"…the Library at Alexandria was charged with collecting all the world’s knowledge. It did so through an aggressive and well-funded royal mandate involving trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens and a policy of pulling the books off every ship that came into port. They kept the original texts and made copies to send back to their owners." (Wikipedia)

We have it in our grasp to realize the original mission of the Library of Alexandria, "collecting all the world’s knowledge", but with significant improvements on the original plan:

• Multiple, redundant, perfect copies.
• Copies in multiple physical locations, (to avoid the problem of, say, one central location being burned down and losing the whole collection).
• Storage of not only texts, but images, audio recordings (music, spoken word, etc.), and video.
• The ability to search all of this knowledge comprehensively yet instantly that the librarians of Alexandria could not even have imagined (but would have loved!)
• The ability to interconnect between all these texts and other media so that connections between them can be made explicit and easily navigable.
• Access to all this from almost anywhere in the world, rather than scholars having to travel to a single location in Egypt.
• Participation by all scholars (or anyone with something to share) from all over the world, rather than a relatively small group of scholars funded by a single government.
• And all of this based on a voluntary process of sharing. No breaking in and stealing originals from anyone. If anyone wants to keep something to themselves they simply refrain from sharing it and this great project will leave them in peace.

Before we consider the threats to this new "Library of Alexandria" that we call the Internet, let’s pause for a moment and consider the historically unprecedented opportunity that lays before us.

To help us, let’s enlist a librarian from the Library of Alexandria by transporting him to our time. Let’s bring Zenodotus, the first superintendent of the Library, pioneer of the alphabetical storage of texts and metadata to mark texts for easy retrieval.

Once getting over all the other various shocks of coming to our time, he would be curious how we now deal with his own passion: scholarship and the preservation of the great texts.

We would show him how, rather than spending months making a copy of a text by hand, we are able to make a copy of a text instantly by copying from one computer to another. Furthermore, the source and destination for this copying need not be anywhere near each other but can be on opposite sides of the world!

We would then show him how all this information, stored all over the world, is instantly searchable. Perhaps we would do a "vanity search" for him and show him the thousands of results containing the word "Zenodotus" in texts on computers all over the world.

We could then show him how articles on him contain references to other texts with information on the history of the Library of Alexandria and the librarians who came after him. How each text links to another in a vast interconnected web of knowledge.

But, inevitably, in showing him information on the Library of Alexandria he would see that eventually the Library was burned. Though some of the work of the Library was preserved, much was lost. In the long term, the project was a failure.

And after showing Zenodotus the astounding opportunity to resurrect his project and improve on it greatly, how would we explain to him that making copies of information is increasingly under threat? That people who make copies of information have been sued and jailed? That unauthorized copies are hunted down and destroyed constantly?

How do we explain to him that we were this close to realizing the dream of the Library of Alexandria but decided to burn it down instead?

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy and is the proud father of five children. See his reviews of Films on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web Site. He blogs at Radical Liberation.

The Best of Stephen Carson

With the selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has impressed many as making a savvy political maneuver. McCain has not had much appeal to pro-lifers, gun rights advocates or fiscal conservatives. Sarah Palin looks to be much more appealing to those voters. So this VP pick may serve McCain’s campaign for the presidency well.

Bully for him, as my Grandma would say.

For the rest of us, the Herb Tarlek question remains, “What does this mean… to me?” I believe what the selection of Sarah Palin is supposed to convey is that a McCain administration would save babies’ lives, protect gun rights and shrink the size of government.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

So what is Sarah Palin’s true purpose? Whether she knows it or not, she is a stalking horse.

I learned about a “stalking horse” reading a seemingly unrelated book years ago. It is a little treasure called Education’s Smoking Gun: How Teacher Colleges Have Destroyed Education in America by Reginald G. Damerell. The book is a fascinating account of a well-meaning retired advertising man who decided he would use his knowledge of effective communication to help people to teach. So he taught as a professor of Education at Amherst from 1970—1982. What he found appalled him.

Education fads came and went with little or even negative benefit for the students. He eventually decided that the emperor had no clothes, that the “Educationists” had other goals besides the ones they publicly proclaimed. He came very near to the libertarian analysis of government schools, that they are a glorified jobs program with little real ability to effectively teach beyond, perhaps, filling children with the latest government propaganda.

Where the notion of a “stalking horse” comes in is in his perceptive analysis of the use of minorities by the Education establishment. He argues that they responded to criticism in the 1950s by use of the “Big E — Education," essentially responding to any critics by saying they were criticizing education itself. He writes:

But handling criticism by name-calling this way was not adequate to ward off mounting criticisms in the 1960s, including numerous accusations of bigotry. Unable to reform themselves, educationists needed something to add to their Big E — education on a pedestal — behind which to hide. They found it in blacks and other minorities. They could fend off criticisms by accusing critics of being guilty of racism.

…Educationists made blacks and other minorities their stalking horses, hiding behind them, using them as camouflage for self-protection.

“Stalking horse” comes from hunting. To avoid scaring the prey, say a group of wild ducks, the hunter lets his horse wander towards the ducks since the ducks are not startled by seeing a horse. The hunter stays carefully behind the horse until he is close enough to shoot the ducks.

McCain and his coterie of neocon, war-mongering imperialists are the hunters. Sarah Palin is the stalking horse. And you and me, we’re the ducks.

There is nothing new here. In 1969, Murray Rothbard pleaded with libertarians to stop being stalking horses for the Right wing:

I got out of the Right-wing not because I ceased believing in liberty, but because being a libertarian above all, I came to see that the Right-wing specialized in cloaking its authoritarian and neo-fascist policies in the honeyed words of libertarian rhetoric. They need you for their libertarian cover; stop providing it for them!

~ “Listen, YAF”

As someone who is squarely in the demographic that they are trying to target with Sarah Palin, I can feel what they are trying to do. A friend of mine who is also a Christian and a libertarian hilariously wrote that he “is disappointed in himself because the Palin pick has softened his dislike for McCain.”

Many people who were not finding much to like in John McCain will be won over simply because they find what Sarah Palin stands for much more compelling. But I’m not buying, and you shouldn’t either.

Sarah Palin may be as sincere as can be, but if after a combined Reagan/Bush I/Bush II run of 20 years you still think the Republicans are going to shrink government, stop babies from being killed or reverse the slow erosion of 2nd amendment rights then you haven’t been paying attention.

It’s a trick! Don’t be fooled. Once again, those devilishly clever statists are figuring out how to quiet unrest among the natives and co-opt the growing opposition movements (as seen, for example, in the Ron Paul Revolution).

I wish Sarah Palin the best. But if she really stands for life then she’ll oppose McCain’s plan to kill more Iraqis and possibly Iranians. If she really stands for shrinking the leviathan US government, then she should know that it has grown, not shrunk, under Republican administrations. If she really understands the 2nd Amendment then she should know that it is the state that wants to register and eventually confiscate our guns so that we are helpless before it. If she really stands for the things she claims to then she should walk out of the Republican National Convention and head over to be with the true friends of liberty at the Rally for the Republic.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of three children. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site. He blogs at Radical
Liberation.

Stephen Carson Archives

You’ll know what a triumph the design of the iPhone is when you hear people say: “I hate computers, but I love my iPhone!”

Here’s the main thing you need to know about the iPhone: Apple’s done it. They’ve figured out how to bring the power of a personal computer to a handheld device. After this, it is all details.

Subsequent iPhones, and iPhone competitors, will add features, get cheaper, faster, etc. But we’ll look back to the release of the first iPhone as the moment when the power of the personal computer moved off of our desks and into our pockets — not just the pockets of technology nerds, who have been carrying PDAs for decades, but into the pockets (and purses and backpacks) of the otherwise gadget-wary public.

The irony will be not just that the iPhone is in fact a computer, but that it runs a variant of OS X, the same operating system in the Macintosh and AppleTV. The significance of this to non-geeks is that the sky is the limit for what the iPhone can do. Now that Apple has brilliantly solved the user interface challenge, it will just be a matter of building more applications in the iPhone style.

Why is Commercialization a Dirty Word?

In “The Mouse and the Market” I told the story of the invention and commercialization of the mouse. The main point is that the mouse was invented in the 1960s, but sat in the lab as an impractical, expensive prototype until Apple poured capital into designing a mouse useable by the masses in the early 1980s. Furthermore, this process of commercialization was not trivial but involved creativity and innovation equal to the original conception of the mouse.

Yet, very typically when people speak of something being “commercialized” they mean that some pure and lofty thing is cheapened, vulgarized, and exploited.

The iPhone is yet another example of what a creative, innovative process commercialization can be. For commercialization is exactly what Apple excels at. Just as with the design of the original Macintosh, Apple has taken features that have been around for years and done the hard design work to make those features useable by non-geeks. (And speaking as a professional computer geek, let me say that I, for one, don’t prefer for things to be hard to use. Just because I can puzzle out lousy computer interfaces doesn’t mean I want to spend my time doing so.)

Apple takes its interface design very seriously as described in this Time article on the iPhone:

Unlike most competitors, Apple also places an inordinate emphasis on interface design. It sweats the cosmetic details that don’t seem very important until you really sweat them. “I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to look to make sure every pixel is right,” says Scott Forstall, Apple’s vice-president of Platform Experience (whatever that is). “We will argue over literally a single pixel.” As a result, when you swipe your finger across the screen to unlock the iPhone, you’re not just accessing a system of nested menus, you’re entering a tiny universe, where data exist as bouncy, gemlike, animated objects that behave according to consistent rules of virtual physics. Because there’s no intermediary input device — like a mouse or a keyboard — there’s a powerful illusion that you’re physically handling data with your fingers. You can pinch an image with two fingers and make it smaller.

As hinted at in that excerpt, the iPhone dispenses with many of the interface conventions that Apple itself popularized with the original Macintosh: windows, scroll bars, menus, cut/copy/paste. In its place they have developed a new user interface language more suitable to a small handheld device. For example, instead of clicking on a scroll bar to move down a web page, you merely flick your finger up the display and the page moves up. It creates the illusion that you are manipulating the web page like a physical object.

Many, if not most, of the things the iPhone can do have been done before in handheld devices. Phones have been incorporating non-phone features for some time now. For example, it is claimed that the camera phone was invented in 1997. But just because a phone is technically capable of doing something doesn’t mean that people are actually wading through the manual, figuring out how to do it and regularly making use of the feature. With the iPhone, ordinary people will make use of advanced features like web browsing, maps, music and video, and fully powered e-mail that they would have dismissed as “only for people good with computers” before.

Innovating For the Market

Why is this sort of innovation, the kind that affects millions of people, so often given short shrift? Perhaps it is because it is so clearly a market phenomenon. What curse word is worse from the intellectual class than “commodification”?

Typical of this sort of innovation, Apple’s development of the iPhone has been marked by capital investment with an eye towards profits, and therefore a merciless control of costs. Apple CEO Steve Jobs isn’t just interested in neat technology for his personal amusement. He is clearly driven to lead the development of devices that will be both fun and practical for millions of people.

Somewhere along the way, innovating for the market came to be considered a low, uncreative activity. The cultural elite considers only those who follow their personal muse without regard for money, popularity or even comprehensibility to be original and creative.

They can have their naked performance artists covered in chocolate ironically singing the Star-Spangled Banner. I’ll be playing with my iPhone.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of three children. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site. He blogs at Radical Liberation.

Stephen Carson Archives

Sharp-eyed readers of LewRockwell.com may have noticed the recent addition of “DIGG THIS” links at the top of each article. These links make it easy for registered users of the news site Digg.com to submit the article to Digg or vote for it if it has already been submitted.

I’m going to explain to you why you should care about Digg, what it is and how it works. I’ll end with a brief analysis of what the creators of Digg mean by calling it “democratic” and what, if anything, that has to do with political democracy. (Already know and love Digg? Click here to skip to the political analysis.)

Why Should I Care About Digg?

Digg is the 23rd most popular web site in the U.S. according to Alexa. The New York Times web site is at 19th place on that same list. (Both numbers are as of August 6, 2006). The trend points to digg.com surpassing nytimes.com any time now. Digg was also recently profiled in a cover article for BusinessWeek. Keep in mind that this is a web site that was launched on Dec. 5, 2004. It hasn’t even celebrated its 2nd birthday yet.

Furthermore, Digg is a different way of doing news, as I’ll explain below. The bottom line of why you should care about this is that Digg does away with the “gatekeepers” that keep the mainstream media hewing closely to an Establishment line. Libertarians have not fared particularly well under the rule of the gatekeepers. With this new kind of media there is an opportunity for libertarians to have a real seat at the table. I say, kill the gatekeepers!

