Anarchy X: There and Back Again

Posted: December 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Anarchy X, Politics | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

Several months ago I started out on a personal journey of discovery. Unlike many authors who seem to feel they need to take to the road, I abhor travel, so I decided to turn inward and try to explain, as best I could, what I believe, who I am, and the filter through which I view the world. It’s no small thing to encapsulate a worldview; greater thinkers than I am have filled volumes with better writing than I will ever manage trying to do the same, and making it approachable is even harder. The best I could do was pour my simple knowledge and limited understanding onto this page (yes, even now I still think of it as a page) and hope that it makes some sense and connects somehow with someone. While I would never be so presumptuous as to suggest I have scaled Mount Doom, I do feel confident saying what a long, strange trip it’s been.

This series has been as much an exploration of my principles and beliefs as it has been an explanation of them. In the course of that exploration I have discovered (or perhaps reaffirmed) that I am more William Wallace a là Braveheart than I am Patrick Henry; I believe that everyone is born with liberty, and it is not something that can be given or taken away. At worst, someone can violate my rights, even my right to life; as the movie goes, they can take my life, but they can never take my freedom. More than that, I have found, or at least I hope I have found, some semblance of support for that view, or an argument to be made for support, in two of the sources for much of the political discourse in America, The Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments.

It is possible along the way I have given the impression that I am somehow not proud of my country, or that I am less than a patriot because I do not support every decision that the government, my government, makes; I do not believe that anything could be farther from the truth. I believe there is always, must be, a place for the loyal opposition, and that so long as one is adhering to the core principles that the country is founded on as you understand them then you cannot be said to be unpatriotic. You may be wrong, but being wrong has never been treasonous; if it were, we would all of us be good company for each other in Coventry.

I also believe that it is possible for good people to disagree with my interpretations of these key and critical documents and still be good people. Who knows, they may even be right. I never made any claims to omniscience, nor would I want it; it would take all the fun out of surprise parties. What I do believe is that most people are mostly good most of the time; or as John Agresto put it:

Everywhere we see people fighting for their religion, for their cultural values, for the traditions of their fathers, for their idea of justice. Warped and destructive as they sometimes are, every day we see people driven not by “the economy” but by their creed, their values, their sense of honor. People sacrifice not for things beneath them, but for ideals they believe are higher than they are. And we Americans, with our pride and creativity and sense of duty, patriotism and love of country, are no different.

I couldn’t agree more. I have expressed my creed, my values, and my sense of honor in these posts as best I can. I hope they have resonated with you.

Does that mean this is the end of the Anarchy X series? For now. I promised myself when I started I would take it this far, and now my creativity and pride are driving me to try something new. Perhaps someday I’ll come back to it; after all, America has been around for a very long time, and I expect will be here long after I am gone. Politics, I fear, will last even longer, so I will have no shortage of things to write about.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

(Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

How the iPod is Killing Political Discourse

Posted: December 7, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture, Internet, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I was discussing gun control with My Not So Humble Wife the other night, and something strange happened. She’s mostly libertarian like me, but unlike myself, she actually believes in putting certain limitations on gun ownership. Tanks, for example, are straight off her list for private ownership (no, I am not kidding, this was a serious part of the discussion). I personally see no problem with it for several good and sundry reasons that I won’t get into now, so she upped the ante to nuclear weapons. I couldn’t name even a theoretical reason why someone might want a nuke (self-defense? sport? cocktail party conversation starter?), and I had to concede that even my tank argument didn’t apply. Let’s face it, if you need a nuke to defend yourself against the government, the situation is already well beyond salvageable.

This is when things got weird: we talked it out and came to a reasonable solution we could both be okay with. She conceded that the government didn’t need to have gun registration laws (it’s no business of theirs who owns which guns), and I conceded that certain classes of people (namely felons) shouldn’t be allowed to buy guns, so background checks are acceptable. I couldn’t get her to budge on non-violent felons, but my big beef there is with drug laws, and that’s a different issue anyway, so I was willing to concede the point. We also both agreed that waiting periods should be abolished, because the technology exists to do immediate background checks, and those checks should be done everywhere, including gun shows.

