The Atheism Delusion

“He who pretends to be an honest inquirer into the truth of a self-evident thing, is a knave.” – William Blake

All Christian groups hold that faith, not just good works, is essential to salvation. The Protestants hold that faith alone is needed. Catholics hold that faith must be backed up by works. But faith is the sine qua non.

This seems a bit unreasonable if, as is commonly assumed these days, you take faith to mean “belief that God exists.”

After all, how is that a moral issue? If you perceive that logic and evidence points to the existence of God, you believe that God exists. If you perceive that logic and evidence points to the nonexistence of God, you believe that God does not exist. First, you really do not have any choice in the matter—contrary to a lot of current postmodernist mumbo jumbo, one is not really free to choose what one believes. One cannot simply choose to believe, for example, that one is smarter than Einstein, however much one might want this to be so. Furthermore, if one could, to believe in the existence of God counter to both one’s logic and the evidence of which one is aware hardly seems a moral thing to do. It would be tantamount to a lie—lying to oneself, and to others. And thou shalt not bear false witness. It would be hypocrisy.

So how does this work?

It works only if you accept one simple reality: the existence of God is not in doubt. All cultures are aware of Him. Philosophers have proven his existence in a dozen different ways. I also suspect that all of us have some direct experience of Him—a good God would want to do this, so He surely has. His existence is engraved in our reason, our emotions, our imagination, and our conscience, if we look for it.

And if we are not looking, we are culpable.

Non-Christian religions agree: for both Buddhism and Confucianism, ignorance is a sin.

This being so, Christian “faith” does not mean an intellectual assent to the truth that God exists. It means trust in God, a humble submission to his authority and his mercy.

It follows that atheists (or agnostics) are not really people who sincerely do not believe God exists. And, frankly, the anger one commonly encounters from atheists, notably Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins currently, reinforces this assumption. Why be angry at a being who does not exist? Why be angry at people for believing in Him? Is such anger directed at those who believe in Santa Claus, or unicorns, or that Oprah Winfrey is Dutch? No—belief in God is apparently somehow special, for the atheists. Atheists and agnostics are not honest inquirers, but people who, for their own reasons, have turned their faces away from God, and stuck their fingers in their ears.


Now, according to Catholic doctrine, this is what sends a soul to hell: “a willful turning away from God… and persistence in it until the end.” In a sense, it is the soul who chooses hell, and for approximately the reason Satan chose it according to Milton: “better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.” They will not submit to a higher power.

It is hard to imagine a purer instance of this than atheism—save only the case of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, that is, being confronted directly and knowingly by God and denying Him. Indeed, atheism may often be precisely this sin.

This is in essence the one sin that forces you into hell, because it is a case of choosing hell yourself. God will not interfere with free will. And truly free will means our decisions must bear their proper consequences. Otherwise our choices are not real.

Hence submission to God in love is the first of the Ten Commandments. Hence Jesus calls it the first and greatest of all commandments, summarizing all the rest.

Poison Ivy

Karl Dietrich Bracher, in his study of Hitler’s rise, The German Dictatorship, notes that the Nazis’ first and fiercest converts, aside from “food faddists, vegetarians, and nature worshippers” (p. 39), were university students and faculty. He explains this by suggesting that universities are by their nature undemocratic: “Professors and students felt … their status and prestige threatened by democratic ideas of government and society” (p. 165). So they preferred any alternative to the Weimar Republic.

Exactly: the university by its nature is the opposite of a democracy, and is antithetical to it. It is a rigid hierarchy, a self-selected elite.

This is not necessarily a bad thing—for untrammeled democracy is not necessarily a good thing. It can serve as a check and balance against popular excesses.

However, it is well to remember that the university is by its nature opposed to democracy, by its nature reactionary, and by its nature represents an upper class jealous of its “status and prestige.” Universities are, among society’s institutions, one of those most resistant to change.

Long after Marx and Freud have been discredited, for example, they remain dominant in the universities. Long after the rest of the world had migrated to desktops, universities were still working and teaching on mainframes. Any university becomes a repository for ancient traditions, passed down generation to generation. Any university seeks the ivy-covered walls that imply stability and long duration. To be able to go to university, by and large, implies that your parents are relatively rich—it is an important way in which a ruling class can perpetuate itself. It is conservatism personified.

More: the prestige and livelihood of a university or a faculty member depends upon the premise that he or she possesses some special, privileged knowledge. Change makes any such repository of knowledge relatively obsolete. Suddenly anyone can play. So progress and the university are not friends.

All well and good—there is a beauty in the changelessness of it all, in preserving the ancient verities.

But the most disturbing thing about the modern university is this: rather than acknowledging this truth, this inevitable bias, the typical university and the typical faculty member nowadays seeks to conceal it. They seek to masquerade instead as agents of change—especially of social change. This is suspect—this is hypocrisy. This strongly implies a ruling class that has grown corrupt and self-indulgent, and is doing something of which it is ashamed. It is a cover-up.

Postpostmodernism

The ultimate symbol of modernism and postmodernism in art is nakedness. Yeats used just this analogy for his aesthetic: “there’s more enterprise in going naked.” Duchamp exhibited a urinal as sculpture. Allen Ginsberg stripped to read his poetry. Jim Morrison stripped to sing his songs.

We have tried to reduce art to a bare minimum, or even “deconstruct” it. Poetry without rhyme, visual art without representation, music without tone or scale, architecture reduced to the structural minimum, all girders and glass.

But this is, surely, a dead end. One reaches the point of complete nakedness rather quickly. And once you’ve done it once, what do you do next?

After almost a century, it is just tiresome. Little or nothing has happened in the arts for about a half-century now. This is doubly tragic, for man needs art.

It is time to move forcefully in the opposite direction. For while there is something to be said for clearing the air, ultimately, nakedness is the reverse of art.

Nakedness is nature unadorned. Art is nature perfected by man’s spirit.

Nakedness is not art; nakedness is the lack of art. The clothing we wear—that is art. Art is the clothing of nature.

Mirabile Dictu

Faith is apparently required to perform miracles. Jesus says, “if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Effecting a miraculous cure, he says, “your faith has healed you.” Elsewhere, he says he can do no miracles, because of the general lack of faith in those villages.

This seems to be backwards, doesn’t it? People more commonly look to miracles as proofs of faith. The New Testament pretty clearly says the opposite, that you must have faith in the first place or you’ll never see them.

Nor can this New Testament claim be covered by the common concept of “faith healing”—when what is meant is essentially the “placebo effect.” For we are not speaking only of healing here, but also of walking on water and moving mountains. No placebo effect does that.

So how does this matter of miracles requiring faith work?

Well, here’s my thought. Just imagine you were a disbeliever in all things supernatural. Or better, since I believe this is essentially an intellectually impossible position, imagine you had decided to shut yourself off from God and the spiritual realm and any consideration of them. And suddenly, before your eyes, something impossible happened. A mountain moved. How would you feel?

Very threatened; I’ll warrant. Very frightened. Quite likely, it would drive you mad.

I say this, because I have myself seen people go mad in similar, but relatively trivial, circumstances: as a result of culture shock, or because assumptions about their marriage or relationships or family that they had long held proved untrue. When merely the social organization around them stopped making sense to them. How much more so if the tumult includes the physical world: “hallucinations,” indeed.

And so, a merciful God will not do this. If you do not have faith, he is not going to perform any great miracles for you, for your protection. Even if you ask for them, and sincerely want them, he cannot.

Realizing this suggests another interesting possibility, regarding another New Testament puzzle: what happened to all those demons that possessed people in the Bible and in the New Testament? Have they all disappeared since then? Logically, mustn’t we still have demonic possessions happening today?

It is possible, mind, to believe they are now many fewer then they were then—thanks to the widespread practice of baptism and faith in Christianity, which hold them at bay. But then, these practices are now in decline. It should follow that we get an upsurge in demonic possessions, and this should show up somewhere…

Interestingly enough, it does. The incidence of “mental illness” has risen dramatically since the 1960s—since just about the time our focus on Christianity clearly began to decline.

But of course. If you accept the Bible as true, you must accept not just the existence of God, but also of both angels and demons. Demons will not share God’s compunctions about performing supernatural acts when the human supplicant is not prepared for them. Speak of the devil, and he will appear. Turn from God, and you lose protection against him.

Hence, surely, the traditional legend of the “sorcerer’s apprentice.” Hence the warnings against dabbling in magic. All hell really could break loose.

And hence the possibility that much of what we call “mental illness” is, more or less as the New Testament says—indeed, as many sufferers themselves insist--a demonic possession. It is a spiritual (psychic) “illness,” and so how would it not have a spiritual cause?

It could be the common result of becoming suddenly, dramatically aware of the reality of the supernatural, and lacking the conceptual framework to handle this knowledge. This could be caused by taking hallucinogenic drugs. It could be caused by culture shock, or a shock in one’s personal life--hysteria. Or, especially in severe cases, it could be caused by a demon, a mischievous or hostile spiritual being.

If so, of course, traditional psychotherapy is not going to help—as, indeed, it does not, for the “severely” mentally ill. The therapist is going to insist that the visions and voices and moving mountains are purely imaginary and “nonexistent”—and they are not, and the “patient” in his heart and his mind knows perfectly well they are not. In such a case, talking therapy will be purely counter-productive: striving mightily to hold the sufferer back from the fundamental restructuring of his notion of reality that he needs to perform. Interesting that all severe forms of “mental illness” are now “incurable”—while they clearly were not in the New Testament.

The bottom line is this: the modern techniques, objectively speaking, do not work. Those in the New Testament apparently did. Moreover, similar shamanic approaches, which center on casting out unwanted spirits, still do seem to work in cultures like Korea, India, or Sri Lanka today.