What is Digg?

Digg.com is a news site. If you go there you see story headlines with brief summaries under each headline. If you click on a headline you’ll go to another site where the item actually resides. That site might be nytimes.com or cnn.com, but it is just as likely to be someone’s personal Blog or a video on YouTube.

Next to the headline you’ll see a yellow box that says something like “849 diggs." This tells you how many people voted for (“dugg”) the article. Digg.com doesn’t have any content itself, it just points to other places for content. It doesn’t have any editors on staff, the “editors” are the users of Digg who vote for stories they like. Digg doesn’t have any reporters on staff, instead the users submit stories they think are interesting.

In the year and a half it has been around, Digg has grown at a phenomenal rate with around a million unique users visiting it each day and over 400,000 registered users who can submit and digg stories. Particularly amazing is that most of this growth occurred while Digg only allowed Technology stories. It is just since the recent release of Digg v3 that non-Technology topics were added including Business & Finance, Political News, Political Opinion and World News that are appropriate topics for many libertarian articles.

How Does Digg Work?

Digg works like this. You submit a story and it goes into the Upcoming Stories queue. Other Digg users sift through these submissions (thousands a day) looking for gold among the dross. When they spot something that looks good, they “digg” the story. If they spot something that looks like spam or otherwise looks like junk they “bury” the story.

If the story receives enough diggs fast enough then the story gets “promoted” to the Popular Stories which is what most Digg readers look at. A story that gets promoted might be read by thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of readers. Alternatively if 24 hours pass or enough Diggers bury the story then the story loses its chance to be promoted.

On Digg, stories get promoted because the submitter writes a good title and summary that catches people’s interest and points to a story with good content.

Libertarian Diggers

I would like to see you, the intrepid LewRockwell.com reader, get involved with Digg for two reasons. First, it really is a great site. Once you’ve used it a bit I think you’ll understand why it has grown so fast in popularity. The staff of Digg.com doesn’t stop a story from getting to the front page because it is politically incorrect or weird. In fact, part of the fascination of Digg is to see what stories will be dugg to the top next. There’s a sense of spontaneity, of freedom from the dead weight of respectable Establishment opinion that is exhilarating. It is a natural place for libertarians.

A second reason for getting involved is to have an influence on the content of Digg. Imagine if you could spend a few minutes each day (along with other libertarians) and see excellent libertarian articles featured in the New York Times. That isn’t very likely to happen, but you can submit and vote for libertarian articles on Digg and see them make it to the “front page." In fact, some of us have already been doing it.

Since these new political topics recently became available quite a few free market articles from the Mises Institute and libertarian stories from LewRockwell.com have already been promoted to the front-page of Digg. The new “DIGG THIS” links on LewRockwell.com articles make it even easier to promote articles from this site. If you click a “DIGG THIS” link, and you’re a registered Digg user, then you will either be sent to the form for submitting the story or, if someone else already submitted it, you’ll be able to digg it.

Digg Democracy vs. Political Democracy

“…users like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations. All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren’t anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors.” —Kevin Rose, founder of Digg.com

“For the sake of our long-term security, all free nations must stand with the forces of democracy and justice that have begun to transform the Middle East.” —George W. Bush, U.S. President

What does Kevin Rose of Digg.com mean by “democracy”? What, if anything, does it have to do with President Bush’s notion of democracy? Is Digg democratic like the Unites States is democratic?

At the most basic level, Rose talks about his news site as democratic because the decision about what news stories make it to the front page of Digg are made by the users of Digg, not by editors.

If Digg, then, is like a democracy because it is “editing by many” then, I suppose, traditional news media are like monarchies “rule by one editor-in-chief” or oligarchies “rule by editors."

What about the similarity between Digg democracy and U.S. government democracy? In both there is voting. The similarity pretty much stops there.

To make the point, let’s imagine that Digg were run like the Federal government. Instead of users directly submitting and digging stories, they would digg for representatives every several years. Those representatives would then submit and digg stories. Furthermore each of these representatives would represent around half a million people.

You can imagine the results. Many stories would be featured because those representatives were in some way paid off by folks who wanted to see their stories on the front page. The relationship of the featured stories to what stories would have been featured if voters were able to directly vote on the stories would be tenuous at best. In particular, only large groupings of voters would have any influence. The interests of smaller or dispersed groups would tend to be ignored. Stories critical of the regime would never make it to the front page of course. Finally, we would all be forced to read the front-page stories or be faced with fines, imprisonment or even execution.

So there are really two major differences between Digg democracy and U.S. democracy. The first is that Digg is a direct democracy and the U.S. Federal Government is a representative democracy. Secondly, Digg is a voluntary democracy whereas the government is a coercive (state) democracy.

Let’s clarify the issue with a Walter Block style 2×2 grid (pdf, see p. 70):

Types of Democracy

Representative

Direct

Coercive

U.S. Government

Swiss Government

Voluntary

Neighborhood Association(?)

Digg.com

Would our government really be improved if it functioned as a massive direct democracy like Digg? Leftists seem to think so and are often very concerned with the issue of how directly the government expresses the “will of the people." What seems to frighten leftists the most is that laws would be influenced by corporations or other non-popular entities.

For the libertarian, though, the argument between representative democracy and direct democracy misses the more important issue. Whether representative or direct, both are political democracies, which forcibly eliminate the option to exit altogether as opposed to voluntary democracies, which allow you to freely choose to participate, or not.

Libertarians find the most important distinction to be whether something is coercive or voluntary. Let’s say that the U.S. Government became more like Digg in terms of the directness of democracy. For example, laws could be submitted by anyone, enough votes would get a law up for general consideration and then everyone would directly vote up or down on the law.

As interesting as this might be, this would not address the core issue. However they got voted in, the laws would still apply to everyone, whether they had voted for them or not, whether they even support the existence of the state or not.

The ultimate libertarian solution to political organization would dispense with coercion altogether. The rules of a neighborhood would only be what the property owners of the community wanted them to be. There would be no “taxes," only purchase of property (possibly with certain restrictions on the use of that property), goods or services that individuals “dugg."

When President Bush talks about spreading democracy he isn’t talking about Digg democracy, where people can vote every day or even every minute for the things they want and are free to simply ignore the results altogether if they choose. He is talking about political democracy where, let’s be frank, a pretense of “we’re ruling ourselves” is used as a cover for the ruling class to steal, tyrannize and start wars just as they always do.

What we get a tantalizing taste of with Digg might properly be called “participatory democracy” in the political sphere. While participatory democracy is a notion generally associated with the Left, Rothbard endorsed the concept as libertarian, properly understood:

In the broadest sense, the idea of “participatory democracy” is profoundly individualist and libertarian: for it means that each individual, even the poorest and the most humble, should have the right to full control over the decisions that affect his own life.

In a Digg Democracy anyone who doesn’t like what others have “dugg” may avoid spending his or her money on it, joining it or being governed by it. And, ultimately, may retreat to their own property unmolested. Other people’s “political” choices would be a matter of opportunity instead of fear, like the top stories on Digg. If you didn’t like the rules someone else established, you would simply not take part in their community. This is quite different from the laws voted on by political representatives which follow us into our homes whether we like them or not, in fact even if we think the laws are immoral and unjust.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of three children. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site. He blogs at Radical Liberation.

Stephen Carson Archives

But why is this a dream of mine? Why should you care about a 1973 book that is currently out of print? (Though it is about to be back in print). Let me begin by describing the effect this book had on me personally. Then I will tell you about the effect it had on one college campus. I leave it to your imagination to multiply this by many people and many college campuses.

Taking the Rothbard Pill

A libertarian friend of mine kept a stack of Rose Wilder Lane’s Discovery of Freedom on hand to give to potential libertarians. It was reading one of his copies that set me on the course to libertarianism. I was brought further along the path by reading the Cato Letters by Trenchard and Gordon. I felt that I finally “got” the ideas that had inspired the secession from the British Empire.

But from here I could have gone in many directions. Men much smarter than me and just as aware of classical liberal ideas had gone on to become tools of the State, members of a Republican administration, war hawks, and Bill Buckley. It was Rothbard who saved me from going down these well-trodden, evil paths.

Reading For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto inoculated me against the fatal mistake made by so many others who became gripped by a passion for liberty: To look to the State as the guarantor, and even the advancer of liberty. Rothbard taught me that the State was the enemy of liberty and that, perhaps, more importantly, liberty does not require the State. Law, security, an orderly and peaceful society, all these things and more could and had been provided without the need for a monopoly provider of violence looming over society.

For example, in discussing police he points out not only that there is a viable alternative but also that it would be superior:

"The police, standing as they do for a mythical “society,” are primarily interested in catching and punishing the criminal; restoring the stolen loot to the victim is strictly secondary. To the insurance company and its detectives, on the other hand, the prime concern is recovery of the loot, and apprehension and punishment of the criminal is secondary to the prime purpose of aiding the victim of crime. Here we see again the difference between a private firm impelled to serve the customer-victim of crime and the public police, which is under no such economic compulsion.

What made a big impression on me throughout this book was that Rothbard did not stop at theory but illustrated from history that non-State alternatives had previously existed and worked quite well. For example, he recounts a case of private police not only from the United States but from the 20th century (why are so many aspects of even recent history virtual secrets?!):

The most successful and best-organized private police forces in American history have been the railway police, maintained by many railroads to prevent injury or theft to passengers or freight. The modern railway police were founded at the end of World War I by the Protection Section of the American Railway Association. So well did they function that by 1929 freight claim payments for robberies had declined by 93%. Arrests by the railway police, who at the time of the major study of their activities in the early 1930s totalled 10,000 men, resulted in a far higher percentage of convictions than earned by police departments, ranging from 83% to 97%. Railway police were armed, could make normal arrests, and were portrayed by an unsympathetic criminologist as having a widespread reputation for good character and ability.

Still Relevant After All These Years

Perhaps you are wondering whether a book written in 1973 that, in part, deals with current events would simply be hopelessly dated — that it would be more of antiquarian interest. Skimming back over the book I ran across Rothbard’s discussion of education. With only slight changes, it could have been written yesterday.

While the Friedman plan [school vouchers] would be a great improvement over the present system in permitting a wider range of parental choice and enabling the abolition of the public school system, the libertarian finds many grave problems yet remaining. In the first place, the immorality of coerced subsidy for schooling would still continue in force. Secondly, it is inevitable that the power to subsidize brings with it the power to regulate and control: The government is not about to hand out vouchers for any kind of schooling whatever. Clearly, then, the government would only pay vouchers for private schools certified as fitting and proper by the State, which means detailed control of the private schools by the government — control over their curriculum, methods, form of financing, etc. The power of the State over private schools, through its power to certify or not to certify for vouchers, will be even greater than it is now.

…Perhaps the gravest injustice is that, in most states, parents are prohibited from teaching their children themselves, since the state will not agree that they constitute a proper “school.” There are a vast number of parents who are more than qualified to teach their children themselves, particularly the elementary grades. Furthermore, they are more qualified than any outside party to judge the abilities and the required pacing of each child, and to gear education to the individual needs and abilities of each child. No formal school, confined to uniform classrooms, can perform that sort of service.

In his chapter on environmentalism we find a passage that applies just as well to the current attempt to cancel the Industrial Revolution in the name of global warming:

The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented upper-class liberals. Enjoying a material contentment and a living standard undreamt of by even the wealthiest men of the past, it is easy for upper-class liberals to sneer at “materialism,” and to call for a freeze on all further economic advance. For the mass of the world’s population still living in squalor such a cry for the cessation of growth is truly obscene; but even in the United States, there is little evidence of satiety and superabundance.

One Campus

I asked KV to summarize the impact of Rothbard’s book at the Washington University in St. Louis campus. Here are his quick notes with some bracketed comments from me:

Jon Bird was given FANL [For A New Liberty] by a friend of his. He read it and became an anarchist in ’99.

I was given FANL by Jon Bird in Fall 2000. I worked for the College Democrats. I was converted as I read the book and abandoned the Dems before the election.

Aaron was already a libertarian, and we started College Libertarians.

Spring 2001 I gave FANL to Mike Ewens [now on staff with AntiWar.com]. He went from Objectivist to Rothbardian.

In the fall of 2001, I gave FANL to this guy Zak and John Payne [later a summer fellow at the Mises Institute and author of a JLS article on Rothbard]. They read it and became anarchists.