What’s so weird about all of this? Watch fifteen minutes, or even five minutes, of political television and then ask me that question again. Granted, we came from roughly the same starting place, but we still had some strong views that we disagreed on, and we both gave a little to get to something we could agree with. It’s called “compromise”, for those of you too young to remember what it looks like. And I blame the iPod for its absence in contemporary politics.

Sounds crazy, right? Bear with me for a little while and you’ll understand. When I was a kid, we had one TV in the house (well, two, but the one in the basement was tiny, black and white, and got crap reception, so it doesn’t count). It got exactly two channels: whatever my sister and I could agree on, and whatever Dad decided to put on when he got home. Occasionally, when I was very lucky, my sister would be at a friend’s house before my folks got home and I would have a few hours of TV to myself, but that was a rare luxury and one I didn’t count on.

Growing up like that I had to learn the art of compromise. Granted it usually involved a lot of yelling, screaming, cursing, and more than a little hitting, but that’s politics for you. What I didn’t learn was an attitude of entitlement, one that said I could have whatever I want whenever I want and everyone else could go suck an egg. That all changed when the iPod came along.

Don’t get me wrong, the iPod was and remains one of the greatest inventions in human history. The chance to have your music, your way, whenever you want wherever you want is a glorious thing. But it shapes expectations; people become accustomed to having what they want, without having to negotiate with others. It’s not like the boom boxes and ghetto blasters I had as a kid, when “sharing” music was a very immediate and sometimes involuntary experience. Facebook and other social media have only exacerbated the phenomenon; people choose the stories they want to hear, and they shape the media they are exposed to before and as much as the media shapes them.

This sort of “a la carte media” has expanded into all aspects of life. If you can’t find a cable channel that caters to your specific tastes, there’s a YouTube channel that will. Streaming radio will introduce you to new music, unless you skip past a song you decide you don’t like in the first few beats. And there’s a website out there dedicated to every conspiracy theory known to man, and a few that aren’t.

What is the net result on politics? The politicians we elect reflect the media of our time. It used to be that politicians were like mass media: they appealed to broad demographics, even to the point of being criticized for chasing “the lowest common denominator”. But hey, at least they were accessible to everyone. Now every politician is like a personalized playlist, narrowly targeting key demographics with a hyper-partisan message, and who can blame them? The electronic graffiti that litters the walls of our social media pages screams for it, begs for it, demands the same hyper-partisan rhetoric they are only too happy to deliver. If we aren’t getting the politicians we want it’s only because we’re getting the politicians we’ve been asking for, and maybe deserve.

Anarchy X: The Tenth Commandment

Posted: December 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Anarchy X, Culture, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.”

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come not to praise this Commandment, but to bury it. For all the good that it may have done in its social graces, so has it been undone in the policy sphere.

Let me begin by saying that I am a child of the Eighties. It was a decade known both affectionately and without irony as both “The Decade of Greed” and “The Decade of Excess”. If the Sixties were a party and the Seventies were a hangover, the Eighties were the day everyone went back to work, ready to get things done. It’s like the entire country decided one day that free love might be great, but everything else worthwhile costs money, and they were going to do whatever it took to get as much of it as they could.

You want to talk about coveting? Oh, they had coveting down. The official motto of the decade was “he who dies with the most toys wins”. It wasn’t enough to keep up with the Joneses. You had to beat them into the ground and then rub their noses in it. Everything had to be bigger and louder, faster and cooler, newer and just plain BETTER. Too much was never enough, and style always trumped substance. If you don’t believe me, let me point out that this was the decade that glam rock reigned supreme, and even Poison packed stadiums (sorry, Bret Michaels, you know I’m still a fan).

Is it any wonder my generation turned out to be a bunch of slackers? We had seen what commercialism and the desire for what the other guy has (y’know, coveting) had wrought, and we wanted none of it. Well, until we had kids of our own and needed to get a mortgage, but that’s a different story. The point is, I see the social value in this Commandment, truly I do. But I fear the policy implications far more.

Consider for a moment: what exactly is coveting? Is it an action? When you covet a man’s house, do you go inside of it? When you covet a woman’s ox, do you take it from her? When you covet your neighbor’s wife, do you bash him over the head and drag her off? Or even attempt to woo her away? The truth is, coveting something may drive you to do any of these things, but it is not the same as actually doing them. In the same way I might think about giving to charity, but go buy a burrito with the money instead. Do I get good karma for the thought, even though I don’t carry out the deed?

