love thy neighbor" is really a Jewish concept and it is likely that Buddhists might fulfill this commandment better than either religion. If you are on the right, you can be a Republican and still be a hypocrite about family values. None of these things require Jesus. It might serve the interests of those on either the left or right to continue to use the label "Christianity," but Christianity would cease as its own ideology, incapable of influencing Christians let alone the world. 

In a similar vein, C. S. Lewis argued that Christianity was the one religion that needed its miracle no matter how much that might trouble the modern scientific mind. If the life of Jesus was not some earth-shattering miracle of God becoming flesh, there would be no point to the religion. Jesus as a wise rabbinic teacher is useless for Christianity (hence Lewis' famous trilemma). You might as well be a Jew or practice some other ethical monotheistic religion, perhaps be a stoic philosopher. Just as Christianity needs its miracle as embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Christianity needs its horrific doctrine that this miracle was necessary in the first place.   

Over the past few decades, it has been a strength precisely of Evangelical Christians that they have been willing to insist on the necessity of accepting Jesus as your savior despite the fact that it turns so many people off. Perhaps it has been their tragedy that they have not insisted hard enough and allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Republican Party to the extent of Evangelical leaders being willing to endorse Trump despite him being the most blatantly non-Christian major candidate in our country's history. They will pay a steep price for this as millions of Evangelical kids will turn around and ask their parents how they could endorse Trump for president and not endorse them for their lapses in Christian living such as pursuing an openly gay lifestyle. (One thinks of Shelby Steele's argument that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was fueled, in part, by white parents lacking the moral authority to denounce their children's sexual behavior on account that they had, at least passively, been complacent in the much greater evils of segregation and racism.)

Insisting that Jesus is the savior may sound simplistic, but there is an advantage to simplicity. Consider the example of the slave Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin. First, it is important to recognize that, contrary to what the name has come to imply, there is nothing weak about Tom. A person who allows himself to be beaten to death rather than give up information is anything but weak. The key to understanding Tom is that he is simple. In Harriet Beecher Stowe's hand, what sounds like a negative stereotype is turned on its head as Tom is fashioned into a model Christian. Tom knows one truth that his soul was bought and paid for on Calvary with the blood of Jesus. There are two corollaries to this claim. First, it is Christ's will that Tom is sent into slavery in order that he preach this Gospel truth to everyone, black and white. Second, while Tom might be obligated to obey orders, the white man is not his real owner. This is Tom's truth and he never allows himself to become distracted by other issues. If Tom were a more gifted theologian, read Augustine and learned to separate the political from the spiritual realm, he likely would have fallen either into despair at his circumstance or into flattering his masters. If Jesus did not send me to save the soul of even a wicked man like Simon Legree, I should probably do the world a favor and kill him while he lies drunk at my feet. Alternatively, maybe, if I speak nicely to the white man and tone down the plain truth that to own slaves is to deny Jesus, he will be good to me and might even set me free. Tom's last breath is to reject young George Shelby's attempt to buy his freedom. Shelby might want, in today's language, to be a "good white ally" of slaves, but if he were a better Christian, he would have realized that just as he never really had the power to enslave anyone, it is not within his power to make anyone free, Jesus already accomplished that. 

To bring this back to libertarianism, the claim "taxation is theft," like "Jesus is the savior," maybe a horrific doctrine that alienates most people, including libertarians, but it protects the movement from being captured by outside interests. In a sense, the very alienation created by saying that taxation is theft is valuable as a signaling device. Anyone with an outside agenda would be kept away precisely by a doctrine so abhorrent to anyone who is not a libertarian today. 

All libertarians have other allegiances, whether we come from the left or the right. A thick libertarianism that allowed itself to become distracted from "taxation is theft" would quickly lose its relevance. Left-libertarians can support civil liberties and right-libertarians can support property rights, while each side ignores the other part. Furthermore, one can always defend distinctly unlibertarian policies on libertarian grounds. Forcing Christians to bake gay wedding cakes or banning Muslim immigrants might, in the long run, serve to create a society more open to libertarian ideals. Thus, libertarianism can easily be infiltrated and used to support other ends. By insisting that "taxation is theft" be placed front and center of the movement we force everyone, left and right, to surrender any claim of using the government to advance even explicitly libertarian causes. Left or right-libertarian, I will find a way to work with you. You are allowed to accept the reality that we have government and, certainly for the near future, there may not be a better option. That being said, if you are not deeply troubled by the very concept of government action, you need to leave the movement.   

All ideologies have their horrific elements in that one is going to have to accept the equivalent of a pile of dead children. This is simply a matter of consistency. If you have not figured out how your beliefs lead to dead children or worse, you have not thought them out properly. There is a practical value to being open and honest about one's horrific doctrines. It allows you to keep out those who are merely trying to use you for their own ends. If they reject your horrific doctrines, you can assume that they have rejected other parts as well. So here is to the cartoon libertarians with their simple faith that taxation is theft. Your doctrine is horrific and you will never be more than a despised minority. You are also the reason why the libertarian movement will survive another generation and you are the reason why it is worth having a libertarian, movement, even one that is a despised minority, to begin with.  

The Rhetoric of Critical Theory and Intersectionality: A Review of Authoring Autism

Melanie Yergeau is an old friend of mine from my Ohio State days (though she has since gone over to the School Up North). She was the driving force behind the founding of the Columbus chapter of ASAN. I would describe our relationship as she led, I followed; I spoke loudly, she got things done. (You can say that I was the Emerson to her Peabody.) 

She was a very quiet person, but that quietness masked a very sharp tongue that did not suffer fools lightly. When I got into trouble with the central ASAN office over my understanding of rights, she had my back. Of the two of us, she was the one to actually finish her doctorate and enter academia. (Just in case you were wondering which of us is the better dysfunctional autie.) So it was with great pleasure that I read her book, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness.  

The book perfectly embodies Melanie's ability to get you to underestimate her soft-spoken nature until she knocks your teeth out. In a sense, Melanie offers a more sophisticated autism narrative designed to demonstrate that behind the peculiar autistic quirks lies a serious intellect. This personal narrative serves as a vehicle for self-reflection on the role of narrative in crafting personhood. The central thesis of the book is that autism is a form of rhetoric to express oneself instead of the non-rhetoric of the missing person stolen by autism. 

There is a lot to recommend in this book (besides for the fact that I am mentioned in the acknowledgments). Melanie's fighting personality comes across throughout and never allows the book to get boring. I cannot think of an academic work that has more cursing in it (and I have read books about the history and psychology of profanity). This is a rare example in which the profanity is appropriate and adds to the book. This is not some abstract analysis of autistic rhetoric, but a primal scream of someone who has lived with the specter of being shut down and denied a voice. It is only proper that the author's voice ring out uncensored for good and ill. This is not a rose-tinted view of autism, but an honest one, literal and metaphorical poop included.  

Melanie notes that many in the medical profession would dismiss what she has to say about autism on the grounds that her ability to communicate and write a book precludes her from "truly" understanding autism. Of course, if she was unable to write she would not be able to communicate her autie experience.  I particularly wish to call attention to Melanie's use of Zeno's Paradox as a means of describing the rhetorical trap we face. If you constantly gain fifty percent on someone, you will never catch up. Similarly, auties live in a world in which, no matter how hard they work, they are endlessly running to live up to neurotypical standards of behavior and can never catch up. The problem is that the neurotypical has been placed in a position of judgment in the first place, from which they can always find reasons why you do not measure up to their standards. 