In fall 2002, I gave it to Thea, Jessica Jones, Dave, and Cathleen. They became anarchists. That year I also gave it to a few of my friends at home and they became anarchists. I believe around this time Emily read FANL and became an anarchist with mine and Mark’s help and Aaron too.

Christen read the book in Spring 2003. She became an anarchist. In Fall 2003, I gave it to Ale and Gregg and Scott (I think then). They became anarchists. I believe it moved to Jeff [currently president of WU College Libertarians] in Spring 2004 and Andrew in that same time.

I know that Payne converted Jeff Holman with it at some point in 2003—2004.

We had one of the largest libertarian groups ever. We ran several hundred-person events. You know all the rest. Basically, it totally radicalized us. It was awesome.

For A New Liberty Podcast

The Mises Institute is doing a fully professional production of an audio book and publishing the audio book as a podcast, thus bringing this 30+-year-old book into the latest (and most convenient) technology. The book is read by Jeff Riggenbach whose work includes his excellent reading of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. The audio book also includes a new introduction written and read by Lew Rockwell. The full text of the book is available online.

The audio book podcast is here. Here are the files for download. Give it a listen. Then spread the word!

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of two baby girls. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

Then I got the e-mail. If it had been from anyone else I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. It was just a casual comment at the end of an e-mail on another topic that “…I agree that some kind of speaking schedule for LRC writers would be a good idea." But it was from Tom Woods. I got a chill when I read it.

Oh sweet, innocent readers. You’ve read Tom’s excellent articles. If you’ve met him or seen him speak you’ve gotten the same impression that I did at first: Here’s the genuine article. A smart guy, but a nice, funny guy. A scholar who isn’t going to compromise the truth but isn’t going to add insult to injury, making you laugh even as he challenges your cherished beliefs. But there’s something else about Tom that he carefully veils in his articles and public appearances. You don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. At my own risk, let me pull back the curtain ever so slightly.

How do I explain this about Tom Woods? Remember in Godfather III when they explain how Michael Corleone was only feared but Vito, his father, was both feared and loved? Let’s just put it this way… In private, we refer to him as Tom “Vito” Woods.

Tom had, in his own faux casual way, given me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I knew then that I should have just kept my trap shut. Within minutes I had fired an email off to Lew letting him know that I was willing to manage a LewRockwell.com Events Calendar and, by the way, Tom Woods would like it. Lew had Eric Garris, the LewRockwell.com Webmaster, setting up the calendar about as fast as Internet packets could fly.

The distractions of life set in, though. I’m still trying to figure out how to juggle having a wife and small baby, working as a full time computer programmer, keeping up on the computing literature as well as trying to keep up on the political economy literature and write articles for LewRockwell.com. I’ve already dropped learning ancient Greek and picking jazz piano back up from my wish list. Tips from those who somehow live 3 or 4 lives simultaneously are appreciated. (One pastor/historian advised me that the people he has studied that got a lot done in their lives usually didn’t get much sleep… Surely there’s got to be another way!)

So things dragged out. Then I saw a blog from Tom a little over a week ago that got things jumpstarted quick. Again, in a seemingly casual aside he let his wishes be known with the threat a little less veiled this time: “…may I point out that I’m mostly Armenian?” Later that day he found another way to drop the hint, “As an Armenian and not Anglo-Celtic at all…." He had brought up the Armenian Connection. Twice. I reached down to check my legs to make sure they weren’t broken.

Now don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are mostly Armenian, but this let me know that there wouldn’t be anymore warnings before I might have a visit from one of the gentleman from the old country. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

So the LewRockwell.com Events Calendar is now up. (Phew!) The purpose is to have one place to go to find out where your favorite LewRockwell.com columnists are speaking. We already have a few events posted and more are on the way. Whether they’re speaking at a local campus, part of a conference, making a TV/radio appearance or having a lecture webcast we want you to know about it as soon as possible so that you can make plans to catch them. I’ve asked the columnists to let me know about events as soon as they know a date and location. So if you see something up there that you can catch but it is sketchy on details, go ahead and mark the date on your calendar. We’ll get the exact time and place up there as soon as we know.

Personally, I enjoy reading folks more when I’ve met them in person. It is also nice to get a chance to ask questions of a speaker and see how they field them in front of a live audience. We want all LRC readers to get a chance to see LRC columnists live, one way or another.

Oh, and a word to the wise. If you happen to go to an event where Tom Woods is speaking… Be real nice to him if you know what’s good for you.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

Compare this to Bishop Eusebius (c. 260—c. 341) writing in his important Church History about the first Christian emperor, Constantine: “the emperor, friend of God… the mighty victor Constantine, outstanding in every virtue godliness confers… with God… as Guide and Ally, father and son divided their forces against the haters of God on every side… all tyranny was eradicated.” There is more along these lines in Eusebius’ Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine.

Here is the parallel I see. Eusebius and the other Christians at the time actually had fairly good reason to be thankful for the ascendancy of Constantine. The early church had been persecuted numerous times by the Roman Empire. Eusebius’ own beloved teacher Pamphilus had been martyred in a recent persecution. When Constantine seemed to genuinely be a Christian and work to stop persecutions of Christians it came as a great relief.

In a very roughly similar way, conservative American evangelical Christians have felt besieged by a secular elite seemingly determined to undermine their way of life through what Murray Rothbard described as “multicultural, socialistic, condomaniacal, anti-Christian public schooling” and in many other ways. Clearly, the parallel is in one sense weak. American Christians have not been fed to the lions. Nevertheless, psychologically Christians have felt besieged. So just as with the arrival of Constantine, the arrival of first Reagan and much more significantly George W. Bush, who has really made a point of speaking to Christian evangelicals in their language, has meant a feeling of real empowerment after many decades of feeling excluded from the mainstream of society. (I argue in my article on “The Return of the Religious Right” that this exclusion lasted from the Scopes trial in 1925 all the way to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976.)

So it is not surprising that just as Eusebius and many other Christians in the Roman Empire embraced Constantine with wild enthusiasm, so have evangelicals embraced George W. Bush. Furthermore, whereas early Christians had often avoided serving in the Imperial Army and in many other ways developed their own social institutions with a distinctive Christian stamp, under a Christian Emperor the Christians began to become much more involved with the Empire. The division between the Empire and the Church began to blur with, for example, Emperor Constantine playing a key role in calling the theologically crucial First Council of Nicea.

This process of blurring the lines has already begun in our own time with programs like the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. A representative of that department was invited to speak at a conference sponsored by a Christian organization that I have a great deal of respect for (the conference was held in a chapel at a seminary). As he spoke and the usual statist nonsense was expressed, but in Christianese, my wife and our Christian libertarian friend couldn’t stand it and walked out. I fought back the nausea and sat through it while he explained why the American people could not be trusted to take care of each other without State guidance.

It is worth mentioning the intriguing argument of the historian of empire William Marina in his article “Surviving in the Interstices” that the Roman Empire’s embrace of Christianity was an attempt to sustain the Empire with the vitality of the Christian movement. That is, the Empire needed the Church not the other way around. (Note that this point does not require that Constantine have been personally insincere in his own conversion to Christianity). Similarly, the American Empire has lurched forward with renewed energy now that the evangelicals are on board.

Conclusion

So if there were something wrong with the response of evangelicals, what would be a more appropriate response to President Bush from evangelical leaders? How about something like this: “We are thankful to have a President who openly expresses his devotion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet we remain aware that the mission of the church is separate from the role of civil government. Especially at a time like this, it is of paramount importance that the church’s spiritual mission of mercy and reconciliation not be confused with the civil government’s earthly mission of justice. In particular, it is important that American Christians remain aware that His kingdom is ‘not of this world’ and make it abundantly clear to the world that American Christians and the American government are not the same thing. We remember that President Bush’s time in office will be relatively brief and the U.S. government will continue under other Presidents who may not be so friendly to Christianity. We also know that ‘power corrupts’, that President Bush will face severe temptations to lie, steal, kill and start wars as so many former Presidents and political leaders have done. We will pray for him, as the scriptures command, that the Lord will have mercy on him and lead him not into temptation.”

This article was originally published in the Washington Witness.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

1. America’s role in the world has been overwhelmingly positive.
2. The United States is not an empire.
3. When the United States government has acted abroad, it has been to stop evil regimes like the Nazis and Communists and to help people.
4. We should give the President the benefit of the doubt in regards to war because he knows a lot more about what is going on than we do.
5. Even if the large troop and base presence abroad is acknowledged, this is viewed as benevolent. After all, the U.S. doesn’t collect tribute like the empires of old. In fact, the empire is costing the U.S. quite a bit. Resources are flowing out of our country to the rest of the world not the other way around.
6. In modern high-tech warfare, weapons pinpoint the bad guys (“precision bombing”) and avoid hurting innocents (“collateral damage”).
7. The liberal media is against this war, so there must be something good about it. (A quick explanation of this for non-evangelicals: Think of how the media handled The Passion of The Christ. We conservative evangelicals have been watching the mass media fumble or outright misrepresent any issue that we know about well all our lives. Conservative Evangelicals probably trust the mainstream media about as much as the Soviet citizens trusted Pravda.)
8. George W. Bush seems to sincerely be a Christian so we can trust him on these matters.
9. George W. Bush was called by the Lord to be our leader in this post-9/11 world.
10. The Muslims hate America and Israel because they are fanatically and unreasonably anti-American and anti-Semitic.
11. The war on Iraq is a just war of pre-emptive self-defense against worldwide jihad.
12. Bush is being realistic in his response to terrorism (“Take the battle to the enemy.”) as opposed to the naïve liberal “just be nice” response.
13. The world is different from the world of the Founders of the U.S. The oceans don’t buffer us anymore. Non-intervention is no longer an option. Non-involvement doesn’t seem a realistic option. They’re over here, planning more 9/11s.
14. This is spiritual warfare between Christians and the Lord’s Chosen People, the Jews, against the aggressive followers of the false religion Islam. (“Resist the devil.”) Mohammad was no Gandhi! He was a ruthless military leader.

I hope this list helps to make clear why Christian supporters of the war have not been easily swayed from their position by discouraging developments in Iraq. There is a whole worldview here with intertwined beliefs about politics, U.S. history, military reality, the press, the presidency, the Middle East and religion. For many of the Christian supporters of this war a profound paradigm shift would be required if they were to see things differently.

Here is the slim hope I have to write persuasively to American Christians on this matter: I have made that paradigm shift. I have abandoned none of my conservative theology and none of my commitment to Jesus or His Church (au contraire, my belief in the importance of the mission of His Church has only grown). Yet I have reached a place where as I look over the list above I realize that I think nearly every point is either a dangerous half-truth or an outright deception. How is it that I can be in such strong agreement on core values with my fellow believers and yet see current events so differently? I invite you to read this series of articles to find out.

Let’s Get Started

I have partially addressed the beliefs about President Bush in a previous article, King Saul and President Bush. But to address the entire Christian case for war adequately is going to take some time. In this article I would like to start by summarizing the work of a fellow conservative evangelical, Laurence M. Vance. Mr. Vance is a Baptist who has recently published a book addressing several of the points in the Christian case for war: Christianity and War. Vance’s book is a slim volume, about 100 pages. Reading this information packed book is a small investment of time that will yield a lot of insight. (Please note that a number of the essays collected in this book have previously been published on LewRockwell.com. I provide links to the original online articles in such cases.)

In the title essay, Mr. Vance argues against the notion that the President deserves the benefit of the doubt in regards to war. American conservative Christians tend to assume that the President knows more about what is going on in the world than they do (that is his job after all) and that he uses this knowledge to defend us. Mr. Vance shows that, on the contrary, Presidents Polk (1846), Lincoln (1861), McKinley (1898), Wilson (1916), Roosevelt (1940), Johnson (1964), Bush I (1991) and Bush II (2003) all “exaggerated, misinformed, misrepresented, and lied to deceive the American people into supporting wars that they would not have supported if they had known the facts.” Given this sorry record, rather than getting the benefit of the doubt, history would advise us to assume a President is lying when it comes to war.

Let me underscore this important point. Christian supporters of the war have fancied themselves hardheaded realists. But Vance’s sobering roll call of shame suggests that in trusting President Bush’s case for a war with Iraq, his supporters have ignored the hard lessons of U.S. history for a naïve fantasy.

