One of the standard Ron Paul stories picked up by the mainstream media and repeated ad nauseum is his reputed unpopularity with self-identified Christians, and Evangelical Protestants in particular. It is usually stated that fans of Paul (that is Paul of Texas, not Tarsus) usually chime in at about 15% of the Evangelical demographic. What the articles don't point out is that this is about the average for most other demographics as well, unless you're talking about young people and party independents or for that matter "mind independents" in which case the digits could easily be reversed, making for a slim majority.

Be that as it may, voting for Ron Paul is a no brainer for any Christian, and I don't mean just those who style themselves "Christian libertarians"…albeit these latter have a noble pedigree going all the way back to John Lock himself (and no, I don't mean the spooky character on Lost, but the authentic article who inspired the Founders). After all, it's not fair to box Christians into some sort of air-tight ideological compartment, since according to the gospel one is supposed to be accountable to the Spirit rather than the supposed consistency of worldly philosophies.

So if you'll just bear with me, I'd like to demonstrate how Dr. Paul is right about the "one big thing" that all Christians, not to mention right-minded people of any religious persuasion, should use as their criterion when they walk into an election booth. Everything else besides that "one big thing" is just small stuff, and since God is in ultimate control anyway, why not let him take care of that? In this context "small" doesn't mean trivial. In fact it pretty much includes all those gripping issues which animate the American culture wars. Take for example the pro-life/pro-choice question. Dr. Paul has expressed his pro-life convictions in no uncertain terms. But then since all the other Republican candidates have sported a pro-life stance this is no special reason to vote for the good doctor…unless experience and depth of conviction count for something. Furthermore, there isn't much a president could do about overturning Roe vs. Wade anyway. It is the kind of small stuff which will play out in history apart from the will, for good or ill, of any single elected magistrate.

What about the issue of war and peace? Consequential yes, but still small stuff. You may be a pious pacifist, while I may think that lobbing daisy cutters down on the turbaned heads of Ayatollahs is exactly what Jesus would do. But the future is an enigma…and a rather terrifying one at that. People who try to comfort themselves by deducing concrete policy from prophecy are surely reading their own prejudices into the future. For my own part, I find even the past hard to understand without faith. At least with the past we have eyes to see in the form of documents, testimony, and collective memory…although any or all of these may be a source of delusions. Conversely, when we gaze into the future all we see is a big blind spot. And it's not just you and me, poor creatures that we are, but the "big brass," the policy wonks, and the so-called intelligence community, who are blind as well. Of course they have a reputation to protect, so we are told otherwise. However there is only One who knows the future, and it is His small stuff to sweat.

By now, O right-thinking brethren and sisters, if I haven't aroused your indignation at what constitutes "the small stuff" let me throw down one last gauntlet. What about freedom and slavery? Consequential yes, but still small stuff. Certainly having libertarian leaning politicians running for office, either the intrepid Dr. Paul or someone else, is not sufficient cause to preserve or restore America's freedom. In fact, I hate to broach a rather unpleasant subject, but God makes sure that nations which deserve slavery will get their tyrant and nations which deserve freedom will get their liberators. It's not the pool of wannabe tyrants and/or liberators (yes, sometimes people are unsure of their career trajectories) which happens to be the controlling variable in human events. Honestly, the state of the culture, politically or otherwise, doesn't seem to auger well on this point, but it is still a hopeful barometer that Dr. Paul has come as far as he has. Our freedom or unfreedom is just another bit of small stuff which will be taken care of for us provided we cooperate by attaining some degree of clarity on an even more fundamental matter.

Now how can I dismiss politicians' statements on life, peace, and freedom as secondary issues with little bearing on our preference for a candidate? Is this some perverse form of fatalism? No, because there is an issue which is prior to any of this "small stuff" and which everyone must vote "yea" or "nay" upon. It's an issue which, aside from Christians, even commands the convictions of atheists and other people who reject any notion that God is taking care of the small stuff. Moreover, in comparison to the glorious small stuff this issue is so basic as to be anticlimactic.

It's the question of whether the candidate lies or not.

Until this issue is settled, and settled clearly, there is no point in finding out what the candidates are intending to do with your life, your freedom, world peace, or all that other small stuff. People of a scholarly ilk, such as Immanuel Kant, Ludwig von Mises and yours truly have a penchant for using Latin words like a priori or "the primacy of epistemology over ontology" but let's face it, Jesus put it in a nutshell when he declared "I am the truth…" followed by, "…the way and the life." He also left us some exceedingly helpful hints as to who the "father of lies" was, and I trust nobody wants to see that guy's children in high office. Or rather, on the more realistic assumption that they presently occupy high office, they ought to at least be voted out!

At this point I have to issue a disclaimer. Nothing is easier to do than to demonize someone. You don't even have to be a demon to do it, just an ogre-like human being with a big rusty axe to grind. Politicians are just sinners, the same you and me. True, I do fancy that the Pauls of Tarsus and Texas might be a rung or two above the rest of us in saintliness, but that's just idle speculation. Unfortunately Christians sometimes lack an ability to discern fact from fantasy, the Screwtape Letters from the screw-ups of mundane existence. Far be it for me to suggest that even the most corrupt politician wakes up in the morning to pray "Father of Lies, how may I do thy bidding?" Of course that's not how it works.

Rather, you may legitimately ask, if that is not how it works then how does it work? Furthermore, from a practical point of view, what is the mechanism of deceit which corrupts politics, not just in the ordinary sense of the corrupt use of power and money, but in the deeper, and nearly universal sense that politics creates an illusionary reality detrimental to honest social and economic relations. If we can obtain a clearer understanding of this mechanism, then we will have at least a crack at distinguishing the children of the lie from the men and women of candor. Candid, not perfect, is the watchword, for even a Christian is just a sinner who admits the truth. Neither is it a confessional issue, and it seems to me that Luther struck the right note when he said it would be better to have an honest Turk than a corrupt Christian as emperor. Of course it doesn't follow, as the politically correct of our day would suggest, that all "Turks" (Luther meant muslims, but they would cipher it as people belonging to officially sanctioned victim groups) are honest!

So on the plausible assumption that nobody "worships evil"…indeed, the theologians claim that evil, being a negative, doesn't even exist…we can infer that the corruption of politics, like the corruption of an individual, arises from a kind of perverted love. I suppose there is some consolation in the thought that the lies of a politician are not motivated by negativity but by an excess of what might be termed "political eros." Given that assumption, we can imagine politicians being engaged in a courtship ritual with their constituency, a ritual which is called a political campaign. Of course they would like to be the dominant partner in the relationship, to "sway the constituency" as it is put. But successful politicians in democratic countries soon find out what science discovered about nature during the Renaissance, that to rule over something one must obey it. Or in political terms, to capture a constituency one must first capitulate to the interests and prejudices of that constituency.

This is what we have seen in the Republican debates, not candidates but suitors. Whatever the constituency wants the candidates are eager to endorse…and here "the constituency" doesn't just mean the primary voters, but the contributors as well, including the PACs and the super PACs. During the course of the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary, Romney, Gingritch, and all the others (except Paul) have been accused of various inconsistencies, if not wholesale reinvention of their political persona. But since when is inconsistency a vice in lovers who try all avenues to gain access to the hearts and minds of the beloved? In principle, this political eros is no more complicated than "What do you want me to be?" albeit the mavens of advertizing, marketing, and crowd psychology claim to have made it into a science.

In comparison to these politically erotic men (and lest we forget, women too, even though Republican contenders of the fair sex are presently scorned) Dr. Paul is a decidedly cold fish. This is rather ironic in light of the Paulist slogan "r3VOLution" yet it may be that the spelling of the word backward provides a helpful cipher. After all, Christians have become suspicious, and quite rightly so, of the bandying about that the L-word (yes, even the old heterosexual L-word) gets in post-Christian society. C.S. Lewis, with his usual discernment, notes in his book The Four Loves that we must submit the claims of love to close scrutiny for "…just as Lucifer – a former arch-angel – perverted himself by pride and fell into depravity, so can love – commonly held to be the arch-emotion – become corrupted by presuming to be what it is not."

The question then becomes "Love of what?" Love of power is too crass an accusation. Rather we should talk of love of empowerment, which is simply the same thing prefixed. Here the difference, or rather lack of it, is rather similar to the distinction between "populism" which smells of the lynch mob, and noble "democracy"… which just goes to show that, apart from roses, giving something a different name does change its scent. Indeed, the empowerment of a constituency may be a beautiful thing to behold, but the Houdini-like contortions and moral metamorphoses that candidates undergo to obtain their favor is as ugly as sin, because that's precisely what it is.

It's amazing that at this state of American cultural devolution there is even one exception to this kind of politics, but Dr. Paul is on record as saying the following about the function of a libertarian politician.

Limited-government politicians have an image problem because they won't give out free handouts. To defeat this perception, voters need to understand basic economics so they will know that they are the ones who will pay for dubious government plans. Thus, limited government politicians have a tough task: their campaigns must be educational in nature. (Ron Paul, A Life of Ideas p. 70)

Libertarians are often accused of trying to abolish the political dimension of social life, but in fact what Paul's limited government politician ideally accomplishes is to restore a respect for truth and understanding to the political process. Paradoxically, it is the anti-free enterprise conservatives and liberals who treat constituencies as markets where the supposed iron law of consumer sovereignty prevails. Here "consumer sovereignty" is just a modern term of art which means the same as what the Bible calls "serving Mammon." Though people quip that it was "odd of God to choose the Jews" it is even odder that the libertarian should be the only candidate to choose political education over consumer sovereignty!

A great deal could be said about this, but at the very least Christians should note the congruence between the kind of leadership which is advocated above and the gospel's insistence on objective truth which is no respecter of fickle human opinion. And Americans in general should welcome a restoration of the kind of issue-driven debate which characterized the American republic in its classical phase. The best example of this is Abraham Lincoln himself, at least Lincoln when he was still his early libertarian self, untainted by executive power. He campaigned vigorously, not because he wanted to please the people of Illinois, but because wanted to make a point. He was in love with something as impersonal as a syllogism: All men are free by nature/ all races are human/ therefore all people should be free. Now that's a cold fish! Needless to say his constituencies paid him back by voting against him more often than not.

Abraham Lincoln, Ron Paul, yes, imperfect men to be sure. I'm not convinced, for example, that Lincoln's greenback currency was such a great idea, and there are one or two points where I find myself in disagreement with the representative from Lake Jackson too. But for those of us who know that God is sweating the small stuff, unity of mind on political doctrine is neither necessary nor desirable. What consecrates a man or woman to political mission is something far more important than any one partisan plank. It comes down to who is your lover, the mob or the truth? If the latter, you may keep your soul. If the former, well, you still may keep it provided only that the mob remains virtuous and consistent in its opinions.

If God is sweating the small stuff then we don't need candidates who are right about everything, even in religion, let alone politics. But we at least need candidates who are honestly struggling to discern truth from falsehood, and who love something higher than the idolatry of human opinion. Jesus chose Nathan while he was sitting under the tree because he was "without guile." In fact Nathan had all sorts of misconceptions and lacunae in his knowledge, points which Jesus would have to painstakingly educate him on. But Nathan had a naïve love of wisdom, as opposed the "wise guy's" love of that cunning understanding which allows one to get ahead in a corrupt world. In short, Nathan, for all his faults, was the kind of material that Jesus could at least work with.

That's what the r3VOLution is about, reversing people's disordered, perverted perspectives on love. In this case the problem is not sexual love, but rather the public loves of patriotism, democracy, and politics. Loves which easily become idolatrous if they aren't subordinated to criticism and limitation. Loves who's "guile" must be cleansed by exposure to a higher love for truth.

Can any American wish for more?

Can any Christian demand less?

R3VOLUTION!

Mark Sunwall [send him email] studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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By now the left-wing press has said so many rude things about Sarah Palin that it would be superfluous to add to the stew. The Republican vice presidential nominee no doubt has her flaws, but seems to be the sort of solid pit bull of a mother without which no American community could long function. More than Palin herself, it’s her appeal which seems so over the top, an idol set up by certain people who, in any other context, would be the first to condemn idolatry. After all, if you think the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 A.D. was too liberal on the subject of icons…it might also behoove one to keep a cool distance from political messiahs of either sex.

And yet…perhaps there is nothing wrong with a little bit of hero, or rather heroine, worship in this particular case. Palin has tapped into the populist streak in the American psyche, and she has the bona fides to do it. It’s the general feeling…a feeling based on considerable evidence, that the United States is run in the interests of a series of interlocking elites, not "we the people," which has coronated a hockey mom from Wasilla as the darling of the "overfly states" as well as Alaska. The only irony is that the enthusiasm is all out of proportion to the office which she seeks.

No, I don’t mean the vice presidency.

Let’s face it (Dick Cheney aside), nobody runs for the splendid chance of ruling from the Naval Observatory for four years. Anyone who resides at that address, under present political circumstances, is just engaged in a four or eight year campaign for higher office. Interestingly enough, this wasn’t the plan of the original constitution. The founders, being acute students of history, started off thinking in terms of the Roman consulate. They knew that the Romans had a co-presidency, elected each year and rotating responsibility for domestic and foreign affairs. This notion was quickly torpedoed by the crypto-monarchic movement of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists; however a vestige of vice presidential consulship was retained until the ratification of the 12th amendment in 1804. Up until that time America’s second magistrate was also the runner-up in the previous presidential election. For example, sans that amendment, John Kerry would have been the leader of the senate under Bush…a position of considerable power, particularly if, as in the past two years, the legislative and executive had been controlled by different parties. In that case the vice presidency would have the potential of becoming "the executive of the legislature"…a kind of semi-parliamentary office.

But enough of alternate history: in post-12th-amendment reality the vice president is the creature of the President, who is not only chief magistrate but the head of his (or her!) party. The only exception (purely hypothetical I am sure) would be if the president were such a weak character that he became dominated by the gravitas and expertise of the junior office holder. Now that might be somebody…but not John McCain.

Once having established that the vice president is a creature of the senior magistrate, we can safely conclude that a woman of Sarah Palin’s potential has no possible interest in that office, other than for use as a tent to ice-fish for something else. And since the u2018something else’ is obvious we can move on to the taboo question: Who is the President a creature of?

"God!" Yes Sarah, as indeed we all are, but in this context we are referring to…

"The People." Text book correct…which is to say completely false. The idea of a populist presidency is a mirage. It just can’t, and never will happen. Certainly America has had its share of populist leaders, and some of them have even campaigned for the supreme office. There was William Jennings Bryan, who struck many of the same chords a hundred years ago that Sarah Palin does today…but he never became president. Not for want of trying, but because the presidency is just not that sort of animal…it was not intended to represent the American people or its values.