When crafting laws, it is important to make a distinction between action and motive. Motive is an element of a crime, but it is not a crime in and of itself (which is good for me, because as Prince wrote, “if a man is guilty for what goes on in his mind, give me the electric chair for all my future crimes.”) But the truth of the matter is that we do have crimes in this country that are based solely on what goes on in a person’s mind. They are called “hate crimes”.

Now I know there are those of you who are thinking “what does that have to do with coveting?” and that’s a fair question. To me they are one and the same. The motivation to commit an act is an element of thought, something that exists solely in the mind of the individual. Hatred, while it is something that we as a society should stand against, is no more or less repugnant that wanting something just because someone else has it. And just like covetousness, hatred in itself should not be a crime, nor should it be an additional element that can exacerbate a sentence.

Consider: if I were to propose a law against covetousness, such that if someone were deemed to have committed a crime out of covetousness, would that be acceptable? Would that be something that should warrant a harsher sentence than committing the same crime for another reason? If I stole your jacket “because I wanted it” rather than “because I was cold”, you still don’t have your jacket. By the same token, if a person has been assaulted, to me it does not matter why; the assailant should be punished.

When we start defining motivation itself as a crime, we are delving into thoughtcrime. For any literate person that should be enough to give them pause; for any moral person that should be enough to give them concern; for any just person, that should be enough to give them fear. Unfortunately, for politicians it doesn’t even seem to lose them a single moment of sleep.

UPDATE (12/16/12): I recently discovered The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law, which I highly recommend to everyone. Of particular relevance to this post is “Part 7: The Axes of Evil”, which discusses culpability,  responsibility, and depravity in relation to crime. In the issue of hate crimes, I would consider those a matter of depravity, which is an element of the crime to be considered when determining the total punishment to be served, but again (as I stated above) not something to be charged as a separate crime. In the same way that we would consider any other element of a person’s mental state, of course we should consider their total relationship to the victim, and that includes any specific prejudice they may have IF it was a motivating factor.

Anarchy X: The Ninth Commandment

Posted: November 28, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Anarchy X, Culture, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.”

If you had to pick just one Commandment as an example of why the Ten Commandments should be used as a system of law, I would choose this one. I know others would go with the Sixth Commandment, or possibly the Eighth Commandment, but for my money it just doesn’t get any better than this. For every other Commandment I can find some flaw, some reason to say “yes, but…”, yet this one is unique in that I believe it is not only excellent as personal advice but essential for a functional judiciary.

We have in America (and there are in many other countries as well) what is referred to as an adversarial judiciary system, one that relies in large part on people being honest about what they have seen or heard and even what they believe. While there are many critics of such a system (and the U.S. judicial system in particular), it is generally thought to be superior to the inquisitorial alternative. Certainly I believe it is, and regardless of which type of system you use, in either case false testimony would be damaging to the proceedings.

In the broader context of society, I also think that it is worth keeping this Commandment in mind in daily life. I can’t help remembering as I reflect on this one time when I was much younger, and in a fit of jealousy I said some very untrue things about someone else; they cost me a good and close friend, and it is one of only three things I have done that I deeply regret. Words have power, and we forget that at our peril.

But is there an intersection between these two things that perhaps is the step too far? Is there a gray area that we have given over to politicians that is of society but not governance? I would argue that there is, and more to the point I would argue that it is an area that is not only expanding but being abused both more frequently and more frivolously as time marches on. I am speaking in particular of Congressional hearings.

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of any sort of Congressional hearings is the House Un-American Activities Committee. Not only is the idea of grilling people about their personal lives and politics repugnant to me, it seems antithetical to the very idea of what America stands for. More to the point of the Ninth Commandment, like the Salem Witch Trials that Arthur Miller compares them to in The Crucible, there was a strong compulsion on witnesses to implicate others, even if it meant doing so under false pretenses. Once again, it would seem to be the antithesis of what America and our government should stand for.