A simple list of “Eight Facts About Iraq," destroys the case for the war on Iraq being a just war of self-defense and casts doubt upon the historic benevolence of the United States’ role in the world:

1. There was no country of Iraq until it was created by the British in 1920.
2. The United States already sponsored two previous regime changes in Iraq.
3. Saddam Hussein was an ally of the United States until the first Persian Gulf War.
4. Iraq got its “weapons of mass destruction” from the United States.
5. Iraq was a liberal Muslim state.
6. Iraq was not responsible for the 9-11 attacks on the United States.
7. Iraq was not a threat to the United States.
8. Iraq is the Mideast’s second largest oil producer.

Was the U.S. having a positive effect on the world when allied with Hussein prior to 1991? When it gave Hussein chemical weapons? I do not know why the dodgy alliances that the U.S. government has regularly made do not give Christians pause. I mean here is a political figure that American Christians seem to be unanimous in condemning as a brutal dictator: Saddam Hussein. Yet, the United States government supported Hussein, indeed was instrumental in putting him into power in the first place. The government provided Hussein with weapons, including chemical and biological weapons.

Why hasn’t all this cast some shadow of doubt on Christians’ minds? I attribute this to two main factors: a short memory (which afflicts Americans in general) and a veritable whirlwind of spin from the interventionist conservative press (National Review, Commentary, etc.) But let’s face it folks. When American Christian leaders stand before the Lord on Judgment Day and He asks them why they gave their moral support to U.S. supported atrocities it isn’t going to cut it to say, “William Buckley told me we had to.”

The United States Is an Empire

One of the most useful services Vance’s book provides is to demonstrate the reality of a global empire run by the United States government. Vance uses DoD, Marine Corps and other government sources to meticulously document the extent of troops and bases deployed abroad. This important section was published in three parts on LewRockwell.com as The U.S. Global Empire, The Bases of Empire and Guarding the Empire.

Here is a quick summary of his conclusions. There are about 1,000 U.S. military bases in foreign countries. Let me say that one more time: one thousand military bases on foreign soil! These bases officially are in 39 countries around the world, but that official list leaves out a half-dozen others (like Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq!) and possibly even more.

Counting bases is one way to document the extent of the U.S. global military presence, but that leaves aside countries where no full base exists but U.S. troops nevertheless are present. Counting all the troops stationed throughout the world, Vance writes, “the United States has troops in 150 countries or territories." That is 150 out of 192 countries in the world. This count excludes Marines merely serving as embassy guards. Vance recounts the expanse of the empires of the past: The Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. But, this ubiquitous U.S. presence leads him to conclude, “Nothing, however, compares to the U.S. global empire.”

The reality of the U.S. Empire is a fact. You can be ignorant of it, but it cannot be denied. In a future article, I will more directly address the fallback positions of American war supporters: The U.S. may have an empire, but it isn’t bad like all those empires of the past. (In some cases, the bold argument has been put forward that these empires of the past were not in fact as bad as Americans traditionally understood them to be. But I think this case goes too blatantly against the anti-Empire origins of the U.S. to have much purchase… For now.)

Christians and War

An assumption that, though typically unstated, is obvious from watching many Evangelicals’ enthusiasm for the current war is that they hold the military, the U.S. military at least, to be a noble instrument of justice and a career in the current military to be completely compatible with Christian beliefs and the best of America’s traditions. Vance shows that this represents a sharp break from the traditional view of Christians and early Americans.

He cites the anti-federalist Brutus, the Cato Letters (much read and admired by the American colonists) and Thomas Jefferson on the evils of war and standing armies. Cato writes that “Great empires cannot subsist without great armies, and liberty cannot subsist with them.”

Vance shows the stark contrast between the early Americans’ attitude to war and the current enthusiasm for it, “Regarding the attitude toward war of the people of the United States, Jefferson believed that ‘no country, perhaps, was ever so thoroughly against war as ours. These dispositions pervade every description of its citizens, whether in or out of office.’” Elsewhere Jefferson wrote, “The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.”

A particularly striking quote from Jefferson demonstrates that his approach would now be condemned as “appeasement” and “capitulation to terrorists”:

In another statement regarding relations with the Indians, Jefferson again decried standing armies:

“We must do as the Spaniards and English do. Keep them in peace by liberal and constant presents. Another powerful motive is that in this way we may leave no pretext for raising or continuing an army. Every rag of an Indian depredation will, otherwise, serve as a ground to raise troops with those who think a standing army and a public debt necessary for the happiness of the United States, and we shall never be permitted to get rid of either.”

Finally, in a brief but important aside, Vance addresses a verse that has been used repeatedly to silence dissent among Christians: Romans 13:1.

“To justify their consent or silence, and to keep their congregations in line, Christian leaders repeat to their parishioners the mantra of ‘obey the powers that be,’ a loose paraphrase of Romans 13:1, as if that somehow means that they should blindly follow whatever the president or the government says, and even worse, that it overturns the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17), which is repeated in the New Testament (Matthew 19:18; Romans 13:9). The way some Christians repeat the ‘obey the powers that be’ mantra, one would think that they would slit their own mothers’ throats if the state told them to do so.” (from Christian Killers?)

Has it been hard for me to reject the U.S. Empire, coming from a patriotic American conservative Christian background? No, not once I understood that the U.S. Empire is real and learned about what it does. The peoples around the world that I grew up praying for, that my church has been sending missionaries to all my life, these people are killed by the U.S. Empire, oppressed, and manipulated. I am horrified that these people would think that the U.S. Empire has anything to do with America’s libertarian roots or the gospel of Jesus Christ and His Church.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

There is a lot to learn from Shakespeare’s play, and from the actual events it dramatically retells, but one thing stood out for me above all. Before getting to that let me briefly recount the story. Though by the time of Caesar the territory under the control of Rome was vast and stretched far beyond Italy, the Romans did not think of themselves as an Empire. In fact, the period up to and including Julius Caesar is referred to as The Late Roman Republic. Julius Caesar was never titled Emperor. Note, by the way, that Julius Caesar is properly pronounced Yulius Kyzar. Knowing this it becomes much more obvious how we ended up with the titles Kaiser and Czar. Also his first name was actually spelled Iulius as there was no letter “J” in classical Latin.

The Roman Empire at 44 BC at the death of Caesar [Roman-Empire.net]

Caesar had become renowned as a populist politician and military figure. It should be carefully noted that the man many consider the forerunner of modern dictators appealed to the masses against the elites. Shakespeare’s play begins with Mark Antony offering Caesar the crown as king of Rome. He refuses as the Romans are not quite ready for that but many senators suspect that it is only a matter of time before Caesar centers all authority in himself. The Brutus of the famous line “Et tu, Brute?” seems particularly motivated by concern that Caesar will bring an end to the Republic forever and replace it with a dictatorship. In fact, Brutus is really the central figure of the play despite its title and is the most compellingly presented character.

Brutus bears no personal animosity towards Caesar but feels it is his duty to the general good to prevent the rise of a tyrant:

I know no personal cause to spurn at him,
But for the general.
…

We all stand up against the spirit of Caesar,
And in the spirit of men there is no blood.
O that we then could come by Caesar’s spirit
And not dismember Caesar!

It is this “spirit of Caesar” that is the real problem. This spirit is both the lust for power of rulers as well as the temper of a people that desire to be ruled by a tyrant.

In the play, Caesar is warned by a soothsayer to “Beware the Ides of March [March 15th]“. For it is on this day in 44 BC that Brutus, Cassius and a number of other leading Romans assassinate Caesar by stabbing him 23 times in the Senate. After Caesar is killed, the rest of the play follows Caesar’s friend Mark Antony and Brutus and Cassius as they fight each other. The conspirators ultimately lose out to Mark Antony and Octavian and pay with their lives.

The Spirit of Caesar

Here is the thing that struck me. The assassination of Julius Caesar did not stop the move towards Empire. Twenty-one years later Octavian, Caesar’s adopted son, with the title of Augustus Caesar was named Emperor for life and given complete control of the State. The Roman Empire continued to grow.

The Roman Empire at AD 54 at the death of Claudius

The relevance to our own time is that a focus on the personal evil of a Clinton or George W. Bush misses the point. Conservatives became maniacally focused on Clinton during his years as President and now liberals have become focused on Bush. But the real problem we have is far bigger than either of these men.

Let us imagine that Clinton had been impeached. Would it really have changed all that much? The sanctions on Iraq and the military presence in the Muslim holy land of Saudi Arabia would have continued anyway, provoking 9/11 or something like it. Let us imagine that George W. Bush was somehow impeached. It is difficult to figure out what further malfeasance would be required for such a thing to happen beyond what he has already done. But even if Bush were somehow impeached, would the Empire be shut down the next day? I don’t know if troops would be withdrawn from Iraq even if the “opposition” were suddenly in power.

My last article was an attempt to raise questions in the minds of evangelicals who have uncritically supported President Bush. But this was more for their sake than because I think the withdrawal of evangelical support would bring the Empire down, (though it wouldn’t hurt). There is a tremendous danger in becoming overly partisan, deciding that all the evil resides in Republicans or in Democrats. It takes two to tango and this murderous United States Empire has been a bi-partisan affair.

If we are to have any real change it will not be because half the country sees the light and switches party affiliations. It will be because individuals come to question deeply the nature of the State and the proper role of civil government. (As always, I make a distinction between civil government, which will always exist in human societies in one form or another, and the monopolistic State, which is merely one form of civil government and is deeply flawed). The scholarly introduction to the Pelican edition of Julius Caesar has this sobering thought:

“After Brutus, Caesar, Cassius, and Antony, the plebeians are the most important ‘character’ in the play. It is their corruption that defeats the Republican cause from the start. Brutus’ major disillusionment… should have occurred at the very moment of his greatest apparent success — the moment when, after his plain and honest speech in the Forum, the plebeians shout ‘Let him be Caesar.’ ‘Caesar’s better parts / Shall be crowned in Brutus.’ At this point Shakespeare’s audience knew that the Roman mob was no longer capable of Republicanism, that the Romans, like themselves, might best be governed by a king.”

Beware the Ides of March, because it’ll do no good.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

Bush himself seems to have felt that he was called to be president, “Bush called James Robison (a prominent minister) and told him, ‘I’ve heard the call. I believe God wants me to run for President.’ ” After 9/11, President Bush indicated an even stronger sense of divine purpose, “Time magazine reported, ‘Privately, Bush talked of being chosen by the grace of God to lead at that moment.’ “

Now I have no special knowledge or insight in regards to whether President Bush was in some special sense willed by the Lord to be President at this time. But there is a conclusion that has been widely drawn among his conservative Christian supporters that is not at all warranted, even if he really was called. The usually unstated corollary to the claim that the Lord called Bush to be President is that what he has done as President has been what the Lord wanted done, that President Bush is even now doing the Lord’s will. But this is a leap that is not justified by the testimony of the Scriptures. The fact that the Lord appoints someone to an office does not mean that that person automatically succeeds in his mission. The scriptures are filled with kings, prophets, priests and even a Disciple of Jesus who were definitely called by the Lord but who then failed to do His will. Let us focus on one instructive example, the very first monarch of Israel: King Saul.

King Saul Was Called

The scriptures make it abundantly clear that King Saul was precisely the person that the Lord chose to be the first King of Israel:

Now the day before Saul came, the LORD had revealed this to Samuel: "About this time tomorrow I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin. Anoint him leader over my people Israel; he will deliver my people from the hand of the Philistines. I have looked upon my people, for their cry has reached me." When Samuel caught sight of Saul, the LORD said to him, "This is the man I spoke to you about; he will govern my people." (I Samuel 9:15—17)

Samuel anointing Saul (CC-Art.com)

Samuel then anointed Saul with oil (Messiah, by the way, simply means “anointed one”) and foretold several very specific upcoming events that would serve as signs to confirm that Saul was indeed the one chosen to be King of Israel. After these signs confirmed the Lord’s hand to Saul personally, Samuel then called all of Israel together. After briefly reminding them that by choosing a King they had rejected the Lord (I Samuel 9:19), Samuel called out Saul’s tribe, then out of that tribe, he called out Saul’s clan and finally the Lord’s prophet identified Saul before all of Israel as their first King. There is no question that the Lord Himself chose Saul to be the King. If the Lord possibly, maybe called George Bush to be President, the Lord clearly, unmistakably called Saul to be King.