Shocking? If you can’t remember this having been taught in school, don’t worry, it probably wasn’t. But the founders who established the office knew well enough what they were doing. They were familiar with the notion of a tribunate: a high office in which the will of the people is expressed through concentrated executive power for democratic ends. For very good reasons the founders abhorred this notion, and created the presidency to be a kind of anti-tribunate.

Yes Sarah, imagine that! The office of the presidency, the one that you intend to seek in four to eight years, was designed explicitly by Alexander Hamilton and like-minded men to keep power out of the hands of the people. To be specific, it was intended to keep power in the hands of an eastern establishment centered around New York, Philadelphia, and later the custom-designed capital we now call "Washington." And ever since then the office has functioned very well in accordance with the original plan.

It seems our Sarah may have to decide between the office and her status as one of the "we" in "we the people"…or at least the wee people as opposed to the big (and generally bad) people. But in the case of the contemporary presidency it gets even worse. For there is yet a further complication, one that not even the Machiavellian brain of Mr. Hamilton could fully imagine in his time. However his much wiser contemporary, the Anti-federalist leader George Mason, did grasp the future danger. In reward for his perspicacity Mason (until recently) has been held up as a faithless prophet of doom. Yet in a sense Mason predicted that the presidency would work even better than its planners envisioned. The Federalists intended to make the executive, in the interests of stability, the guarantor of a national elite, but Mason went beyond this, and suggested that the presidency would function, or perhaps dysfunction, as the agent of foreign interests.

To be sure Mason was off on some of the specifics of his prophecy. On June 17th 1788 he delivered a speech to the constitutional convention claiming that the president would eventually wind up serving for life and be corrupted by foreign powers. While American presidents don’t literally serve for life, they are part of a continuously seated government which is an easy target for both domestic and foreign lobbyists. Mason stated that this highly visible concentration of power would make it easy for anyone in the world to purchase the good will of the president. Or to put it in the crassest terms, it is easier to purchase one office-holder than many.

(Nota bene: "purchase" may refer to any binding contract, transacted through media such as common interest, sentiment, honor, or prejudice…not just the obvious lucre.)

One must remember that, while it may have taken America’s rise to globalism to highlight the efficiency of the chief executive to foreign interests, the function was already inherent in the office, not the result of some sort of post-Wilsonian policy revolution. It is a structural aspect of our system of government, safely beyond ideological shifts between left and right, internationalist or nativist. Now, contrary to the Tom Tancredos of this world, I’m not entirely convinced that the dictation of policy in Washington by foreign lobbyists is any more evil than its dictation by their domestic counterparts, but it is decidedly no more "populist." After all, it is not the leaders of world’s democratic movements which have come to joyously join their votes with our representatives in Washington. The foreigners are ruled by their elites as well.

If this sketch of the presidency, in its essence and its very constitutional inception, is even half true (say, the half about being an agent of domestic powers…not to mention foreign powers) I do think it puts Sarah Palin’s political ambitions in a rather tragic light. For if she is sincere in her desire to turn self-rule back to the people outside the Washington beltway, there will have to come a point at which she recognizes that the very office she seeks is the chief obstacle to her aim. There may be something comical about comparing her popularity to that of Eva Peron. After all, what would the Argentine descamisados (lit. "shirtless ones") of Evita’s day have in common with today’s Alaskan moose hunters insulated in their vinyl and down jackets? But like our Sarah, Evita was nothing if not sincere. It wasn’t for want of beauty or a strong will that her reform movement failed. It was rather that one woman couldn’t change the prevailing reality of her land: a country settled by first world immigrants, which was swiftly attaining third-world status.

In spite of the best efforts of government economists the United States has yet to attain perfect third-world status, but we already have tragedy enough: a country settled by people seeking freedom from molestation has morphed into a meddling, interventionist empire. Sarah Palin seems to have made her peace with the "empire" side of the equation, but she wants an empire ruled by the families next door, the good people of Wasilla and all those other towns of middle America where honesty and decency still flourish. And who knows, perhaps the axiom "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" can be gotten around somehow, either by pure force of will and good character…or failing that, a miracle.

Well, Evita believed in miracles too.

Mark Sunwall [send him email] studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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The Pentagon
is spending an unprecedented $300 million this summer on research
for post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury,
offering hope not only for troops but hundreds of civilians.

~
Gregg Zoroya, Aug. 6th edition, USA TODAY

No
doubt the opportunity for extended research reported on by USA Today
will be welcomed as one of the more benevolent spin-offs of the
war in Iraq, even while what is called research might more correctly
be termed reparations and serves to mask the fact that combat-related
post-traumatic injury resulting from that war was 100% preventable…at
least as late as 2003. But then, instead of moral memory, today
we have scientific inquiry into the loss of memory. This latter
must be considered a phenomenon not an effect, since an effect implies
a cause, and in the blinkered world of scientism there can be no
discussion of causes, other than physiological ones.

Now
ever since the time of Destutt de Tracy (oddly enough, one of Thomas
Jefferson's boon companions) a movement has been afoot to make science
an "ideology" of the state. Today the process is virtually
complete, unnoticed apart from a few curmudgeons who insist on the
distinction between science and scientism. Fortunately scientism
has not lived up to the promises of its ideological founders, who
were loath to put any limit on the promises of empirical research.
Does evil exist? Aha! There's a stimulating question and perhaps
some agency could commission a study on the subject. Is aggression
wrong? Certainly the answer would be worth a few piddling hundred
million in research funds. Of course any such clumsy attempts by
science to take over the function of religion and ethics would invoke
ridicule. Rather, the questions themselves have been conveniently
abolished from the corridors of science.

Clearly,
our problem today is memory loss, and not just among the soldiers
coming back with brain injuries…although they are the most visible
and tragic symbols of a problem which has become pandemic. The very
method which society uses to attack its ills has rendered us all
amnesiac. In our times smuggling in the moral prejudices of civilization
would be like starting a university lecture with an unwiped blackboard…so
the ethical scientist must resort to palliative measures, beginning
de novo and piecemeal among the ruins…a truly heroic venture
requiring supercomputers, large research teams, and generous state
funding.

One
medico involved is reported to have exclaimed of the Pentagon funding,
"It is huge…it is…just the most…enormous thing that has happened
in traumatic brain injury research." (USA Today, ibid.) Enormous
indeed! Like the happy villagers in Bastiat's famous allegory, the
awed researchers, physicians, and grant administrators are gloating
as if some providential vandal had broken the plate glass in every
hospital from the Mayo Clinic to Miami, requiring massive reinvestment
on infrastructure. But of course the situation is complicated by
urgent humanitarian concerns, concerns which compel us to agree
that if funds actually manage to trickle down to care and therapeutics
we should let a thousand flowers grow. After all, once a human being
has become so battered and traumatized that he or she can no longer
make decisions on personal recognizance, then yes, let the physician
and the care giver use whatever means available in putting the pieces
of the wounded soul back together, no matter that the means be dropped
by Pentagon helicopters.

Yet it is important to remember how that person in need of material
care has been reduced to what we call a "patient," as
opposed to an "agent," someone exercising free will in
a social setting. And knowing the particulars of how men and women
have been placed into such hellish predicaments by society requires
the study of agency, that is, of human culpability, not just natural
causes. Few people realize that one of the best studies in the moral
philosophy of agency was made by Ludwig von Mises, known today almost
exclusively as an economist. In his Theory
and History, he rejected the materialist doctrine that mental
illness is entirely the result of material causes. He noted that
Charcot, Breuer, and Freud reversed the traditional thinking of
psychiatrics in which mental illness was the ineluctable result
of physiological causes.

Well
yes, certainly the proximate causes of combat trauma are physical,
but what of the ultimate causes? What of the minds which, of their
own free will, committed the troops to a fruitless cause? Will any
amount of research, however well funded, be able to trace the links
of causality back up to a point in the past where destiny was still
fluid and the trauma preventable? No, even in the absence of friendly
dissuasion and political pressure, any such attempt will sooner
or later run up against a logical firewall: free actions cannot
be operationalized, measured or enumerated…therefore they are beyond
the pale of rational investigation. Hence the scientific variant
of legal immunity, which doesn't even require a presidential pardon.

You
see, the madness is in the method! Its logic runs as follows: we
cannot have a science of human decisions, and human history is the
outcome of countless decisions, therefore we cannot know anything
about what occurred before the present. The corollary of this is
that we must remain obstinately agnostic about everything except
the gross facts which confront us and their visible antecedents.
Or, as Charley Reese has put it so poetically, it is left to each
generation to "rediscover the existence of sin." History
being unknowable, we are doomed to repeat it, and suffer the insult
of surprise along with other, and multiple, injuries, thus manufacturing
a windfall of ignorance which steadily accrues to the fortunes of
the political class.

But
of course there is something terribly wrong here, because we do
know something about the past, even about that indirectly experienced
past which we call "history"…although we are at a loss
to explain precisely how it is that we happen to know. It is as
if we had a mystical intuition which told us stepping off the next
precipice will lead to unpleasant consequences, even though we cannot
recall performing the experiment in recent memory.

One
might venture all sorts of hypotheses regarding this uncanny perspicacity
of the scientifically untutored mind, ranging from innate ideas
to reincarnation. However the most economical hypothesis is that
we know because we have been told, told by people who lived before
our own generation. Thus, at least in principle, we are not reliant
on stretching out our hands to see if the flame burns. We are not
even limited to what our parents taught us, because we have a further
means of communication from the Great Beyond. It is a source of
knowledge which is stronger than the grave, though weaker than the
apodictic certainty demanded by scientific fundamentalists. This
source of knowledge we call "literature."

We
learn about the joys and pitfalls of life from literature, even
if today we are more likely to encounter the content of books in
their more popular media avatars. In either form, we learn from
stories, not from case histories or statistical surveys…the latter
being no more nourishing to the moral memory than the proverbial
stones for bread. (And if there are some genres, like the anthropological
monograph, which partake of both categories…these borderlands testify
all the more to a basic distinction.) Literature may or may not
teach us, but it certainly robs us of any claims to exceptionalism
or exculpatory innocence. We should have learned about obsession
from Dostoyevski, about society from Austin, about suffering from
O'Conner, and about war from Crane and Tolstoy. True, we are likely
to keep on making the same old mistakes, but unlike the immaculate
ignorance which scientism seeks to instill in us, a world in which
every day starts off with a new null hypothesis and absolution from
the past, literature should at least teach us a sense of awe at
the fragility of life lived in the shadow of old Adam's bad moral
habits.

Which
reminds me of a story somebody told about a man named Erick who
worked in a Veteran's Hospital during the Korean war. Actually he
was a veteran of the war before that. Now of course we have veterans
of the war after that and after that and after that ad infinitum.
Well, this Erick was an orderly in the hospital, but to all intents
and purposes his personal background and psychological profile resembled
a typical patient. He was stuck in a great scientific/bureaucratic/therapeutic
machine which ran relentlessly onward. If you looked at one end
of it, it seemed to offer hope. But this Erick got to thinking,
and the more he pondered the matter the more it seemed to him that
the war and its medical aftermath were all part of one seamless
event. That is, the war was never over…even though he was living
in a university town deep in the Midwest of America, he was still
mentally on a battlefield. To be sure, Erick was trying to get a
new start on life: exploring his career options, thinking of taking
more education, and making some new moves in his love life…but in
actual fact, nobody is able to start their life over in an absolute
sense. Rather, he started to realize that, in spite of being an
orderly and carrying The
Keys to Nine West, he was as locked in as the mental patients
whom he was locking up every night. If you want to find out how
Erick resolved his dilemma you can read about it in the book of
that title.

I
mention this story because it is the earliest treatment of post-combat
trauma of which I am aware. That is, a literary rather than a scientific
treatment. It was written by my father during the Eisenhower administration,
long before the subject had become widely acknowledged. It is during
in the summer of '52, so much like the summer of '08 that Erick
must endure the seeming fatality of events,

He kept the
radio on almost constantly, going to sleep with it on and jarring
awake at six when it began to blare the Star Spangled Banner.
The music was interrupted throughout broadcast time with news
of the delegate fights and Ike and Taft's arrival in Chicago.
Erick wished savagely that neither would get those delegates,
that some obscure senator or governor from a western state would
get the nomination, sending the politicians into consternation
and despair. But this was an old habit of his, to hope for some
spectacular and fantastic catastrophe which would upset the order
of things and miraculously set everything right. The expected
always happened, of course, as the order of unalterable law rolled
and crushed. (ibid, p.111)

Erick's
feeling of being "rolled and crushed" by the "order
of unalterable law" that is, historical law, accurately describes
the reaction of any sensitive person to the seemingly ineluctable
progression of political events. This is the other great fallacy
which abets the loss of moral memory…the notion that history is
determined by some sort of unalterable organic pattern. After all,
this seems plausible in light of our historical experience with
each new generation being sacrificed to another war. However there
is a crucial difference between the valid formulation: "those
who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" and
its more popular ellipsis "history repeats itself"…the
latter being a tempting snare for those who lack the energy or inclination
to analyze their own, and their country's, past.

As
Mises explains in Theory and History, "historical laws"
have no more real existence than the snark. The tendency towards
repetition in human events is the result of psychological motives
which we recognize, in literature and elsewhere, as being common
to humanity. However it is important to acknowledge that these motives
themselves are not subject to any kind of exact scientific description.
We can only understand the free-willing personality in an approximate
and indeterminate way. Indeed, it may be possible to create sciences
of behavioral observation and control, but the objects studied are
no longer free personalities…through clumsy intervention they have
been rendered as morally dead as Schrdinger's proverbial cat. In
fact, Mises was so adamant about the distinction of behavioral and
literary psychology, that he invented a separate name "thymology"
for the latter.

Literature
represents a movement in the opposite direction from scientism,
towards the recollection of history and the recovery of freedom.
However terrible the forces of fatality may press down on the characters
of the plot, the intent of the author is to enlighten the reader,
making him or her sadder, wiser, and less inclined toward cupidity
the next time around…while the window of freedom and humanity is
still an option. In contrast, science may be able to ameliorate
the human suffering from the Iraq war, but it can't prevent the
next war…indeed, it won't even let us know if the next war is preventable
in principle. Is it?

August
18, 2008

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches
Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an
Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute.