Time for some real “faith healing,” I’d say.

Hath Not a Jew Brains?

Gary Wills has recently written a remarkable op-ed piece for the LA Times (“Abortion isn’t a religious issue," Times, November 4). Remarkable as an indication of just how wild the anti-religious party has become.

A few highlights, with commentary:

GW:
The right-to-life people hold that [abortion] is as strong a point of religion as any can be. It is religious because the Sixth Commandment … says, "Thou shalt not kill."

Od:
No, it is not religious. Not according to Catholics. The obligation not to kill is a matter of objective morality. It doesn't matter whether you are religious or not. You still can't kill people.

GW:
Is abortion murder? Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons.

Od:
No, the parallel is exact. Jews were not persons. They were "untermenschen." Subhuman.

GW:
Not even evangelicals act as if it were. ...a woman seeking an abortion … is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

Od:
The Catholic Church does not, because the Catholic Church opposes capital punishment, and believes in the possibility of human redemption. Why wouldn’t the “right to life” apply to adult women as well as unborn children? Why is it inconsistent that it does?

GW:
About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived.

Od:
I find it entirely within the realm of possibility that 10% of evangelicals are wrong; my guess is that the other 90% are more representative of the true Evangelical position. I remain unshocked that this is so.

GW:
Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial.

Od:
This is an absurd Catch-22. You cannot baptize someone who is already dead. And someone who is not baptized cannot be buried as a Christian.

Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia (1911) says: "Whenever it is possible to baptize an embryonic child before it expires, Christian charity requires that it be done, either before or after delivery; and it may be done by anyone, even though he be not a Christian."

But of course, any woman aborting her child is not a good Catholic in the first place.


GW:
…abortion is not scriptural. … Abortion is not … in the Ten Commandments -- or anywhere in Jewish Scripture.

Od:
False. The Hebrew Scriptures address the killing of a foetus pretty directly:

Exodus 21:

22 If men who are fighting hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely [e] but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman's husband demands and the court allows. 23 But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, 24 eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, 25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Not in the Ten Commandments? Wills himself has already said it is. "Thou shalt not kill" covers it decisively--given that the Bible makes no distinction anywhere between born and unborn human life. John the Baptist "leaps in his mother's womb." God "knew us before he knit us together in our mother's womb." Jacob and Esau compete in the womb.

So expecting the Ten Commandments to mention abortion specifically and separately is rather like demanding they mention that thou shalt not bear false witness on a Friday.

GW:
It is not treated … anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

Od:
False. It was banned by the Third Council of Constantinople (7th century), as murder plain and simple. And deserving of the same punishment.

True, it is not mentioned clearly in the New Testament. But no need, given that it was already clearly prohibited in Judaism, and assuming it was not a common practice. It is unnatural in the first place not to desire children. And it was probably obvious enough to the early, Jewish, Christians that it is murder.

It was, however, apparently practiced in pagan Greece and Rome. Hippocrates, therefore, though not a Christian, prohibits it in his oath for physicians, and Roman law prescribed exile for the crime. Several of the early Church Fathers, who were in contact with Greek and Roman culture, expressly say that it is prohibited: Tertullian, Athenagoras. None say it is permitted. The Fourth Century Council of Eliberis prohibited any woman soliciting an abortion from ever again receiving communion.

GW:
Lacking scriptural guidance, St. Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle's view of the different kinds of animation -- the nutritive (vegetable) soul, the sensing (animal) soul and the intellectual soul. Some people used Aristotle to say that humans therefore have three souls. Others said that the intellectual soul is created by human semen.

Aquinas denied both positions. … Aquinas denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation.

Od:
This is a serious distortion of Aquinas. Is it clear from this that Aquinas expressly prohibited abortion at any stage of pregnancy?

I didn't think so.

Aristotle's view of ensoulment was popular in the late Middle Ages, but had no influence on Catholic doctrine on the matter of abortion. It is irrelevant.

GW:
Even popes have said that the question of abortion is a matter of natural law, to be decided by natural reason. Well, the pope is not the arbiter of natural law. Natural reason is.

Od:
This is another serious distortion. All morality is a matter of natural law, according to Catholic teaching. It is equally binding on all, and accessible to all through reason and conscience. There is nothing special about abortion in this regard.

Nevertheless, the pope most definitely is, for Catholics, a legitimate arbiter of morality, as is the Catholic Church. Both are infallible in this matter. They are guided by the same God who created human reason.

GW:
John Henry Newman … wrote that "the pope, who comes of revelation, has no jurisdiction over nature." The matter must be decided by individual conscience, not by religious fiat. … Newman said: "I shall drink to the pope, if you please -- still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterward."

Od:
It is deceitful to pretend Cardinal Newman was speaking here of abortion. He was pointing out that you do not go to the pope to make it rain, that science is independent of religion. Nor is one supposed to obey even the pope against one's conscience.

So tell me, whose conscience honestly demands they kill their unborn child?

GW:
If we are to decide the matter of abortion by natural law, that means we must turn to … philosophers, neurobiologists, embryologists. Evangelicals want to exclude them because most give answers they do not want to hear

Od:
Wills contradicts himself. Did the Church ignore Aristotle, then? And it is precisely science that disproved Aristotle, and demonstrated that human life begins at conception.

GW:
… One cannot be indiscriminately pro-life.

If one claimed… that all life deserved moral respect, then plants have rights, and it might turn out that we would have little if anything to eat. …. Harvesting carrots… would constitute something of a massacre.

Od:
This is a classic straw man. Christianity has never held that animals and plants have the same souls as humans, or the same rights.

If the rights of humans must automatically be extended to all living things, Wills must also allow carrots the vote.

GW:
…. It is certainly true that the fetus is human life. But so is the semen before
it fertilizes; so is the ovum before it is fertilized. They are both human products, and both are living things.

Od:
The difference can easily be explained in scientific terms. The complete code of the complete being is present in every nucleus of every cell, in the DNA. But semen and ova do not have the complete code. They are not, therefore, human beings. Hair clippings or saliva may have the complete code--though probably not--but are not stem cells. They lack the programming to be or to become a human being.

For analogy, I think any one of us can grasp the moral distinction between cutting off somebody's fingernail, and cutting out his brain. The one brings the processes of life to a halt. The other does not.

GW:
… in fact, two-thirds of … embryos produced … fail to live on because they do not embed in the womb wall. Nature … produces more embryos than are actually used. Are all the millions of embryos that fail to be embedded human persons?

Od:
Yes.

Wills’s science is a bit off; it’s 50%. But either way, the fact that half die is perfectly irrelevant. We all die. Does that prove we are not human?

No, it proves we are.

GW:
The question is not whether the fetus is human life but whether it is a human person, and when it becomes one. Is it when it is capable of thought, of speech, of recognizing itself as a person, or of assuming the responsibilities of a person? Is it when it has a functioning brain?

Od:
GW clearly implies here that his answer is "yes."

This would be very bad news for the mentally or physically imperfect among us generally. If I cannot talk, I take it, I can be killed with impunity.

GW:
…. A functioning brain is not present in the fetus until the end of the sixth month at the earliest.

Not surprisingly, that is the earliest point of viability, the time when a fetus can successfully survive outside the womb.

… the onset of a functioning central nervous system with a functioning cerebral cortex and the onset of viability occur around the same time -- the end of the second trimester, a time by which 99% of all abortions have already occurred.

Od:
This is all irrelevant, but Wills is even wrong here. A good number of infants born in the fifth month survive. One of my son's classmates did. At six, she is a perfectly normal child.

Moreover, here's an article discussing ultrasounds of fetal brains at 12 weeks. They obviously must exist by that time.

http://radiology.rsnajnls.org/cgi/content/full/215/1/205

Wills is not just looking for loopholes, he is inventing them.

GW:
Opponents of abortion like to show sonograms of the fetus reacting to stimuli. But all living cells have electric and automatic reactions. These are like the reactions of Terri Schiavo when she was in a permanent vegetative state. …. The fetus has a face long before it has a brain. It has animation before it has a command center to be aware of its movements or to experience any reaction as pain.

Od:
The same argument could "prove" that Jews, let alone Terri Schiavo, are not really alive.

In either case, if one is not a foetus, or a Jew, the matter is essentially theoretical.

Opinions Canada

Happy to report that, quite unsolicited, Opinions Canada has picked up this blog for their regular aggregated feed.

I do no advertising of this site. Nice to see it getting wider readership nevertheless.

The Coming Catholic Renaissance

John Paul II apparently predicted that the 21st century could see conversions to Catholicism “like a tidal wave.”

Given John Paul’s saintliness, he may have been speaking prophesy. He may have seen something.

I believe it is possible. First, I think it is the logical next step for us all. I have felt, ever since the late Sixties, that this was the direction in which the zeitgeist was inevitably moving. It seemed to me that the logical and necessary Sixties thing to do was to become either a Jesus Freak or a Hare Krishna. The spiritual world was obviously the “other side” we were trying to get to. Anything else was, as we used to say, a “cop out.”

Most of us copped out.

But even for us, the good part of the Sixties may be recovered. The same big demographic, we “Baby Boomers,” is now heading into our twilight years. It is time to wake up and start thinking about what comes next.

The Sixties were a “youth culture.” We will soon, for the same demographic reasons, have an “age culture.” And it is natural for the aged to ponder the afterlife.

This alone may well make the entire culture suddenly get religion.

At the same time, modernism has spectacularly dead-ended, intellectually, in “postmodernism”—the lack of all belief or principle. There is nowhere left to go on that path. Very little has really happened in the arts or in philosophy for several decades. What is obviously needed is a massive reinjection of the fundamental principles of our civilization. That would be the Catholic Church.