Over the decades Congressional hearings have delved into other areas of concern ranging from Watergate to Iran-Contra, and those have been important matters that needed investigation. Did Toyota need investigating by Congress? Arguably, since there was a Federal agency involved, although I think that was more posturing for headlines than any real effective action. But the one that bothers me most is when Congress starts investigating steroid use in athletes.

Aside from basically encouraging perjury (“hey, how would you like the opportunity to destroy your own career? No?”), I don’t see what point there is in Congress even being involved in this. Again, it seems more a matter of either pandering for the cameras or, even more ominously, honestly believing they have a right and a mandate to be involved in every aspect of American life simply because they are… well… politicians. And we put them there.

So yes, I believe very much that you shouldn’t tell lies about other people. It has cost me personally and it costs us as a society. But I also believe we need to think very long and hard about when and how we ask the sorts of questions that might elicit lies from others. There are some things that are properly none of our business, or if they are our business, there are proper forums for handling them. When the cost for telling the truth outweighs the risk for telling the lie, people will lie. And in that case, how much of the burden for that lie falls on the ones who put them in the position of feeling like they needed to lie in the first place?

Economic Recovery: Resolving the Housing Situation at Last

Posted: November 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment

When I first planned to run for president, I had a great idea for what my platform would be: “somebody has to take it in the shorts.” It was simple, elegant, and caught the spirit of American politics in a nutshell, as well as providing the sort of common sense blueprint for recovery that we’ve so desperately needed. As we continue to hurtle toward fiscal ruin, particularly in a housing market that is either better, worse, or about the same (depending on who you listen to and what day of the week it is), I’d like to take a moment to expand on that admittedly simplistic notion of social justice and offer a better solution: “everybody has to take it in the shorts.”

So what does that mean exactly? Put simply, every American, regardless of your housing situation, needs to accept here and now that it’s time to take one for the team. Maybe you think you’ve already taken one for the team; maybe you think everybody else has gotten by and you haven’t gotten your free ride or your bail-out or your hand-up or what have you yet. Maybe you just think it’s time that somebody else who has more to spare steps up and gives for a change.

Well, I’ve got some bad news for you. This is America, and around here it doesn’t work like that. As my mother enjoyed telling me many times as a child (when she wasn’t threatening to sell me back to the Gypsies), life isn’t fair. It’s possible you’ve already taken a hit. Maybe you’re right and somebody else got a handout and you missed out. Almost certainly you’re right that there are people who have more than you do, but guess what? The fact that you’re able to read this at all means you have more than someone else, so that excuse carries not a lot of water. I’m not sure when in America we started glorifying the complainers instead of the doers (and I mean this on both sides of the political aisle), but it is a multi-generational thing, and it’s time we all stopped pointing fingers at someone else who should make the sacrifices (I include myself in that statement, don’t worry) and just accept the reality: if we’re going to get out of this, everybody has to take it in the shorts.

So here’s my plan. If you’re underwater on your mortgage or you can’t afford to pay your mortgage, you need to accept the fact that you will never get to cash out on your house. Your choices are stark: get help or lose the house, and option #2 doesn’t include paying for your retirement with the equity, so why should option #1? Here’s my solution: anyone can get a government-enforced write-down on their mortgage to the current estimated market value of their home, not what they borrowed. The lower valuation will be used to determine the new monthly payments, which should help to make things a bit easier for folks, as well as giving them a larger percentage of equity in their homes. But if you take the write-down, that’s exactly as much as you get to cash out for; if you ever sell the house for more than that, any excess sale price goes first to pay off the original mortgage holder and then the rest goes to Uncle Sam for his help so we can pay down the debt. Don’t like the terms? Don’t take the deal. The idea isn’t for it to make life easy or better for anyone, the idea is to keep people in their homes who would otherwise be homeless. Given a choice between the two, I doubt most people wouldn’t love the terms.

What banks get out of this is two things. First, they don’t have even more unsold foreclosure inventory just sitting around. Second, and here’s another thing the homeowners need to pay attention to, the homeowners agree to stay in the house for at least three years, or six years, or whatever term we can agree on as a society for the banks to feel like they at least got something out of the deal. In that time they will keep making those mortgage payments every month, on time every time, or they go out on the street, no questions asked, no second chances, because this was their second chance. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, out in the cold. The banks also get something else for their part in this: a little reformation of character, which they could use right about now.