I am reminded of something Trevor Noah brings up when talking about South African apartheid. One of the reasons why the white minority was able to rule was that there existed a wider population of coloreds, who were placed above the black majority. Whites held out the promise to coloreds that, if they met certain arbitrary bureaucratic standards, they too could become classified as white. Hence you had a colored population forever chasing acceptance for themselves while also keeping blacks down at of a fear of being tainted by them. 

The problem with Authoring Autism is that it feels the need to place itself within the structure of critical theory and intersectionality. Despite the fact that people on the autism spectrum face very real violence, Melanie often seems far more concerned with denouncing as violence any time other people have power over her. Even though our cause would be just even if we lived in a world that lacked other oppression, Melanie feels the need to attach autism to other causes like LGBT rights to the point that it often is not clear which one she is advocating for.

                                                                                                      

Obviously, it is reasonable to be both pro-autistic and LGBT rights. That being said, they are distinct and any attempt to confuse the two is not only intellectually dishonest but likely to cause harm to both sides. Consider the example of libertarianism. I am an autie libertarian. There are a number of us out there and there is certainly a lot of overlap between the two. That being said, they are not the same. Furthermore, it is inevitable that a conflict of interest will arise and one will have to choose between the two. Even when I choose to be a libertarian over being an autie, I have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge what I am doing. Even here, I benefit the cause of autism by not writing myself a blank check to piss on autistics and pretending I was doing otherwise.   

Much of the book is an attack on ABA, which is perfectly legitimate. The practice can easily cross the line into physical abuse. Such abuse is facilitated by an attitude that delegitimizes the personal lives of autistics. If you view people on the spectrum as suffering something akin to being dead then it logically follows that any attempt to “cure” them, no matter how extreme, is acceptable. One can imagine even agreeing to play Russian roulette with autistic lives; either we cure them or they die, which would still be better for everyone involved.  

For some strange reason, Melanie seems intent on connecting ABA to gay conversion therapy programs. While I am inclined to see gay conversion as the more problematic of the two, it almost seems as if the real crime committed by the founders of ABA, in Melanie’s eyes, was supporting gay conversion therapy. Furthermore, whether it is ABA or gay conversion, Melanie seems less concerned with physical abuse than with the very notion of people in power making judgments about those in their care.  

This need to declare autism professionals guilty of every non-autism related charge leads to some comically absurd conclusions, such as that autism organizations are racist. According to Melanie: "Even a cursory glance at the boards of major autism advocacy organizations reveals white supremacy at work." (158) The reason for this is that they are "surprisingly white." For example, in 2013, Autism Speaks had twenty-five white men and only one person of color on its board. As someone who dislikes Autism Speaks greatly and has repeatedly denounced racism on this blog, complaining about the racial makeup of their board seems beside the point. 

A lack of diversity on a board is a problem as it strongly suggests a lack of openness to alternative points of view. This marks an important step on the road to actual racism, but in of itself is not racism. If you wish to say that this is a symptom not of white supremacists but of a white supremacist society, you may be right. That being said, it makes everyone, from me to Melanie, racists and renders the term useless in the fight against actual racists.

Efforts should be made to make autism organization boards more diverse, but that is hardly a top priority. If Autism Speaks made a serious effort to recruit more minorities, I would not see them as any less dangerous. Quite the contrary, as the Me Too movement has demonstrated, a general support for progressive causes can coexist and even facilitate highly abusive behavior against women. Similarly, if Autism Speaks were to unveil a front office made entirely of black Muslim lesbians, I would suspect that they were trying to create some ideological cover for themselves in order to blatantly call for eugenic policies against autistics.   

If we are going to be accusing autism professionals of heteronormative thinking and downright white supremacy, it is only reasonable to also throw in … (can you guess it?) neo-liberalism. Thus, we learn:

… cognitive rhetorics quantify both behavior and free will and gain their rhetorical traction through neoliberalism. The productive subject reigns, and mental hygiene is a paragon of productivity. What neuroplasticity lends to capitalism are rhetorics of improvability and calculability. … under neoliberalism, we will always need more of these things, and it is our individual responsibility to acquire them. (130)

I confess to being uncertain what this passage even means. I think it has something to do with condemning anyone analyzing society from a rationalist perspective and who believes in individual self-improvement.

Neoliberalism is a term that, in practice, can mean anyone from Donald Trump to Ta-Nehisi Coates, anyone not Prof. Cornel West. (I am sure, though, that someone, at some point, has accused West of being a neoliberal. Who else, but a secret neoliberal, would so recklessly accuse others of being neoliberals?) There is a certain irony to this. In a book premised on the notion that people have a right to their own discourse and not to be defined by others, a word like neoliberalism is used even though epitomizes not allowing people to define themselves. Neoliberalism is not a word people use for themselves.  It is an epithet used to define other people with little sense of what they might actually believe. Let us be charitable and assume that Melanie was simply mentioning how other people have attacked neoliberalism because she needed to cross off neoliberalism from some checklist.

This leads me to a more personal complaint. Melanie mentions an incident with the autism book club we both were involved in that used to meet at the Barnes and Noble on High St., near the OSU campus. The members were a mixture of people on the spectrum, mostly boys in their late teens and early twenties, and people involved with autism social work. There was a vote between Catch-22 and the Curious Incident of the Dog at Midnight. Incident of the Dog won largely because the non-autistics in the group voted for it. From Melanie's perspective, it was not just that the book was badly written or that it failed to accurately portray autism, the book itself was oppressive. The fact that non-autistics dared to vote at all was bad enough, but they used their vote to "make" us read this book. 

I confess to not remembering the vote. I cannot recall what book I voted for. I do remember reading Incident of the Dog and that we later read Catch-22. Let me state for the record that I did not like Catch-22 and thought it was over-rated. I was ok with Incident of the Dog largely because, having previously read it, I had no large hope invested in it. It was a humorous book, but hardly the book I would have recommended to people trying to understand what it means to be on the spectrum. My teenage self had little in common with Christopher and the same could be said for the other teenage boys in the group. 

The non-autistics were in the book club to better their understanding of autism and one of the virtues of the club was that it allowed them to interact with us in a non-hierarchical manner as opposed to a more professional setting. I don't think anyone was trying to force us to think of autism in any particular way. It was only reasonable for them to be curious how autistics would view what had, by then, become a classic novel on the topic. Let me state for the record that I am very grateful to Dr. Renee Devlin, Hillary Knapp Spears, and the others who took part in the club over the years. I find their implicit treatment here to be unfair and downright insulting. 

I believe that autistics have a voice and are capable of rhetoric. For that voice to be heard, it is necessary to take control of the autism narrative away from parents and professionals, even well-meaning ones. Melanie is a powerful force on this front and I look forward to reading her future work. That being said, Authoring Autism is a cautionary tale of how critical theory and intersectionality can taint even a noble cause. I look forward to the day when auties can engage in their own rhetoric, unfettered by the boxes that others, whether parents, professionals, or modern liberalism, wish to place us in.  

No, Nancy MacLean, Autistic People Do Not Become Libertarians Because They Lack Empathy

I must confess that since reading Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, my opinion of her has only lessened. To move away from her incompetence as a historian or an economist, I would like to discuss her views on autism. As always, whenever suggesting that MacLean might not be completely correct, it is important to confess, right from the start: I am a Koch minion so you should ignore everything that I say. All arguments against her simply prove how deep and nefarious the "not exactly a conspiracy" against her is and how desperate her enemies have become now that she has revealed the truth about them. (Also, as an Asperger, I have no sense of humor and am incapable of sarcasm.)