Meantime, the current general antipathy towards the Catholic Church for not “changing with the times” will have tested its bona fides, in the face of general error, and will identify it clearly as the bearer of truth when the time for truth comes. The stone that was rejected is become the cornerstone—that is the way history always works.

It seems to me that even the recent upsurge in militant atheism—Dawkins, Hitchens--is a good sign. Their charges are so wild they sound hysterical—or desperate. They may be secularism’s last gasp. Rather as Oliver Stone’s movie JFK managed inadvertently to discredit Kennedy conspiracy theories generally, these sorts of wild charges, once plainly stated and generally examined, will tend to discredit atheism.

And there is another factor, at least for the developed world—which is to say, mostly, the traditionally Christian world. The assumption has been that the recent decline in religious observance was permanent, based on a conventional wisdom that, with increasing wealth and well-being, people turn away from religion. Atheists would say this proves religion is a crutch. Christians would say it proves the Beatitudes: “blessed are the poor.”

But prior history suggests this is true only up to a point. Even in the past, some people were exceptionally wealthy. Were they also conspicuously irreligious?

No. What we find is that, when people are poor, they are pious. As their wealth grows, they tend to question their old beliefs—or perhaps, to forget about God and concentrate on their acquisition of worldly goods. The middle classes tend to be less conventionally religious, or at least less religious in the Catholic sense. But this is not the end of it—once they have acquired a lot of worldly goods, and risen to the upper class, they tend to become once again conspicuously religious. British monarchs, for example, kept inconveniently converting to Catholicism. Perhaps this is because, once one is familiar with wealth, one loses the illusion that it can solve all your problems.

For the past two centuries, since the Industrial Revolution, the story of the developed world has been of a growing middle class. Hence, the materialism of the middle class, often commented upon, has grown in influence.

Now, in the post-industrial era, we in the developed world are in effect starting to move broadly into the upper classes.

The spirituality characteristic of the upper classes is therefore likely to grow. Indeed, it was seen first in the Sixties, though in an immature, adolescent, abortive form. We wanted the world, and we wanted it then—which is to say, the whole world no longer satisfied.

Already in the US, religion is again becoming socially acceptable. Presidential candidates suddenly feel obliged to at least claim to be religious. This will probably spread to the rest of the developed world in time, as all US trends tend to do. And it should deepen in the US.

The confrontation with “militant Islam,” or rather, Islamism, ought also, logically, to help this process. It tends to remind those of us who are, at least ethnically, Europeans of our essentially Christian identity. It forces us to think again, and more clearly, of the proper sphere of religion in our culture and in our lives. And, I think, we are starting to realize, partly through the example of the Muslim world, how very intricately intertwined they really are.

And then there’s China. True, it is moving broadly into the middle class, and so presumably growing less religious. But there is another factor: religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, have been suppressed in China for some time. This always works, in the long term, for more conversions.

I expect the lid to come off China very soon—the present regime, with its hostility to religion, must sooner or later fall, and I expect this to be soon. When it does, many Chinese may embrace Christianity en masse, in reaction to atheism and as an obvious alternative value system. There are signs of this—and it has already happened in Korea, next door. The Catholic Church stands perhaps in good stead here as the most repressed of religions—along with Falun Gong, but Falun Gong is not really a religion in the same sense. As in the developed world, this establishes her bona fides.

The same will probably eventually happen in North Korea and in Vietnam. As China goes largely Christian, the growing Chinese prestige may prompt many more in other parts of the world to take a closer look.

I am also hopeful of a third tidal wave: the unification of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The experience of the “Uniate” churches proves that there is no theological bar to this. With growing globalization and growing contact between East and West, this essentially artificial and geographical division should end. Besides adding several hundred million souls to a greater Catholic Church at a stroke—about a 20% increase in size--closing this wound will also help evangelization. It might also inspire a wider ecumenism within Christianity. Its possible aftermath might draw in the Anglicans and Lutherans as well.

Welcome to the Age of Aquarius.

Hallowe'en--Boo! It's Christian!

There seems to be a pervasive myth that Hallowe’en is a pagan celebration. It is supposed to be a survival of the old Celtic feast of Samhain.

It is probably not. It has a perfectly proper Christian pedigree. It is, as the name implies, the eve of All Hallows; that is, All Saints’ Day. And All Saints’ Day is itself quite ancient—as old as the Third Century AD. Which is to say, as old as Christmas. The current date has been observed since the eighth century—in Rome, making any connection with the old Celtic Samhain apparently purely coincidental. There are no Celts in Rome.

It is traditional to include the night before as part of a Christian feast: Christmas begins Christmas Eve, and Easter Sunday begins with the Easter Vigil. So with All Saints’. In the very early church, indeed, well before the Third Century, it was traditional, on the night before a martyr’s death anniversary, to go to his or her tomb and celebrate mass there on the preceding night.

Following the ancient practice, it is still traditional on this night throughout Catholic Europe to bring flowers to the tombs of one’s ancestors, and stay there overnight in vigil, in the pious hope that they, too, are now saints in heaven. This is also how it is still observed in the Philippines. Precious few Celts are involved.

It is therefore a “Night of the Dead.” All Saints’ is indeed known, in Mexico, as the “Day of the Dead.”

If children, then, dress up as corpses or mummies, they too have a right to expect some sort of reward. It is a natural way of including them, when they are too young to understand death or to remember the ancestors being honoured.

November 2, again, is All Souls’ Day—a day of prayer for all the souls in Purgatory. This too can have no relation to the pagan Samhain—the observance of November 2 as All Souls’ began at Cluny, in France. However, the tradition that a door opens on November 2, and that the souls in purgatory are able to communicate with the living through it, is associated with this feast since its beginnings. In the 11th century Life of St. Odilo, the origins of the celebration of All Souls’ are explained: a pilgrim returning from the Holy Land was shipwrecked on a deserted island. There, a hermit told him, there was a chasm through which the souls in purgatory could be heard to lament, requesting prayers, and demons could be heard complaining of how well the prayers of the monks of Cluny worked to rescue these lost souls.

In Tyrol, families leave out cakes on All Souls’ Night. They do so in Bolivia as well, and the souls in purgatory are understood to be somehow nourished by them.

It is a short step from all this to the idea that kids knocking on your door are to be given cakes as well, and that they represent the dead returning to our homes.

Here, some traditions of All Souls’ have probably simply been moved to the celebration of All Hallows—just as the traditions of St. Nicholas, whose feast day is early December, have been amalgamated with those of Christmas; as has the gift-giving of Epiphany.

Bad news: it’s a Christian feast.

I guess this will lead to its being banned in the schools. Bizarrely, so long as we think a tradition is pagan, and has to do with such things as devils, witches, self-mutilation, and human sacrifice, it is socially acceptable.

But a nativity scene? Unacceptable.

Ozymandias

Visiting Old Goa, once called “The Rome of the East,” is oddly like visiting Rome itself. In this one way: both were once managed by military men, conquerors, famous men of their day, whose business was war, and by merchants who grew spectacularly wealthy. Both cities were once the administrative centres for vast empires.

But now, for both, the empires are gone; the captains and the kings have long departed. And what is left?

The churches. In the case of Rome, though it lost its political and military preeminence a thousand five hundred or so years ago, it remains the centre of a spiritual empire much larger than Rome ever was: the Catholic Church.

In the case of Old Goa, there is almost literally nothing left standing but the churches. Even the governor’s palace is gone—all but one sad doorway. Yet a dozen impressive religious buildings survive, alone in the jungles. Most are still in use. And, while all the other famous men have long been food for worms, even the actual body of St. Francis Xavier is still there, looking not much changed in the past five hundred years.

The moral: earthly glory fades. But religious power, even on earth, partakes of eternity.

All Religions are One

A Protestant friend wondered why I, as a devout Catholic, had statues of Buddhas and paintings of Hindu gods in my home. He was under the impression that Hindus worship idols.

But Hindus do not worship idols. There is a simple test: does one Hindu god compete with another? They did, in the classical Greek conception. They did, among the Canaanites. If so, we are dealing with polytheism, and with multiple gods. But they do not, in Hinduism. Here we are not dealing with multiple gods. There is one supreme God, Brahman, which/who is expressed in many ways. Any Hindu well-educated in his faith will insist in this point. While Hinduism might once have been a polytheistic faith, it has not been so since at least the Puranic/Vedantic period, dating from Sankara and the revival of Hinduism in the early centuries AD.

Strikingly, Hinduism even recognizes the Trinity. Their Trimurti (“Three Forms”), the chief manifestations of Godhead, includes Brahma, the Creator—he is directly equivalent to the Christian God the Father; Vishnu, the Preserver, who notably incarnates in Creation, most famously as Krishna and Rama—very like the Christian Christ; and Siva, the Destroyer, who dances eternally amid flames—an energy principle, at least vaguely similar to the Holy Spirit. Interestingly, there is a similar trinity in Buddhism and in Taoism as well.

It seems to me that here we have a basis for dialogue.

It may be that Hinduism has been directly influenced in all this by Christianity. After all, Christians have been in India since the first or second century AD. And Sankara, the acknowledged founder of Vedantic Hinduism, was born in a heavily Christian area, Kerala, in the 8th century AD. Indeed, he was late enough to be influenced by Islam as well, brought to Kerala by Muslim traders.

Or it might be that God leaves no nation without light—for surely a merciful God would not. And so the outlines of the same message can be found in all major religions, accessible to all mankind. The same images are imbedded in all our imaginations; the same moral certainties are imbedded in all our consciences, the same unspoken cravings are engraved in all our hearts, and the same eternal principles govern all our reasonings. All lead to the same destination; for all are inscribed there by the same God.