DIGG THIS

A poll
out Monday …showed that nearly a quarter [of Britons] think Winston
Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes
was real. ~ AFP
Feb. 3, 2008

If
you were one of the thousands taken in by the "Ron Paul"
hoax, possibly maxing out your campaign contributions, don't get
angry, get happy…because there's a silver lining to this cause without
a rebel. Just in case you haven't heard, our favorite urban myth
was exploded yesterday in a terse press release from Rationalization:
The official magazine of Beltway Libertarianism. To follow up
on the story Rationalization has tracked down Don Tazmibro,
putative campaign manager for America's most famous fictional candidate.
Whether you're in a state of denial, or just think that you've denied
the state it's monopoly on absurdity, what he told our reporter
should be of interest.

Rationalization:
I'm sure a lot of people are surprised and upset to learn that Ron
Paul doesn't exist. Don't you think you owe his supporters an apology?

Tazmibro: Upset…yes, I think I can understand that. But I don't
think anyone could really be surprised. Ron Paul has always been
a non-person in Washington and the national media…when, on top of
that, he turned out to be a mythical as well, it shouldn't be particularly
astonishing.

Rationalization:
As you know there are still some people who claim that Ron Paul
exists…how are you going to deal with that?

Tazmibro:
I don't see that there is a problem there. It's like Elvis sightings,
people see him because they want to…that's all there is to it.

Rationalization:
So he gives people hope…like Superman.

Tazmibro:
Something like that.

Rationalization:
What's surprising to me is how long you got away with it…especially
in today's age of the internet when there are all sorts of skeptic
groups, you know, the ones who go after false claims and hoaxes…they
should have been on to "Ron Paul" as soon as you can say
Bigfoot.

Tazmibro: It's a little unfair to say they were asleep at the wheel,
since we were aided by an unusual set of circumstances, all of which
conspired to give "Ron Paul" the benefit of the doubt,
even among professional doubters. These things work like stage magic,
you have to have some sort distraction, something which puts the
skeptics off on the wrong tack.

Rationalization:
I see, and what would that have been?

Tazmibro:
Well, remember in the early days of the campaign, when the "Ron
Paul" phenomenon really started to get off the ground. Of course
there were all these blogs and youtubes and whatnot…and suspicious
minds being what they are…they could figure out that something was
going on. But they took the bait, and pretty much said something
like the following: "Look, there can't be so many Ron Paul
supporters out there, it must be done with mirrors." They thought
there was a candidate with no supporters.

Rationalization:
When in fact there were supporters without a candidate!

Tazmibro:
Precisely! That was the misdirection, and you know, the skeptics
could never extract themselves from that obsession once they had
taken the bait…it was all about "Ron Paul's" support in
this or that demographic…nobody ever thought of reversing the telescope
and taking a hard look at whether someone so remarkably like one
of the founding fathers could really exist in today's political
world. It was an illusion which only became more efficacious with
the exponential increase of "Ron Paul's" following…the
supporters tended to give the candidate credibility…or at least
reality.

Rationalization:
I'd like to talk a little bit about how you conjured up the candidate.

Tazmibro: Well, there's nothing to that! Anybody who, say, had been
a subcontractor with a Disney firm and had access to the internet
could have done it. Naturally we didn't want anyone who looked like
a modern politician…so we settled on an avuncular septiginarian
country doctor type. And we had wonderful actors…especially the
people who played his family. That and the computer graphics…

Rationalization:
No I don't mean his physical appearances so much as…how did you
give his character the kind of weighty substance which made him
seem authentic…actually much more of a credible person than most
people in the public eye?

Tazmibro: Yes, that was the real trick…and I don't mind saying that
it took an enormous amount of research to get everything just right.
What we were aiming for was a persona which resonated with all which
was good but had been lost in the original Republic. We wanted a
kind of synthesis of Jefferson and other of the more radical founders,
but on top of that the kind of orator who could have held his own
in, say, the tariff debates in the US Senate during the 1820s.

Rationalization:
So "Ron Paul" is really a kind of composite?

Tazmibro:
Very much so…but as they say, the devil is in the details, and we
really had to work like devils to develop a bio to match a contemporary
person with those kinds of vanished pristine attributes. For example,
where on Earth is he supposed to come from? Pennsylvania of course!
Why? Well, it just has to be that way…but then to get a little southern
and western sympathy we have him moving to Texas in mid-life.

Rationalization:
I notice he's supposed to have graduated from "Gettysburg College."

Tazmibro:
Yes, we went all out to fit in as many of those historical resonances
as possible. Actually I think we overdid it…and somebody could have
called us on something as simple as that right from the beginning.
But you see what we were aiming at…the crucible of the American
spirit, the oratorical tradition of the 19th century…and
so on.

Rationalization:
Speaking of orations…there has been a lot of criticism directed
at the mainstream media for minimizing and trivializing the input
of "Ron Paul" during the debates. I suppose these revelations
put everything in a new light.

Tazmibro: I hope so. It really makes me sad to think that hard feelings
have been created over this. The truth of the matter is that the
"Ron Paul" campaign has had wonderful relations with the
media. They were very tolerant and understanding of the fact that
Ron Paul didn't exist, and gave him the appropriate coverage. After
all, considering that, by all rights, we could demand only zero
coverage…their policy of zero plus coverage of "Ron Paul"
was extremely generous and more than fair.

Rationalization:
That should restore our confidence in the system.

Tazmibro:
Well, it ought to. But I'm a little bit disturbed that there will
always be people who won't acknowledge the fact that "Ron Paul"
is a mythical character.

Rationalization:
What would you say to someone like that?

Tazmibro: I
don't really know. I suppose "get a grip" would be a little
harsh. After all, that's why we created "Ron Paul" to
begin with…to give people a sense of hope. And there is a kind of
earnest, trusting person for whom it really doesn't matter if "Ron
Paul" exists or not. I'm comfortable with that. On the other
hand, there is kind of person who has an inquiring mind and always
wants to get to the bottom of things. For this kind of person, believing
in "Ron Paul" would constitute what, I think it was Ayn
Rand, called "epistemological treason." Such a person
would never rest until they had determined whether "Ron Paul"
was real or not.

Rationalization:
Then it would be fair game to ask what you would tell that kind
of person specifically.

Tazmibro: Certainly.
I would tell them that a "Ron Paul" is an impossibility
in this or any other time or place. You don't need to go hunting
down his resume or his acquaintances, all you need is a little deduction.
Politicians are motivated by the accumulation of power…but in our
story line about "Ron Paul" we have a man who has stood
many times for public office and has tried to divest the political
system of power. That was the glaring flaw in our hoax…yet nobody
called us on it!

Rationalization:
A psychological impossibility!

Tazmibro:
Call it what you will…I rest my case! One way or the other, you
can't violate the laws of human motivation and have a believable
character…yet we did it all over the place with "Ron Paul"
and nobody caught us!

Rationalization:
I guess today, for once, the skeptics lose!

April
2, 2008

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches
Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an
Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute.

DIGG THIS

Ah!
Dull witted mortal,
if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune.
~ Boethius

Those who fancy
themselves part of what Albert J. Nock called "the remnant,"
i.e., the die-hard advocates of natural rights and civilized values,
may sense, as this winter campaign stretches on and the spring of
victory seems to recede, a feeling that it has all been in vain.
Indeed, it would have been in vain if either we or our candidate
had embarked on a campaign for political plunder, rather than what
I prefer to call a "prophetic pantomime." The remnant
may remain firm in its anti-political creed…but it has been a long
season of acting out the part of men and women hungry for the spoils
of victory. Even so, we should remind ourselves that it was never
a game of win or loose, it was a game of speaking truth to power…which
is more of a prophetic than a political function. Now it's perfectly
understandable that many people (and by no means just the fans of
Senator Obama) would warm to the advent of a "great" president.
But Ron Paul supporters wouldn't want the good doctor to be quite
as "great" as a Teddy Roosevelt, or even a Franklin Pierce,
a William Henry Harrison, a Millard Fillmore or a Rutherford Hayes.
I'm not sure how Thomas Carlyle would have answered Tina Turner's
assertion that "we don't need another hero" but the Scottish
curmudgeon at least had the perspicacity to point out that heroism
comes in a variety of forms, some of them less dangerous to life
and limb than others. For example if one consults the Bible one
will find a distinction between the office of a seer and of a king,
the latter being what today we would call a "politician,"
with some not too subtle hints that the former is more reputable
than the latter. Note, in this regard, that Samuel usually comes
off in a better light than David.

And closer
to home, hasn't America had far greater non-presidents than presidents?
Perhaps the archetypal non-president was William Jennings Bryan,
the crusher of youthful Vachel Lindsay's political hopes, who whines,

Defeat of
the alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and the silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.

Be that as
it may, reading between the lines of his work, it's curious that
Lindsay's self-pitying effusions don't carry conviction, for the
poem gives ample testimony to the enduring power of his hero, Bryan
the prophet who overshadows and outlives Bryan the president-manqué.

And Bryan
took the platform.
And he was introduced.
And he lifted his hand
And cast a new spell.
Progressive silence fell
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around the world.

For better
or worse (and I'm no Bryan fan) much of the "progressivism"
of Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign became prophetic of what America
would become in the 20th century. His "cross of
gold" speech was a classic example of speaking truth to power.
Today of course it is an endless torrent of paper and Matrix-like
information bytes which crucify mankind, but we can't be too hard
on old Bryan for not foreseeing that, for as I will explain, foresight
is not the primary characteristic of prophecy. And moreover, we
have our own political prophet, Dr. Ron Paul. Rather, we must come
to grips with the everlasting difficulty of understanding the prophetic
(as opposed to the political) modality of power, which is simply
a problem of patience, of being able to endure the interval between
the "speaking truth" and the "to power."

On the other
hand, why would anyone want to pin the label "prophet"
on a nice guy like Ron Paul, a sobriquet which, possibly second
to "politician" is the most despised job category (or
is that Job category) on earth? It all depends what one means by
a prophet, so let me offer, once and for all, a handy all-purpose
definition: A prophet is a person who sees some higher reality
which is invisible to others. This higher reality doesn't have
to be something complicated or metaphysical, it could be a moral
principle which is so basic that most people take it for granted,
and hence render it invisible. Ron Paul, when debating with his
so-called peers in the Republican primary debates seemed to dwell
in a world of entirely different premises. It wasn't just that Dr.
Paul and his antagonists were disagreeing on the issues, which of
course they were, but more fundamentally, Dr. Paul was using an
entirely different "tool kit" from the mental "tool
kit" (or absence thereof) used by his opponents. His antagonists
were accustomed to talking about facts on the ground, facts in a
constant state of flux, whereas Ron Paul consistently recurred to
first principles. Is there any wonder that there was no meeting
of minds? Even if the debates had been broadcast in a fair manner,
which they weren't, there could have been no communication between
minds habituated to operating along different dimensions.

Which brings
us to another uncomfortable fact: prophets are generally considered
to be mad by the vast majority of their contemporaries. Not that
even madness itself should be considered without redeeming value.
After all, one of the charms of American culture is that the national
landscape is periodically enlivened by the outburst of some joyous
madness, either sacred or profane. From the ecstasies of native
shamans to awakenings in Pentecostal tents, to hot jazz and hotter
rock n' roll…an occasional delirium has been known to soothe the
collective soul. No, it is not madness per se which deserves
censure, for there is a salutary ecstasy, as well as a calculating,
sober tenor of mind which leads to perdition. And for this latter
reason I am not willing to grant the title of "prophet"
to divines who spin future military history from the margins of
their Schofield Bibles, or to kabbalistic rabbis whose angels have
told them to exodus the Labor for the Likud. These people might
be prognosticators but they certainly aren't prophets in the true
sense.

The problem
with all prognosticators, whether they speak in the language of
religion or some warmed-over Marxian dialectic, is that they are
simply looking down the barrel of a gun called "the future."
If they are wrong they loseand we have been made fools of, and
if they are right we all loose, for it means that they have succeeded
in locking the rest of us into their own tunnel vision, a nightmare
in which the future is merely an exaggerated form of the present.
On the contrary, true prophecy should increase the indeterminacy
of events yet to come, stirring up the crucible of time using novel
insights into timeless principles. This is the sine qua non
of a true prophet.

Yet it
is proverbial that the lying prognosticator is less likely to be
accused of insanity than the true prophet, for the former appeals
to prejudice and probabilities, while words of the latter refer
to values which are not only intangible to the senses but often
difficult for the mind to grasp. This is classically true of metaphysical
prophecy, as in the numerousand inexplicable "wheels"
and "eyes" and "feet" of Ezekiel's visions.
It also manifests itself in the world of art, for example in the
incomprehensible visions of surrealism, which provoked Salvador
Dali's famous quip that "the only difference between a madman
and me is that I'm not mad!" But oddest of all is that this
disjunction between ordinary and prophetic perception should even
hold true in the seemingly mundane realms of public ethics and political
economy. Yet it apparently does, as recent events have shown. It
is clear that a Ron Paul, and the remnant that are able to follow
his mind, are capable of "seeing" freedom and justice
in a manner which is at radical variance from that of the other
candidates and the general electorate.

Now given
the assumption that the prophet in question is indeed a true prophet,
we must proceed by turning conventional wisdom on its head. From
this vantage point only the prophet is sane! Conversely, insanity
can be seen as normative, with the exception of the remnant who
can follow prophet's logic. Hence, to the mad majority the words
and the behavior of the prophet seem more than a little "off."
The primary reason for this is that the prophet is using an entirely
different mental "tool kit" (which philosophers, with
their penchant for Greek jargon, term an organon). While
the multitude is hypnotized by the flow of palpable events, the
prophet lifts his or her face up to "heaven"…a vertical
dimension of intangible values and principles. This transcendentalism
elicits a common response from the flatlanders, a response which
all members of the remnant will instantly recognize: the characteristic
rolling of the eyes, a shrug of the shoulders, and a studious avoidance
of any serious communication.