This is a video of a speech given several days ago by historian MacLean about her book. At about the hour mark, she speculates that James Buchanan and other people who share his libertarian politics (or his desire to take over the world) are autistic as they do not "feel solidarity or empathy with other people." This is a further jump from her attempt, in her book, to make something out of the fact that Tyler Cowen, a libertarian economist, is involved with the autistic advocacy. Now she is going so far as to diagnose Buchanan, a man who never identified himself with the neurodiverse community.

Whether Buchanan really was on the spectrum or not, this is dangerous slander, particularly for the casual way in which she frames it, as if it was a truth that everyone knew that people on the autism spectrum lacked empathy. Such "casual truths," by their nature cannot easily be refuted by simply pointing out the facts because people are not going to think that it is even a matter for debate. You can actually see this in action a few minutes later in the video. A person in the audience runs with MacLean's statement and jokingly starts talking about autistic libertarians trying to take over law schools.   

The principle of rational ignorance teaches us that there is no reason to expect MacLean to educate herself about autistic people or care about what we might find offensive. It is generally not productive to get worked up about someone (even a university professor) being wrong on the internet. My justification for this is twofold. First, her account of Buchanan's life is an exercise in trying to tar someone as a racist on the vaguest kinds of guilt by association. (Contrast her case against Buchanan with the kind of evidence that Prof. Deborah Lipstadt and her team had to produce when sued by David Irving.) It is a losing proposition to simply attempt to defend Buchanan. It is inevitable that at some time, over his career, that he walked within a mile of a Nathan Bedford Forrest statue. It is necessary, therefore, to hold MacLean to her own standards. The fact that she fails, robs her of the authority to prosecute her case and demonstrates that she does not care about tolerance, but merely uses it as moral cover for her progressive agenda. (If Buchanan was guilty of all of MacLean's charges, but was a progressive in his politics and economics, would this book have ever been written?)

Second, there is a wider case to be made against modern liberalism, which gains much of its moral authority from its claim to universal tolerance. This is connected to modern liberalism's claim to knowledge of some objective "public welfare." It is impossible for anyone to be universally tolerant or to grasp the public welfare. Inevitably, much like G. K. Chesterton's insane rationalist, reality is chopped up to fit the limitations of the human mind. Tolerance for certain people must take precedence. In practice, this means that liberals are terrible at considering problems of justice the moment they have to step outside of their narrow index card of privilege scoring. (What do you do when the villains are not white Christian heterosexual men?)

There is an even larger problem in that the liberal's belief in the ultimate value of tolerance makes it difficult for them to ever question their own prejudices. This is similar to how formal religion has a tendency to work against actual spirituality. How can a person whose very notion of self is equated with their relationship with God ever question the genuineness of that relationship? (The dark night of the soul, by its very nature, is something that only God, not the human seeker, can initiate.) Likewise, since the liberal defines himself as tolerant and it is this tolerance that gives him moral authority over all the "less enlightened," any attempt to question that tolerance challenges the liberal's very being. By contrast, both religious people and liberals might agree that it is a virtue to be slow to anger. That being said, acknowledging that one is quick to anger (something I am quite guilty of) is not that serious a problem as it does not challenge anyone's central narrative of themselves nor undermine anyone's moral authority.  

Are libertarians likely to be on the autism spectrum? In my experience, there seems to be some truth to this. If I were in charge of a libertarian organization, I would make a special point in reaching out to autism organizations on the assumption that they contained likely converts and vice versa. (Admittedly, as a libertarian on the autism spectrum I am biased to notice people like me.) This is not because we lack empathy; whatever the very real challenges of being on the autism spectrum, lacking empathy is not one of them. I suspect that autistics come preconditioned to make the kind of Faustian bargain necessary for ideological libertarianism (as opposed to simply being socially liberal and fiscally conservative). Libertarianism offers the prospect of being right and logically consistent, but the price you pay is irrelevancy. Note that I am not claiming that libertarians are right or consistent; on the contrary, to even seriously consider libertarianism you have to be willing to surrender relevancy and you may never turn out to be right or consistent.

I confess that this is a limitation of my own thinking. A politically conservative relative recently compared reading this blog to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. You can count on Calvin being logical, but nothing he says has anything to do with planet Earth. I write in order to have my own little universe that is rational and where the things I care about matter. There would be no point in writing if I lived in a world that actually reflected my mode of being. 

In politics, this leads to voting for Gov. Gary Johnson in the last election even though he only got three percent of the vote. (Not that Johnson was some kind of perfect libertarian. Furthermore, voting for him did not make you one and vice versa.) I voted for Johnson precisely because I refused to make the practical consideration of whether Trump or Clinton was worse than the other. I simply voted for him out of a desire to stick to my principles, to live according to a set of values that exist only in my head. I readily grant that, by doing so, I chose to make myself irrelevant. Not that I have any regrets, but I threw my vote away and neither of the two parties has any reason to take me into consideration.

Consider libertarian principles like "taxation is theft" and "the state has no special moral authority." These are great for those on the spectrum as it offers the chance to turn political science into geometry with beliefs that logically follow clear axioms and theorems. Trying to beat neurotypicals' heads with these ideas is unproductive as they do not relate to their lived experiences. We live in a world of states that claim the moral authority to tax and do anything else for the "public welfare." The state is so ubiquitous that it is meaningless to seriously analyze it as an instrument of power. Unless you can produce something tangible with it, neurotypicals are not likely to make the moral jump and reject the state. To mentally live in a world where you have rejected the government from your own head has no meaning for them.

This leads us to a certain irony in MacLean's accusations of a Koch backed libertarian conspiracy. Much as anti-Semites would have never dreamed up the Protocols of the Elders of Zion if they only had spent time with Jews and saw that Jews could not plot through a kiddush, if MacLean understood either libertarians or autistics, she would have realized that we have no master plan and, if we had to come up with one, it would be much better than the one she invented for us. Buchanan, whether or not he was on the spectrum, wrote as an academic for people living a century in the future, not guidebooks on overthrowing the state.

Autistics are often accused of lacking a theory of mind. In essence, this is a more sophisticated version of the lacking empathy libel. It has the advantage of sounding more clinical and offers the fig-leaf of pretending not to be prejudiced. What is funny about MacLean is the extent that she seems to lack any theory of mind regarding her opponents. Conspiracy thinking is fundamentally about lacking theory of mind in the sense that you assume that your opponents claim what they claim, knowing that it is false, for some sinister purpose as opposed to accepting that, whether they are right or wrong, they honestly believe what they say.

History is about getting into the mind of your subject. If MacLean honestly wanted to write a biography about Buchanan, she should have, for the purposes of the book, started with the assumption that public choice economics is correct. Furthermore, that progressivism, the New Deal, and the 1960s marked wrong turns for this country. If you were an academic who believed this, how would you have responded? Now you have a story worth telling regardless of your political affiliation. The fact that MacLean failed to do this does not mean that she is autistic; she simply lacks the moral imagination to be a good historian.

Needing the Secular World: A Thought Experiment and Some Rodney Stark

In the last post, I discussed the idea that Haredim, while they might possess individual scientists, are incapable of creating their own genuine scientific culture. This brought up an argument from the late Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz of the necessity of being able to fill out all jobs required by a society. It is not enough for Haredim to say that other people should be doctors or lawyers and, for that matter, policemen and garbage collectors; Haredim need to be able to fill these positions themselves. The fact that Haredim cannot do this, in the long run, poses a major ideological challenge far beyond any particular scientific argument. I would like to further develop this idea with a thought experiment and consideration of the Rodney Stark model of conversion. 