Now there’s one more group that gets to take it in the shorts here, and it’s one that rarely if ever gets mentioned, so I’m going to give a special shout out to them now. This would be anyone who didn’t buy a house when the market went crazy, or already had one. Anyone (and this includes my wife and myself) who saw the way things were going and said, “yeah… no,” because they didn’t think it was possible for housing values to go perpetually up and hey! looks like we were right, or for the folks who decades ago settled into a house and are getting punished for prudence now. Or hey, even the young folks coming up who never even had a chance to get into the market then and can’t get into the market now. For all of us, and for all the folks who did buy a house prudently and won’t need help, here’s what we get: not a god damn thing. If you own a house and don’t need help, you can sell it whenever you want for whatever you want. If you didn’t buy a house, you’re not locked into living in one place or having your credit rating suffer. You get exactly what you were promised, which is nothing at all.

Nobody wins, nobody loses. Everybody takes it in the shorts. Then we can finally put the whole thing behind us and move on. That’s my proposal, anyway.

Along Came a Spider

Posted: November 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture | Tags: , , , , | 3 Comments

I just don’t understand vegetarians who kill spiders.

I guess I should be more specific than that, lest I have to field cries of creating a strawman vegetarian. The specific case I have difficulty with is the specific subset of vegetarians (which to my knowledge is the majority of them) who are vegetarian on moral grounds, those grounds being that it is immoral to kill animals for sustenance. I understand there are also vegetarians (and vegans) who choose that lifestyle for health and economic reasons, and I hereby exclude and absolve them from the above statement and any further discussion herein; but getting back to my original point.

I just don’t understand vegetarians (exceptions above notwithstanding) who kill spiders. Or any other bugs for that matter. Ants, mosquitos, roaches, you name it. Is there some line that one can draw that changes the morality of the equation? Is there some size limit on the morality of life? I won’t delve into the morality of taking the life of a plant, as I don’t know if it is necessary to kill plants in order to eat them, but this is one I feel on pretty solid ground with. So what’s the difference?

I’ll offer another illustration. So long as humans are part of a wider natural world, we will have to interact with it. Our choices will be to either let it happen to us or take an active hand in shaping it. Due to the choices made by those who preceded us, our options are to a certain extent constrained in that regard. For example, the deer population in the U.S. used to be controlled by predators such as wolves. Well, not so much anymore, since we pretty much got rid of the wolves. We can either let the deer population grow until they starve to death (and jump in front of cars), or we can let hunters thin the population out. If we let people hunt, what do we do with the meat? Do we eat it or let it rot?

I freely acknowledge that by eating meat I am on the same moral level as the butcher. I do not take some perverse joy in knowing that my food comes from dead animals, and if the day should come that I am provided with an alternative that is just as nutritious, tastes the same or better, and that I cannot tell a difference in texture, I’ll gladly make the switch. But until then, so long as there is a utilitarian purpose to the animal’s death, how is that materially different than killing insects invading my home?

Roaches and ants devour my food. Fleas and mosquitos spread disease. Termites weaken the very walls that make up my house. I have no problem killing any of these insects. Spiders I put outside because they do no harm to me or mine, and are in fact helpful little creatures. There is no utilitarian purpose in their death.

But morality vegetarians (for lack of a better phrasing) do not allow for a utilitarian approach to the killing of animals. So on what basis do they allow for the killing of insects of any kind? I’m not being deliberately obstreperous; I just really don’t see the difference. If you believe taking the life of an animal is wrong that’s fine, I’m not here to question your beliefs. I’m just questioning the consistency of those beliefs.

Does this mean I want everyone who believes that “meat is murder” to suddenly grab a hamburger and dig in? Or at least feel ashamed for not pouring A-1 on the first steak they see and eating it with ravenous fury? No, because that’s my steak and you can’t have it. All I’m asking is for one of two things: either a little clarity on were the line is drawn, what makes the animals I eat a special class that should be protected as opposed to the ones they step on, or else that they live a consistently principled lifestyle. For those who already do, you have my respect; it’s no easy thing to put the spiders outside.