But it
gets worse, for there is a corollary factor which confirms the majority
in its opinion of the prophet's madness. One must keep in mind that
the prophet, as the emissary of a higher truth, is not free to desist
from communicating the message. Seeing that mere words fail to move
the majority, increasingly dramatic modalities of expression must
be resorted to. For example Jeremiah, that patron saint of all sandwich-men
and placard bearers, roamed the streets of Jerusalem with a yoke
around his neck, warning of a Babylonian captivity. Our own captivity
to an increasingly out-of-control world order, an order based on
militarism, administrative edict, and fiscal legerdemain has evolved
so insidiously "within the form" of traditional institutions,
that it is as invisible to us as the impending captivity of Israel
was to Jeremiah's contemporaries. Ron Paul's response to this emergency
has been, like that of Jeremiah, one of prophetic pantomime. The
good doctor has put himself forward as candidate for emperor! In
doing so he has lost the sympathy of a few self-righteous anarchists,
caused a goodly number of his followers to mistake him for a "messiah,"
and confirmed the majority in their opinion of his eccentricity.
Of course all of these mistaken, though perfectly predictable, reactions
have been elicited through the old prophetic trick of stirring up
the pot of public opinion with the unexpected. Indeed, nobody expected
Ron Paul to get as far, in as short a time, as he has managed to
do. It has created more than anxiety in establishment circles…it
has created indeterminacy.

One may
bewail the fact that Congressman Paul is unlikely to ascend to the
imperial purple. But would any action less dramatic have brought
the remnant together, given it a voice, and started it off on the
road, not to the future, but to a possible time when people are
ready and sickened of our present future?

March
3, 2008

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches
Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an
Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute.

DIGG THIS

Read
More
Open Letters

As
an American living abroad, I am acutely aware of global interdependence,
something of which I hardly need to remind Iowans. This January,
the eyes of the whole world will be on Iowa, to see if America chooses
internationalism, or if it continues to dig itself into an isolationist
pit. Perhaps you will be surprised if I told you there was only
one truly internationalist candidate running for president, and
that his name was Dr. Ron Paul.

This may seem
like a paradox to those of you who have been told that Dr. Paul
is the isolationist, and the other candidates are upholders of internationalism.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say this was a disagreement
over methods, and that while Ron Paul thinks that peace and free
trade promote internationalism, his opponents think the same end
can be attained by saber-rattling and coercion. Viewed this way,
perhaps it would take a degree in diplomacy or a crystal ball to
tell which of the two positions was the more expedient.

Not being prescient,
I am forced to rely on my moral intuitions and what I know about
human nature. I know that people react negatively to foreign domination,
even when that domination is arguably in their own best interests.
If left to their own devices, the people of any given country are
likely to experiment with error before they make their own way to
a free and just society, but such a process of trial and error cannot
be short-circuited by imposition from the outside, for the painful
process by which freedom is attained is the prerequisite for building
up a culture of moral and political responsibility.

In the view
of Dr. Ron Paul we have squandered our own moral capital in fruitless
attempts to build up bogus democracies (and even bare-faced dictatorships)
abroad. This is a great tragedy, for while the maintenance of our
own free institutions requires a constant replenishing of our national
and spiritual resources, we have been bled dry, morally, fiscally,
and in the literal toll of American men and women who have perished
in dubious conflicts abroad.

Throughout
our national history Iowa has contributed more than its share to
America’s campaigns overseas. My own grandfather was a lifelong
Republican who always voted the straight party ticket. He also was
a commander of the Iowa National Guard and saw service in both world
wars. In these he was unflinchingly loyal, and proud to lead the
first Expeditionary Force to the relief of the British Isles upon
America’s entry into that second world-wide conflict.

Yet he was
never a boastful soldier, and preferred not to speak about what
he had been through. However he did keep, in a place where he thought
nobody would discover it, a scrapbook of pictures from the trenches
of France. He, or somebody he knew, had gone to the trouble of documenting
the terrible effects of poison gas on the human body. These were
the images which my grandfather sought to preserve, as testimony
to the terrors of total war. Since they were from the first war
I can only imagine what was going through his mind as he marched
into the second!

Yet he went,
for though he despised the man in the White House, he respected
the democratic process by which Congress had declared war against
Germany. Hitler was conquering Europe and dropping bombs on London,
and it was no time to be arguing the finer points of pacifism or
just war theory. Yet he was never happier than when he returned
to his home in Waterloo Iowa at the end of the conflict.

Almost everyone
is familiar with the parable of beating swords into pruning forks.
At the end of World War II this meant that the veterans of Iowa
could put down their arms, return to their families, and start manufacturing
agricultural implements and other useful tools of peace. However
dreams of a demobilized world were soon squashed by a new globalist
doctrine of national security, and a continuing Democratic administration,
which now claimed the right of the executive power to commit troops
abroad unilaterally, even in the absence of a declaration of war.

Against this
new doctrine of false, unilateralist “internationalism”
stood the policies advocated by the Republican leader, Senator Robert
Taft. It was a philosophy which Iowa Republicans could understand
and support, and it had nothing to do with isolationism or pacifism.
How could it have been? After all, Midwesterners had just welcomed
soldiers from a global conflict back to what was from that time
called “the breadbasket of the world.” Taft’s voluntarist
internationalism insisted only that American policy abroad should
be constitutional and conducted with the consent of, and in the
general interests of, the American people. It was a policy formulated
in the same spirit that animates what people are calling “the
Ron Paul Revolution” today. In truth, this “revolution”
consists in nothing more than calling the Republican Party back
to its roots.

Unfortunately,
after Taft the party gradually adopted the Democrats’ doctrine
of unilateral interventionism. A policy of “bipartisanship”
evolved which said that trivial issues such as budgetary details
were proper items of debate, but major issues such as war and peace
were too delicate to be trusted to democratic process. This would
have greatly surprised the founders of the Anglo-American tradition
of free government. 19th-century Iowans, with the words of the Lincoln-Douglass
debates still ringing in their ears could never have imagined such
a tame and, as it were, “unpolitical” future. Moreover,
in the course of events Congress has even surrendered its authority
over the minutiae of policy and expenditure, viewing with contempt
the “green eye-shade” preoccupation with details. Again,
Congressman Ron Paul (affectionately known as “Dr. No”
for his persistent governmental skepticism) is the exception who
proves the rule.

Surely there
is a time for peace and a time for war, a time to say “no”
to tyrants like Hitler when they actually threaten the security
of the United States, but also a time to say “no” to those
who create bogeymen, attempting to suborn the generous internationalist
instincts of Americans by pressing the buttons of past traumas.
Yes, the world is full of criminals, troglodytes, and wild-eyed
fanatics, but surely these are better dealt with by the attention
of a few well-placed Sherlock Holmes than by the maintenance of
a ruinously expensive military-industrial establishment.

Internationalism,
peace, and prosperity: these three goals stand in no logical contradiction,
although they have suffered a great deal of political obfuscation.
America needs all three, but before it gets them there must be a
return to genuine debate over fundamental principles. The Republican Party must, to borrow a famous slogan, offer “a choice not
an echo.” Between the social collectivism of the Democratic
Party and the traditional civil society of the Republican Party
there may some day be the possibility of rational choice. Today
there is no choice whatsoever.

All the other
Republican candidates are running for office; Ron Paul is running
with an idea. It’s the idea without which there can be no internationalism,
no peace, and no prosperity. It’s called freedom. Please consider
that when you caucus this January and give Ron Paul your hearty
support.

December
28, 2007

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches
Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an
Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute.

DIGG THIS

When
Ludwig von Mises was still an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army
he earned several decorations, but his true title to nobility was
a nickname which stuck to him from an anonymous source: they called
him "the last knight of liberalism" for even in the dark
years of the Great War, he had embarked on a quest to save the world
of peace and property. Modern and post-modern thinkers, beginning
with Cervantes, seem to have arrived at a consensus that knighthood
in a military sense is a rather silly notion at best, but of course
Mises was being honored for his services to liberalism not as a
chevalier d'epee, but as a literary champion of public thought
and policy, though the
biography bearing Mises' unauthorized title by Jrg Guido Hlsmann,1
shows that he was not so bad at soldiering either. It would appear
that soldiers of the shooting variety, like the poor, shall always
be with us, and contrary to the expectations of Cervantes even the
private soldier is making a determined, though morally dubious comeback.

What
had not made a comeback, until very recently, was a genuine champion
of liberty, a political peer who could face down the pretenders
and would-be-kings of the illiberal order, beating them at their
own game. To everybody's astonishment such a person has actually
emerged, in the humble and rather unknightly form of the Congressman
from Lake Jackson, Texas, Dr. Ron Paul. To call the Texas doctor
a knight might rightly be considered faint, indeed faintly ridiculous,
praise, for a man who has vowed to restore the constitution, including
all its republican (lower case) scruples on titles of rank and nobility.
After all, when and if the good doctor takes up residence at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, we might expect one of his first acts to
be a general recall of those so-called Medals of Freedom which presidents
since Truman have arbitrarily bestowed on the good, the bad, and
the toadies. Or perhaps not, since with so many government-sponsored
tragedies crying out for immediate abolition, the comic opera aspect
of the state might be safely left to wither from disuse and ridicule.

Yet,
when his detractors call Ron Paul's campaign "quixotic,"
they are in fact dubbing him a knight by way of backhanded compliment.
Implicit in this ennoblement is the idea of futility, the noble
failure of swords against gunpowder, the man against the machine.
It is part and parcel of that modern consensual thinking which is
so hard to break away from, and which even the most optimistic Paulistas
fall prey to: do we dare trust one man to be a vehicle of our dreams…lest
our dreams turn out to be dreams and nothing more? But of course
we are taking our chances here not with a mounted warrior engaged
in a test of strength, but with a figurative battle for the mind
of America. In the case of this election we might better ask ourselves,
is it possible for a good idea to be defeated by a bad idea? The
answer, unfortunately, is a resounding yes, as the voices of integrity,
ingenuity, and expert opinion are commonly shouted down from the
stage of policy before they can be properly articulated.

That's
why it's essential to have a champion, someone who won't back down
in the face of madness and monsters. Unfortunately, this time around,
the monsters are quite real, and we find ourselves facing something
more akin to the nightmare world of Beowulf than the windmills of
sunny La Mancha. And on top of that, what could be more dangerous
than when freedom's back is to the wall, and hoards of well-intended
bezerkers start crawling out of the woodwork to save her with wild
swings of their battle-axes. Indeed, the meat-axe of political diatribe
is a perfect illustration in our times of how a knight is more than
an ordinary warrior, differing from the latter by adopting the practice
of chivalry, a mysterious quality which has been hunted to near
extinction by the intellectual progeny of Cervantes.

So
we have to ask ourselves: what is this thing called "chivalry"?
Actually, today few know and still fewer care, most considering
it to be long out of fashion, and that all for the better. One of
the few who disagreed was writer and teacher Richard Weaver (1910–1963),
who saw chivalry as a kind of virtue, or quality of character. Far
from being antiquated, chauvinistic or elitist, for Weaver chivalry
was the traditional virtue ancestral to the watered-down "tolerance"
of contemporary political correctness. Thus in Ideas
Have Consequences he writes,

It is a matter
of everyday perception that people of cultivation and intellectual
perceptiveness are quickest to admit a law of rightness in ways
of living different from their own; they have mastered the principle
that being has a right qua being. Knowledge disciplines egoism
so that one credits the reality of other selves. The virtue of
the splendid tradition of chivalry was that it took formal cognizance
of the right to existence, not only of inferiors but of enemies.
The modern formula of unconditional surrender – first against
nature and then against peoples – impiously puts man in the
place of God by usurping unlimited right to dispose of the lives
of others.2

So
chivalry, at least according to Weaver, is tolerance without the
debilitating relativism of its contemporary substitutes. This has
a double application in contemporary political practice, for the
knight of liberalism must first gather together the companions of
freedom and then venture out in combat with the knights of illiberalism.

First with regard to the knight's companions, it should be noted
that they include both radical Don Quixotes and the traditionalist
Sancho Panzas. In the first category would be those who think the
championing of freedom is a duty bound unto them without considerations
of reward, and that the non-aggression axiom, once grasped by correct
reasoning, should swiftly attain universal assent. On the whole,
it seems disgraceful to them that the entire world did not embrace
anarchism after its initial proclamation in the works of Herbert
Spencer (1820–1903). To these hardies, values other than freedom
are uninteresting, and a "value voter" a cowardly compromiser.

But
the truly chivalrous knight would eschew these quixotic pretensions,
knowing that only the first, easy, victories of freedom could be
won among these odd individuals whose love of liberty renders them
indifferent to hot and cold, day and night…or at least those who
feign such indifference. Since the vast majority of the human race
lies outside this small band of would-be heroes, a true knight would
see that the scorn of the quixotic minority was unjust. In the knight's
wisdom, the common sense of the "value voter" would in
fact be closer to the truth, namely that the conduct of life entails
preferences and the better must be chosen over the worse, even if
further reflection sometimes reveals what had once been considered
better to be a mere prejudice. While its attachment to preferences
speaks well for the majority, the majority can obstruct freedom
if it fails to distinguish chivalry from indifference.

This
is the narrow bridge of freedom before which many an honest, but
fearful, donkey of the world digs in his or her hoofs. For those
who cherish the tried and true (that is, the Sancho Panzas who make
up the better part of the world) the knight of liberalism will seem
like either an apostle of indifference or one possessed by a mania
for toleration. In fact nothing could be further from the case,
for chivalry distains cultural and moral relativism. The chivalrous
attitude is that other people have the right to be wrong, not that
there is no right or wrong.

With
that in mind, Dr. Paul appears to be off to a good start on his
quest to restore freedom. After all, he seems to have those qualities
Weaver would demand in a chivalrous knight. The "knowledge
disciplining egoism" and leading to the "crediting the
existence of others" seems to be his hallmark…and even in such
provocatively incredible company as his fellow Republican contenders
the good doctor has managed to stay on message and refused to be
led into the labyrinth of ad hominim argumentation. Should he ever
become president we could expect that he would not enforce his values
on anyone but would recuse himself from the culture wars, returning
debate on such matters to those state and local forums where they
rightfully belong. That's respect for the autonomy of others…not
a lack of conviction.

With the companions gathered, we come to the second application
of the principle of chivalry, the combat, either military or political,
against the knights of illiberalism. To be sure, we live amidst
a world of barbarous conflict, one in which blackhearted mercenaries
in the employ of the American state have been unleashed on helpless
populations abroad. This is an evil so manifest that it calls for
little moral reflection, but it does call into question the smug
assumptions of progress which look back at the "age of chivalry"
with condescension.