The Real World of Empire

A correspondent, wanting to cite the world’s largest empires currently, produced the following list:

France: French Guiana and other possessions
Great Britain: Falkland Islands and other possessions
Denmark: Greenland
Netherlands: Netherlands Antilles

But these nations, though they once had their day, are pikers in the Empire Bowl.

What is an empire? “A state uniting many territories and peoples under a single sovereign power.”

China and India must rank as the two largest empires currently—indeed, two of the largest empires in history. Each rules about one fifth of mankind. In China, the Han nationality strongly dominates, but it includes such disparate territories as Tibet and (Caucasian) Sinjiang, and over fifty “national minorities.” India includes a vast number of languages—which means, ethnicities—with the languages of South India completely unrelated to those of the North. When China was ruled by the Qing, nobody doubted it was an empire. When India was ruled by the Mughals, nobody doubted it was an empire. They still are.

After that comes the EU—comprising another ninth of humanity, and the greatest empire ever to emerge on that continent.

After those three, Canada is worth an honourable mention at least. Nunavut, Quebec, Newfoundland, Vancouver—pretty far-flung territories, pretty disparate peoples.

There are more, including most of the countries of Africa: South Africa, Nigeria, Tanzania, the Congo. Taken together, empires are about as common as nation states.

Are nation states preferable? Not obviously. Empires have been given a lot of bad press over the last fifty years or so, but they have many advantages.

Diversity is not always a bad thing.

Yes, Aisha, There Is a Future

It is not that the modern left lacks imagination—they can always imagine an impending disaster requiring government intervention. But when it comes to possible good news, or the possibility of an individual making a difference, they sure lack imagination.

Witness a piece from NPR I came across recently, pronouncing the Alberta Tar Sands doomed. Why? The first problem is that treating the bitumen releases—their words—“dangerous gases.” These “dangerous gases” are of course carbon dioxide, produced by the burning of natural gas to fuel the extraction process. Carbon dioxide--harmless to humans, essential to plant life, common as air, but now reclassified as poison. Dangerous if you believe in the conventional theories about global warming and greenhouse gases.

The second problem dooming the Tar Sands and the world’s energy supply, is the worry that the natural gas, needed to refine the oil, will itself run out. Because natural gas is no more renewable than oil.

But the entire story miraculously avoids two simple words: nuclear power. Is it really inconceivable that a nuclear plant could be built in Ft. McMurray, far from major population centres, close to one of the world’s largest uranium deposits, to run the process? Producing, among other things, unlimited fuel and zero CO2 emissions?

Apparently so.

Similarly, I have been told by science teachers since I was in knee-pants—well, jeans--that the world was about to run out of fresh water. Never mind that this is one of the most renewable resources—renewed at every rain. Never mind that access to potable water, according to UN figures, is actually increasing worldwide every year, and has been since I was in those knee-pants. No, within a few decades—by now, in fact--everyone would be killing everyone else fighting over the next water hole.

It’s apparently an appealing image. Because, even though it hasn’t come true yet, exactly the same claim is currently being made loudly and hourly on CNN, that “the next wars will be over water,” to advertise their new (typically neutral, as the title suggests) series called “Earth in Peril.”

Hard to believe they’ve actually missed the fact that the surface of the world is over two-thirds water. It would be very hard for any species living on the remaining one-third of the earths surface to ever use it up.

Yes, that water is salty, and so unsuitable for drinking. No chance it could ever be useful, I suppose—this is the same thing they were saying about the Alberta Tar Sands for decades, in fact. But is desalinization such an unthinkable technology? A technology already supplying all the water for irrigation and drinking in several countries, including the one in which I currently reside?

Yes, it is still fairly expensive—at least compared to how cheap water is elsewhere. But are we really at the limits of what we can do with desalinization technology? And would we really end up killing each other, not due to any real shortage, but just to save a few bucks?

Now comes news that an Ottawa Valley student, Asha Suppiah, now 20, managed, as a science project when in grade school, using everyday materials, to literally double the efficiency of current solar desalination techniques. Just a kid working at her kitchen table. Because she is using common, everyday materials—cotton and wire mesh—her process ought to be accessible to just about anyone in the Third World. Because it is solar powered, the cost is only the purchase cost—it needs no fuel.

That’s some indication of just how primitive our desalination technology still is. We’ve just gotten started. We’re still at the Wright Brothers work-in-your-garage stage.

It’s also a good indication that we need is fewer teachers filling kids like Asha Suppiah with helpless, hopeless doom and gloom, and more encouraging them to innovate.

Ann Coulter's Heresy

Now Ann Coulter is in trouble, for saying that Jews would be “perfected” if they become Christian. As soon as she said it, the interviewer himself declared to her face that he was personally offended, that she was “hateful,” “anti-Semitic,” and her statement was “absurd.”

Since then, the pundits have been going crazy.

It is barely credible to me--and evidence of how anti-religious America has become--that there is any controversy attached to Coulter's remarks. I say this even though I am far from being a fan of Ann Coulter.

But what on earth do people think that believing in a religion means? It means you think it is true. If you care at all for your fellow man, surely you want them to know the truth--and the best way to heaven--too.

This is what Coulter was saying. She said it in so many words: “Jews go to heaven, sure, but ours is the fast track—like Federal Express.”

Yet people are objecting to this?

The world is mad.

Suppose she had said that everyone should know how to read and write, or that everyone should know basic physics. Would that be similarly offensive?

If not, we are discriminating against religion.

She has also been absolutely misquoted in many outlets as saying that Jews would have to “discard” Judaism to become Christian. This is especially offensive, because this was what the interviewer, not Coulter, said, and it seems to me Coulter made it quite clear this was not what she meant. She pointed out that Christians all believed in Judaism, in fact. That Christians all accept the Hebrew Scriptures. That Christianity is itself a form of Judaism. One can, as "Jews for Jesus" have always pointed out, be both a Jew and a Christian. As, of course, Jesus was; and St. Peter, and St. Paul, and Mary, and all the apostles. There is no question of “discarding” Judaism here. She said “perfecting” it.

Just as the misadventures of Dr. Watson over the last week show it is dangerous in the current climate of thought to know too much about science, Anne Coulter’s experience here shows it is also now dangerous to know too much theology.

Dr. Watson's Heresy

Poor old James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA and Nobel Laureate, apparently has run into some political trouble. It pays these days, even for famous scientists, to keep well apprised of the prevailing political currents. To recap briefly, Dr. Watson apparently observed that the intelligence of Africans was, based on IQ testing, “not really” the same as that of Britishers.

Appearances on his current book tour were immediately cancelled. He was immediately suspended from his job. His employer of 35 years publicly disowned him. He quickly recanted, insisted that there was no scientific evidence to back his original claim, and apologized “unreservedly.” But even that, combined with the Nobel Prize, does not appear to be enough. The commentary has been universally condemnatory, and quite personal. Canada.com hopes his career is over. Wired calls his comments “utterly unacceptable to civilized society.”

Galileo must be grateful, up in heaven, that he did not live in these times.

What Watson said was of course perfectly true, and little more than common sense. Any IQ test yet devised shows definite differences in outcome based on ethnicity. Africans score lower than Europeans. Jews score higher than other Westerners. Chinese score better than Europeans. Japanese score highest of all.

Two politically-correct responses are commonly made: first, that this is due to cultural bias in the tests. But if so, how to explain that Japanese score better than Europeans on European-devised IQ instruments? Second, that there are different types of intelligence, and if Africans do worse on one type, it must be that they do better on some other. Maybe so, though it seems a pretty romantic notion, and one backed by no evidence. But, if so, what Watson said is still perfectly correct: he said that African intelligence was “not the same as” European. If they are better at hand-eye coordination, but worse at abstract reasoning, his point still holds.

But then, just as Watson noted, there is no reason to suppose that different populations, evolving in different places and under different circumstances, would somehow all end up with identical levels of a selected range of mental talents. In fact, the assumption is, on the face of it, ridiculous. First, it goes directly against Darwin. And it goes directly against common experience and common sense. It is logically the same as assuming that all individuals have identical mental talents; or that all families must be equally intelligent. Indeed, let's say they are; if so, mustn’t everyone also have equal levels of singing talent? Making American Idol discriminatory? Leaving alone professional sports… Where's the outrage?

So why is it that no one, not even a Nobel-winning scientist, is permitted to point out this obvious imperial sartorial fact?

Because the chattering tribe has long claimed that the doctrine of human equality is based on science. I recall very well a comic book feature when I was a child called “Science says you’re wrong.…” It featured the standard establishment beliefs of the day—the hyperscientistic Sputnik-spooked early Sixties--as scientific “truths.” One, of course, was “science says you’re wrong if you believe different races have different mental abilities.” Yet then, as now, all the tests ever devised indicated they did.

What could be less scientific than rejecting the evidence of repeated experiment because it did not conform to a preconceived notion?

Why do they do this? Because science, with its accomplishments, has gathered a great deal of prestige—thanks in some small part to Dr. Watson himself. This prestige is very useful to those in power, as an ideology justifying their program and their power. If they want people to believe a thing, they assert that it is “scientific.” They use science rather the way Osama bin Laden uses Islam: they pretend to scientific authority and invoke it in their interests.

(Al Gore, are you listening?)

Ironically, this makes them quite hostile to any real science—as witness Watson. As Jesus was to the Pharisees of his day, to these people James Watson is a great danger—precisely because he seems to speak with scientific authority, but does not toe their line. It all gives some insight into the dangers scientists who publicly dissent on global warming must also face.

Hence the sharpness of the reaction to Watson. They really don’t want to see this happening soon again.