Anarchy X: The Eighth Commandment

Posted: November 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Anarchy X, Culture, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Though shalt not steal.”

When making the case for basing legislation (or even an entire criminal or civil code) on the Ten Commandments, this is usually right behind the Sixth Commandment in being cited as to why it would be a good idea. After all, the reasoning goes, who among us could object to a law that says “don’t steal”? Sure , we might quibble a little about the specifics (there’s a big difference between shoplifting and grand theft: auto, for example), but the basic concept is sound.

And yet… what is theft, exactly?

I believe the Merriam-Webster definition is particularly instructive in this regard: “1. a. the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it; b. an unlawful taking; 2 obsolete : something stolen”. Isn’t it interesting that both current definitions involving personal property include words like ” felonious” and “unlawful”, and it’s an obsolete use to say something as direct and simple as “something stolen”. It becomes even more interesting when you follow that particular line of thought over to the definition of “steal”. I won’t pull every part of the definition I found intriguing and useful, but here’s the very first one: “to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice”.

So where am I going with all of this? It’s an old argument, and one that a lot of folks have written off before as crazy, but pause for a moment and think about it. If someone came to your door and demanded money, and if you didn’t give it to them they would come back with guns and take it by force, would you call that theft? And yet that’s what taxation is, in a nutshell. There may be a few more steps in between the nice ask and the men with guns (they’re called “police”, by the way), but the end result is the same.

So what justifications do people offer for why this isn’t, in fact, theft? First there’s the suggestion that “you owe it to the community”. An interesting thought, and one that I’ve never quite understood. If I offer something for use by “the community” and then demand payment post-facto, that is by definition illegal and immoral; either I state a charge upfront or there is no charge. And yet the oft-cited reasons I “owe it to the community” are for the roads, police, fire department, etc. which I have either never used, never wanted, or never been billed directly for so that I can determine whether I am interested in the service at that cost. As for the schools I attended growing up, what about the taxes my parents paid? And what about the sales taxes I paid on goods I purchased? And again, why was I never given a choice as to whether I was interested in those services in the first place?

But of course, that is often the second argument I hear as to why taxation is not theft; “you had a chance to vote”. I’ve already expressed my opinion on voting, but in this specialized case I’ll narrow it further: this is blaming the victim. If I voted and didn’t get the guy I wanted, I’m being robbed for policies I don’t agree with, except for the ones I do. How is that fair? If I voted and I did get the guy I wanted, I’m being robbed for policies I do agree with, except for the ones I don’t. How is that fair? If I didn’t vote at all, I’m just getting robbed, but I get lectured about how it’s my own fault for not voting, and how is that fair?

Speaking of blaming the victim, there’s another argument that ties into both of the ones above: “You choose to live here.” This is occasionally accompanied by “if you don’t like it here, leave.” This is somewhat akin to saying to someone born into the ghetto that they chose to be born there, and therefore they have nobody but themselves to blame for being there. Show me a country on Earth where I won’t get robbed just for trying to live there, and I might consider living there. As I have yet to find that option, I take the best that’s on the table, but that doesn’t mean I can’t (and won’t) try to make it better, and noting the flaws is the first step.

Having said all this, does this mean I am completely against taxation for all reasons, at all times? No. In all things there must be compromise and balance if we are to live together as a society, and necessary evil is sometimes one of those things. For the common defense, for police and courts and fire departments, the things that we all need and benefit from but nobody wants to pay for until after we need them and it is too late to pay for them, taxation is a necessary evil. But being aware that it is theft, that we are stealing from ourselves and our friends and our neighbors every time we tax, will hopefully keep in check the desire to “do more good”. There is very little good that can be done when the root lies in breaking a Commandment, even though we all know where that paved road leads.

Silver and Gold

Posted: November 19, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture, Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

There are two approaches we are offered from antiquity, one of which we are all familiar with and one that is less familiar although not completely unknown. The more common is the “Golden Rule”: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The less well known but still famous is the “Silver Rule”: Do not do unto others as you would not have them do unto you. I believe it is instructive to examine both of these approaches to see how they differ, and how they can guide us in life and in law.