However, Weaver’s concept of chivalry as "respect for the existence
of others, enemies as well as friends" is not a direct contribution
to just war theory, as important as that might be. Rather it was
integral to his theory of political rhetoric. According to Weaver,
the corruption of public rhetoric is the ultimate source of all
other evils, since the buck always, or at least was once alleged
to, stop in the halls of government. It is easy to visualize the
misery created by modern warfare, terrorism, and aerial bombardment,
but they are just the end results of political decisions, which
in turn are the outcome of mental attitudes. We can see a dismembered
corpse, but we don't grasp that it results from the same mind set
which prompted Congress to divide Iraq, like Gaul, into three parts.
The annihilation of the other which chivalry stands opposed to is
primarily a spiritual, not a physical, negation, although the first
readily becomes a cause of the second. Indeed, human life is sacred,
but there are just wars and police actions, and to my knowledge
Dr. Paul is not a pacifist. Rather he opposes that sickness of American
political rhetoric which objectifies the world's peoples and communities,
and the assumption that they are justly subject to the machinations
of our own political process. When Washington politicians speak
unilaterally, as if they are agents and the rest of the world patients
of their actions, they are destroying the world in thought, before
a single bullet is fired. The left dimly grasps that something is
wrong here, and fails to come up with any better solution than a
universal homogenization of values, grasping hands and singing kumbaya.
Needless to say this stupidity only further empowers the unilateralists.

All these evocations are far from the chivalrous ideal and noble
rhetoric of the Paul candidacy. Yes, Dr. Paul wishes the peoples
of the world be free, enlightened, and prosperous, but he also knows
that it is not his business to make them so. Rather, to be content
in one's possessions, even if that includes the lonely possession
of truth, and not to annihilate the other, either in thought or
deed, that is the essence of chivalry. This explains not only why
it is hard to be a so-called "knight of liberalism," but
why the phrase is, ultimately, a pleonasm.

Hurrah
for Sir Ron!

References

1. Hlsmann,
   Jrg Guido; Ludwig
   von Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism; Mises
   Institute, Auburn AL: 2007
2. Weaver,
   Richard; Ideas
   have Consequences; University
   of Chicago, Chicago IL: 1948

See
the Ron Paul Collection

November
10, 2007

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and now teaches
Rhetoric and Social Science at the University of Hyogo. He is an
Adjunct Scholar of the Ludwig von
Mises Institute.

DIGG THIS

"I
think at last I understand what happened to Liberty."

"Liberty?"

"As in:
u2018The Hymn to Liberty.' You know, those fragmentary inscriptions
we've been finding." The philologist was looking up from the
table cluttered with the artifacts which the archeologist had fostered
on to him in a fit of exasperation.

The archeologist
wiped the sweat from his brow. It was hot as hell in this country,
that hadn't changed since the time of the Amerikkans…for that matter,
it hadn't changed since the time of the Sumerians. "Are you
sure you haven't mixed up the labels I put on exhumations from different
strata? It's awfully easy to confuse Ishtar or Inanna with….what
did you call her? Liberty? That's not even a proper name, its just
a kind attribute or title."

"Call
her what you will, but I think I have the hymn pretty well worked
out. For one thing its not a hymn…it's a kind of lament, or an admonition."

The archeologist
made a rude gesture indicating irritation. "Lament or admonition…which?
It's not a trivial distinction. If it was a lament then your hypothesized
catastrophe was probably unavoidable. But if it was an admonition,
we're talking about people who believed their civilization could
still experience a rebirth."

"Fair
enough," the philologist sighed as he scratched his bald pate,
"why don't we put our heads together and see what we can deduce."

"Do you
think you have a sound translation of the first stanzas?"

"Better
than that, I've rendered the whole inscription as literally as I
could! But the real challenge is to come up with a satisfactory
interpretation of the meaning…there is a great deal of ambiguous
symbolism in the text."

The archeologist
looked skeptical. "Assuming we know what dialect we're working
with. As I remember, you claimed to be none too sure about of that."

"I am
now. At first I thought we were looking at Old Amerikkan…because
it didn't have that rude staccato quality that serves as a marker
for Middle Amerikkan, but now I'm convinced this is a late text…that
there was some sort of neo-classical revival at the very end. Well,
can we start into it?"

"If you
must…"

"There's
no title. The introduction must have been destroyed in the catastrophe."

"Or simply
by the ravages of time."

"Whatever.
This is the first fragment that I could make out…

This lady
left earth and heaven
     And went down into the pit

Left powers and titles
     she went down into the pit

Left fields of waving grain
     To go down into the pit
Left shore to shining shore
     Going down into the pit
Left purple mountains majesty
     And went down into the pit

…..well, does
that make any sense?"

"So according
to you u2018this lady' is referring to Lady Liberty?"

"Yes.
If you think I'm wrong, and that the fragments describe a local
fertility goddess, let me point out…"

The archeologist
waved the paleographer off of his impending justifications, "Let's
suppose for the moment that your hypothesis is correct. By u2018Liberty'
you mean the same as the colossus which once stood somewhere beyond
the mouth of the Hudson river."

"A densely
populated area at the time."

"I know,
I know. It's too bad that these colossi have a way of disappearing
without a trace. As you may know, the bronze Helios of Rhodes was
broken up and transported from the Mediterranean to the banks of
the Tigris…right around here. But we're not likely to find a single
rivet, no matter how deep we dig. Over the millennia there are too
just many upturns in the price of metals. Sooner or later…"

The philologist
blustered, "But of course, I don't mean that she was
here herself! But her devotees…"

"Just
relax, it's not that I take you for a fool…I can even see where
one might find some sort of deep allegory in these inscriptions.
As for it being Amerikkan, old, middle or late…I suppose that some
of the geographical allusions might refer to places the western
hemisphere as well as here…but it’s pretty ambiguous."

"Then
listen to the next stanzas…you know the iconography as well, if
not better, than I do…

She put
on her insignia
     And walked down

The steep
path
     That led to hell

The four
signs of her noblility:
     The seven spiked nimbus
          Of
her coronet
     The torch held aloft
          With
its mighty flame
     The book of laws
          tucked
beneath her hand
     Her robe of dignity
          Flowing
about her
And she said: "Open the gates of hell
     I desire to enter.
     I, bold and alone,
     Into the Land-of-No-Return!"

…does it check
out or not?"

The archeologist
paused for thought. "Iconographically? I suppose it matches
the verbal accounts of her appearance well enough…the visual media
of that epoch were too fragile to have survived. But there are other,
and I am afraid insurmountable, objections to your hypothesis. Why
would anyone in their right mind posit a Late Amerikkan intrusion
into Mesopotamia?"

"I admit
it constitutes an apparent anomaly."

"It's
more than just an anomaly! It's positively grotesque! And I'm not
talking about technological improbabilities here. From what we know,
it would have been perfectly feasible for the Amerikkans to have
gotten over here physically during that period. Physically yes…but
motivationally improbable, for at an even deeper level it goes contrary
to everything that we can reconstruct about the meaning of the icon
herself."

"I'm afraid
you've lost me there."

The archeologist,
working hard not to loose his patience, continued. "How much
do you know about the colossus of Liberty island…or rather the archetype
that she represented?"

The July sun
was beating down on the philologist's shiny scalp and doing some
damage to his faculty of recall, but he managed as best he could.
"Well, let's see…located outside of a harbor, she must have
been a liminal deity…a kind of boundary stone inflated to divine
proportions."

The archeologist
gave a patronizing grin. "That's correct as far as it goes.
She welcomed immigrants approaching the Western Hemisphere from
the North Atlantic. The idea was that the Western Hemisphere, at
least during that period, was a kind of refuge for people seeking
asylum. It wasn't a matter of then turning around and wreaking revenge
on whoever had pushed those people out of the Eastern Hemisphere.
The Amerikkans were supposed to stay on their own continent once
they had arrived and build up a new civilization. As far as the
rest of the world was concerned, the continent to the west of the
colossus was intended to inspire by example, not the projection
of force. That's the significance of the torch in her right hand."

A flicker of
acknowledgement lit up the philologist's face. "Aha! So she
acted as a kind of semipermeable barrier…a one-way street, aloof
from extra-continental affairs. Thus my hypothesis of a Late Amerikkan
intrusion into Mesopotamia based on this literary artifact violates
the laws of symbolic grammar, and thus may be dismissed as incoherent!"

The archeologist
gave a sigh of relief. "It is a good scientist who can see
the error of his ways."

"A good
scientist perhaps, but a great scientist will never give up on a
promising paradigm, especially if it can explain an interesting
anomaly. Anomalies are precisely what we need to investigate if
we want to break out onto a higher level of explanation!"

The triumphal
look on the face of the philologist warned the archeologist that
there was no turning back…they would have to wade through the entire
text until it had rendered up all its enigmas. "Very well,
let's continue on the assumption that this inscription is going
to tell us something about the fate of Lady Liberty. To be honest,
I don't feel comfortable with where the narrative seems to be heading…not
that I am exactly the most chivalrous of men. But in all my years
of devotion to the field of Mesopotamian archeology, delving into
strata ranging from pre-Akkadian to post-Amerikkan, I have come
to the reluctant opinion that this region somehow attracts wrathful
forces. I would like to be able to hold onto the popular view of
the Amerikkan as a happy cultural epoch. Truly, I'm not sure how
I justify that prejudice, for as you know from your philological
researches, we have too few remains of their literature to form
any opinion whatsoever. To this day most people remember nothing
of that culture beyond Disney's comic redactions of Grimm's fables,
which is probably just as well. But now, if your hypothesis is correct,
and there is indeed an intrusion of Western hemispheric matter into
the cultural deposit of Mesopotamia dating from the Late Amerikkan,
we are forced to conjecture some terrible and hitherto unguessed
at tragedy which engulfed the region, and perhaps the world, around
that time. I grow weary at the prospect…but of course you are right,
we should seek no solace short of the truth."

"Let's
just follow the text wherever it leads us. Perhaps the Amerikkans
were able to avert tragedy. It continues…

And the
gate-keeper of hell cried out
     "Why, O lady, do you wish
to enter
          the
lapis lazuli halls of hell?
     Why do you leave the land of
dawn
          And
force your way into the
               Realms
of twilight?"

It was
as that moment
That the lady sinned.
     At the gates of hell she lied,
and said,
"I have come to free my little brothers and sisters

     The shackled ones of Mesopotamia

     I have come to strike the fetters
from their necks,
          Lest,
in trying to do so on their own
          They
should injure themselves."

…so what do
you make of that?"

"If we
read it literally? Superstitious rubbish!" The archeologist
enjoyed donning his skeptical persona from time to time.

"But should
we read it literally?"

"Probably
we shoudn't. The Amerikkans, for all the lip-service that they paid
to religion, were seldom pious at heart, which many have posited
as an explanation of their demise. Personally, am no more inclined
to believe that they were talking about a real goddess in this inscription,
than I am willing to believe in a hell that has lapis lazuli halls."

"Which
doesn't necessarily mean that the narrative is without importance.
Even if the so-called u2018lady' was not a real person, she might be
a summing up of all that the Amerikkans valued in life."

The archeologist
was inclined to grant the philologist that much. "Yes, which
makes the story even more tragic."

"Assuming
it's a tragedy. Let's continue…

Then the
keeper of the gates of hell
     Went to the palace of the Queen
of Fatality
And he said,
"My lady,
     there waits upon the gates of
hell
          a
maiden wondrous fair
     like she is unto a god
          who
speaks of liberty
     she wears a crown upon her brow

          of
seven solar rays
     In her right hand is a torch

          her
left hand holds a book
     she wears the robes of modesty

          what
shall I do with her?"

Fatality
spoke to her servant,
     "Open the locks of the gates
of hell to her
          One
by one
     But at each gate extract the
toll
          Required
for its unlocking
     Such that she will be fitted

          To
enter the Dark City."

….so how are
you liking it so far. I'm sorry I couldn't quite get it to rhyme."

"Naturally,
it's just a translation, and after all you're dealing with Late
Amerikkan, an argot only distantly related to English. I can hardly
fault your scholarship…but if this is anything other than a lament
or a tragedy…well, I don't see things lightening up anytime soon."

"They
don't, listen to this…

The door-keeper
bowed to his mistress
Returning to unlock the first door of hell
He recited to the lady her obligation
     And took from her the seven spiked
coronet
     Which once had gleamed in the
light of dawn.
"Why do you take my crown?" she asked.
     "Quiet maiden!
     This is the law of the underworld

     Which must be fulfilled.
     Do
not question the rites of hell!"

…this is the
pattern which continues for the rest of the poem, or at least the
fragments which have come down to us in this inscription."

The archeologist
laughed. "I see, it's a kind of subterranean strip show! Well,
that certainly bolsters your hypothesis of a Late Amerikkan composition
doesn't it?"

Wearing an
expression of disappointment, the philologist murmured. "Please,
try to be serious. There's a lot of depth in this text…I was hoping
you would be able to help me figure it out."

"Depth!
I should say so! There's enough matter in every verse to write a
doctoral dissertation on, which is one reason why I would just as
soon be non-committal. The other reason is that any comments I had
to make wouldn't paint a very pretty picture…not in light of what
we surmise about exogenous intrusions into this region. It's bad
enough when you have the indigenous Sumerians or the Akkadians or
the Arabs slaughtering themselves in the region around the Tigris
and the Euphrates, but when you get something really exotic, like
the Mongol invasion, the excavation pits become a happy hunting
ground for forensic anthropologists. You've seen the Mongol strata
haven't you, with all the shattered femurs and bashed in craniums?"

"Yes,
but we haven't seen anything quite that bad at the depth of our
proposed Amerikkan intrusion layer."

"Indeed.
But perhaps they were just better at disposing of their corpses,
or the wounded were taken off to die somewhere else. Personally,
I wouldn't want to speculate on what happened."

The philologist
banged his hand down on the table, jostling the motley collection
of artifacts out of their places…in itself a terrible crime against
law of preserving chronology. "But it's our job to speculate!"
he exclaimed. "If you won't do your job and locate the level
of the Amerikkan intrusion, then at least help me do mine and try
to unravel this inscription!"

"All right,
you win!" the archeologist found his colleague's determination
compelling. "What we are proposing as the Amerikkan layer is
very thin…so thin that we can assume their presence didn't last
very long, at least as archeology measures time. Of course from
their point of view things probably dragged on at an excruciating
pace. When we compare the excavated material, or rather lack thereof,
with the verses that you just cited from the inscription, it becomes
clear what was going on. To begin with there is the reference to
the crown…"

"Representing
sovereignty."