Imagine a town divided between secular people and Haredim. No one has a political advantage to allow them to force their values on anyone. Both Haredi and secular parents are keen to pass on their values to their children and keep them from going over to the other side. One major advantage that secular parents would have is that, ironically, it would be easier for them to raise their children without ever interacting with the other side. The reason for this is that there is no job that they require that they cannot simply fill in with their own people without recourse to Haredim. They can make sure that their children only visit secular doctors and have their trash picked up by secular garbagemen. Haredim, for all their talk about maintaining their purity, are forced to lead relatively open lives. Every day Haredi children will walk past secular policemen and garbagemen. If they get sick, they will be hard-pressed to make sure that they are seen by a religious doctor. It will not only be that these people happen to be secular, but the children will be conscious of these facts as they have been taught to think of these as non-religious jobs.  

Haredim, of all people, should be able to instinctively appreciate how such casual contact with the outside world can become spiritually dangerous. To understand the problem at an intellectual level, it is useful to turn to the sociologist Rodney Stark and his model of conversion. Stark argues for the importance of social relations in causing people to convert to a different denomination or even to move outside of one's religion. People are unlikely to be converted and even more importantly stay converted due to some argument made by a stranger in the street. By contrast, they are very open to their friends and family. 

There are two major reasons why a personal connection is so much more valuable than an intellectual argument. Human beings are social creatures. Even if we wanted to, we are unlikely to be able to change our lives around an argument, even one we believed. By contrast, we do readily change our behavior to match those around us. Furthermore, it is social relations that are going to keep a person within a movement. An argument can be countered with another argument. By contrast, you cannot will a new set of social connections into place; it takes years of work (particularly if you are not a neurotypical).

A good example of this kind of thinking can be found in Mormonism. The LDS Church, decades ago, recognized that having missionaries try to "cold call" strangers was essentially useless. By contrast, having a potential convert meet with a missionary at the home of a Mormon friend was very effective. Hence the LDS Church has now built its entire missionary program around this premise. 

Everyone has their moments of crisis. People with a strong spiritual sensibility are likely to have more of them and they are likely to involve their chosen faiths. Keep in mind that, if you never expect much from your religion, it can never disappoint you. It is precisely the true believer who can become disillusioned. When that happens it can only benefit the LDS Church if you have a Mormon friend that you can find yourself falling into a theological conversation with. This friend can then suggest that perhaps you might want to come over to his house sometime to continue this conversation with some of his other "friends."

This idea that people are ultimately converted by their friends leads us to a particular narrative of conversion. There is a first stage in which a person "socially" converts in the sense that they take on a group of friends, who happen to follow a particular religion. At this point, there is nothing intellectual involved. In fact, the person would likely insist that they have not converted or changed in any significant way. That being said, this is the truly crucial stage. At some point, a person is going to realize that he has come to associate with people from a particular religion and that religion carries a particular ideology that needs to be taken into consideration. A person who fully converts is likely to look back and reframe their narrative to make themselves seekers who found their faith when, in truth, it was the religion that found them.  

This idea of social conversions can be seen in Chabad. The society around a Chabad house consists of a series of circles. At the center is the Chabad emissary couple. Around them, you will have some observant people. But most people at a Chabad house are not Orthodox. You can have people who have been associated with Chabad for years as an important part of their lives without ever becoming Orthodox. They like the Chabad rabbis and perhaps recognize some need for Jewish spirituality, but have no interest in being ritually observant. 

This state of affairs is possible because Chabad emissaries tend to be both remarkably nice and tolerant. Non-religious Jews are amazed at how tolerant Chabad emissaries are and want to be friends with them. In the long run, this model has proven to be incredibly effective even if that is hard to see on a day-to-day level where it appears that what you have is an observant rabbi surrounded by a non-observant congregation just like you would see in a Conservative synagogue.

My wife an excellent example of this. As a teenager with a non-Jewish mother, she started going to the Chabad in Pasadena on Friday nights mostly as a matter of convenience as it was easier to get there by bus than the Conservative Temple. Her taking on ritual observance and then realizing that, if she ever wanted to get married, she needed an actual Orthodox conversion was a process that took years. This process was made possible by the kindness and tolerance of the Chabad emissaries for someone who was not halakically Jewish.

As to ideological conversions, consider the example of C. S. Lewis. The most dramatic moment of Lewis' journey from atheism to Christianity was a late-night conversation with a number of religious Christians, including J. R. R. Tolkien, in which Lewis argued that the main ideas of Christianity came from ancient paganism and therefore should be taken with equal seriousness. One might enjoy Greek and Norse mythology and even see it as a source of great moral teachings, but one cannot be expected to seriously believe in these religions. The response was that the ancient pagans intuitively understood certain truths that were ultimately fulfilled in Jesus. 

Now what can easily be lost in this story is that Lewis did not simply walk up to some random Christians at his favorite pub, the Eagle and Child, and start an argument with them. At this point in his life, he had started believing in God largely because the writers he most identified with were theists and he found that he could not disassociate what he admired from that theism. He had even started going to church as an exercise in being part of the theism team. This led him to become friends with a number of intellectually serious practicing Christians and it was with these Christian friends that he had his famous late-night conversation about pagan mythology.    

To bring this back to our earlier thought experiment, in order to keep their children in the "faith," both the secular and Haredi parents are going to have to keep an eye out for alternative social circles as opposed to some guy handing out leaflets. The secular parents have nothing to worry about as there is no reason why their children would consciously ever have to interact with Haredim. They will know that Haredim exist as theoretical abstractions walking in the streets in strange clothes almost like philosophical zombies. There will never be a reason to take them seriously as individuals with names. Haredi parents will be able to work with no such advantage. Their children will have to interact with secular people, such as doctors and policemen, as individuals with names. This can form the basis for a friendship or at least enough of one that, when that inevitable moment of crisis comes and they feel frustrated with the Haredi community, they might think to go talk to that secular person in their life. The moment we cross that line, the child might still be a long way from leaving and may have no conscious desire to do so, but his soul is now in play.

Science and Torah: Is a Society of Torah Scientists Possible?

This past Shabbat, I attended a Shabbaton hosted by the Chabad of Pasadena. It featured Dr. Mickael Chekroun, an atmospheric scientist at UCLA. He gave an address titled "From Particle Physics to Serving Hashem." (Why someone who is not a particle physicist would speak about particle physics is a mystery to me.) His main point was that it is possible to be a religious Jew and a scientist as you can count on science eventually catching up to the truths that Torah has already revealed.

Already, such an attitude makes it difficult for someone to be a scientist. Science is a method to be followed, admittedly one with a tenuous relationship to objective facts, and not a set of conclusions. A scientist is not a prophet and can have no inkling of where new evidence will lead. In practice, any evidence produced by someone that fits neatly into their pre-set beliefs must be discounted. It is the equivalent of a tainted crime scene. (Science does have the advantage over criminal investigations in that it is possible to redo an experiment as opposed to a crime.) As to the question of being a religious scientist, yes it is possible, but also completely irrelevant. An individual scientist can hold Jewish beliefs, but he can also hold flat-earth beliefs without it interfering with his ability to perform productive research. Since science can be reconciled with any belief system that does not point-blank declare the scientific method to be invalid, the fact that it can be reconciled with Judaism says nothing positive about Judaism. The relevant question is whether Judaism can serve as a helpful backdrop to a society of scientists, who not only produce legitimate research but also pass on the scientific method to the next generation.