Note carefully, by the way, that having a monopoly government (a State) was definitely not what the Lord wanted for Israel as I have previously discussed. But once the Israelites stubbornly demanded one, despite the Lord’s strong warnings through Samuel that they would regret it, the Lord then chose who would be the leader of the new state. Understanding this seeming contradiction is, I believe, central to reconciling Samuel’s warning about monopoly governments in I Samuel 8 and Paul’s admonition in Romans 13 that the Lord establishes present authorities. Clearly, as with Saul, the Lord can establish particular rulers without endorsing the system of government as the ideal system. If Paul’s statement is taken as an endorsement of the present system as ideal then it becomes self-contradictory… How can the Lord endorse monarchies, democracies, anarchies and tyrannies as all ideal systems of government? All these forms of government have existed for lengthy periods of time since Paul wrote those words, and his teaching would presumably apply to all these situations.

King Saul Was Rejected

Saul Denounced by Samuel (Guy Rowe, CC-Art.com)

Just as surely as Saul was chosen by the Lord to be King, the Lord rejected Saul later when he failed as King. I Samuel 13 records how Saul disobeyed a direct order from the Lord and how Samuel immediately told him that his kingdom would not be established (his line would not continue as Kings of Israel) and also that the Lord had already chosen another to take Saul’s place as King. Though Saul continued as a sort of lame duck King for a while before David became King, the Lord’s blessing was no longer on him and he and his house came to a sad end.

Despite the fact that the Lord Himself chose Saul to be King, Saul still failed. The Lord often works through fallible people and sometimes these people do not do what the Lord intended for them to do. In a sense there is nothing really special in the fact that leaders fail. The story of humanity that the Bible tells is one of people failing, starting with the very first humans, to be what the Lord called them to be. If someone tells you that a human leader cannot fail, that he cannot lose the Lord’s blessing, then they are a fool. All of scripture and secular history testifies against them.

What Would Samuel Say to President Bush?

If you believe that George W. Bush was chosen by the Lord to be President at this time then, go ahead, give him the benefit of the doubt. But, ultimately, there is no excuse for giving the President a free pass on everything he does while in office. The Apostle John teaches, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God….” Jesus taught, “by their fruit you will recognise them” and also “be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” Saying “I was just following orders from the leader the Lord called” doesn’t cut it.

My own assessment, for what it is worth, is that President Bush has shown himself to clearly not be doing the Lord’s will. Is it the Lord’s will that people should be lied into war, that thousands and tens of thousands of innocents should die? President Bush has borne false witness against Saddam Hussein to dreadful effect. He has ordered the continual bombing of a people who have done our country no harm. Does our Holy Father in Heaven who will allow no sin before him bless this?!

George Bush may well have been called to be President, but like King Saul before him, he has failed.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

When I say dessert, I mean the real thing. These low fat, sugar free desserts seem morally wrong and repulsive to me. Wraithlike, these desserts hide a horrible nothingness inside their pretty looking cloaks. No, proper desserts have real fat, sugar, butter, cream, honey, chocolate and others of the Lord’s bountiful blessings.

As I have often been reminded, it is easy for me to say this. I was stick thin until I got married and immediately gained twenty pounds walking back from the altar. Nevertheless, I think that if you have diabetes or are watching your weight you should either just avoid desserts or have small amounts of them. (“And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint.“)

My own love for desserts has led me to be on the lookout throughout my travels for the best that various countries have to offer. So here is a select collection that I am sure leaves out many worthy desserts but should serve as a good short list.

France

Éclair: Many Americans, unfortunately, have had their impressions of éclairs formed by abominable imitations that use sugary cake icing type stuff for the filling. Proper éclair filling will be yellow, not white, because it is a custard involving lots of egg yolks. Personally, I have never particularly thought much of hard candies. Most of my favorite desserts are pastries or in some sense bready. The éclair is almost the ideal dessert as far as I’m concerned. Good pastry, creamy rich custard and chocolate as a tasteful highlight. It is simple enough to appreciate each element.

Crepe: When I first visited France in 1987 one of the things that made a lasting impression was the crepe. Describing it definitely undersells it. It’s a big thin pancake folded up with some kind of filling, often sweet but also savory (my favorites are the simplest: chocolate spread (Nutella) or butter and sugar). Ignore that description and let me tell you that me and my friends would grab a crepe from the ubiquitous crepe stands on the way down to the Metro, then again as we came out of the Metro, then take a little crepe break before starting a tour of the Louvre… You get the idea. On the last night of our time in Paris we decided to have a fancy dinner. We went to the exclusive little island Ile St. Louis and paid for a fancy French gourmet meal. As the end of the meal approached I was excited to see that they served crepes here, gourmet crepes far superior I assumed to the simple crepes the street vendors absent-mindedly threw together in double quick time. Oh how wrong I was! The gourmet crepe was terrible, too complicated. Stick with the entrepreneurial street vendors that have to make good crepes if they are not to lose business to the other guy a block away. Here’s my little amateur tip, by the way, on getting the French “R” right like the one in “crepe.” Throw the R half way down the back of your throat, forget about it and clear your throat a little at that part of the word.

Italy

Now, I have little patience for the elitist snobbery that looks down on Americans’ lack of foreign language skills and general lack of knowledge of the rest of the world. First of all, let’s say you go abroad hoping to practice a language with native speakers that you’ve been studying. Unless you already speak the language perfectly, the first thing most foreigners do is switch to English, which they usually speak better than you speak their language! In regards to American ignorance of foreign affairs, I would just like to point out in our defense that the United States is really, really big. If you live in Switzerland, where three languages are all well represented by the way, your country borders 4 major countries and you can get to any of them by hopping on a train for a few hours. In the state of Missouri where I live the nearest foreign country is about 1000 miles away (1600 km) and mostly speaks the same language anyway. I do agree that given the way the U.S. Central State gets in everyone’s business it would be nice if Americans knew how to locate the country that the Empire was currently bombing. But my solution to this is that the American Empire should be shut down. Frankly, my plan is far more likely to happen than that Americans are all suddenly going to become intimately familiar with places that they primarily hear about on the evening news.

But there is one thing about Americans’ ignorance of foreign things that really does go too far, that really gets me thinking, “What is wrong with you people?” That is that Americans still are largely unaware of the Italian style ice cream, gelato. I mean you don’t have to have Italian taste buds to appreciate gelato; you don’t need to be able to understand Italian or even particularly care about Italy.

Gelato is Italian style ice cream, which is, in my judgment, far superior to the ice cream we typically eat in America. Gelato is whipped with far less air than regular ice cream (say, 20% instead of 60%), is less firmly frozen, more intensely flavored and creamier. Spagnola (vanilla with cherries), Stracciatella (chocolate chip), Fior di Latte (creamy milk), how I love to hear these words and say these words, especially if it means I’m going to actually get some gelato handed to me. Some gelato flavors (pdf).

On our ten-week honeymoon, nine weeks of which were in Italy, my wife and I ate gelato pretty much every day. (As soon as we mention the length of our honeymoon, people usually ask why it was so long. The lengthy foreign adventure, my wife’s first trip abroad, was my subtle little way of saying, “Hey, marriage is cool.”)

Switzerland

Toblerone is a “Swiss Milk Chocolate with Honey and Almond Nougat” candy bar that you might actually prefer to have for dessert unlike most candy bars that you just get out of desperation when all you have to turn to are vending machines. I had the exact description on hand, by the way, because I still have the 14 oz Toblerone bar that my parents put in my stocking this Christmas. It’s nice to be understood by your parents.

England

Yes, the English actually have a good dessert. It is called Treacle Sponge with Custard and far from being the sort of mild mannered dull dessert one might expect from English cuisine it is actually one of the few desserts that I can barely handle. It is sweet sponge cake with sweet treacle drizzled through the cake and sweet custard on top of that. In short, it is very sweet. It is almost too sweet but very good.

India

Gulaab Jamun, or as I prefer to call them, “golden balls of joy” are a favorite Indian dessert of mine. They are described as “brown colored dumplings of dried milk and refined flour in sugar syrup” but taste better than that sounds. My dear friends from Cochin, Kerala (land of spices, where St. Thomas ended up and Columbus was trying to get to) are kind enough to serve me homemade Gulaab Jamun when I am over for dinner.

Greece

I do not really understand what fyllo pastry is. I don’t necessarily like other things made with it. But in Baklava, the thin delicate layers covered in honey and filled with almonds are dessert perfection.

At Home

Finally, here is a recipe for cinnamon biscuits. It is very simple to make, so simple that you will look at the recipe and laugh at me.

Cinnamon Biscuits

Tin of plain buttermilk biscuits

Cinnamon

Sugar

Half a stick of Butter

Melt the butter in one bowl. Make a sugar cinnamon mixture in another bowl. Dip each raw biscuit in the butter (make sure it is drenched!) Then roll the biscuit around in the cinnamon and sugar until it is completely covered. Put in a baking pan. Repeat for all the biscuits. Cook for the time recommended for the biscuits. Drizzle any extra melted butter over the cooked biscuits when they come out. Eat them hot.

My wife Heather scoffed at first, until she tried one. When I was young and making these I would carefully explain to my half-annoyed, half-amused little brother how the unit was not the single biscuit but the tin of biscuits, so I couldn’t possibly share a biscuit with him and break the tin up.

But I was wrong. Good desserts shouldn’t be hoarded they should be shared. Frequently.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

Then one year ago, I read Jeff Tucker’s article How To Dress Like A Man on LewRockwell.com (also see his Addendum). With the passing of a few more years I had solidified my reasons for why I wanted to dress in a more traditional manner but still didn’t know how. Jeff’s article gave me the basics I needed but somehow was never taught. My wife and I went out that night, picked out a sports-coat and the next day at work I was in jacket and tie and have been nearly every day of the year since.

For some this might be no big deal, but for me this is quite a change. I grew up around hippies. Due in part to this, I was aggressively casual and always resented dressing up. I found dress shoes to be uncomfortable and thought ties would strangle me. To be fair to my younger self, I think I was typically wearing shoes that I had outgrown. I now know that dress shoes need not be torture. During my undergraduate years in college (1987—91) I usually didn’t wear shoes at all in the warmer parts of the year. I kept sandals stashed under the driver’s seat of my car in case I needed to go into a restaurant. So you can see why the first time one of my oldest friends saw me dressed up and heard that I was dressing like this every day, he said, "Who stole my friend and replaced him with an alien?"

To make my little transition all the more awkward, I work at a small software company that prides itself on a casual, relaxed work environment. The software industry was established in California after all. The CEO is often in shorts and a t-shirt. I am usually the only one at work wearing either a jacket or a tie, much less both. In the first few weeks of dressing more formally, I received several discouraging comments from managers about my new wardrobe. One coworker looked at me with frank horror when he saw my tie. I took Jeff’s advice and just made self-deprecating jokes when people asked why I was dressing differently.

The one difficulty I did not foresee was the trouble I caused my wife. It was enough of a problem that I was suddenly dressing differently, causing her to need a slightly different wardrobe to match, but she was also pregnant (with this baby) most of this last year which causes wardrobe difficulties for a woman at the best of times. To make it trickier, I grew up around hippies but her parents were hippies.

As I worked on expanding my new wardrobe, I received invaluable advice from Ask Andy About Clothes. See, for example, his brief article, Ten Most Common Men’s Fashion Mistakes.

Why Dress Up?

In his article, Jeff explained the how but only briefly addressed the why. Here’s some of my thoughts over the past year on why to dress in the traditional way.

Look at the old movies, (from the 1950s or earlier). Men are just about always dressed in jacket and tie unless they are depicted doing manual labour. What changed? I would say it was the cultural revolution of the 1960s… An egalitarian, anti-traditional cultural moment that gave us wonderful things like high levels of divorce, better thinking through hallucinogens and whole new families of frightening sexual diseases. Why continue something that came out of that?

My wife and I have realized, by the way, that women who want to dress more traditionally are in a worse fix than men. Though worn far less than they once were, men’s suits haven’t really changed in a hundred years. Fine men’s clothing can still be bought. But for young women, hooker chic reigns.

The traditional suit and tie are the culmination of many generations of development that have resulted in an outfit that makes most men look fairly respectable even if their body isn’t giving them much help. Fashion is a perfect example of an area to apply Burke’s recommendation that we ought to benefit from the wisdom of generations rather than rely on the trends of our passing historical moment. I’m the last one who thinks he has the fashion genius to go beyond traditional dress for men and come up with something superior. So, with that final bit of prodding from Jeff, I finally bent the knee and submitted to the results of a slow accumulation of knowledge over generations of how a man should dress so as to complement his looks and convey the right message. There is no question in my mind that in submitting to this tradition I am a far better dressed man than I was under my own weak fashion guidance.