"Of course,
and the sudden loss thereof. But we're talking about more than sovereignty
in a narrow legal sense. I get a vision of people afflicted with
a terrible hubris, bursting into the region from far away. These
people, whoever they might have been, would have initiated their
adventure according to a sense that they were in control of history,
an almost godlike feeling of omnipotence. But as time went on and
they realized that it was impossible to control the environing forces
of Mesopotamia, this confidence began to crack, and they began to
understand that they were at the mercy of forces which they had,
in their ignorance, conjured up out of the depths of history. Whether
these people actually founded a state, or whether they manipulated
the local people to do their will, is impossible to tell from the
evidence at our disposal. From the inscription we know that they
came in on some sort of pretext, that they spoke of liberty and
freedom…"

"Words
which can mean a thousand different things to as many people!"

"Exactly!
What their real motivations might have been isn't stated, but that
doesn't ultimately matter. The point is that they insinuated themselves
into the region using lies, and that initial act of bad faith set
in motion a series of calamities which would ultimately lead to
their downfall."

"That
pretty much tallies with what I get out of the inscription."

"You say
it just goes on in the same vein."

"Worse
and worse."

"I suppose
we had better accompany Lady Liberty as far down into hell as the
text will take us…so lead on my friend."

"Don't
expect any reversal in her fortune."

"I won't…but
by teasing out the remaining allegories we may be able to make some
inferences about the fate of the political class during Late Amerikkan
times."

The philologist,
who was feeling vindicated now, cheerfully continued his recitation.
"The meter just stays the same…I think there was a sense during
the Middle and Late Amerikkan that monotony was poetic….

The gate
keeper unlocked the second door of hell

He recited
to the lady her obligation
     And took from her the lamp of
leaping flame
     Which once had guided mariners
to port
"Why do you take my lamp?" she asked.
     "Quiet maiden!
     This is the law of the underworld

     Which must be fulfilled.

     Do not question the rites of
hell!"

…you see, everything
is the same but the lamp, which is usually a cipher for the mind
or knowledge in these kinds of inscriptions…although I'm not too
sure of the significance of the mariner."

"I think
you have the gist of it all right, as long as you don't loose it
by worrying the text to death. You philologists are an odd bunch
aren't you? You think you can get more out of a book by putting
your eyeballs as close to the letters as possible, but that only
makes you cross-eyed! With archeology the point is to be well cross-indexed,
not cross-eyed."

"No thanks
for the compliment, especially when you could graciously cure me
of that myopia by giving me a few clues about this lady's lamp."

"Well,
in literature, it means no more than you have already deduced…the
mind in general. But on a site like this, where we are surrounded
by hints of possible catastrophe during the Late Amerikkan, it points
to a failure of political decryption."

"There
you go again…"

"Sorry,
let me back up. We've already cross-referenced the data from the
Mongolian and the Amerikkan intrusions within this, and other, Mesopotamian
sites. The deposits are about six or seven hundred years apart,
and as we've already had occasion to point out, the Mongolian has
yielded up much more satisfactory evidence of sudden, cataclysmic
violence. However I'm not convinced that the Amerikkan intrusion
was any less contentious than the Mongolian. How could it have been?
Whenever you see that sort of sudden influx into a region it means
that exogenous forces were probably trying to force entry into the
native culture using political means."

"Lady
Liberty trying to insinuate herself into the halls of hell?"

"Exactly.
But we still have to account for the relative paucity of forensic
evidence in comparison to the Mongolian strata. First, I think some
of that evidence was deliberately destroyed, but second, I also
think that the information war played a much larger role during
the Amerikkan epoch than the Mongolian."

"Those
are mutually supporting hypotheses."

"Yes.
And now we see what became of the lady's torch. The longer an information
war persists, the harder it is to isolate its negative side effects.
At first the idea is to gather accurate information from one's friends
and disseminate disinformation among one's enemies. However as the
struggle persists into later phases, the boundary between allied
cadres and adversaries begins to blur causing information and disinformation
to circulate indiscriminately. At first this corruption of data
is only severe around the raw boundaries of violent conflicts, but
if the struggle goes on interminably, it begins to seep back into
core areas of the contending cultures. Ultimately the core civilizational
norms are themselves corrupted, as philosophy gives way to propaganda,
mental clarity and sound judgment to shadow-boxing with erroneous
data. Indeed, the erroneous data works, at the level of thought,
much like a transfusion of bad blood would physiologically."

"I prefer
the way our anonymous poet allegorizes it."

"That
the lady lost her means of illumination…yes, that would have been
yet another fitting toll to extract from one who had embarked on
such a misadventure. So now she is forced to witlessly stumble her
way down into the City of Darkness."

"And her
stripping is far from finished. Perhaps I should continue….

The gate
keeper unlocked the third door of hell

He recited
to the lady her obligation
     And took from her the book of
laws
     Which she had long clutched to
her bosom
"Why do you take my book?" she asked.
     "Quiet maiden!
     This is the law of the underworld

     Which must be fulfilled.

     Do not question the rites of
hell!"

…you see how
everything just iterates around the same phraseology."

"The repetition
of the phrase u2018rites of hell' is what catches my attention. I think
it refers to something more inclusive than the abode of the dead…although
I'm afraid the historical circumstances which provoked the narrative
witnessed a sharp uptick in morbidity. Note, for example, that the
ruler of the underground, this so-called u2018hell' is Lady Fatality,
a kind of negative counterpart to Lady Liberty."

The philologist
piped up with pride, "We call that a u2018syzygi'!"

"No, you
call it a syzygi, I call it a miserable blunder. Liberty in itself
is a problematic idea. On the one hand it can represent a political
system freed from despotism, but it also has voluntaristic connotations
as in u2018free will.' I suspect the poet, whoever he or she might have
been, was playing on this ambiguity. Liberty, as long as she stayed
west of the North Atlantic, was the incarnation of the anti-despotic
sort of freedom. However when she shows up here, in Mesopotamia,
she personifies an arrogant denial of the law of cause and effect.
She walks headlong into the element of Lady Fatality, and the latter
obliges her by springing the trap. The story of her journey down
into hell may be long and dolorous, but the underlying impetus is
really quite simple."

"Bravo!
That is precisely what I had deduced about the underlying unity
of the text, and it’s good to get confirmation on that point. But
the real reason I'm asking you to tag along with me through this
rather terrifying inscription is to get at its significance in historical,
as opposed to mythical, time. What does this tell us about our hypothetical
Late Amerikkan intrusion?"

"A hypothesis
which, I now concede, is looking less and less hypothetical all
the time. Alas, to seek the source of a mirage is itself an illusion!
No doubt the people who suddenly showed up in Mesopotamia during
the epoch we call Late Amerikkan…no doubt they felt that they were
somehow magically exempt from the law of cause and effect. Perhaps
they saw themselves as racially superior to the indigenes…although
there is evidence to the effect that the Middle to Late Amerikkans
typically conducted their campaigns under the auspices of anti-racialist
symbols."

"One can
seldom go wrong overestimating the power of hypocrisy."

"How true!
Another possibility is that the exogenous forces put their confidence
in some sort of technological differential. The difficulty with
that idea is the evident technological uniformity of the world during
the Late Amerikkan. But it may be that, from an archeological point
of view, we are too impressed by the brevity of the Amerikkan strata.
At the time fleeting delays in the extension of technology might
have loomed large in people's minds, and they might have thought
that, for example, the countries situated on the North Atlantic
had a permanent advantage over those, say, surrounding the Indian
Ocean. At an even higher level of abstraction they might not have
been aware of the mobility of capital, and thus felt that gains
in productivity were somehow an intrinsic and inalienable aspect
of their own civilization."

"I find
that hard to believe! I'm no archeologist, but it does seem to me
that you are imputing to the Amerikkans an ideology which would
be more appropriate to the Sumerians or the Akkadians. After all,
we speak of the Middle and Late Amerikkan as industrial…even post-industrial."

"Oh, I'm
not saying that they weren't smart enough to understand their own
economy and technology, to be sure that would be a complete absurdity.
But there must have been some fatal gap between people who had experiential
knowledge of these matters and the political class. Otherwise how
could something as potentially catastrophic as an exogenous penetration
into Mesopotamia have even been conceived?"

"Perhaps
there was something here that they wanted very badly?"

"Oh, undoubtedly
there was! Let's suppose there was a wish-fulfilling stone buried
somewhere in the desert, something that would give its possessor
omnipotence. You are the mythologist, you are the one who knows
how all these attempts at circumventing the laws of cause and effect
turn out in the end."

The philologist
gave a grim chuckle. "Badly of course…at least in song and
fable. Which is one reason I think there is often more wisdom to
be found in poetry than science."

"And to
that end you probably think we should rejoin Lady Liberty on her
downward course to perdition."

"By all
means."

"Even
though you have already perused the inscription a hundred times
and have come to your own conclusions."

"As you
have correctly divined, I need archeological confirmation."

"Well,
I have little more to add at this point. As you say, the text has
an integrity which is founded on Lady Liberty's lack thereof. She
lies herself into hell and from that point on matters take their
course. First she looses her crown, namely, the ability to control
events. Inevitably this causes her to loose her mind, as represented
by the torch. Once the ability to distinguish true from false is
extinguished, the capacity for judging right from wrong rapidly
ensues. This is symbolized by the loss of the book of laws."

"That
much I know…but how is this reflected in the archeological record?"

"I'm afraid
we've passed the point at which I can be of much assistance. It's
a dicey business making conjectures about extinct political and
legal systems from stones and bones. Things would be much easier
if we had a copy of their constitution, but up until now none has
turned up. Its ironic, we have a better knowledge of the constitution
of Athens, thanks to the preservation of Aristotle's works, than
we do of political organization during the Amerikkan period, which
is much more recent."

"I think
the phrase u2018book of laws' indicates that they had a written constitution."

"I tend
to agree, and furthermore, the preservation of that fragment alone
would vindicate all the hard work that you've poured into deciphering
this inscription."

The philologist
gave a whimsical look and muttered, "Thank you."

"But what
actually happened I can't say. When we find aggregates of indigenous
and Western hemispheric material in the Late Amerikkan level, is
it too much of a conjecture to suppose that political organization
had entered a period of rapid transformation? Was Mesopotamia actually
annexed and administered as an integral part of the Amerikkan polity?
I would be curious to know. The most that one can say is that there
would have been a great deal of mutual interpenetration among the
political classes of both regions. Naturally this would have led
to changes in legal and moral norms on both sides of the relationship.
Whether for good or ill…I don't suppose that's for either you or
I to judge."

"No, but
the author of the inscription has judged, and judged very clearly."

"I sense
a certain amount of bitterness in the text. But then, assuming the
hypothesis that we have framed to be correct, it must have been
a terrible experience, seeing one's world implode so suddenly. Or
was it as sudden as the thinness of the strata, together with the
alarming tone of the text, seem to indicate? Let's have the final
stanza and be done with it, this thing is making me depressed and
making you more cross-eyed than you already are!"

Ignoring the
insult the philologist burst out. "Agreed! This is where she
goes out for the count and we finish our labors….

The gate
keeper unlocked the fourth door of hell

He recited
to the lady her obligation
     And took from her the robe
     The single garment which covered
her body
"Why do you take my robe?" she asked.
     "Quiet maiden!
     This is the law of the underworld

     Which must be fulfilled.

     Do not question the rites of
hell!"

…and that's
it, its over, she's standing there stark naked, presumably in front
of Lady Fatality who is grinning like a cat with its paw in the
canary's cage. Any comments?"

"Well,
not a very satisfactory ending is it? Obviously there are a great
many missing fragments."

"Then
go dig up some more inscriptions! My job is just to do the decoding."

"Well,
somehow you've finagled me into doing both of our jobs, and I suppose
now that you want my amateur opinion on the symbolism of the robe."

"And I
suspect that you will say that it represents the loss of dignity."

"No, I
won't fall for that. Of course whoever wrote the poem must have
felt a great deal of shame, as if having been stripped naked by
the winds of history. But he or she was also an acute symbolist,
and knew that a garment stood in the same relationship to the body
as the body itself does to the soul. Thus the loss of the garment
symbolizes death. The terrible truth is that the momentum of the
whole narrative, from the very beginning, is hurtling towards the
death of Liberty."

"You've
confirmed my own hypothesis…although I would have preferred it if
you hadn't. It's as if the poem was a cry of anguish from the past.
Now that we've given it a careful reading, how would you place its
genre: a lament or an admonition?"

"Both!
A lament for them, an admonition for us."

The philologist
gave the archeologist a searching look. "And what precisely
is it that we are being admonished about?"

"Well,
I'm a skeptic myself, but at the risk of sounding like an ancient
Mesopotamian, the admonition is very clear: don't betray and blaspheme
your god…or goddess as the case may be. Liberty underwent a transfiguration
on her way to hell, in which her icon was first drained of all meaning,
and finally came to signify virtually the opposite of what she had
stood for in her native land. I assure you, nations don't long outlive
the death of their gods!" The archeologist thought he had done
a good summing up, but his colleague was holding up his hand in
a gesture of defiance. "What, do you think I've gotten it wrong?"

"Yes,
you've omitted an essential element in the story. Hope! You see,
although we only have fragments of the text, we can try to guess
its outcome by relating it to the classical structure of Mesopotamian
epic. I hope some day we find further fragments of the poem, fragments
which tell how Lady Liberty either extricates herself from hell
or is rescued by a benevolent force. You describe the poet as bitter…I
would say indignant, and resolved to see a new birth for Liberty,
rising up from the underground. After all, that's what all the old
myths promise, in one form or another, isn't it?"

The archeologist
gave a sigh. "I suppose you're right…but I'm tired. To begin
with, tired of pondering the fate of the Amerikkans! They had their
day in the sun, and its time for us to get out of it…back to town
and into the shade."

"Very
well, but let me lock the Descent of Liberty inscriptions
up in the storage shed first. They say the antiquity thieves are
on the prowl again, and at the minimum I hope we can at least safeguard
these meager fragments, lest their testimony of a long forgotten
freedom vanish utterly from the earth."

Amongst
other things, The Descent of Liberty: An Archeological Enigma
for the Future is a layman's tribute to the now threatened field
of Middle Eastern archeology. For more information on the Mesopotamian
epics see Poems
of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia.

September
17, 2007

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
teaches Anthropology and English at the University of Hyogo, Japan.
He has studied Austrian economics at George Mason University and
is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute.