The dirty little secret is, the doctrine of human equality was never based on science. Social Darwinism, Fascism, and Nazism were. And human equality certainly has nothing to do with people having the same IQ. The doctrine of human equality is a religious belief. It comes from monotheism, and most specifically from Christianity.

Note the words of the US Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Similarly, Locke based his argument for human equality on the fact that we are all descended in an equally direct line from Adam. As the Levellers chanted back when Charles I faced the swordsman: “When Adam delved, and Eve span—who then was the gentleman?”

For it follows: if God created all mankind in the one act, in Adam and Eve, we are all equal at our birth. Equal in our ultimate value, that is, in our intrinsic worth, equal in the eyes of God. Regardless of our intelligence, or height, or race, or physical strength, or sex, all of which are obviously not equal at all.

A simple principle; indeed, elementary, my dear Watson.

One of the interesting consequences of this truth is that atheism is by its very nature corrosive of our human rights and civil liberties. Therefore, assuming we believe in human equality, while atheism perhaps should be tolerated in a civil society—albeit Locke and Rousseau to the contrary—it certainly ought not to be encouraged.

Conversely, there is a legitimate reason for the state to encourage theism and religion.

No, more than this—while evolution too should perhaps be tolerated, there is a legitimate reason for the state to want to ensure that Creationism is also taught in the schools.

With gusto. And in its most literal sense.

Harper Wins Ontario Election

Warren Kinsella says the result of the Ontario election should kill any federal Tory plans for a fall poll.

He has to say that. He’s a party flack. But he is exactly wrong. The Ontario election is good news for Stephen Harper.

There is no national trend towards the Liberals provincially—yesterday’s news was Danny Williams’ historic Conservative majority in Newfoundland.

No—put the two provincial results together, and the real message is that this is a good time for incumbents. The economy is booming. The dollar is going further. Canadians feel good. They are in no mood to rock the boat.

That’s what killed John Tory—his religious schools proposal simply smacked of major change.

And Stephen Harper is the man in power.

Historically, Ontarians have no party loyalty. When they vote Conservative provincially, they generally vote Liberal federally, and vice versa. There is good reason for this—beyond the public’s instincts to maintain a balance of power. When the Liberals are securely in power provincially, the top Tory talent focuses on the federal arena as their best opportunity, and vice versa. Many of the strongest Liberals, meanwhile, are tied up in the provincial parliament or civil service.

Voters respond—all else being equal, the best candidates, the best flacks, and the best organizers, win.

Kinsella himself is a case in point. He used to be strictly federal. Now he is Mr. Ontario.

For Harper, it looks like all systems are go.

God Save Us from Practical Men

Here's why I love Andrew Coyne.

Chinglish

Notes from a visit to Hainan, China, a couple of years ago:

Strange English is everywhere. The hotel restaurant offers a "nourishing dish" of "Whole Hawaiian papaya with stewed snow frog" at 28 RMB per person. The mini bar includes "goat embryo element," but I don’t think I’ll try one. The hotel "Regulations" include an admonishment against radioactive materials in the hotel rooms, and against the spreading of reactionary, obscene, or superstitious books. No Gideon’s Bible here. I am shocked to discover that criminal activities are strictly forbidden. And this helpful note:

"A word of caution: cautious about buying stuff from the illegal peddlers around. We wouldn't be responsible for that."

The Good Empire

The view popular on the left is that the nations of Western Europe set out in the eighteenth century to rape and pillage the rest of the world. Indeed, most of us live white males have spent the last fifty years and more living down our history of “colonialism.” Even though, for most of us, neither we nor our ancestors had anything to do with it.

But this is not what happened at all. Few in Europe ever sought an empire.

True, it was on the agenda a few centuries earlier: Back in the days of Vasco de Gama and Columbus, the Spanish plan, at least, had been to make money by exploiting foreign colonies for raw materials. Exploration and colonization were, at least, supposed to pay for themselves. This, however, did not work out—only Spain ever managed to turn a profit on its colonies, and this only for a time. Moreover, the expansion of Spain called into being almost immediately in Spain itself the School of Salamanca, which set strict criteria for just and unjust wars—something previous empires had never bothered with.

By the eighteenth century, nobody was under any delusions that colonies were moneymakers. Free trade, not colonies, was understood as the best route to national prosperity. In financial terms, colonies were seen as losing propositions.

Neither Britain nor France, therefore, though they were the two main colonial powers, had any interest in possessing an empire, nor any plans to do so. Neither did Portugal, or the Netherlands.

So how did they end up with some of the biggest empires known to man?

First, they were drawn into it by the need to preserve order. Order was necessary for trade; and in large parts of the world, basic order was lacking. One had to police the trade routes, and to control the possible pirate bases. One had to ensure the safety of traders. This is explicit in Salamanca’s rules from the start: it was a basic human right to travel freely in order to do commerce. If, then, a local potentate refused traders this right, they had the right in turn to try to force their way.

Beyond that, much was done out of concern for human rights more generally. Governments in most parts of the world were markedly oppressive, in European terms. Locals would often appeal to European forces for aid, and the home front would be galvanized into sympathy. It was all very similar to the reasoning that, more recently, drew the international community into Lebanon, Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and so forth. The School of Salamanca, again, initiated this idea: if, for example, a foreign government was slaughtering people innocent of any crime, foreigners had the right to intervene. All had a right to freedom of religion; if a foreign government prevented Christians from preaching or practicing, this too was cause to intervene. One could not, by the same token, intervene to force conversions; local religions too had to be honoured.

Finally, there were the needs of collective security. While the actual European trading posts might have been small, they relied on local allies. These allies, in turn, had enemies nearby. And they naturally appealed to their European colleagues for aid in time of war. Then, as now, this was a form of legitimate self-defense, and recognized by Salamanca.

These three factors together, combined with overwhelming European military superiority, caused empires to form quite apart from any conscious policy. It was no more rapacious or oppressive or racist, in principle and in broad strokes, than we are today. Indeed, it is the same thing that is happening today, although today the intervention is more likely to be by the World Bank or IMF, using economic rather than military means.

There are, it is true, specific examples of Imperial abuse: Ireland, Poland, the Belgian Congo, Armenia, Korea under Japan. These were generally recognized, and condemned, as such at the time.

In France, the left actively opposed an Empire, because it would tend to give more power to the army. The right opposed it because it distracted France from her real defensive needs, which were, they believed, against Germany on the continent. There was no constituency for it.

The French Empire was built on ad hoc situations like the failure, in 1882, of the de facto government of Egypt to pay its debts to French and British banks. Much of the eventual Francophone domain was called forth by the collapse of civil order in the Ottoman Empire. In this context, France, French shipping, and French nationals were subject to piracy and what we would now call terrorist attacks--as were the other unfortunate inhabitants of that part of the world.

Condemn, if you will, this supposed European “aggression.” But you must then also condemn the UN for interfering in Darfur, or Kosovo, or Bosnia, or Cyprus, or ….

Kerouac in Montreal

The Toronto Star recently commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Road by recounting Jack Kerouac’s 1967 appearance on the CBC, on a French-language programme called Sel de la semaine.

The story is that the audience broke into laughter to hear him speak French.

Not that Kerouac’s spoken French was bad—he always spoke French with his own family, and did not learn English until he went to school. It’s that it was the French of rural Gaspe.

“To the members of his audience, anxious to be part of a modern Quebec, hearing Kerouac's French was like an educated American audience hearing a famous author speak in the hillbilly, southern accent of a guest on The Jerry Springer Show. The way he was speaking, it wasn't so much the words by themselves, it was just the rhythm of the sentences,’ Pierre Anctil, of the University of Ottawa, says. ‘It appeared as rural and unlearned and folkloric.’”

The article suggests this tells us something about Kerouac. I think it tells us instead something about the difference between Quebec and America. It is the Quebec audience’s reaction that seems to me uncultured and provincial. Hillbilly southern accents? Like those, say, of Mark Twain, or William Faulkner, or Thomas Wolfe, or Tennessee Williams? My guess is that an American audience would not blink an eyelash.

And how would such an audience have greeted uneducated, rural William Shakespeare?

Indeed, Kerouac’s Brooklyn English was no more the literary language of America than his Gaspe French was that of Quebec. The whole point of his concept of “Beats” was that all good came from the fellaheen, from the common people: the hero of On the Road was a compulsive car thief who had grown up in reform schools.

If this surprised the audience, they obviously had never read anything he wrote.

America is democratic to its toes. Quebec, and Canada, are not.

Crazy People

Here’s my proposal for ending all mental illness in Canada:

Just issue everyone who is psychotic with a cell phone. Their behavior immediately becomes normal.

And speaking of madness, having read a review by Dawkins of Hitchens; here is the logic of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens’ atheism, in brief:

1. If I cannot disprove a thing, it must not be true.
2. All evil is claimed to be good. Therefore, good is evil.

Speak No Evil

A posting from a few days ago has strangely disappeared from this site. Ironically, it was on free speech.

My guess is that the photos attached simply broke Blogger’s bandwidth restrictions.

So I’m reposting without the images:


There is something Orwellian about the speaker’s podium set up at one corner of Nathan Phillips square. There it stands, unused, behind a barricade, and with a rather frightening warning label:

This Speaker’s Corner is dedicated by the City Council of Toronto to the concept of free speech. The public may mount the dias and speak, or challenge another speaker to debate.

Speakers may not use the dias for any purpose that is contrary to law, and are reminded that the Canadian Criminal Code prohibits slanderous statements or statements promoting genocide or hatred against an identifiable group or race.

When speaking from the dias, the speaker assumes all risks. The City does not assume and shall not be liable for any damages or action resulting therefrom.

It bears mute witness that there is no free speech in Canada; that something like Speaker’s Corner in London's Hyde Park is in fact no longer possible under Canadian law. And any member of the public is taking his personal liberty in his own two hands to dare to mount that platform.