The Golden Rule is what I think of as affirmative guidance. It tells us what we should do. It doesn’t restrict or circumscribe our actions away from things so much as guide us toward things. While this seems good on the surface, I’m always leery of things that look good (too many “candy from strangers” commercials as a kid, I guess). The first caution I would bring to the table is that maybe what I like isn’t what someone else likes. Just because I want you to do it to me, how do I know that’s what you want done to you? I’m not talking anything sick or extreme here, but there’s a lot of human activity that falls in the grey areas between “obviously wrong” and “of course I’d be okay with that”. If you don’t believe me, swing on by house next week. It’s almost time for my annual mohawk, and my wife is going to be out of town; I’ll do your hair first, then you can do mine. It’s the Golden Rule, after all.

Standing in opposition to this is the admonition to not do unto others. While this doesn’t lift nearly as much weight from a moralistic perspective, it does just as much work from another perspective: that of circumscribing negative behavior. Again, if there is objectionable behavior someone would actively enjoy, there’s nothing in this rule that would stop them from doing it to someone else, but then the Golden Rule practically requires them to go out and do it. At least this rule just amounts to “keep your hands to yourself”.

That leads into the other aspect of where I think these two subtly different moral guidelines have major differences in their implications. Many people, some among them being either moralists or lawmakers (and even moralistic lawmakers) like to cite the Golden Rule when debating the merits of different laws. Why? Is there something inherent to the Golden Rule that makes it a superior basis for a legal system? Citing something like Hammurabi’s Code I could at least understand (not that I think that’s a good source mind you), or the Magna Carta. But instead they refer to “the Golden Rule”. Aside from its qualities as a common point of cultural reference, what else does it offer in terms of jurisprudence?

Consider my point from above: the Golden Rule is affirmative. It does not circumscribe behavior as much as compel it. All laws are compulsory by nature, in that they compel us to act a certain way or refrain from acting in a certain way for fear of punishment (if we would have behaved properly without the law then we either don’t need it or can safely ignore it). So laws that are made with the Golden Rule in mind are looking to compel people to take a good action, to “do unto others”. They are not designed from the perspective of refraining from negative action, that of “do not do unto others”.

The essential question then is, what sort of government do we want to live under? What sort of system do we want to have? Do we want a system that determines in advance what actions we should take, and uses the threat of force to compel us to take actions for the benefit of others? I’m pretty sure that’s been tried, and it never seems to work out very well. The alternative is a system that writes laws carefully, narrowly tailored to circumscribe intolerable behavior but otherwise leave open the grey area of noxious but tolerable behavior. It’s perhaps not as pretty in theory, but works much better for a diverse plurality than reaching for fool’s gold.

The War on Christmas

Posted: November 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture | Tags: , , , , | 147 Comments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the next person who mentions Christmas before I taste turkey gets a kick in the jingle bells. It’s not that I’m a Grinch (although my sister, the Christmas Elf, will gladly tell you otherwise). It’s just that my ability to enjoy the Christmas season is inversely proportional to my level of exposure to it. Don’t get me wrong; we have our holiday traditions, and I love them all. The music, the food, the decorations; most of all I will never forget the look on my sister’s face the year I finally slipped the lump of coal into her stocking for a change. But I digress. The point is that these moments are beautiful because they are rare, they are fleeting, and thereby they are magical.

I remember when I was a kid (and I have never felt older than when I typed those words) there seemed to be an understood rule: Christmas didn’t start until after Thanksgiving. Sure, you might see a few commercials about the big sale at your local department store on Black Friday in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, but it was always in the background, like the siren song of savings before the mad rush of commercialism truly began. First came the parade, Dad would yell at the TV while he watched football all day, then the turkey, and you finished off the night with The Wizard of Oz. The next day would come with its marathon of shopping quite soon enough, and Santa’s lap would be waiting all month long for you to whisper your list of impossible desires to be passed on to your long-suffering parents.

In the last twenty years, and particularly I’ve been noticing it in the last yen years, it’s like the stores can’t wait for Christmas to start. They’re worse than the kids. My roommate told me he was in one store, which shall remain nameless (but it rhymes with K-Mart), and they had a Christmas aisle set up already. Oh, I forgot to mention: this was three weeks before Halloween. It was right next to the Halloween aisle; talk about one-stop shopping. I’m surprised they didn’t have chocolate bunnies out, too.