Whether
Treasure Island is even juvenilia by today's standards is
debatable. Its language is too crisp and sophisticated for a progressive
reader (in either the political or the pedagogical sense) and more
importantly, its narrative is too deeply subjective to appeal to
those, either young or old, who glean for no more than action and
plot. It is easy to recognize the multi-perspective structure of
the narrative in the candid musings of Jim Hawkins which alternate
with the clinical observations of Dr. Livesey, a technique which,
for a 19th century work, must have seemed daringly experimental.
For while Stevenson was best known as a traveler, whether on donkey
in France or schooner to the South seas, his deepest explorations
were into the opaque recesses of the human soul. However to go further
and say that the literary subjectivism of Stevenson's fictional
world reflects the zeitgeist of a near-contemporary economic revolution
is a bridge at which many a mental burro will baulk. But then the
mental donkeys that carry around our common sense notions always
tend to get vertigo as soon as they approach a bridge which spans
the divide between the way things appear and the way they really
are, which is why Carl Menger might very well have considered encrypting
the simple, but counterintuitive, truths of subjectivist economics
in the vehicle of light fiction.

Yet even if
I were wrong and Treasure Island had nothing to teach us
about either economics or politics, it would still be a mighty fine
tale. It is struggle of good and evil, and by modern standards it
is that, not any lack of literary subtlety, which consigns it to
the nursery. It offends the demoralizing sensibilities which prompted
early 20th century critics, in and out of Bloomsbury,
to eliminate Stevenson from the canon of serious literature. And
of course, from their perspective, it was the right thing to do
since there is much which smacks of prejudice in Treasure Island,
a place where we find ourselves in a simpler world, one where the
reader, given a few moral clues, can instantly grasp the distinction
between a gentleman and a damned and dirty dog overripe for chastisement
by his betters. No doubt there is some deficiency in this gentleman-bites-dog
world view, but today any adequate criticism of the Manichean mentality
which lies at the root of the matter would likely be forestalled
by the preemptory intervention of the ASPCA. In the meantime perhaps
the most prudent course of action is, alas, to remove Treasure
Island from the children's book shelf and to place it high,
out of reach, and in a brown paper wrapper.

Considering
its scandalous nature, is it really so difficult to imagine that
Stevenson has buried a wealth of information about the allegedly
dismal science in his little masterpiece? Our suspicions would be
aroused even if we knew no more about the author than his title.
As it happens, we can guess that Stevenson was both a romantic
and a hard-money man…ahem, that he and his wife Fanny were hard
money persons, from the fact that they spent their honeymoon shivering
in their long johns camped out in a California silver mine. And
surely titles, not to mention names of leading characters, can hardly
be coincidental.

No one, to
be sure, could possibly deny that Treasure Island is shot
through with a variety of economic exchange from beginning to end.
Hardly have we turned the first page when we are greeted by the
unsavory, but hardly impecunious, character of Billy Bones who arrives
at the Admiral Benbow Inn, and announces his intention to be fed,
liquored, and sheltered with a flurry of transactional bravado:

…and he
threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. "You
can tell me when I've worked through that," said he, looking
as fierce as a commander.

What volumes
might not be written just to tease out the economic assumptions
that are concealed behind those few lines! Notions of debit, credit
and the discount on future goods and services lurk here, barely
visible behind the deceptive simplicity of Bones' words, much as
the abiding trust in the fiduciary medium employed shines through
the ugly patina of the character who employs it. Indeed, from the
outset of our inquiry even the dullest of our mental donkeys will
have to recognize that Treasure Island is, among other things,
an encomium to the faith human beings have traditionally put in
hard money, even when they have had scarce reason to trust its bearers.

Indeed if
Treasure Island, considered as an economic text, has a fault
it is the scant attention it pays to paper money. There is nary
a banknote or a bond in the entire tale, nor is anything but silver
and gold ever given in credit excepting only those circumstances
where the characters of the story are reduced to barter. This is
no great disadvantage for us, we who are reading for no more than
economic and political edification in Stevenson's classic, however
it may have been a serious encumbrance for the worthy but worried
Mrs. Hawkins, forced as she was to grapple, unassisted, with the
thorny issues of bimetallism in the wake of Billy Bones’ subsequent
demise. To collect her rent due from the remains of the dead man
she must count out a motley collection of coins including gold guineas
and silver "pieces of eight" i.e., Spanish dollars. Not
knowing the precise exchange rate of gold to silver, and confused
by foreign denominations, she confines herself to guineas, not because
they are gold but because of the calculatory convenience of a monometallic
standard. In the meantime the threatening pirates are fast approaching
the Inn. Jim Hawkins relates,

But my mother,
frightened as she was, would not consent to take a fraction more
than was due to her, and was obstinately unwilling to be content
with less…she knew her rights and she would have them; and she
was still arguing with me, when a little low whistle sounded a
good way off upon the hill. That was enough, and more than enough,
for both of us.

"I'll
Take what I have," she said, jumping to her feet.

"And
I'll take this to square the count," said I, picking up the
oilskin packet.

This u2018obstinate
honesty' is a characteristic of societies where contract is honored,
including the implicit social contract which says money has a constant,
or near constant value. Indeed, one wonders if even the proverbial
honesty of Mrs. Hawkins would have survived habituation to the inflationary
standards of the assignats or continentals which were to make their
appearance only a few decades after the years in which Stevenson
sets his story. One further wonders if the stark moral dualism that
we find so quaint in light romantic literature is not a souvenir
of economic history, in so far as we moderns have lost our moral
compass, fowled in a Sargasso sea of fraud, inflation, and tax-code
abetted legerdemain. In a hard money world moral distinctions would
have been harder as well, and it would have been easier than today
to separate people into the u2018Billy Bones' and the u2018Mrs. Hawkins'
categories. Much more could be said about the way that money is
used in this tale, and not just by Billy Bones or Mrs. Hawkins…but
this might risk embroiling ourselves in currency questions of the
18th century, in short, the fine branches of political
economy.

X Marks
The Spot

Instead we
want to go to the trunk of the matter, not the dead men's trunk
of the mutineers but the living trunk of purposeful human action
which underlies all political economy. Therefore we must start at
the end, at that point where the treasure has at last been discovered,
and work our way back towards the beginning. For like any good story
Treasure Island is teleological…which is just a fancy way
of saying that the head and the tail of the tale are connected.
It is a story about purposive action, and everybody in the story
is pursuing a common end, namely the treasure itself. This is the
bare skeleton on which the narrative hangs, and it makes no claims
as to the goodness or badness of the characters themselves, the
state of their knowledge or the means they employ to attain the
end, only that they all act and compete in a way that is mutually
intelligible. Like with most good tales (even mysteries) we know
how things will end up before we even crack the book, so we are
hardly surprised when we at long last find ourselves in Ben Gunn's
cave with Jim Hawkins who describes himself as looking down in satisfaction
at the treasure…

…I think
I never had more pleasure than in sorting them. English, French,
Spanish, Portugese, Georges, Louises, doubloons, and double guineas
and moidores and sequins, the pictures of all the kings of Europe
for the last hundred years, strange oriental pieces stamped with
what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider's web, round
pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle,
as if to wear them round your neck — nearly every variety of money
in the world must, I think, have found a place in that collection;
and for number, I am sure they were like autumn leaves, so that
my back ached with stooping and my fingers with sorting them out.

Just like
Jim Hawkins any child, or even an older reader with an interest
in curios, will get a great deal of pleasure in sorting through
the numismatic details of this paragraph, and I won’t spoil the
fun by giving out details which can be easily researched in your
local library or hobby shop. But to the eyes of an economic historian
there is a bitter nostalgia in the account, for Stevenson has set
his tale in an era when money circulated on the basis of its metallic
value in contrast to the token coinage of today. The "pictures
of all the kings of Europe" was nothing but a guarantee of
the weight of the metal, a convenience to obviate constant reweighing,
and added nothing to the value of the coins at the time. And while
it would be wrong to attribute to the curmudgeon-like characters
of Treasure Island an enthusiasm for internationalism, it
remains true that, in terms of monetary affairs, the globe had not
yet been divided into currency blocks or hemmed in by exchange controls.
In that sense, it was still one world.

So much for
numismatics, what of political economy? Why do all the characters
in this story seek the treasure, a premise that we as readers never
question, although we smile at Ben Gunn when he chortles to Jim
Hawkins, "I'm rich!" In truth, the treasure is perfectly
useless on the island, except as costume jewelry, or rather buttons
on Ben Gunn's rags. Moreover Gunn is no Crusoe, the latter so beloved
of neoclassical economists for his ability to work raw materials
into useful objects. Yet to be sure he is just as cunning, if not
more so, than his literary predecessor. This is possible since Gunn's
island is haunted, unlike Crusoe's, by the specter of the world
economy…and thus the prospect of Gunn redeeming the heavy metallic
objects which he has removed to his cave allows them to take on
a more than ornamental value. To be sure it could all have turned
out quite differently, say if the Hispaniola had been lost
and all were marooned with Ben Gunn. In that case some medium (or
media) of exchange might have arisen from a class of objects which
was both scarce and valued. Undoubtedly Ben Gunn would have been
willing to exchange gold for cheese, the pirates would have been
willing to exchange cheese for rum, and the party of Captain Smollet
would be willing to exchange Dr. Livesey's materia medica for weapons.
In other worlds, the starting point for an autonomous island economy
would have been barter, a system that we can see beginning to develop
in that frantic period when it is not at all clear that escape from
the island is even possible. Having said all that, it is not entirely
impossible that the marooned islanders might have returned to the
gold standard in due time!

How could
this be possible when it is clear that the treasure is no more than
a collection of worthless baubles? To see how it might happen we
have to acquire a "marginalist insight" and this is the
first of those donkey-bridges at which our common sense gets instant
mental acrophobia. To accrue this insight from the very beginning
we must accustom ourselves to the point of view of a person who
is initiating an exchange and focus on what they are willing to
give up and only afterwards on what they hope to gain. Of course
the person will only be willing to exchange something that they
value less for something they value more. More importantly, they
will only exchange "at the margin"…that is, they will
try to exchange a thing in their inventory which is of less value
rather than greater value, as ranked in terms of their subjective
priorities. Ben Gunn wants cheese, not gold. If he has by some great
fortune come into a "bit of cheese"…say a gift from Jim
Hawkins, or if he has gone to the trouble of producing it from goat's
milk, he will not be quick to part with it. On the other hand he
has a vast amount of gold, and it is precisely because gold is of
little use to him that he is likely to offer a large amount of it
for some more desired item. In fact, this is precisely what happens
in the end, when he exchanges all of it for the cheese, a return
trip to England, and a small share in the salvage proceeds. We can
imagine the pirates and Captain Smollett's party in the same situation,
valuing medical and food supplies over gold, with the result of
the former being pushed out of circulation by the latter. All this
is speculative of course, and there are some reasons to doubt the
return to such a grossly inflated standard…for once Gunn's stash
began to circulate freely, a single musket or bottle of rum would
have gone for hundreds of golden Guineas or thousands of pounds
sterling. Perhaps something else would have eventually turned out
to be the media of exchange, say cured goat meat or bolts of sailcloth,
however anthropological records of islands where ornamental objects
did in fact constitute the local exchange (kula items, cowries etc.)
indicate that the eventual remonetization of Ben Gunn's treasure
is not entirely beyond the pale of possibility.

The subjectivity
of the book is not the subjectivity of magic or desire, but rather
finds itself expressed in action and choice. To be sure Ben Gunn
craves cheese, the pirates lust for rum, and everybody longs for
gold, but these primordial facts in and of themselves do not suffice
to coordinate any action, let alone make a story, since they are
constantly in flux and incommensurable.

It is only
when the pirates, who epitomize desire and what economists call
high time preference, are able to set aside their quarrels and delegate
planning to their agent, Long John Silver, that they become, if
not formidable, at least a force. Their pathos, trapped in this
gentleman-bites-dog world which is largely of the dogs' own making,
might have aroused the sympathy of a romantic (and vaguely leftish)
writer such as Hugo, but the more sanguine Stevenson seems to shrug
off their fate as fortunes of war.

In the act
of barter which occurs at the climax of the story, Jim Hawkins relates,

And he [Long
John Silver] cast down upon the floor a paper that I instantly
recognized — none other than the chart on yellow paper, with the
three red crosses, that I had found in the oil-cloth at the bottom
of the captain's chest. Why the doctor had given it to him was
more than I could fancy.

What has transpired
is the exchange of the treasure map for a safe conduct pass out
of the blockhouse for Captain Smollett's party. The outcome of the
story hinges on this simple transaction. Yet it is unclear, and
not just to Jim Hawkins, why this transaction has been made. All
we know is that at the precise moment of the exchange, the treasure
map was of less value for the Captain's party than escaping from
the blockhouse, and from the point of view of Silver letting the
loyalists escape was of less moment than getting the treasure map.
Beyond that, things are pretty murky, since nobody has perfect information,
either about conditions on the island or the contents of one another's
minds. Even if someone had the omniscience which narrators provide
in certain kinds of fiction, in other words the sort of narrator
who is so conspicuously absent in Stevenson's adventure, it would
be of little use in fixing exchange rates based on supposed wants,
since these are in a continual state of flux. Silver points this
out contemptuously to his own men, noting that their own standards
of just barter swings back and forth depending on the ever changing
state of their health, sobriety, and courage.

X marks the
spot: This is where demand and supply meet. All the psychological
elements which went up to make the decision are as dead as Schrdinger's
cat…or rather, since we are back in the pre-quantum world of the
18th century, the ghost of old Flint.

In Stevenson's
work we only know Long John Silver through the observations and
inferences of Jim Hawkins. Apart from that, nearly everyone today
knows him as a stock character in Hollywood movies, growing ever
more genial and even mentoring in his relation to Jim through countless
remakes. However there is nothing in Stevenson's book to justify
this sympathetic treatment of Silver, and in the end Hawkins himself
concludes that the man is utterly and irredeemably wicked. Indeed,
Silver, once we understand his nature, is a frightening character…much
more frightening than his lieutenant Israel Hands, who has all the
refreshing candor of a neoconservative think-tanker just out graduated
from political science with a major in Machiavelli. Hands relates
to Jim Hawkins that…

For thirty
year…I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better or worse,
fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and
what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o'goodness
yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's
my views — amen, so be it.

One can imagine
Hands’ captain having spoken exactly the same words on a suitable
occasion, differing only in Silver's repertoire not being limited
to such naked professions of the true piratical faith. Rather, Silver's
primary weapon is a capacity for deceit…a knack at stringing people
along in a deal until it is to his advantage to break it.