This must change, for Canada to become again truly free.

And without free speech, ultimately, without the free exchange of ideas, there is no democracy either.

A New Extinction Threat

I expect you’re busy—we all are—but this is an emergency. It seems, just when we were feeling a little better about the polar bears and the killer whales, we have a new crisis, in the world of language. The National Geographic News warns that fully hundreds of languages are “teetering on the brink,” a “a global extinction crisis that greatly exceeds the pace of species extinction."

No, seriously. If a language no longer has any speakers, this is a tragedy, right? It is just as if an animal species has become extinct, right? We should all be upset, shouldn’t we, and taking firm government measures to preserve our endangered languages?

Or not. A language is a tool. Tools are more often for throwing out when they no longer happen to be useful. There is some logic in preserving old tools in museums, for interest. There is very little logic in obliging some people to keep using them, demonstrably beyond their usefulness.

And language is a tool, specifically, for communication. It follows that the more people speak a languages, the better language works. A language spoken by very few people is intrinsically less useful. Insisting on preserving languages spoken only by small minorities is like making them chop firewood. With a stone axe.

Conversely, if the world is speaking fewer languages year by year, that is a sign of progress. Just as, with the printing press, the infinity of small dialects in England or France resolved into one recognizable literary language.

Push the logic of preserving small languages to an extreme, and one must also fight to preserve a speech impediment rather than learning to speak as everyone else does.

National Geographic, to the contrary, beats the drums of alarm yet louder. It claims that losing a language means losing important knowledge: “irreplaceable knowledge about the natural world.”

"Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere, it's only in people's heads," the NG’s expert, David Harrison of Swarthmore, warns.

Right. Let’s see how that works. When did knowledge become language-specific? Has National Geographic never heard of the possibility of translation? Does it think it is only possible for each human to speak and understand one language?

And, if so, if the very last few speakers of some minority language never learn any other language, how do they manage to get by—without being able to speak to anyone?

In the real world, languages most often die out not because everyone who speaks them suddenly dies of the plague, but because those who had spoken them gradually switch to a different language. Absent government action, they switch if and only if they find the new language more useful.

I’m trying hard, but I can’t get excited over the loss that represents. A loss to whom? After all, not even the knowledge of the language itself is lost, so long as a grammar and a dictionary have been written down. Latin has done remarkably well with no native speakers for a couple of thousand years.

Therefore, unless things known in one language are genuinely untranslatable, no knowledge is lost when a language dies. Not even the vocabulary or grammar of that language, if anyone has ever taken the time to write it down.

I gather we are simply running out of things to worry about.

The Truth about Househusbands

Whenever I go out alone with my son, I can expect some unpleasantness. He is quite a well-behaved little six-year-old. And there is rarely a problem when his mother is with us. But it seems that when a man cares for children, he is subject to general contempt, most especially from women. Many women seem to think that they have the right to order around any man with a child, and they seem positively eager to complain about any inconvenience they have been caused. They never, in my experience, act this way with a mother. They wouldn’t dare.

Where a woman with a child is helped by all comers, a man seems to be obstructed wherever possible. It is an opportunity for bullies to get in their licks.

And never mind a man paying any attention at all to a child not his own. He is lucky if he is not openly accused of being a pedophile on the make.

This attitude is the furthest thing from equality of the sexes--and yet, while everybody claims to believe in equality of the sexes, nobody seems to remark on it. Equality of the sexes is the last thing “feminism” is about.

Similarly, current “progressive” thought holds that men are supposed to do half the housework. But let’s be frank: there is no equality in the kitchen. What happens if the man decides he wants to store the good plates here rather than there? Who decides?

Never the husband. Men who work in the kitchen inevitably work under the close direction of their wives. She is the supervisor; they are unpaid labour.

Don’t even get me going in “reproductive freedom.” Why is it that for women, the free choice to have or not have a child is a fundamental right, even if they choose to have sex with all comers, yet men have no say, beyond refusing all sex, in whether they have a child or not?

We will have equality of the sexes when fathers are given custody of children as often as mothers; when women are charged with sexual harassment as often as men; when men can choose as freely as women whether to work outside the home or not; and when there are as many women as men in prison.

Why are the feminists who claim to want sexual equality not lobbying for affirmative action on these fronts?

The Crisis in Canadian Manufacturing

It is always amusing to read the Toronto Star—I haven’t seen a paper copy for years, but picked one up while in Canada this summer. It is like stepping into a different world. One that might have been familiar to Alice Liddell, as a little girl, when she sat on the knee of Lewis Carroll.

There was Carol Goar ringing the secular church bells in alarm over the crisis in Canada’s manufacturing sector (“Lean times in industrial heartland,” Star, July 27th). Apparently—who knew?—they are in decline; manufacturing is moving offshore. Something must be done—and it must, she stresses, be done by the federal government specifically. She notes that government has shovelled quite a few million to a few corporations already, speaking approvingly of $150 million given by Ontario to the forestry industry. Never mind that forestry is not actually manufacturing—all government money is good. But this is far too little. Even the billion plus given to the auto sector is, for Goar, far too little. We need more government spending, and more transfer of funds from the poor to big corporations; that goes without saying.

I can’t but feel from this that the Canadian left—the Star’s constituency—is living in the past. The decline in Canadian manufacturing is news? I am in my fifties now, and I have been aware of it all my life. The town I grew up in used to have forty different manufacturing concerns. It now has two, and earns its living from tourism. This fifty-year time lag in reporting the “news” tallies nicely with the recent uproar on the left (recent meaning to me within the last month, not the last century) about what was in the Catholic Latin mass before the 1950s. Indeed, the left generally gives the feeling that they have not yet emerged from the Great Depression. Perhaps they never will.

And it is indeed not just Goar, or just the Toronto Star. It must be more that coincidence that, speaking on the phone the next day to one of my leftist friends, and noting how prosperous Toronto is looking these days, he responded that it was all illusory, because in fact Canada is losing its manufacturing. Manufacturing is apparently the only real source of wealth.

No doubt many thought the same two hundred years ago—that Britain was heading to hell in a handcart with all these new factories, because it was losing its agricultural base. Land was the only real source of wealth. But we used at least to call that kind of thinking what it was—conservatism. To the modern left, doom is always just around the corner, and we must run backwards as fast as we can just to stay in the same place.

And no evidence of increasing Canadian prosperity, no matter how dramatic, can be real. Things must always be going from bad to worse to worst. If it isn’t global cooling, it’s global warming. If it isn’t desertification, it’s the shrinking deserts. All change is frightening. Only the status quo is good.

Of course, there really is a long-term decline in Canadian manufacturing; no dispute there. Canada is broadly moving from manufacturing into services, as manufacturing moves offshore.

To leftists like Goar, of course, “services” means only one thing: flipping burgers at McDonald’s. (As Goar puts it, “low wage jobs in the retail or hospitality sector.”) Not a bad job at all, really, a lot more fun than factory work, with better chance of advancement; but leftists hate McDonald’s. They have the prejudice of all idle elites against the stain of “commerce.” Pleasant and opportunity-full as a future at McDonald’s really is, though, in the real world, “services” also means banking, insurance, medicine, layering, accounting—not especially poorly-paying positions. And many good blue-collar jobs in transportation—trucking, for example, Canada’s single most common occupation. Indeed, the more manufacturing moves offshore, the more jobs there will be in transportation. Others of a blue collar bent might similarly enjoy piloting, air traffic control, barbering, cosmeticianship, construction, plumbing, electrical work, auto repair, boat repair, and on and on. All experiencing shortages, all well-paying, all services.

And, as Goar does not mention, or does not notice, that the same people also have growing opportunities in the resource sector. This cannot move offshore; and Canada’s uranium mines and oil patch are booming.

Leftists will argue, and Goar does argue, that, regardless of what other, better, jobs might be available, the average manufacturing factory worker does not have the skills for them (and, patronizingly enough, they believe the average factory worker does not have the intellect to learn them).

Now, this if true is only a problem if the decline in manufacturing is happening faster than the retirement rate can naturally reduce is workforce. Can this be true if the decline in manufacturing has been going on for at least fifty years? No, it cannot—anyone in manufacturing when the trend first became visible is already retired. If there was a problem, by now it is necessarily solved.

Conversely, anyone in manufacturing now has had their entire lifetimes to adjust; and has gone in aware of this issue, and taking it into consideration. Are they really, then, in need of and deserving of government help, which is to say, being supported financially by the rest of us? Are we obliged to save them from their own conscious choices?

Okay, let’s even say yes—and suppose that the money we have available to help others is unlimited, that there is no question even of setting priorities. Even so, if the decline in the manufacturing workforce is really faster than retirement can reduce it without dislocation, and manufacturing workers are really incapable of learning other work, this should logically show up in higher unemployment figures. Instead, the Canadian unemployment rate is down over the past fifty years or so, as Goar herself admits, with no sign of a recent jump. Despite the fact that the mass migration of women into the workforce over the same period ought logically to require twice as many jobs to be created, even leaving aside the growth in population from about twenty to about thirty million. With a growth in average income.

Odd, if there is a crisis at hand, that we have absolutely no evidence of it.

Goar and other leftists argue, in fact, that the apparent rise in jobs and employment masks people being forced to take worse jobs—i.e., flipping burgers at McDonald’s. (Perhaps even, God forbid, in the natural progression of things, ending up owning and operating their own McDonald’s outlet, or string of outlets.)