Earlier in this article I emphasized the negative responses, but I have also noticed that I get a lot more smiles from folks now, especially older ones. There has been a subtle shift in the treatment I receive from people at stores, tellers at banks and so many others. I am far more often treated as a serious, professional adult. This is rather nice since I’m 35 now, am getting gray in my beard and have been a professional engineer for 15 years.

I have always understood the importance of manners, however sadly lacking I have been in proper training. It is a matter of religious conviction for me that all men are made in the image of the Lord and that, among other things, this means that I ought to respect that divine image that each person bears no matter who I am dealing with. Dressing in a more gentlemanly way has prodded me to behave in a more gentlemanly fashion. I have also felt a bit more dignity about myself. Just as I labor over my articles and speeches, selecting each word to express just what I want, neither more nor less, clothing is also a communication that deserves care. Dressing properly conveys that I respect myself, respect others and expect respect in return.

Conclusion

Armed with the basic guidelines for dressing well, I have found that I am not as inept with fashion as I assumed. My wife regularly comments on how she likes ties and outfits that I have selected. I don’t think I’ve been alone among American men of my generation in finding clothing to be a confusing and even forbidding area. It’s a small part of life, but one about which we must make decisions every day. And who knows? Maybe my radical political ideas will get a more serious hearing if I come off as a gentleman instead of a wild-eyed kid.

Stephen W.
Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, occasionally writes about political economy
and is the proud father of a new baby girl. See his reviews of Films
on Liberty and the State. More articles are available at his Web
Site.

Stephen Carson Archives

One of the most startling things about the resurgence of the Religious Right is that it happened at all. Both modernists and conservative evangelicals themselves were certain that this movement would continue to diminish under the onslaught of modernism and a process that it was assumed went along with modernization, “secularization." Modernists thought that progressive forces of history were bringing the death of “primitive” religion as a wave of the future and these “fundamentalists” were clearly just bitter reactionaries who would become part of the past. Evangelicals themselves often adopted a premillenial eschatology (esp. fundamentalists) and taught that the true followers of Christ would shrink in numbers as society became more and more corrupt until the second coming of Christ.

The historian Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties: “The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear. For many millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play much or any part in their lives, and the ways in which the vacuum thus lost was filled, by fascism, Nazism, Communism, by attempts at humanist utopianism, by eugenics or health politics, by the ideologies of sexual liberation, race politics and environmental politics, forms much of the substance of the history of the century. But for many more millions — for the overwhelming majority of the human race, in fact — religion continued to be a huge dimension in their lives. Nietzsche, who had so accurately predicted the transmutation of faith into political zealotry and the totalitarian will to power, failed to see that the religious spirit could, quite illogically, coexist with secularization, and so resuscitate his dying God. What looked antiquated, even risible, in the 1990s was not religious belief but the confident prediction of its demise once provided by Feuerbach and Marx, Durkheim and Frazer, Lenin, Wells, Shaw, Gide, Sartre and many others… The secularist movement, that is militant atheism, appears to have peaked in the West in the 1880s… so that Lenin was a survivor rather than a precursor, and his secularization programme was put through by force, not established by argument. By the 1990s, the Museums of Anti-God and Chairs of Scientific Atheism he had established were merely historical curiosities, or had been dismantled and scrapped. The once-influential alternatives to religion, such as Positivism, had vanished almost without a trace, confirming John Henry Newman’s observation: ‘True religion is slow in growth and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgment; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself; it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers.’ Perhaps the most spectacular testimony to this truth was to be found in Russia, where the collapse of belief in the Communist ideology Lenin had implanted revealed, in the growing climate of freedom of 1989—91, that both Orthodox and Catholic Christianity had survived all the assaults made upon them by the regime, and were strong and spreading. Throughout the world, while spiritual bewilderment, neatly classified as ‘agnosticism’, was widespread, it is likely that there were fewer real atheists in 1990 than in 1890.”

Coming back specifically to the evangelical resurgence in America, Ed Dobson writes in Blinded By Might: “With the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979, evangelicals and fundamentalists ventured into the political process. They were not welcomed with open arms by either the political or religious establishments. Rather, they kicked down the door and marched in with such fury that they sent panic through most sectors of American society.

“The media were shocked. Where did all these fundamentalists come from? Who were they, and what did they want? Since the general public had assumed that fundamentalists disappeared after the infamous Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ in 1925, it was at a loss to explain their sudden public resurgence. A kind of paranoia set in, and some began to assert that hoards of bigoted ‘Bible-bangers’ had formed a conspiracy to take over America. In September 1980, Newsweek magazine stated, ‘What is clear on both the philosophical level — and in the rough-and-tumble arena of politics — is that the Falwells of the nation and their increasingly militant flock are a phenomenon that can no longer be dismissed or ignored.’”

II. Definitions — Evangelical (broad and narrow), fundamentalist, Religious Right

Before I go further let me define some of these labels I’m throwing around.

Besides being a political economist, another qualification I have for speaking on this topic is that I can pretty fairly be classified as a member of the Religious Right myself. Or, to use a less charged term, I am an evangelical Christian.

This means that I am what is called “theologically conservative." I hold that the Hebrew and Greek scriptures provide a historically true and spiritually profitable account of the dealings of God with man, most significantly the incarnation of God as the human Jesus of Nazareth and his subsequent bodily death, burial and resurrection.

To give you an idea of how many evangelicals there are in America, I’ll cite George Marsden who writes that"…opinion surveys that test for evangelical beliefs typically find somewhere around fifty million Americans who fit the definition.”

To be in the “religious right," on the other hand, has connotations beyond strict theology and implies socially conservative beliefs. This describes me as well. I believe sex is meant to be confined within marriage, that killing babies inside the womb is a destruction of human life. And even beyond these sorts of things I’m a strong adherent of “bourgeois morality”: hard work, thrift, staying married even when it isn’t fun, etc. I also, like many in the religious right, have no socialist sympathies and think that private property and voluntary exchange are the proper basis for a just and progressive economic order.

Now let me clarify that the term “evangelical” which is what I will primarily use tonight instead of “the Religious Right” has quite a history, which I’ll touch on later, and more than one meaning. George Marsden, a major scholar of Evangelicalism in America, says there are two primary meanings of “evangelical," a narrow and a broad meaning.

Marsden writes in Evangelicalism and Modern America that, "…with the possible exception of [fundamentalists], evangelicalism is a transdenominational movement in which many people, in various ways, feel at home. It is a movement as diverse as the politically radical Sojourners community in Washington, D.C. and the conservative Moral Majority… Institutionally, this transdenominational evangelicalism is built around networks of parachurch agencies. The structure is somewhat like that of the old feudal system of the Middle Ages. It is made up of superficially friendly, somewhat competitive empires built up by evangelical leaders competing for the same audience, but all professing allegiance to the same king. So we find empires surrounding Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker [this book is a bit out of date], Jimmy Swaggart, and other television ministers. Card-carrying evangelicals are just as familiar with Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth for Christ, Young Life, Navigators, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri Fellowship, and other evangelistic organizations….”

“We can see, then, that a decisive factor in distinguishing evangelicals in the more narrow sense from evangelicals in the broader sense is a degree of transdenominational orientation. So, for instance, many Missouri Synod Lutherans, Southern Baptists, Wesleyan Methodists, Church of the Brethren, or Mennonites whose religious outlook is channeled almost exclusively by the programs and concerns of their own denomination, are hardly part of the card-carrying evangelical fellowship, even though they may certainly be evangelicals in the broader senses.”

The last term to note is “fundamentalist” which I will shortly explain more about in the context of the history of the term. Suffice it to say for now that “fundamentalist” currently refers to a subgroup of evangelicals who are marked by being more strongly separatist in regards to the culture and other Christian groups. An example of a fundamentalist institution is Bob Jones University. As we will learn, “fundamentalist” once referred to a much broader group.

III. Defense of the Religious Right

Now, before going any further it is my duty to defend evangelicals in regards to their political involvement from some of the charges that are more outlandish but unfortunately still get repeated in the mass media. This is especially important since later I’ll be making a critique of that political involvement.

The key to understanding what brought evangelicals back into politics after 50 years is one term: “self-defence."

Since you may not trust me as a self-identified member of the “Religious Right," I’d like to call as a witness the great libertarian Murray Rothbard, sometimes called “Mr. Libertarian." I think his observations are particularly interesting because he was an agnostic Jew who spent his life criticizing the State and those who would use it to steal from and control others. I should note that he made these observations in 1994, so what he would say now, especially in light of the invasion of Iraq which was generally supported by evangelicals, would probably be somewhat different. I’m using a lengthy passage because I also think Rothbard’s insightful and funny.

This is from his article, “Hunting the Christian Right”: “Watch out, Johnnie and Janie, the Christians are out to get you!… You see, the problem is that Christians — those sneaky devils! — are on the march; they’re taking over, in particular, the Republican Party. And, once again, as they have done effectively so many times, left-liberals, who wouldn’t be caught dead voting Republican, are rushing dewy-eyed, to try to save the wonderful old GOP from those terrible, extreme, Christians.

“So what’s wrong with these Christians, anyway? They’re ‘extremists!’ Oooh! On what? Well, they’re single-issue types: they’re only interested in abortion. Soon, it turned out patently that that wasn’t true: for example, the Christian Right (for they indeed, are the Christians under attack) are also passionately interested in saving their children from multicultural, socialistic, condomaniacal, anti-Christian public schooling.

“And so the anti-Christian left retreated to another line of attack: they’re ‘creationists’! They’re interfering with the separation of church and state! They want voluntary prayer in the schools! But why is even discussing a Christian view in the schools a breach in this holy wall of ‘separation of church and state,’ while presenting all sorts of New Age propaganda, channeling, pantheistic mysticism, etc. is not a breach in such a wall? It is pretty clear that the only separation of religion from the public schools that left-liberals are interested in is from Christianity, not from religion in general.

“The liberal media have spun an entire web of disinformation and lies around the Christian right. First, there is the notion that there are two types of Republicans: the Christian right only interested in ‘social’ issues (bad), and economic conservatives interested in safe issues like taxes and economic controls (good). Or, alternatively, that there are three types of Republicans: the Christian right (bad), the economic conservatives (so-so), and the ‘moderates’ (wonderful), who are left-liberal on all issues, or who are willing to cave into the left everywhere.

“All this is baloney. The Christian right might well have been inspired into activism by abortion or by the horrible state of the public schools, but by this time the nature of the Enemy is clear, and they have become ‘conservatives’ on all issues, anti-tax and pro-free market as well as cultural rightists.

"…I’ll say it only once more: it does not violate the separation of church and state principle for Christians to get involved in politics, or to take political stands. Or even for Christian ministers or priests to do so. For people who use this absurd argument, this point should be thrown into their face: All right, are you prepared to repudiate all the political activities of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King? Or of all the other black ministers? Are you prepared to condemn Catholic Bishops when they agitated for civil rights legislation? And if not, why not? And if not, please inter this idiotic argument once and for all. The blatant hypocrisy of left-liberals on this entire matter is a stench unto one’s nostrils. They must not be allowed to get away with this intellectual fraud.”

IV. 1900—1925: Prohibition, Modernist/Fundamentalist debates, Scopes Trial

To understand the sudden reengagement in politics of evangelicals in the late 1970s, I think we must first begin with what came before. Namely, how it came that a large segment of the American population stepped back from politics.

Coming out of revivals led by men like Dwight L. Moody, the 19th century was filled with religious activity. Marsden writes that “‘Evangelical’ (from the Greek for ‘gospel’) eventually became the common British and American name for the revival movements that swept back and forth across the English-speaking world and elsewhere during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries… the revivalists’ emphases on simple biblical preaching in a fervent style that would elicit dramatic conversion experiences set the standards for much of American Protestantism. Since Protestantism was by far the dominant religion in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century, evangelicalism shaped the most characteristic style of American religion.”

While the seeds of a coming split quietly developed among evangelicals, the late 19th and early part of the 20th century seemed to be a time of triumph for evangelical influence on society. There were massive missionary efforts abroad as well as new organizations at home like the YMCA. The Prohibition movement resulted in the passage of numerous state laws beginning in 1917 which culminated in the passage of the 18th Amendment in early 1919 which made the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” illegal in the United States. This alcohol Prohibition was repealed by the 21st Amendment in late 1933.

But the seeming unity among evangelicals was about to fall apart.