Can Judaism produce a scientific tradition? It has long been recognized within Orthodox circles that it is quite possible to be a committed Jew without being Orthodox or even in any way observant. The difficulty is getting multiple generations of committed non-observant Jews. So it is only fair to ask the same question regarding Orthodox scientists. Dr. Chekroun might, today, identify with Chabad, but he is not the product of Chabad. (Much like Kylo Ren did not rise out of the Dark Side.) By his own admission, he already was a working scientist when he came to be involved with Chabad. Will his children become Chabad scientists? Rabbi Chaim Hanoka, the head Chabad rabbi in Pasadena, is the son of the scientist Dr. Yaacov Hanoka ztl. Like Dr. Chekroun, Dr. Hanoka was not a product of Chabad, but part of the early generation of college students, who became religious through Chabad. The Hanokas are a respectable Chabad family. That being said, none of Dr. Hanoka's children ever became scientists.

The fact that a person's biological children do not become scientists, in of itself, is not a serious challenge. Personally, I feel little at stake over whether either of my children, Kalman or Mackie, will become practicing historians when they grow up even if I am determined to give them the values of a historian. That being said, this issue of children helps us comprehend the larger issues of society and continuity within science. Contrary to popular perception, science is a social process. Science is not about individuals performing experiments. Science happens when those experiments are repeated by other scientists including the scientist's worst enemies. A scientific community is possible because whatever petty personal rivalries might exist, everyone is committed to the scientific method. As with any community, the sense of shared values allows science to craft a covenantal tradition that binds the dead, the living, and those who have not yet earned their Ph.Ds.

Can Lubavitch (or any Haredi movement) produce a self-sustained scientific society? In practice, there are very real difficulties for any product of the Chabad school system to ever become a scientist. As a matter of principle, Chabad is against college. It might be theoretically possible for Chabad to create its own scientific institution to train Lubavitch scientists. Perhaps, something along the lines of the Vatican's astronomy institute. In practice, this is unlikely as the scientific method is not something that you can dabble in. It requires a full commitment, the kind we usually associate with religion. A scientist with anything less is going to fall prey to having some kind of outside agenda. (This might explain why so many scientists are against religion. Science cannot afford to submit itself to any outside authority. This causes religion to be seen as a threat. Furthermore, the fact that science is such an all-encompassing commitment allows it to serve the kinds of emotional functions most people get from religion. Hence, for a scientist, science becomes a logical replacement for religion.)

This commitment that science demands for itself makes it different from other professions. It should surprise no one that, in the New York area, Orthodox Jews are a force to be reckoned with in Law and Medicine. This is unlikely to happen soon with any of the sciences as science is not simply a job that you put in long hours in the hope of being well paid and that demands no larger allegiance. (Note that the practice of medicine is not a science any more than being a mechanic makes you a scientist. In both cases, you are applying a set body of knowledge instead of attempting to acquire new knowledge.)

It is here worth distinguishing between applied science and theoretical science. Historically, the tendency has been for a theoretical science to proceed without any sense of how it might be useful, followed several decades or even centuries later by the applied science. The crucial science is the theoretical one. It is also the part of science that would be the most difficult for the Orthodox world to produce on its own. Unlike Law and Medicine, theoretical science offers little in the way of financial reward. Rather than helping fund those engaged in full-time Torah study, a society of Orthodox theoretical scientists would compete for funds. Even more damaging, such a society would demand that the wider community believes that funding science is equal to funding Torah in the sense that both should be pursued for their own sake.

Does any of this make a difference? The Haredi world can do quite well for itself simply by recruiting professional scientists for itself from the secular world. But what would happen, granted that this is an extreme scenario, if the Haredi world ever "won?" Say, maybe just in Israel, if everyone decided to become Haredi and we had to face the Yeshayahu Leibowitz challenge. Now Israeli science is going to be handed over to Haredim and, come the next generation, there will be no more secular kids, who became religious as adults to become scientists. What would happen to Israeli science? Historically, one thinks of the philosophical traditions produced by pagan Hellenists, suddenly in the fourth-century, falling into the hands of Christians and later to Muslims. Now we have no more pagans and we must expect Christians and Muslims to step in and do philosophy. There is some debate on the matter, but overall the fall of paganism was not good for philosophy.

Not that I expect Haredim to ever become close to triumphing, but this issue does indirectly have practical implications. As long as Haredim cannot answer questions like what will happen to science if they took over (or the police and the army for that matter), Haredim will always be a marginal group. Even a large birth rate will not help them as, in the long run, they will not be able to hold on to their children. Such practical questions, with their implied reliance on secular society, will do far more to destroy people's faith than any science lecture. 

I do not doubt that Haredi communities such as Lubavitch will be able to continue to attract scientists. I am also willing to charitably assume that Haredim are tolerant enough to put up with eccentrics in their midsts with an interest in science. Such behavior can easily be justified by assuming that these exceptional individuals have special souls, which require this particular spiritual diet. That being said, I doubt that the Haredi world will ever be able to produce a scientific society of its own that is not dependent upon the secular society it opposes. Yes, one can be Haredi and a practicing scientist. What the Haredi world will never be able to accept is a self-conscious organized society of people with the values of science and with the determination to pass those values on to their children (biological or otherwise).

If Taxes are Not Extortion, You Cannot Pay Them

A major foundation of my personal libertarianism is that I see it as a self-evident truth that government is, by definition, an act of violence and even murder. While this does not discredit all government action, it does mean that it is immoral for the government to do anything that I would not personally be willing to kill someone in order to accomplish, a pretty narrow list. It occurred to me that there are some very interesting implications as to the morality of paying taxes if you reject this premise.

I assume all my readers can agree that it would be immoral to sell me a gun knowing that I planned on killing my wife with it. It would not matter if I were otherwise a very decent fellow and used the gun to guard a battered women's shelter. (As it has been demonstrated with the recent revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood, there is no contradiction between supporting women's rights in general while violating the particular women in your life.) If you were to give me the gun, you would be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. Now imagine that I was connected to the government and threatened you that if you refused to pass guns to mafia hitmen with which they could take out their opponents you would be put in jail. I assume that you would be morally obligated to go to jail rather than participate in a murder.

Now I do not question that the United States government has done a lot of legitimate good around the world. That being said, there have certainly been cases in which the government, particularly the CIA, has literally helped arm gangsters in order to commit murder. This means that, as taxpayers, there can be no illusions; by agreeing to pay taxes, we are literally complicit in murder.

While I believe that it is immoral to pay taxes to the American government in much the same way that one is not allowed to be a gun runner for the mob, I still pay taxes. There is a simple reason for this. I fully believe that there is a gun to my head and that I would be killed for refusing to pay. Keep in mind that I would not be refusing out of venal greed, but because I reject, on principle, the moral authority of the government to do certain things. This is treason and the penalty for treason is death. Furthermore, consider that the people involved in those actions I most object to are likely acting out of idealism. Like the Operator villain, in Serenity, they kill because they believe they are making a better world. If these men are already committing murder to further their aims, surely they would be willing to kill ideological tax evaders bent on stopping their better world from ever happening.

If you believe that taxes are not extorted at gunpoint, but are willingly given then you have no such excuse. Either you endorse every action of the government and as not wrongfully murdering anyone or you believe that the government is guilty of murder. If you believe that the government is guilty of murder, why do you pay taxes? Just as none of you would ever willingly buy guns for the mob even if it paid well, you should not feel any need to buy guns for the government. Keep in mind that our government spends far more on the military than on social services. So, when you pay taxes, you are supporting the military industrial complex with some welfare programs thrown in on the side as cover.

This argument is of little use against conservatives, who are likely to take a strong moral stance in favor of the American government. What intrigues me here is the reasoning of liberals, most of whom seem to view the American government even less charitably than I do. At least I acknowledge that radical political Islam is a threat and that it theoretically might be justifiable for the government to take action against it. I am even open to fire-bombing cities. The more you believe that the American government is a blood-soaked racist entity the more you need to feel directly threatened in order to justify paying taxes. From this perspective, it is not just libertarians who need to assume that taxation is theft at gunpoint, but liberals perhaps even more so. 

Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part II)

(Part I)

Connected to Game of Thrones' pessimistic anti-heroism is a sense of realism. Beyond a few dragons, there is remarkably little magic. In fact, the series often seems to function more as historical fiction, only being held back by the technicality that the story is not actually taking place within the War of the Roses or the French Wars of Religion but on another planet. Just as the series abandons the physical magic of fantasy in favor of a disenchanted realism, it abandons fantasy's psychology of heroism in favor of a more "realistic" disenchanted anti-heroism.

Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Chronicles has much in common with Game of Thrones. While there is a lot more magic, Sanderson represents a key turn within modern fantasy toward science-fiction. Mid-twentieth century science-fiction, as exemplified by writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, turned away from black box technology that differed little from magic in favor of engineering stories that placed how a technology might plausibly work at center stage. Similarly, even as Sanderson starts from a different set of natural laws, his characters approach their magic in a scientific spirit. It is useful to think of Stormlight as the kind of science-fiction novel that someone living in a platonist universe might have written. The naturalism in Stormlight goes so far as to include heroes like Jasnah Kholin, who is an atheist, and her uncle Dalinar, who loses his faith in the Almighty as the series goes along. These plot lines are particularly intriguing as Sanderson is a religious Mormon.

The really crucial connection between the two series is this crisis of heroism. In Stormlight, this occurs very literally at the cosmological level with the death of a divine being called Honor. Nine of the ten Harelds refuse to continue to damn themselves to Desolation every few thousand years in a never-ending cycle to save the world from the Voidbringers. In essence, Jesus has refused to get back on the Cross. At a human level, the story focuses on the implications of this death, much in the same way that Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God presaged the start of World War I. In fact, the war between the Alethi and the Parshendi, the central event of the story, is essentially a fantasy world version of World War I. You have the assassination of a royal figure, King Gavilar of Alethkar (an event that is retold in every book from the perspective of a different character). This leads to a war that quickly turns into a stalemate on the Shattered Plains.

The irony of the Alethi light-eyed aristocracy is that they had just enough sense of honor to declare war to avenge the death of their king but not enough to stop the war once it became a stalemate and spare the lives of the common soldiers (particularly the bridge crews, callously sacrificed as cannon fodder). The dark truth is that the light-eyes have the pretense of an honor code without its substance. The pretense, as manifested in the keen attention to ritual, is necessary considering that their lives of privilege could only be justified by laying claim to serving a higher code. Beyond the rare sets of shardplate and shardblades, what protects the light-eyes is that the masses of dark-eyes honestly believe that the light-eyes are honorable and deserve to rule. The moment they stop believing this, you will have a revolution on your hands (which is one of the main subplots of the second book, Words of Radiance). The pretense of honor allowed the light-eyes to declare war to avenge their king while serving their real goal of collecting gemhearts out on the Shattered Plains battlefield and plotting against each other to improve their individual family positions. The real reason why this war is not ending is that the light-eyes want there to be a war as an end in itself.

Worse than honor just being dead, its very death has allowed it to be corrupted. The light-eyes, in a  sense, have the corpse of honor, its ritual forms. Because of the almost total absence of actual belief, they are able to parade themselves draped in that corpse. (Considering what shardplates and shardblades are eventually revealed to be, this is not exactly a metaphor.) Honor becomes what elevates them above the rest of society. This means that, by definition, everything they do becomes honorable. Furthermore, acts that conventional thinking might consider dishonorable are now not only not dishonorable but the very height of honor for only a "truly honorable" person could ever do them. In dealing with light-eyed villains like Amaram and Sadeas, much of their charm and effectiveness comes from their ability to be openly cynical about honor and still to be thought of as honorable. As with Ayn Rand villains, their nihilism is not taken seriously. This makes it a surprise when they can commit such cold-blooded actions without any sense of guilt or remorse.   

This crisis of honor is played out from the perspectives of the dark-eyed commoner Kaladin and the light-eyed Dalinar. Kaladin comes into the story as an idealist, who believes in the honor of his light-eyed commander, Amaram. This faith is cruelly shattered when Amaram repays Kaladin's heroic slaying of a shardbearer by taking the spoils for himself and having Kaladin's men executed to leave no witnesses. As for Kaladin, Amaram's "mercifully" has him branded and sold as a slave. This eventually leads Kaladin to serve on Bridge Crew Four.

If Kaladin is disenchantment from the bottom up, Dalinar is disenchantment from the top down. He is part of the aristocracy, the brother of the assassinated king, and one of the main Alethi commanders. More than anyone else, he honestly tries to live up to the code of chivalry as taught in the Way of Kings. Because he is a true believer, he is unable initially to see the treachery around him as manifested mainly by his friend, Sadeas. From Sadeas' perspective, betraying Dalinar to his death is the decent thing to do for a friend, who has lost his touch and a truly noble defense of the aristocratic right to feud without the forced unity of a strong king. One of my favorite moments of the entire series comes in book two when a stylized duel is allowed to turn into a trap for Dalinar's son, Adolin. Dalinar is left pleading for mercy and with the realization that none of his fellow light-eyes, including his nephew, King Elhokar, possess anything but the hollow outward trappings of honor.

To deepen the disenchantment, it is not just that Kaladin and Dalinar are good people in a bad world; they themselves are highly flawed individuals. Not only have they made mistakes, their mistakes are of such a nature that there is no coming back from them. Repentance is, by definition, impossible as any attempt to do so demonstrates that one never truly appreciated the gravity of the sin in the first place. Beyond Kaladin's anger at Amaram's betrayal, he is weighed down by the guilt of failing to protect his men. He joined the army because he wished to protect those who could not protect themselves, particularly his drafted younger brother Tien. The reality is that, despite his best intentions, he has only gotten people killed. First, he failed in the particular task of protecting Tien and then he failed even at the symbolic level of protecting the men under his command. The need to redeem himself by fixing the world leads Kaladin to agree to allow Elhokar to be assassinated despite having sworn to protect him. There are good reasons for killing Elhokar and it is not unreasonable to imagine that Alethkar would be a better place if Dalinar took over. There is just that small issue of cold-blooded murder and treachery. 

As for Dalinar, much of the new Oathbringer novel is devoted to revealing that, for most of his life, he was not really any better than Sadeas and Amaram. Dalinar's slaughtering whole towns in "service of the Crown and the Almighty" led to the death of his wife. His subsequent turn to drink to drown his guilt led to his being drunk during the assassination of his brother. In fact, it was Sadeas, who put himself in harm's way trying to protect Gavilar. Dalinar finally managed to strike a magical bargain to escape his guilt that removed all memory of his wife from his mind.

It is Kaladin's and Dalinar's task to save the world by restarting the ancient order of Knights Radiants, who once served the Harelds. In essence, they have to reenchant the world by restoring heroism to it. In this disenchanted world, in which even the heroes are irreparably tainted, reenchantment is achieved by acknowledging both one's sins and inability to atone for them. Next, one tries to do better even while knowing that this may fail. The most important step in a journey is simply the next one. In a story about saving the world, it is amazing to the extent that the major acts of salvation come about by people not trying to save the world but by humbly doing the right thing in front of them.

Kaladin comes to accept protecting a flawed king after Elhokar acknowledges his failures as a king and asks Kaladin to teach him to be better. Elhokar's limited repentance with its honesty in looking at both the past and the future allows Kaladin to step back from "heroically" trying to fix the world in one grand gesture to redeem his past failure to fix the world and instead simply do the honorable thing. It should be noted that Elhokar's moment does not mean he transforms himself into either a good king or a good person nor does it mean that things turn out well for him. 