Let us even accept the dubious claim that former manufacturing employees are now commonly flipping burgers. It seems to me unlikely, since the people I see behind the counter at McD’s seem far too young to have had much seniority in any previous job. But let’s assume they are. Let’s even assume that working at McD’s is really a worse job than working in a factory—having worked both in a factory and in retail myself, I find this claim incredible, but let’s allow it. Does that justify the government taking money from the rest of us, and giving it to these former manufacturing workers, in compensation? Or worse, giving it to the shareholders of the corporations who employ them—since that is what Goar and other leftists actually propose?

I’d say just the reverse—because this necessarily means, if Goar is right about everything else, that she is demanding that people actually flipping burgers at McDonald’s—the great mass of us—despite their pitiable situation, have their money taken away from them and given to others who are much better off, corporate investors and possibly their employees, to protect the latter’s privileged position.

How can this be morally justified? How, indeed, does Goar and the left justify protecting or subsidizing manufacturing in rich Canada by any means, since it necessarily means taking money and jobs away from the poor in other countries—people necessarily poorer and needier than any Canadian?

As Alice might have said, curiouser and curiouser. The modern left seems built on one premise: that by calling anything “left-wing” or “progressive” or “liberal,” you can get away with it, no matter how reactionary, selfish, racist, and classist it is.

Thoughts As I Lay Dying

Over the past year, bizarrely, I have suffered all the symptoms of not one, but two different fatal illnesses, and twice briefly had fatal diagnoses.

It kind of makes you think. As Samuel Johnson said, “Nothing so concentrates the mind as knowing one is to be hanged in a fortnight.”

I wouldn’t mind checking out that much, really—we all die sooner or later, so it makes rather little difference whether it is sooner or later.

And most things in this world, the physical-social world, the world we leave at death, are only delusions. They are really the opposite of what they are commonly thought, and commonly claimed, to be.

Maybe that’s what the world is about. Maybe the world is a test; a puzzle, and it is up to us to solve it. If and when we do, we are ready for the next stage.

Four, or more, noble truths:

1. The world is a cock-up. Expect nothing, and don’t waste energy on it.

2. Trust only God—accept no substitutes.

3. If you’re good with God, it does not matter what anyone else thinks. If you’re n ot good with God, it does not matter what anyone else thinks.

4. Right and wrong are absolutes. They matter regardless of rewards and punishments.

5. God is God, and you are not.

6. God is in charge; there is no need for you to try to manage things. Things will go just fine without you.

7. It is better to be punished justly than to be rewarded unjustly.

8. When in need, pray. Believe, or not—it still works.

9. Any sin you can forgive in another when done to you, must necessarily be forgiven by God when done by you. For God’s mercy is greater than yours.

10. You cannot hide anything from God. Don’t waste energy trying.

11. Religious belief is not a matter of faith or will. It is the best explanation for things as they are.

12. God is never silent. Everything we perceive is his word. Sometimes we do not listen.

By the way, I got better.

Napoleon's Pyramid

Like most other apparently successful dictatorships, Napoleon’s seems to have been a pyramid scheme. He floated it all on exploiting conquered territories. This meant that continual conquest was necessary to keep the books balanced. Necessarily, this meant eventual collapse.

Hitler did the same; as a new book, Hitler’s Beneficiaries (Gotz Aly) outlines, the finances of Nazi Germany were quite mad. Albert Speer states plainly in his biography that much of the regime’s early financial success was achieved simply by printing money, while preventing the sort of transparent financial reporting that would have made this apparent.

But this was a short-term solution. Hence Hitler was under a financial necessity to plunder the Jews; quite apart from any racist motive, and he needed their money to keep the government afloat. Even the famous Kristallnacht pogrom was actually a matter of an urgent need to cover two billion marks in short term debt quickly coming due. Fortunately, the Jews were small in number, clearly identifiable (so that they could be singled out without frightening the larger population), and unusually wealthy. The Knights Templar, in their day, fell to an avaricious and needy government of France in exactly the same way for exactly the same reason. So did the Jesuits, centuries later. It could have been anyone else fitting the description; it just happened to be the Jews.

But it was not enough—couldn’t be, because this was a pyramid scheme. By 1939, the Nazis were spending 36.8 billion marks a year, on weaponry and welfare, and only taking in 17 billion marks in annual revenues.

Hence, as Hitler actually said in so many words at the time, war was inevitable. Hitler needed a larger pool to exploit. He could not possibly back down, no matter what the offered compromise: he needed Czechoslovakia to plunder, and then he needed Poland, and then, when Britain did not fall, he needed the Soviet Union.

This insight explains several other things that would otherwise be puzzling. For example, when the Germans first took the Ukraine, they were hailed as liberators. They had a great opportunity to enlist the Ukraine’s manpower in their support against Russia; and the same was true of most other non-Russian areas they took. Instead, they raped the conquered lands ruthlessly, losing the support of the people and requiring large numbers of solders just to keep the areas pacified.

Why? Because they could not afford to do anything else. And by doing this, Hitler probably managed to keep Stalin and Communism in power in the Soviet Union for generations longer than would otherwise have been the case.

Again, this explains the supposed Nazi “prejudice against women” that allows feminists to claim for women the aura of a group opposed by Hitler. Hitler always resisted putting German women into the workforce to replace the German men sent off to war. Officially, this might have been because “women’s place was in the home.” But the financial truth is that women would have had to be paid, and the government had no money. It was therefore far better from their point of view to use slave labour from the occupied territories.


This seems to be the way of most, if not all, dictators. Napoleon III did it, too, if in a smaller way, by confiscating the estates of the followers of the House of Orleans, his predecessor. After that, he relied on shady financing for the reconstruction of Paris, until this scheme collapsed. When Bismark attacked, he discovered France, now short of funds, had little more than a paper army. Iraq’s Saddam, similarly, was quite overtly forced to invade Kuwait because he owed them too much money as a result of his invasion of Iran. Others, with fewer military capabilities, are limited to exploiting helpless internal “enemies,” just as Hitler did at the start: Mugabe, Amin, Mao, Pol Pot. It’s the economy, stupid.

The most surprising thing about Napoleon is that the French still remember him, despite the ravages his rule caused, despite his brutality, despite his sending hundreds of thousands of young Frenchmen to their deaths unnecessarily, despite the ultimate loss of international position and prestige, fondly. This seems to me a specific example of the French preference for illusion over reality. He put on a good party; that’s what matters, no matter how the morning after feels.

But by and large, people do seem to like this sort of thing. People seem too ready to buy cons from their government that are too good to be true. They want a man on a white horse; and they are even inclined to remember the good days fondly after they are gone, not making the connection of the beginning with the inevitable end. The willing suspension of disbelief is a powerful thing.

As for current pyramid schemes, I continue to suspect China of being one. I suspect it will all come apart some day, probably soon. The lack of transparency makes it possible to conceal too much. The current excitement about the safety of Chinese goods may be enough to do it. Not that cutting corners on safety or quality is enough to explain China’s stats—but it might cause a recession sharp enough to cause the whole house to collapse, if it is a Ponzi scheme based on continual expansion.

More on the Threatened Mermaid

One of the problems with ecological studies showing that all kinds of animals and plants are endangered is that they are commonly funded by governments, or by NGOs with a mandate to protect the environment. Government is by far the largest source of funding for research of all kinds.

For a balanced view, there are two better sources: business, and think tanks.
Most of what think tanks do is funded by government or by business, but they also do studies on their own as a means of advertising their services and their abilities.

Corporations have a lot of good reasons for looking into the effect of their actions on the environment—the need to conform to government regulations, PR, and the need for sustainability of their profitable activities. The best thing about corporate research, though, is that it is often the only counterbalance to government-funded research, which tends to dominate the field.

There are any number of examples of hype in the ecology/environmentalism field. It’s hard to figure out what is not hype. According to Dr. Patrick Moore, the founder of Greenpeace, for example, the fastest way to increase biodiversity in a rainforest is to clearcut it. Mature growth forest is far from the ideal habitat for all species. The tall trees tend to muscle out a lot of other species. (Dr. Moore is no longer a fan of Greenpeace.)

But more than that—and this is me talking again--the best habitat on land for biomass as well as biodiversity is probably a wildlife park or a zoo; next to that someone’s urban garden; next to that, a farm.

Qatar used to have almost no resident bird species. Now there are many—and all have appeared since the 1980s. Why? With greater population and greater wealth, there is a lot more greenery in the city streets.

Among themselves, the eco-types have a conscious strategy of targeting “charismatic species” for PR purposes. That is, animals that people find good-looking, cute, fuzzy. They look for that stuffed animal quality.

This is obviously clever in propaganda terms. But is it honest? And does it give us a clear view of the situation? If nothing else, this should be a red flag warning us that such organizations indeed have vested interests, and are skewing what they tell us to promote those interests. This sort of thing is advertising, and should be approached with the same caution that we approach all advertising. Except that, unlike business advertisers, NGOs and government agencies are not liable to fraud charges.

Let’s look more closely at the “threatened” polar bear, current poster child for the ecologists:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0503/p13s01-wogi.html?page=1

Here is a study (I think it is from the WWF) that relies, like most such studies, on computer projections. Broken down by separate population groups, it seems to indicate that most are facing no real threat:

http://assets.panda.org/downloads/statusofthepolarbear_14thworkingmtg_iucn_pbsg.pdf

We do not know if such computer projections are accurate, mind; they have no history of being so.

Note that the polar regions share the advantage of the oceans for alarmists’ purposes: it is the one part of the earth’s land area on which we have the least data. Therefore, the worst can be imagined.