Marsden writes "… the vast cultural changes of the era from the 1870s to the 1920s created a major crisis within [the] evangelical coalition. Essentially it split in two. On the one hand were theological liberals who, in order to maintain better credibility in the modern age, were willing to modify some central evangelical doctrines, such as the reliability of the Bible or the necessity of salvation only through the atoning sacrifice of Christ. On the other hand were conservatives who continued to believe the traditionally essential evangelical doctrines. By the 1920s a militant wing of conservatives emerged and took the name fundamentalist. Fundamentalists were ready to fight liberal theology in the churches and changes in the dominant values and beliefs in the culture. By the middle of that decade they had gained wide national prominence. By a few years later, however, their support faded and they disappeared from the headlines.”

Ed Dobson describes the origin of the term “fundamentalist”: “The fundamentalist movement took its name from the publication of a series of booklets in 1909 named The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth, written by scholars from around the world. The authors represented Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal denominations and people of varying theological positions. These articles were designed to identify the essential (fundamental) doctrines of the Christian faith, which were under attack from the then-current tides of scientific inquiry. Five fundamental doctrines were identified as the basic tenets of the Christian faith:

1. The inspiration and infallibility of the Bible.
2. The deity of Christ.
3. The substitutionary atonement of Christ. The liberal theologians had begun propagating the idea that the death of Christ was merely that of a martyr and provided nothing more than a moral influence on society. That is, his death was a good moral example from which all people could benefit. To the fundamentalists this was a denial of the heart of Christianity and the soul of the gospel. Christ died a substitutionary death, and in so doing, he provided atonement for the sins of mankind.
4. The resurrection of Christ. Liberal theologians advocated a spiritual rather than literal resurrection… The fundamentalists, by contrast, loudly proclaimed the literal resurrection of Jesus.
5. The second coming of Christ. The fundamentalists believed not only in a literal, bodily resurrection, but also in a literal, bodily return of Christ to the earth.”

“By 1918 the liberals and the fundamentalists had clearly articulated their positions and were ready for a head-on collision. Conservative Christians held their first major national conference in Philadelphia that year, with more than five thousand people attending. The next year they met at the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago and decided to go on the offensive against liberalism by establishing their own organization, which would later be known as the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association. They also began advocating the establishment of new Bible institutes and conferences to combat the influence of liberalism. This was a major change of direction. Instead of staying in the major denominations and fighting against the liberals for control, the early fundamentalists withdrew and began their own organizations.”

George Marsden in Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism tells the story of the decline of fundamentalism as a nationally prominent movement: “World War I had produced among many conservative evangelicals both a sense of crisis over the revolution in morals and a renewed concern for the welfare of civilization… German civilization during the war was portrayed as the essence of barbarism, despite its strongly Christian heritage. Could the same thing happen here? The strong winds of change suggested that it could.

“The central symbol organizing fears over the demise of American culture became biological evolution. German culture, antievolutionists loudly proclaimed, had been ruined by the evolutionary ‘might-makes-right’ philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Darwinism, moreover, was essentially atheistic, and hence its spread would contribute to the erosion of American morality. Accordingly, soon after the war fundamentalists began organizing vigorous campaigns against the teaching of biological evolution in America’s public schools. This effort was greatly aided when in 1920 William Jennings Bryan, three times Democratic candidate for president and one of the nation’s greatest orators, entered the fray against Darwinism. Fundamentalist antievolution efforts were essentially political and so attracted a constituency wider than the nucleus of theologically conservative evangelical Protestants. By the middle of the decade laws banning the teaching of evolution in public schools had been passed in a number of southern states, and legislation was pending in a number of others. These efforts led to the famous Scopes Trial testing the Tennessee antievolution law in 1925, an event that both thrust fundamentalism into worldwide attention and brought about its decline as an effective national force. John T. Scopes, a young high-school teacher who admitted to teaching biological evolution, was brought to trial and defended by famed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow. William Jennings Bryan volunteered to aid the prosecution, thus bringing a dramatic showdown between fundamentalism and modern skepticism. The event was comparable to Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in the amount of press coverage and ballyhoo.

“Although the outcome of the trial was indecisive and the law stood, the rural setting and the press’s caricatures of fundamentalists as rubes and hicks discredited fundamentalism and made it difficult to pursue further the serious aspects of the movement. After 1925 fundamentalists had difficulty gaining national attention except when some of their movement were involved in extreme or bizarre efforts.”

V. 1976 — The Year of the Evangelical

Fast forward to the 1970s, though during the intervening years evangelicals were quietly building the institutions that I listed earlier. 1976 was proclaimed by Newsweek to be “The Year of the Evangelical."

I think it is interesting to note that initially evangelicals were not necessarily committed to the Republican party. Cal Thomas remembers: “I had voted for Carter in 1976, believing him to be a serious churchman, a moral man, and a breath of fresh air following the disastrous Watergate years of the Nixon administration. When Carter had said, ‘I’ll never lie to you,’ some mocked, but I had believed him.”

Francis Schaeffer was decisive around this time in bringing evangelicals into the pro-life movement. In particular through his book, coauthored with C. Everett Koop, “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” and an accompanying film and lecture tour.

A friend tells me of something Schaeffer said, by the way, about Christians and political alliances: “At a lecture he [Francis Schaeffer] gave at Covenant College in the fall of 1969 (that I attended as a junior in high school), he told the audience that Christians in the area of politics should be ‘co-belligerent, but not allies.’ In other words, while there were some issues with which we could be in agreement or disagreement, Christianity was NOT to be tied to a political party or parties.”

VI. 1979—1989: The Moral Majority

When the Moral Majority was founded in 1979 they also intended to stay focused on issues of concern to Christians and not become too closely allied to particular political parties or candidates.

Here is the original platform of the Moral Majority:

1. We believe in the separation of church and state.
2. We are pro-life.
3. We are pro-traditional family.
4. We oppose the illegal drug traffic in America.
5. We oppose pornography.
6. We support the state of Israel and Jewish people everywhere.
7. We believe that a strong national defense is the best deterrent to war.
8. We support equal rights for women.
9. We believe the Equal Rights Amendment is the wrong vehicle to obtain equal rights for women. We feel that the ambiguous and simplistic language of the amendment could lead to court interpretations that might put women in combat.

For fear of being misunderstood, we also articulated what we were not.

1. We are not a political party.
2. We do not endorse political candidates.
3. We are not attempting to elect “born again” candidates.
4. Moral Majority, Inc., is not a religious organization attempting to control the government.
5. We are not a censorship organization.
6. Moral Majority, Inc., is not an organization committed to depriving homosexuals of their civil rights as Americans.
7. We do not believe that individuals or organizations that disagree with Moral Majority, Inc., belong to an immoral minority.

VII. 25 years later

It’s about 25 years since the Moral Majority was founded in 1979. We can now assess how successful Evangelicals have been in accomplishing their goals through the political process.

After the Reagan landslide of 1980, excitement at the Moral Majority was high. Ed Dobson writes of what they were thinking, “We had made our mark. We influenced an entire election. Our agenda would never again be ignored. We were about to turn around the whole moral and cultural decline of our country. Our man was in the White House. The Senate was under our control. The media wanted our opinion on every issue.”

"… The Reagan-Bush landslide in 1980 was the greatest moment of opportunity for conservative Christians in this century. We had been disgraced in 1925 at the Scopes trial. But now we were vindicated. We had helped elect our man to the White House, and he openly praised the efforts of Falwell and the Moral Majority. The Republican landslide brought in new senators, and for the first time in twenty-six years the Republicans had a Senate majority. Along with the Moral Majority, groups like the Christian Voice, the Religious Roundtable, the National Christian Action Coalition, and several pro-life organizations published target lists and moral report cards. The new right was successful in defeating senators George McGovern of South Dakota, Frank Church of Idaho, John Culver of Iowa, Birch Bayh of Indiana, and Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Of the targeted senators, only Alan Cranston of California survived.

“Between the presidential campaigns of 1980 and 1984, the Religious Right continued to lobby Congress and register new voters. According to various reports, by 1981 new right groups had enlisted 70,000 clergy and had registered four to five million new voters. The Reagan presidency took a conservative posture toward issues such as abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuality, and school prayer. The Religious Right lined up behind the Republican platform. Jerry Falwell and other religious leaders visited the White House on a regular basis. President Reagan became the hero of the conservative Christians in America.”

Cal Thomas continues the story with how pragmatic compromises began to creep in for the Religious Right: “The subordination of conviction to the pragmatic was also evident in politics — which is one of the great dangers of too close an association by the church in affairs of state. Politics is all about compromise. The church is supposed to be about unchanging standards…

“The temptations occurred early for [the] Moral Majority. Not only were we forced to say nothing about Ronald Reagan’s selection of the previously pro-choice George Bush as his running mate, but only one month into the Reagan presidency, we were faced with the ultimate litmus test. Associate Justice Potter Stewart announced his intention to retire from the Supreme Court. Conservative groups had long believed that the Court had acted as an unelected legislature. We thought that Reagan’s presidency offered a possible once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape the Court in a conservative, or ‘strict constructionist,’ image.

“Reagan nominated a relatively unknown Arizona Appeals Court judge and former state senator, Sandra Day O’Connor, to replace Stewart.

"…because of Judge O’Connor’s questionable record on abortion, many conservative groups immediately opposed her. They felt the conservative movement had not come this far only to be compromised at the moment of victory.

“In an interview with Gerald and Deborah Strober for their book, Reagan: The Man and His Presidency, Jerry Falwell revealed how politicians — even Ronald Reagan, who supposedly was above compromise — can use the prospect of future access to cause one to compromise a principle.

Said Falwell, “I was at Myrtle Beach (South Carolina). The president called me and said, ‘Jerry, I am going to put forth a lady on the (Supreme) Court. You don’t know anything about her. Nobody does, but I want you to trust my judgement on this one.’

“I said, ‘I’ll do that.’ The next day he announced the nomination of Sandra Day O’Connor. About two weeks later he called me again and said, ‘Jerry, I’ve had a chance to talk to her, and my people have, and I can tell you that her views will not disappoint you, and I hope you can help me bring the troops in.’ So I began calling conservatives, asking them to back off.”

[back to Cal Thomas' comments] “But Justice O’Connor has been the swing vote that, in virtually every case, has beaten back any and all challenges to the ‘right’ of a woman to abort her child at any stage of pregnancy.’”

Due to the compromises and the feeling of being betrayed by politicians, Ed Dobson and Cal Thomas began to question the movement of Christians as a group into politics.

Ed Dobson describes one of the false myths that the Christian Right keeps buying into: [Myth 10] “Politicians are genuinely concerned about our issues…

“Dr. Dobson contended that the Republican party had abandoned its previous pro-life and pro-family stance, that the people advocating these positions had been rebuked and betrayed by the Republican establishment, and that if the party didn’t respond, then maybe it is time to make a change. I agree with all these ideas. Moreover, the speech led to a series of talks with Republican leaders and assurances to Dr. Dobson that things would change. And at this point I have deep concerns for Dr. Dobson. When the Moral Majority was at the height of its popularity, its leaders likewise met with the politicians and received their own assurances. But these assurances were never realized — and I predict that neither will those that were given to Dr. Dobson. Why not? Because politicians are politicians. Some genuinely care out about our issues because they share our values. Most do not. They are more concerned about the next election and about keeping power; they are inclined to use anyone, including sincere people of faith, to ensure that they maintain power.”

Cal Thomas: “The American Enterprise Institute and Roper Center examined opinion polls on abortion for the last twenty-five years. In January 1998 they concluded that despite the rhetoric and campaigns by both sides, attitudes about abortion remain pretty much unchanged.

“In perhaps the biggest and costliest battle waged by conservative Christians, twenty years of fighting has won nothing. And our record is no better with other moral and social issues.”

Ed Dobson: “Did the Moral Majority really make a difference? During the height of the Moral Majority, we were taking in millions of dollars a year. We published a magazine, organized state chapters, lobbied Congress, aired a radio program, and more. Did it work? Is the moral condition of America better because of our efforts? Even a casual observation of the current moral climate suggests that despite all the time, money, and energy — despite the political power — we failed. Things have not gotten better, they have gotten worse.”

VIII. Christians in Politics: A critique

I’m going to argue that the compromises and the disillusionment that Dobson and Thomas describe are not due to a lack of sincerity, good intentions and hard work on the part of the Religious Right. I believe that evangelicals, in general, were nave about the nature of politics. I would argue that if they had truly understood what the government, the church and the modern nation-state are, and what they are not, they would have gone about things entirely differently from the beginning. I would further argue that having clarity on these matters suggests that it is nearly impossible for politics to accomplish not only what the evangelicals hoped to accomplish through it but what many other interest groups hope to accomplish.