Similarly, Dalinar's "heroic" attempt to live according to the Way of Kings, while well-intentioned, simply continued the light-eyed practice of donning the forms of honor. He is still trying to atone for his sins, which, as this is an impossible task, leads to him simply continuing to run from the past and ignore it. The big change is when he struggles to negotiate a complex series of alliances as the head of the new Knights Radiant. He is burdened by the fact that he has no experience in trying to convince people to cooperate as opposed to using brute force. With time ticking down to an apocalypse, Dalinar begins his redemption by not trying to seize power even as that accusation is used as an excuse by others to not confront the looming threat in front of them. This sets ups the climax when Dalinar attempts to resist possession by the satanic figure Odium. The trap is that Odium can offer Dalinar the one thing he has been seeking all this time, salvation from guilt. If only Dalinar would consent to possession, he would no longer be responsible for his actions. One might even put this into the past and say that Dalinar had always, in some sense, been under the control of some evil force, which is really what was responsible for what he did. Dalinar saves himself precisely by embracing his guilt and asking to remember. Rather than being a hero, he takes responsibility for his own past and allows the heroic image of himself to be destroyed.

It is interesting to contrast Sanderson and Martin in terms of their production. Sanderson's gigantic body of work has essentially been produced over the same time as Martin has given us only Dance of Dragons. A possible reason for why Martin has not been able to finish his series is that a disenchanted world, by its very nature, does not allow for a satisfactory ending. Martin has to choose between not solving anything, which would be true to his world even as it would be narratively unsatisfactory, or solving things (Daenerys and Jon Snow getting together and ruling happily ever after), which would be dishonest and probably unsatisfactory as well. I suspect we are heading to something like Lost in which, at best, we can hope for an ending that is emotionally satisfying in terms of the characters even as the real issues are ignored. As for Sanderson and Stormlight, there is still a long road ahead and I am sure it will happen at some point that he will write himself into a narrative box. That being said, I am confident that he will see this through and much as a saved Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time and brought it to a satisfactory ending, Stormlight will end in a way that justifies having read it from the beginning.   

  
 

Narnia, Game of Thrones, and the Stormlight Chronicles: the Reenchantmant of Fantasy (Part I)

(Happy birthday to Lionel Spiegel.)

I drive my son Kalman to and from pre-school most weekdays. In the car, he usually asks to listen to Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis. You can clock an average trip as the amount of time it takes to get from the beginning of the book until Mr. Tumnus confesses that he is in the pay of the White Witch as her kidnapper. Kalman knows that the White Witch is bad because she is the government and she makes it always winter. I guess I can live with him not picking up on the "and never Christmas" part.

Lewis opened with one of the finest dedications ever. Writing to Lucy Barfield, the daughter of fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield, Lewis apologized to the teenage girl that she grew up faster than he could write but he hopes that one day she will be old enough to read fairy tales once again. This is a good example of one of the key concepts in Lewis' writing, reenchantment; that one can once again fall in love with the things of childhood that one's more cynical self had abandoned as part of "growing up."

Reenchantment should be understood as a response to Max Weber's notion of disenchantment and Friederich Nietzsche's more poetic "God is dead." Disenchantment is the notion that under modernity our very way of thinking is materialistic and does not allow us to truly operate within a supernaturalist framework. For example, early in LWW, the other children are simply unable to believe that Lucy has traveled to Narnia; to them, it is simply not possible that she could be anything else but either a liar or insane. They are prejudiced against belief even though logically there is nothing to suggest that portals to other universes do not exist.

It is important to understand that contrary to conventional secularist theories of modernity, Weber was not claiming that modernity had intellectually refuted religion and that people, particularly the educated, no longer believed. On the contrary, the prospect of modern secularism could cause many people to cling more tightly than ever to the outward forms of religion. Thus, it may even appear that religion is doing better than ever under modernity with more people attending church and insisting on hardline fundamentalist interpretations of the faith. That being said, such religiosity only serves to cover the fact that religion has been fossilized into something that people practice out of tradition. As such, it lacks the ability to truly inspire its adherents. In this sense, disenchantment stands as a far graver threat to religion than simple secularism. If people are convinced by argument to abandon religion then it might be possible to engage in apologetics and win them back. On the other hand, if people stop believing not because of any argument and without even realizing that they no longer believe then it is practically impossible to ever bring them back.

In addition to religious disenchantment, Lewis, in his own personal experience, confronted a more tangible disenchantment, World War I. Lewis was part of a generation of young Englishmen, who listened to their teachers and did the "right and honorable thing;" they marched off to the French trenches to be slaughtered in the mud, sacrificed to pay for the political and military miscalculations of their elders.

World War I was the death of heroism. In an earlier generation, a man could be said to be brave to stand tall in the face of enemy fire and resolutely march forward. One might die in the attempt but one could believe that he was sacrificing himself to spur his comrades on to victory. During World War I, that became suicide. Thus, the very ethos of heroism led men to their deaths in utter futility. It should be emphasized that dying was never the issue. Young men have always been marched off to war by their elders and died in great numbers. What was new here was this sense of futility that robbed one even of the ability to honor the dead for their sacrifice. By contrast, World War II could once again offer a cause to die for even as it brought the new disenchantment of the massive aerial bombardment of urban centers. As with disenchantment with religion, what was at stake was less an intellectual attack on heroism but the inability, at a gut level, to take heroism seriously in the first place. Someone who seems heroic must either be a scoundrel trying to deceive others or a fool to have bought into such nonsense.

As with fellow veteran J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis' use of fantasy can be seen as an attempt to become reenchanted with heroism. For example, in Narnia, the children are able to abandon the air raids of World War II for a land in which chivalry is still possible. This reenchantment must be understood as something distinct from enchantment. The horrors of the World Wars were real and there can be no going back. That being said, the fantasies of Lewis and Tolkien were attempts to acknowledge the incomprehensible horror of what they experienced yet still allow for heroism. If the blood and the mud were real, the courage shown by the men was equally real.

This project of using fantasy to resurrect heroism must be understood within a larger effort to bring about the reenchantment with religion. Was it not that earlier generation of disenchanted believers, with their mixture of Christian ritual now supplemented with a sense of duty to king and country and a confidence in progress all while being hopelessly naive regarding the implications of industrialized warfare, that had sent all those young men to die? Perhaps, it was not heroism that was obsolete, but the ideologies of modernity? (See Joseph Loconte's Hobbit, a Wardrobe and a Great War.)

If one could recover heroism, perhaps it could lead back to faith and to a religion that might once again be relevant to a modern world. As Screwtape, the Satan of Lewis' disenchanted world, notes, the very fact that non-believers (much like the teenage Lewis, who was then an atheist) march off to war, to give themselves to a cause larger than themselves places them at risk of becoming open to the "enemy." Part of what is going on here is the ability to believe in things that are beyond the physical senses. Disenchantment works precisely by taking the physical as the gold standard of what is real. Thus, before the debate even begins, the spiritual has already lost to be relegated to being less real. The moment we introduce something that is non-physical yet more real than the world of the senses, the spell of disenchantment is broken and the process of reenchantment can begin.