It can’t be the economy, or trying to lure in the “early shoppers”, because they were doing it before the economy tanked, and there have always been early shoppers (my mother is still finding gifts she “hid” back in August… of 1998). It’s like someone decided to hell with the unspoken rule, and once one person crosses that neutral zone and gets away with it, everyone else jumps on board, and I for one think it’s time we all take a stand. We mock people who leave their Christmas lights up on their homes more than a few weeks into the new year; isn’t it time we boycott stores that put theirs up more than a few weeks before the holiday? Don’t we deserve a chance to celebrate one holiday at a time?

Am I the only one who has seen Mame? Does no one else know the song “We Need a Little Christmas”? There’s a reason that song resonates, and it’s because Christmas is supposed to be a special time, a time of magic and joy. But to be special, it has to be rare. When Christmas gets pushed back so far that it literally becomes “Christmas in July” as the marketing campaigns of my youth used to say, where’s the magic? Doesn’t Santa deserve a few months off?

The Value of Tradition (And Challenging It)

Posted: November 1, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Culture | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

I believe it was F. A. Hayek who defined tradition (and I may be paraphrasing here) as those concepts, ideas, or behaviors that have survived undisturbed because they are not sufficiently contra-survival to have died out. The point he was getting at was that even though we may not understand why we do a certain thing, or why we do things a certain way, things evolved that way over time for a reason, and to simply throw it all away because we don’t understand the reason behind it is very foolish indeed.

Truthfully, I am not known for being a very traditional sort of person, at least not in the common parlance of the word. I don’t abide by most of the cultural mores I find around me, and I am the first one to buck the trend if I find that it inhibits me from getting something I want or doing something I want to do. But those who know me well also know that I am a sentimentalist at heart, and I have a fondness for tradition that goes well past nostalgia. I suppose it would be the height of hypocrisy to suggest that when I flaunt tradition it’s for the common weal and when others do so it’s a danger to the commonwealth, but I’ve been accused of hypocrisy before.

Most of our structures, our society, everything we do and live by and with, exists for a reason. We may not understand why or what that reason is, but that doesn’t mean that reason isn’t there. Even something as basic and structural as language is an evolved form of tradition handed down from one generation to the next, and while it is certainly mutable within a few standard deviations of the norm, it is not simply something we can dispose of without regard for what comes next. This is not to suggest we should never challenge tradition; a society that refuses to challenge its traditions stagnates, becomes rotten in the core, and inevitably dies under its own weight. But the challenge should be constructive, with some idea of what will replace those defunct traditions, not a simplistic, nihilistic destruction.

The fact is, most of the time when I see people making a break from tradition these days I see them doing it with lack of foresight. They are not trying to strive toward something, rather than are simply running away from something. Likewise, they are never willing to pay the price for their rebellion; too often the expectation is that there should be no price, that what they want should be the proper order of things, and that they should be rewarded for demanding change rather than being asked to sacrifice to make that change happen. “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” is the cry of a child, not a rational adult, and should be treated in much the same way: ignored at first, and with a time-out if it continues. If and when they decide to grow up and be a part of the broader community, to bring something to the table, to add to the civilized discourse, then we can engage and see what we have to offer each other. The drive to blindly challenge everything without a sense of purpose is simply being a douchebag.

I do have one caveat: teenagers. It is their right, their privilege, and their duty to be douchebags in this fashion. You cannot offer something of value until you know what you have to offer, and to do that you need to know who you are. It is only by striving against anything and everything, by pushing against all that society has and being blasted back in response, that we develop our true sense of self. When that societal pushback comes and scours away everything else, whatever remains and refuses to let go, the part of you that stands defiant against everything and everyone that would change you, that’s what you know is the real you. It is through this process of rebellion that teenagers come out of their parents’ shadow and find their own identity.

The benefit for society is that there are some things that do occasionally, occasionally, need to be challenged on the merits and not be replaced by something new. There are traditions and ideas that have outlived their usefulness (if they were ever useful at all), and it is the responsibility of each new generation to challenge those ideas. It is this sort of pruning that allows our society to continue to grow and brings each generation more fully into the fold.

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