The Dead
Man's Chest

In one
respect Silver is more akin to his antagonists Captain Smollett,
Squire Trelawney, and Doctor Livesey than any of his fellow conspirators…in
common with the former and in contrast to the latter he has relatively
low time preference. Time preference is the economic concept akin
to such more psychological oriented notions as planning, foresight,
and gratification…all of which vary from person to person in so
far as they may place higher or lower value on present versus future
satisfaction. Although we can't see into Silver's mind we have pretty
good indications that his time preference is quite low by typical
pirate standards. Not only is he capable of the premeditation which
goes into planning the mutiny, but we have more measurable accounts
of his relatively low demand for present satisfaction since he has
saved his proceeds from two previous piratical campaigns and this
is his third (and allegedly last) trip out, to cash in on the remainder
of his u2018deposit' by way of his former captain, Flint. Only a small
hard core of his fellow co-conspirators aboard the Hispaniola
are veterans of Flint's crew, the majority of whom have managed
to kill themselves off with rum or in brawls. Even this remnant,
with the exception of Silver, seems to have started this last voyage
from scratch, financially speaking.

This leaves
one more survivor of Flint's crew, Ben Gunn, and unfortunately he
is no exception to the prevailing high time-preference among his
former mates. For when he returns to civilization we are able to
get a reasonably good measure of his propensities, courtesy of Jim
Hawkins.

As for Ben
Gunn, he got a thousand pounds, which he spent or lost in three
weeks, or, to be more exact, in nineteen days, for he was back
begging on the twentieth.

This, by
the way, should send a shiver of collective apprehension down our
spines, we readers who have taken Treasure Island to be our
vade mecum in political economy. And this not merely on account
of any sympathy that we may have for u2018poor Ben Gunn' but because
our mental donkeys are again digging in their hoofs, as they correctly
sense the approach of another vertigo-inducing bridge into the world
of economics.

Now one of
the postulates of economics is that time preference varies inversely
with wealth. People with little wealth will tend to have high time
preference, and people with much wealth will have low time preference.
We can see an illustration of this in the case of Long John Silver,
who is both the richest of the pirates at the outset of the Hispaniola's
voyage, and also has the lowest time preference. For simplicity's
sake we can imagine a person's time preference as a negatively sloping
curve running down from right to left, with the vertical axis representing
assets.

But not so
fast me hardies! Are we really sure about this? Doesn't common sense
and experience tell us that the precise opposite is the case, and
that the slope of the curve should be positive, varying directly
with wealth? If we are in straightened circumstances will we not
pinch our pennies, while we will splurge if we get some windfall
gain? If we see Ben Gunn's thousand pounds as a windfall then, to
be sure, he seems to have been ruined by wealth. In the end he becomes
an almsman, whose only consolation is singing in the chapel choir
on Sundays. Moreover, we can imagine itinerant Wesleyan preachers
turning Ben Gunn's sad story into a homily on the corruption of
a man who was virtuous when he was living under conditions of enforced
austerity but fell amongst rum, strumpets, and of course, cheese.
From there the edifying tale might have made its way into the doctrines
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then to all later generations of survivalists,
primitivists, and back-to-nature enthusiasts. Ben Gunn: the man
who was ruined by money and civilization.

However this
is not the story as Stevenson has written it. Ben Gunn, it is clear,
is the same man from beginning to end. His demise is not the result
of going from literal rags to riches…but latent in his character.
In fact, in the interests of saving the theorem that wealth and
time-preference are inversely related, one could make a credible
case for Ben Gunn suffering a loss when he left the island! After
all he was (considerations of the treasure aside) the sole freeholder
of the place. But this is rather factitious, since we have no way
of calculating, in a monetary sense, the value of his estate during
the time when there was no exchange on the island and when the treasure
was demonetized. All we know is that he was anxious to leave and
that he was willing to exchange both his real estate and the entire
treasure for a trip back to Bristol and a thousand pounds sterling.
But this is just barter, and all it means is that, in Ben Gunn's
scale of value cheese in Bristol would be preferable to goat's meat
on the island.

The real reason
why Ben Gunn lost his fortune on his return to England is that,
in returning to a world of exchange, and monetized exchange at that,
he entered an environment where his assets became liquid. In a world
of debtors and creditors his time preference became manifest. Thus,
preferring cheese now to returns from investment over a period of
time, he squandered his wealth. The man was clearly voracious…although
we can leave it to the economic historians to divide a thousand
pounds sterling by the price of cheese in the 1760's over a period
of precisely nineteen days!

However there
is some terrible incongruity in all this, the demise of the character
who elsewhere, albeit with a touch of irony, is described by Jim
Hawkins as the u2018hero' of the tale. Was he not the stand-in for the
hardy and resourceful Robinson Crusoe? And if he really demonstrated
such high time preference on his return to England, how can we suspend
our belief in the consistency of human nature long enough to permit
him to go fishing, hunt goats, cure their meat, mend clothing, and
build a coracle, not to mention finding, unearthing, and transporting
a weighty fortune a considerable distance in anticipation of the
eventual return of Flint or some other adventurer? These are all
activities which require considerable foresight and planning.

However none
of these activities, energetic though they might be, necessarily
indicate low time preference. Rather, knowing what we do from Stevenson's
description of Ben Gunn, we can best see his behavior as kind of
gambling. Now gambling, as opposed to investment, is a high time
preference activity, the idea being to win as big as possible as
soon as possible. We needn't doubt that every day Gunn has woken
up in hopes of a sail on the horizon, seeking to make a bargain
with Flint's gold. In this respect he differs from the genuinely
low time preference Crusoe, who is bent on improving his homestead,
not winning a jackpot. Once we cease to conflate gambling with investment,
many things, previously obscure, become clear…not the least of them
the mysterious ability of Gunn to waste his fortune in nineteen
days…given that is, the finite capacity of the human organism to
metabolize cheese.

In short,
it wasn't civilization which ruined Ben Gunn, but high time preference.
In saying that we are simply noting that Stevenson, the consummate
psychologist, was too astute to psychologize ethics or ethicize
political economy. When we say that Ben Gunn was ruined we only
mean that he was ruined financially, not morally. To be sure there
is some connection between his ability to make a livelihood and
his ethics, but it is a very ambiguous one. All in all, we are left
at the end of the story with the impression that old Ben is a rather
harmless and well-meaning person. And here we come to the last and
most perilous donkey-bridge of all, the relationship of ethics to
economics, for it must be clarified that there is no direct correlation
between time preference level on the one hand and morality on the
other. None the less, time preference and ethics interact in subtle
and at times perilous ways…never more so than in Treasure Island.

On the other
hand, what is it which gives Silver his fiendish power but an ability
to see a bit farther into the future than his cutthroat followers?
Certainly, being a cripple, he is not stronger than they are physically,
and his assets in England, though they attest to his relative low
time preference profile, give him no immediate leverage over his
fellow mutineers. He is a long-range planner, and in that sense
is the peer or even the superior, to Squire Trelawney. They are
both entrepreneurs, or to use the 18th century expression
for "entrepreneur" which seems to suit Silver much better
than Trelawney: undertakers. Moreover they differ not in their undertaking,
which is to find the treasure, but in how they undertake it. Trelawney
undertakes the treasure-hunt by hiring with his money the capital
and labor which are necessary for the enterprise: a ship, a crew,
and a captain. In short, his rights and the rights of the people
whom he has dealings with are based on contract.

In a sense,
Silver's enterprise is also based on contract, but a very different
sort of contract. For while Trelawney's contracting is based on
the anterior cultural and contractual disposition of people and
goods in society, Silver's contracting emerges out of a state of
nature. There is something Promethean and awe-inspiring about this
bold compact, and if it didn't involve so much violence we would
almost be moved to salute the success of Silver's venture. After
all, to the best of my knowledge nobody has named a successful fast-food
chain after Squire Trelawney! Is this because we "liberals"
(or as long as the story takes place in the 18th century
let's call ourselves Whigs) relish the presumptive fairness of the
"equal shares all around" and "everyone a boss"
principles? Perhaps, but even in our deepest Whigish deliria we
remain dimly aware that not everyone can be boss, and that somehow
Long John Silver is a bit less equal than all the others…a sort
of boss of bosses.

This is a
neat trick for a non-navigator with one leg and a parrot on his
back, but hardly an original one, since according to Stevenson
the constitution of pirate societies followed an unvarying pattern,
on Flint's ship no less than the Hispaniola. Long John Silver
had never been anything but a quartermaster on Flint's ship, but
one can imagine, since Billy Bones profited from the same office,
that this was one of the more politically powerful positions on
board. Indeed, these pirate ships are the spitting images of Athenian
democracies, and endowed with more petty offices than a town meeting
in old New England. From time to time bloody revolution was in order
but a less sanguinary method of instituting reform was to summon
a council (the "Black Spot") and vote for a new captain.
Popularity, not navigational or even military skill, ruled the day.

However there
were two skills that were absolutely essential for the person who
whished to rise to supreme power under such a constitution, namely
the ability to make promises and then to break them with impunity.
It is precisely these two skills which Long John Silver has honed
to perfection. On the island he is able to count on the high time
preference of his crew to keep them directed, or rather misdirected,
towards satisfaction within the shortest possible time frame. He
is able to count on the fact that not only the pirate's physical
constitutions, which crave rum, inhibit long-term planning, but
that high time preference is built into the very fabric of their
political constitution as well.

The most sinister
element of this piratical commonwealth is the fact that it is based
on equal shares in a venture which speculates on the recovery of
a fixed sum at an unknown future time. Under these conditions it
is to the advantage of each party to the contract, baring the need
for assistance, for the number of fractional shares to be fewer
rather than greater. Again, like Ben Gunn, they are gamblers rather
than investors. Of course the quest for the treasure could be undertaken,
la Squire Trelawney, as a matter of investment. However, knowing
as we do that pirates are high time preference beings, they do not
invest but rather borrow, or rather steal, capital from Squire Trelawney
in order to accomplish their hunt. On the other hand they increase
their individual shares of the final amount through various forms
of ostracism. Most blatantly these include execution or marooning
after having been served the "Black Spot"…but there are
more indirect forms of attrition such as accident and death in combat.
In the case of Silver, as with Flint, there are dark hints in the
story that much of this supposedly "accidental" attrition
is the result of premeditation. Whatever the truth of the matter,
Silver is the only one of the pirates who, at the end, escapes both
death and marooning…not to mention making off with a tidy portion
of the fortune! The constant refrain of the mutineers, "the
ship went out with seventy-five, and only one came back alive"
is more than just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it is a necessary
consequence of the political system which they have contracted into.

One suspects
that Stevenson's setting the story in the 18th century
is more than an allusion to the heyday of piracy in the Caribbean.
It was also a watershed in political economy and the development
of the Whig conception of politics. Although my whimsical conjecture
that Stevenson himself might have been the creation of Carl Menger
is unlikely to stand the light of historical criticism, it is no
accident that the former sets his tale in the age of Richard Cantillon
(1680–1734), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723–1790),
who were not only participants in the politics of their century
but critics of it as well. Stevenson, in his day, already had time
to learn from some of the more crude misunderstandings of the Enlightenment,
but the donkey mind of our common sense notions and our lingering
Whig consciences may be unable to follow the grown over trail that
he has laid out towards the fortune of political economy. Repelled
by the Tory bigotry of Trelawney we are still tempted to throw in
our fortunes with the Long John Silvers of this world…only to discover
the difference between a Whig and a Jacobin when it is too late.
If we hasten to refound society in a Year One of our choosing, we
had better not forget that in possessing equal shares of a commonwealth
based on distribution, rather than markets, we are all equally expendable.

The dwindling
of the Hispaniola's crew is an enactment in miniature of
what would later in the same century befall the political class
of continental Europe. The idea of contracting society de novo
out of a state of nature developed in a few years from a half-baked
idea in the fevered brain of Rousseau into the policies of Robespierre.
Moreover, the heads which rolled from the guillotine, seemingly
the victims of envy and fanaticism, were in fact the logical consequences
of this policy. To be sure markets, as well as political policies,
have their victims, as we see from the loss of Ben Gunn's fortune.
However for Jacobinism and other forms of political intervention
it is people, not assets, which are liquidated. In the case of revolutionary
France the "Dead Man's Chest" upon which the political
class sat was the nation itself, conceived physiocratically as a
fixed sum of rent and distributed, in defiance of both Jacobin rhetoric
and gravity, upwards. The beneficiaries of this upward redistribution
were doomed by the same fatal logic as the mutineers of the Hispaniola,
as every ostracism increased the fractional booty of the contending
parties, until the whole process came to its inevitable conclusion
and a Long John Silver on horseback rode away with the jackpot.

These Jacobin
horrors don't imply that we need to be enamored of Squire Trelawney
and his bungling Toryism, or of the gentleman-bites-dog world in
which Stevenson has set his story. Nobody should take satisfaction
in seeing poor old blind Pew run over roughshod by Mr. Dance and
his revenue patrol. Yet even Trelawney and Dr. Livesey take king
and country with a grain of salt, and wisely dismiss Mr. Dance before
they open the suspicious package which contains the treasure map.
Once Trelawney, Livesey, and Smollett have hit the high seas the
state is left behind them, and what binds them (as well as the crew)
together is contract and the memory of civilization. Unfortunately
the faction of the crew led by Long John Silver proves faithless
and decides to wipe this slate clean, recontracting from the state
of nature. Having studied our political economy we now understand
the inevitable consequences of this fatal action on Treasure
Island. But what we 20th-century descendents of the
Whigs should recollect are the principles underlying the process,
hopefully before the appearance of the next man on horseback. Or
failing that, we should at least resolve not to be overly impressed
when he does make his appearance, recognizing him for what he is…just
the latest incarnation of Long John Silver and doomed like all the
other dirty dogs of history.

In conclusion,
let's simply note that Treasure Island lives up to all of its promises,
both as a work of adventure fiction and of political economy. Indeed,
it is only when we understand the political and economic dynamics
of the story that we come to grips with the more bloodcurdling aspects
of the tale. Jim Hawkins realizes this at the end, and vows never
to return to the accursed island, even if dreams of unearned wealth
could be realized there. And we should follow his example, for whatever
wealth of insight the story might contain is hardly an excuse to
put a book like this in the hands of children! That is, unless it
serves to teach both our children and ourselves wisdom.

December
22, 2005

Mark
Sunwall [send him email]
is an associate professor of the University of Hyogo, Akashi, Japan
where he teaches English writing and literature as well as Sociocultural
Anthropology. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute of Auburn Alabama. Although an occasional
fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, his treasure hunting experience
is limited to searching for sand dollars on deserted Florida beaches.