Regardless of this wider religious context, a major aspect of Lewis and Tolkien's legacy to fantasy as a genre has been a kind of optimistic faith in heroism in the face of modern cynicism. (In Lord of the Rings, this optimism is only sharpened by the fact that the book is fundamentally a tragedy.) Thus, it could only be expected that if Lewis and Tolkien represented a kind of enchantment with heroic fantasy, it would produce a backlash of disenchanted fantasy. The most important example of this has been George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. This series is a repeated exercise in both the physical and ideological murder of heroism. Those like Ned Stark and his son Robb, who risk themselves doing the right thing, do not come out ahead. It is not even that they die achieving some noble goal. On the contrary, they come to ignominious ends marked by utter futility. On the other side, you have the anti-heroism of Jaime Lannister. Jaime commits regicide and incest even as the former probably saved lives and he is faithful to his sister as his one true love. To Martin's credit, Jaime fails to be a simple caricature of chivalry. Rather, (much like the more comic Harry Flashman), readers can still love Jaime for his simple honesty in knowing himself to be a scoundrel. In a world without moral absolutes, hypocrisy is the only sin and honesty in one's sinfulness the only virtue.             

War Criminals, Lone Wolves, and Terrorists: Definitions and Implications

With the recent rash of shootings has come a renewed debate over the distinction between a terrorist and a lone wolf. (Clearly, both whites and non-whites can be terrorists.) With Islamic terrorism and the Israeli-Arab conflict always in the news, there is the debate as to what is terrorism and what is a war crime. These issues tend to bog down into polemics so there is a benefit to offering specific definitions for the sake of clarity. Imagine three criminals standing before you, an SS officer, an angry white man and a member of ISIS. All three of them have murdered a classroom full of children so there is no doubt that they are all very bad people, who deserve punishment. The question becomes how they may be treated. The SS officer and the white man, as a war criminal and a lone wolf, have rights while the ISIS terrorist does not.

The SS officer is in uniform and a member of the German armed forces. As such, though he is a war criminal, he is protected by the social contract your country has with Germany. We must accept that he has rights and cannot simply be tortured to death. There is a benefit to declaring him a war criminal in that the German government, by putting him in uniform, has placed its entire leadership and population as guarantors of his good conduct. Ultimately, they are the ones truly responsible for his conduct; the fact that he is the immediate cause of the crime is incidental. Think of the uniform as a loan contract in much the same way as a paper currency that can be called in. The government can disavow the soldier; at which point the uniform becomes null and void. This would render our war criminal an out-of-uniform combatant and thus a spy/saboteur. As such he has no rights and can be tortured or killed at will without trial. Alternatively, his government can choose to acknowledge the soldier, but this would force them to make some kind of restitution to the satisfaction of the victim's government (or social contract insurance agency). Failure to do so would allow the government to take to seek satisfaction in blood. This would allow for the bombardment of German civilian populations and, afterward, the execution of German political leaders.

The lone wolf shooter is not protected by any uniform but, even though he is a criminal, he is still a citizen with rights. His crime does not imply a larger rejection of the social contract so the social contract continues to protect him. As such, he must be given a trial. To be clear, what makes him a lone wolf and not a terrorist is the fact that he lacks any larger material and ideological support structure. This, admittedly, can make it difficult to tell the difference between a lone wolf and a terrorist. It is quite possible that the entire distinction may rest on the discovery of a pamphlet in the person's possession or a history of visiting a terrorist website.

This brings us to the terrorist. The most important thing about a terrorist is that he is an out-of-uniform combatant just like a spy/saboteur. This means that not only is it permissible to not grant him any rights, but it may also be necessary. Consider that the distinction between soldiers and civilians is crucial to the maintenance of civilized order even and especially in a time of war. This distinction requires that soldiers be easily identifiable with uniforms. Unless the penalties for violating that distinction are severe no country would ever bother to hold them.

Not only is the terrorist, by definition, guilty of endangering civilization by undermining the social contract, but the so-called human rights activist who attempts to grant the terrorist rights is also guilty as he has rendered the line between soldier and civilian meaningless. Thus, we must recognize an antinomian "true" human rights, which involves torturing the terrorist. The very act of torturing the terrorist, regardless of the information he might provide, is protecting civilians from harm. The belief in the principle that terrorists do not have rights is precisely what is giving civilians rights. The person who objects to this is himself the real violator of human rights and it is as if he personally tortured innocent people. (To be clear, what is necessary is the belief in the moral rightness of torturing terrorists, which likely requires the occasional literal fulfillment. This acceptance allows for demonstrations of mercy in individual cases. Just because the Law is righteous does not mean it is always right to fulfill the Law.)

As you recall, the distinction between a terrorist and a lone wolf killer is the existence of a material and ideological support system. What differentiates the terrorist from a war criminal is that the terrorist's support structure is not one with which we have any kind of implied social contract relationship. We need to respect the rights of the war criminal in order to demonstrate that we were true to the social contract and justify placing his country's leadership and people outside of it. By contrast, we never had any kind of social contract with the terrorist organization. Furthermore, terrorist organizations, while they may possess a leadership and funders, lack a clearly identified civilian population to pay the price for their crimes. For example, while it was morally permissible to bomb German cities for Nazi war crimes, bombing Afghani cities in retaliation for Al-Qaeda terrorist crimes would have been far more problematic. Since there are no civilians to pay for terrorist crimes, we are justified in pursuing the leadership in a more aggressive fashion. Since terrorist leaders may prove more elusive than war criminal political leaders, this leaves the captured terrorist to pay the full weight of the crime. This is despite the fact that ultimately his role was only incidental as compared to the terrorist leaders who planned the action and provided the physical and ideological support to make it possible.

A large part of the debate over who counts as a terrorist revolves around the implied assumption of a support structure. For example, if you already accept the existence of an entity called "radical Islam" or that Islam is an inherently violent religion then you will be inclined to see any violent Muslim as a terrorist. On the other hand, if you believe that complaints about Islamic extremism are simply cover for "Islamophobia" then you will dismiss any charge of terrorism. Similarly, in regards to white supremacists, if you believe that there really is something racist underlying white American culture then you are going to be more likely to see someone like Dylann Roof, who massacred a black church bible study group in Charleston, as a terrorist instead of simply as a misguided and disturbed young man.

Keep in mind that the distinction between a lone wolf and a terrorist lies completely within the realm of intention; was the crime committed as part of a larger conspiracy by a non-social contract organization to pursue their political goals. It is not just the individual terrorist that we need to make assumptions about but a wider network of people to the point of even calling them a group. Therefore, as none of us can read minds, we can never prove whether someone is one or the other; it is simply a judgment call. This has become even more so in recent years as the line between the terrorist support structure and its perpetrators has become more tenuous. For example, the 9/11 hijackers received direct material support from Al-Qaeda so it is very difficult to pretend that they were just some guys who decided on their own to crash planes into buildings. Contrast this with ISIS terrorists where ISIS merely has to operate a website and angry Muslims draw inspiration to engage in ramming and knifing attacks. It is hard to say that someone who happens to read an ISIS website before committing murder is an ISIS terrorist.

The consequences of who gets the terrorist label are literally a matter of life and death and demand caution. If Islamic terrorism exists. than someone operating a pro-ISIS website calling for jihad is a terrorist and can be shot on sight without the benefit of a trial. (As per the Julius Streicher principle, such speech is not really speech but a conspiracy to commit murder.) If we are wrong, then we have a martyr for free speech on our hands. Before you give the go-ahead to kill radical Islamic bloggers consider that, by the same logic, we should probably recognize that white supremacists exist as a movement and not just disturbed individuals, then the government should have responded to the Charleston shooting by going door to door and executing white supremacist bloggers and radio show hosts, particularly those that directly influenced Roof.

While we can never prove anything in any particular case, we can demand intellectual consistency. If you are quick to condemn Islamic terrorism but bend over backward to deny that there can be white supremacist terrorists there is a problem. Similarly, if you refrain from using the terrorist label unless they are white men, you are not being hones either.