The one group that knows best, in terms of actual observation in the field, is the Eskimos (aka Inuit). They have been insisting for years that polar bear populations have been growing rapidly. Of course, they, like government and NGOs, have a vested interest: they want to be free to hunt them. But they also, as hunters, will probably want to be sure their hunt is sustainable.

http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/2007/articles01/davis.htm

And this looks like an example of the most reliable sort of research, something done by a think tank purely to demonstrate their research abilities:

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba551/

Meanwhile, the real story is not that species are disappearing—so far as we can tell, they are not. It is that new species keep being discovered. Not just tiny microorganisms, either. A large creature may be easy to see, if one is around, but by their nature, large creatures, especially large predators, are more likely to be rare throughout their range.

Here’s one specific example that is, literally, close to home. When I was a kid, I was interested in monsters, as many kids are, and I read a few books about such things. One of the monsters I kept coming across, along with Sasquatch, the Loch Ness monster, The Abominable Snowman, and so on, was the celebrated “Eastern cougar.” The claim was that a few people in New Brunswick, in the Canadian Maritimes, kept spotting large wild cats. But there are no big cats in Eastern Canada: the nearest big cat is the cougar or mountain lion, supposedly ranging no further east than the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains. And there are no mountains in New Brunswick, 3000 kilometers away.

Then, believe it or not, my own parents one summer insisted they say a big cat bound across a country road in front of them.

Then, a few years later, someone actually shot a specimen, and dragged it in to the nearest qualified scientist.

In Quebec.

It is no longer a mythical monster. The textbooks now all suddenly say the cougar or mountain lion ranges as far east as the Canadian Maritimes.

Just today, in the local Qatar paper, it was announced that the local natural history group had discovered a previously unknown species of sea slug on one of their weekend hikes.

Sea slugs are not that small.

We know what large species are present in densely populated, scientifically-oriented Europe. It gets iffier and iffier as one moves away from Europe. Amateurs out on weekend strolls are still “finding” new species in much of the world.

Meanwhile, actual, documented extinctions of species—as opposed to computer models and projections—are not common. Most known species seem to stubbornly keep surviving. And formerly “extinct” species are even rediscovered.
Consider this Wikipedia page, a list of extinct animals of Europe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals_of_Europe

It lists 72 extinctions in all of Europe since the Pleistocene era.
Seventy-two in the world’s most densely-populated continent since the Pleistocene.
Only a small minority of these extinctions would be recent. Only 26 of the 72 are noted to have occurred since 1600.

And two extinct species have been rediscovered in the last few years.

And how quickly are new species being discovered? An MSNBC story reports scientists finding new fish species at a clip of two a week, 106 a year. All would automatically go on the “endangered species list,” of course. Indeed, all new species discovered in, say, the last fifty years or so are probably rare enough to qualify as endangered. That’s five thousand, isn’t it? And that’s fish alone, never mind insects or protozoa—except that the rate of new discoveries is probably accelerating over time.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6565772/

Another paper lists 57 new neotropical mammals discovered in the eight years between 1992 and 2000. That’s mammals alone, and that’s neotropics alone. Say six a year, 3,000 over fifty years, all presumably on the endangered list.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1472-4642.2000.00080.x?cookieSet=1

The IUCN currently reports “16,119 species of animals and plants” “threatened with extinction.” You do the math. Subtract the above figures, and it does not leave a lot of room for anything _but_ newly discovered species, does it?

Next point: compare that figure, of 16,119 species “threatened with extinction,” with the number of those actually documented as extinct in all of Europe since the Pleistocene: 72. Seems as though in the wild, few species take this “threat of extinction” very seriously.

The Medium is the President

The best thing that has happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign so far is Bill Clinton’s book tour. Perfect for them, just as the campaign season begins. He is really, really good on the stump—one of the best retail politicians ever. He can do folksy sincerity better than anyone. Fake that, and you have it made. Hillary’s strongest argument for being president is that if you vote for her, you also get Bill.

Except—there is a real danger that seeing Bill again may remind voters how different Hillary is in this regard. “I knew Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was a friend of mine. And Hillary, you’re no Bill Clinton.” Clinton was and is hard to dislike. Now that he has no pressing need to lie, he is incredibly pleasant to listen to. Even his first Secret Service detail spotted that star quality—they gave him the code name “Elvis.” But Hillary? There is just something about her—a sweaty Nixonian, “not comfortable in her own skin” quality—that instinctively turns people off, even people who should support her ideologically.

I think this issue is extremely important to voters, in the end—more important than pundits seem to realize. And the people are right to consider it important. The US President, unlike a Canadian prime minister, is a symbol of the nation. Much of his effectiveness is based on his ability to sway public opinion—otherwise, he’s no more than a super-police-chief. Beyond vetoing it, he has no control over legislation. The “bully pulpit,” as Teddy Roosevelt put it, is the whole office.

This being so, it is important to the health of the US that the president be someone people enjoy seeing on their TV screens, and enjoy listening to. Someone with a “warm fuzzy” quotient. Bill Clinton has that. Hillary Clinton does not. She is somehow cold and sharp.

Cases in point: people trusted FDR’s voice on the radio. People loved the look of JFK on TV. Reagan had the skills of a seasoned actor, making him terribly hard to dislike: “the Teflon president.”

Counterexamples: Nixon, or Johnson, who were universally considered competent, but not personally likeable or physically attractive.

And their presidencies both ended in something like disaster.

Making it worse for Hillary, some others in the present race also have a lot of warm fuzzy quotient.

John Edwards, granted, is a bit too good-looking. People don’t like that. It makes them feel inadequate. Anne Coulter picked up on that. And all that stuff about haircuts, that’s what it’s really about. (Lucky for Bill Clinton that Monica Lewinsky was not especially good looking. Unlucky for Gary Hart that Donna Rice was). Better to have one or two obvious flaws, like Bill’s pudginess and bulbous nose. It helped Adlai Stevenson when he was photographed with a hole in his shoe, countering the general feeling that he was just too darned intelligent to be permitted to be president.


But Barack Obama? Get away. You just want him to succeed, with his eager schoolboy look. But not too good-looking: fortunately, he has big floppy ears.

There is a good chance, if he does not slip up, that he will wipe the floor with Hillarry in the primaries. If he does, he will be a much stronger candidate.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney has the same problem as John Edwards. Too perfect. He even looks like George Washington. If he wants to be president, he needs to muss up his hair, wear his tie askew, and fart in public

Rudy Giuliani, with his Pinocchio nose and Obama ears, does not have Romney’s problems. And he is another real charmer—very like Bill Clinton in his style. New York folksy—a guy from the hood. John McCain also has formidable skills—he came very close to getting the Republican nomination in 2000 on sheer charm. Because of it, he is a real threat to be a “comeback kid,” like Clinton in 92. Charm lets you do that.

And Fred Thompson, of course, has the skills of a successful actor. Not to be sneezed at. A magnificent voice, an impressive height—the taller candidate almost always wins—and pleasantly ugly. Not too good looking, but expressive, fun to look at. (McCain suffers a bit here—his face is less expressive than it might be).

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this warm fuzzy factor in an actual presidential election. Leaving aside all other considerations whatsoever, and running through all the presidential elections since the Second World War, the more likeable candidate almost always wins.

1948: Truman versus Dewey—Dewey, famously, was doomed by his moustache. Made him look sinister.

1952: Eisenhower versus Stevenson—as my father summarized it, Eisenhower came across as a regular guy, Stevenson as an “egghead.” So he voted Eisenhower.

1956: Stevenson was still an egghead.

1960: Kennedy versus Nixon—as we all know, Kennedy looked better on TV.

1964: Johnson versus Goldwater—this one really tests the thesis. Johnson was not likeable, and as I remember Goldwater, he was. Yet Johnson won in a historic landslide. Why?

There was a catch in Goldwater’s voice, which gave it a harsh and even a desperate-sounding quality. This was crystallized in the public consciousness as a suspicion he might actually be deranged. “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”

1968: Nixon versus Humphrey—okay, Nixon was not likeable, but nobody in their right mind could have handled listening to Humphrey’s squeaky voice for four years.

1972: Nixon versus McGovern—McGovern’s voice was even more annoying than Humphrey’s. There was something wrong with his adenoids or his testicles, surely.

1976: Ford versus Carter—close call. Both were generally likeable. But Ford got an image for being bumbling. People start laughing at you, not with you, you lose the gravitas for being president.

1980: Carter versus Reagan—no contest. Reagan could pretty well mop the floor with anyone on personal likeability and stage presence. Meantime, Carter’s constant smile could only work for so long before it started to grate. You kind of wanted to plant your fist in his face after a while.

1984: Reagan versus Mondale. Nobody could stand up to Reagan. But Mondale also has a bit of a pip-squeak to his voice. Must be a Minnesota thing.

1988: Bush I versus Dukakis—close call, on the face of it. But perhaps by bad luck, Dukakis got filmed looking very goofy in a tank, and that image killed him. People start laughing at you, you’re toast. The Willie Horton thing mostly just underlined the impression that Dukakis was a lightweight. But in the end, didn’t this also have a lot to do with his lack of physical stature next to the gangling Bush? A little guy for a big job?

1992: Bush I versus Clinton—Elvis has entered the building. Bush looked wooden by contrast.

1996: Clinton versus Dole—Dole looked a bit like Nixon—too much five o-clock shadow. This made him look sinister. Too much edge to his voice, and too sharp a tongue. He always sounded a bit sarcastic.

2000: Gore versus Bush II—Gore looked like an inflated balloon; he did not know where to put his hands. Bush came across as a regular guy.

2004: Bush II versus Kerry—as above. Wheezing and whining and a doleful face—who wants that on their TV for four years? Who wants a mortician for president?


I think, based on this, you can pretty much predict the outcome of the presidency now. If the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, she will lose to any likely Republican nominee. If they nominate Obama, it will be a close contest against anyone on the Republican side.

For the Republicans, Thompson is probably their strongest choice--unless his acting skills fail him to the point of actually looking like an actor playing a part.