A. The nature of government

George Washington described the nature of government in this way: “Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

The scriptures say this "…rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and he will commend you. For he is God’s servant to do you good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer”

So the nature of government is that it has the sword, that it uses force. This force is supposed to be used by the government to punish wrongdoers. To put it in one word, the institution of government is about justice. Martin Luther called this the “left hand kingdom” of God’s two realms established in the world after the Fall.

Ed Dobson puts it this way: “We should not expect the government to promote the gospel or prayer or religion. This is not its role. We should not expect the government to promote compassion for the poor. That is not its role.”

Why does Dobson restrict the government in this way? Doesn’t he want the gospel promoted? Doesn’t he want compassion for the poor? He certainly does, but an institution that is marked by force is not suitable for these tasks.

B. The nature of the church

The nature of the church, on the other hand, is to dispense mercy and bring the good news of God’s mercy. Luther called this ministry of mercy “the right hand kingdom."

Cal Thomas puts it this way: “What was the first witness of the church shortly after the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus? Did anyone say, ‘Let’s get an army together and charge Rome so we can overthrow Caesar for what he allowed to happen’?

“No, the first witness was that they loved each other and pooled their possessions (Acts 4:32). It was love, not criticism or condemnation, that persuaded others to learn more about Jesus and to ultimately follow him.”

Though we can argue about the Inquisition or the Crusades, the primary day to day activities of Christian churches for the last two thousand years has been to persuade people of the truth of the gospel, to train new Christians and to do acts of charity.

To make the distinction abundantly clear: The church is not, unlike government, about using force to dispense justice. The seed of the church is the blood of the martyrs, not of the pagans.

C. The nature of the modern nation-state

I would like to make a further distinction. The U.S. federal government is not just a plain vanilla government that dispenses justice, end of story. It is a modern nation-state. It still qualifies as a government but with some major caveats.

Contemporary political science has slowly been finding its way to an old libertarian insight: The autonomy of the state. You can see this, for example, in the book Bringing the State Back In by Theda Skocpol and others. The state is not just a neutral instrument, now being used by this interest group, now by that of another. The state has its own interests… Primarily to grow and eliminate any competition to its authority, like local or regional governments or even the authority of churches and families.

Now when I discussed the nature of government I didn’t mention anything about it growing and seeking to eliminate competing authorities. That is because the modern nation-state is a particular kind of government, it is Monopoly Government. A monopoly government doesn’t just say “We offer protection and justice services.” It gives us an offer we can’t refuse: “We offer protection and justice services, which you have to pay for whether you want to or not or even whether we are doing a reasonable job at these services or not. In fact you have to pay us even if we clearly are just creating chaos and killing innocent people.”

We economists know something about monopolies. Monopolies always give decreasing service at an increasing cost.

The seduction of the modern nation-state is this: The growth of the state, the privileged position it has through its monopoly and the hordes of intellectuals who spend their time singing the praises of the state result in a temptation to consider the state capable of doing more than it can do. Thus, we get crazy utopian schemes to eliminate poverty and uncertainty in life by giving the state power over the economy. Or we get crazy utopian schemes to bring peace all over the earth by giving a single state power over the whole globe.

D. The dangers of becoming a political interest group.

How does this relate to evangelicals in politics? The state has an amazing ability to co-opt “protest” and “reform” movements.

The game goes like this: Left wingers come to the state concerned about poverty. The state declares a “War on Poverty." Poverty doesn’t end up being abolished, or even particularly reduced, but whole new bureaucracies are spawned, taxes are raised, liberty is diminished and the central state grows.

Or right wingers come to the state concerned about drugs or rampant immorality. The state declares a war on drugs and on immorality. Drugs and immorality abound, but taxes are raised, liberty is diminished and the central state grows. Heads the state wins, tails we lose.

Ed Dobson writes: "…when the church engages in the political system, using the weapons of that system, then it becomes another lobbying group and ceases to be the church.”

Thomas & Dobson write: “The church… becomes an appendage of the state rather than its moral conscience. It is transformed from a force not of this world into one that deserves to be treated as just one more competitor for earthly power.”

Cal Thomas further reflects: “We failed not because we were wrong about our critique of culture, or because we lacked conviction, or because there were not enough of us, or because too many were lethargic or uncommitted. We failed because we were unable to redirect a nation from the top down. Real change must come from the bottom up or, better yet, from the inside out.”

And Thomas adds this, directly pulling in a libertarian insight: “Author Charles Murray had some insightful thoughts on the idea that politicians and the political system can transform human beings from the top down. In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Murray wrote, ‘The Democrats of 1964 and the activist Republicans of 1998 — shall we call them modern Republicans? — share the fatal conceit [Hayek!] that lawmakers can engineer the incentives governing human behavior.’”

Ed Dobson sums up the crucial difference between the church and government in this way: “The authority of the church is the power to change people and culture. By contrast, the authority of the government is the authority to punish wrongdoing and restrain evil. But the government has no power to change the hearts of evildoers; it can only incarcerate or execute them.”

So, are there alternatives to addressing the social issues that concern evangelicals?

Of course! Christians can do what Christians have done for the last two thousand years.

In the case of abortion for example, I believe adoptions, moral persuasion, Pregnancy Resource Centers and free ultrasounds have done more than all the work to get pro-life politicians and judges into office. To this, I think we should add efforts to convict the hearts of men to act honorably towards women and take responsibility instead of using women and then eliminating the consequences. I got this idea from the 19th century feminists, by the way, who were strongly pro-life.

For another example, in the area of our government schools, I think parents who are displeased with the state of these schools should take their kids out of them and help others to do the same. There are numerous alternatives: Home schooling, private schools, the Catholic and Lutheran parochial systems. As someone who worked with inner city children for many years, I can tell you that the poorest among us are getting the worst part of this deal. I think Ladue High School, where I attended, had severe problems, but the inner city schools are on a whole other level of dysfunction and danger.

In conclusion, I hope to persuade Christians, and others for that matter, to not waste their time on politics. It seems to me clearly to have been a counter-productive activity with tremendous dangers for those who try to bend coercive powers to the ends of the Prince of Peace. There are so many other ways to engage our culture that desperately need dedicated believers. Some decent Christian filmmakers would do more good than a whole Senate full of Christians.

Stephen
W. Carson [send him
mail] is a working software engineer and a graduate student in
the Department of Political Economy at Washington University in St.
Louis. This
was delivered on September 12, 2003 at the Friday Night at the Institute
lecture series sponsored by the Francis
Schaeffer Institute.

Stephen Carson Archives

My own confrontation with the darkness of the 20th century came to a head in 1987. I was on my first visit to Europe and our tour of Western Europe brought us through Germany (only the West, as Germany was still divided at that time). Our tour bus made an impromptu decision to visit the Dachau memorial, formerly the site of the Dachau concentration camp.

My experience was different than the other young students that I was traveling with. I had been immersing myself in the literature of the great crimes of the 20th century since I was 11 or 12. At first I had focused on the mass murder of the Jews by the National Socialists. After years of this, I began to realize the horrible truth that this crime was not unique in the 20th century. I learned that the Soviet State had killed millions before Hitler was even in power in the "black earth regions," in particular in the Ukraine. I read all of the massive Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

By the time of this unscheduled visit to Dachau, I had already been mentally immersed in the world of concentration camps for one third of my short life. So seeing the camp, even what little of it was still there to see had a terrible effect on me. Everything I had learned about these terrible crimes came home in a new way. I suppose having learned about events an ocean away from my home and only in books there was a thin wall of denial left in my mind. But walking around the camp brought the stark reality of it crashing on me like a black wave. I’ll spare you the attempts to clinically label what I experienced and only say that for about a year after that (my freshman year in college) I found it distasteful to be around other humans, I barely could stand being around myself.

As the sheer emotional impact of all this began to dissipate, dark questions haunted me. Is mass murder and total war a dysfunction of society or something essential to it? Does human sin lead directly to mass murder? Is there any possibility that society could function (rather than dysfunction) so that flourishing is promoted instead of death and destruction?

Because if there’s no pattern of order in society, then there’s no point in even trying to prevent war and mass murder. It’s simply our brutal animal nature like the Darwinists have been saying and we should just enjoy ourselves until the animal spirits rise to, once again, murder and destroy.

Given all this, finding Austrian economics and libertarian theory (about four years after my visit to Dachau) had great meaning for me. I began to see the order in the seeming chaos of society. I began to see the beautiful ways in which society could yield harmony, peacefully navigate through conflict and even improve the conditions of human life.

Perhaps human sin and the imp of the perverse will defeat attempts to prevent war and mass murder. But there is hope. The attempt isn’t pointless or absurd. And there is an immediate benefit to understanding the healthy functioning of society. I see now the beauty that continually sprouts up among the bitter ashes of mass murder and destruction. I can see now the intricate patterns of order that are all around me, work with them, benefit from them, do my own small bit to contribute to them.

If not always so easy to do, I believe the course of action to avoid wars and mass murder is simple to state. Do not steal, do not murder and hold your political leaders to these standards as well. Avoiding these things is not unduly restrictive. There were a multitude of trees in the Garden and only one to avoid. As George MacDonald wrote, "There are a great many more good things than bad things to do."

People tell me that society requires(!) an institution that breaks these simple rules for society to survive. They say that we must have one group in our society with the authority to lie, steal and murder or we would be defenseless and turn on each other. That we require this to avoid chaos, to preserve order in society.

But this is too paradoxical. To preserve our property there must be stealing? To protect our lives there must be murder? To keep the peace we must wage war?

No! Let us be plain: To oppose mass theft, mass murder and total war we must not commit these crimes or support these crimes or the institutions that commit them. We must resist evil, not give in to it. Certainly not celebrate it, sing songs about it and make up self-contradictory explanations about how this evil is required for virtue to prosper!

So. Is it possible for there to be order in society without stealing and murder and war? Yes. Let us be blunt. Is order possible without taxes and state coercion and military invasions? Yes! Yes! Not only is this possible, these are the very conditions for the flourishing of human life, for physical, intellectual and spiritual blessings.

These words of the Bible are so simple and radical we avoid them: "If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."

Don’t despair. There is hope. There is beauty in the ashes. Find it. Defend it. Enjoy it.

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail] is
a working software engineer and a graduate student in the Department
of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Stephen Carson Archives

Building on medieval Just War theory, the libertarian theory of the State and the republican ideals of the Founders, Murray N. Rothbard (1926—1995) developed just such a systematic approach. Though a glance at his academic output suggests that Rothbard may be remembered primarily as an uncompromising free market economist and libertarian political philosopher, his emphasis in practical politics was very often on resisting interventionist foreign policy and opposing wars he saw as unjust (almost all of them). In fact, despite his own emphasis on the central importance of a free market, he often would support a candidate who he saw as less interventionist on foreign policy even if the candidate was interventionist in his economic policies. More importantly for our purpose, this stand was not just a personal preference or a fashionable pacifist pose but the practical outcome of a carefully thought out philosophy of human interaction built on the core values of justice and human liberty.

To understand Rothbard’s system of thought, we must first understand that Rothbard’s non-interventionism was not divorced from his understanding of economics but intimately tied to it. As an economist, Rothbard understood that voluntary cooperation was not just one way of doing things among many but the very wellspring of civilization, the reason that our lives are not "nasty, brutish and short." To override the free choice of individuals and use force to get what we want is unjust, uncivilized and destructive. In contrast to the social Darwinism that glorified the clashing of nations during World War I, Rothbard saw society as a win-win scenario. Through peaceful cooperation and exchange, everyone can be better off: "the distinguishing features of the contractual society, of the unhampered market, are self-responsibility, freedom from violence, full power to make one’s own decisions (except the decision to institute violence against another), and benefits for all participating individuals."

What stands in the way of ever-increasing social cooperation, wealth and fuller development of civilization? The initiation of violence. But Rothbard made a further important distinction, and this is where his analysis begins to take a unique and radical turn. We can divide the violence in society into two parts: illegitimate and legitimate. The criminal initiates sporadic illegitimate violence and theft against which society puts up a concerted resistance. But there is another form of violence that is usually considered more or less acceptable, and even "legitimate," that is the violence systematically initiated by the state as it taxes, regulates and fights wars against it’s people and other states. The definition of the state as a monopolist of "legitimate" violence is fairly widespread and not particularly controversial. What separates Rothbard out is that he argues, first, that this monopolization is not constructive or necessary and is in fact destructive of social cooperation. Secondly, he argues that state violence is a greater threat to social cooperation and liberty than criminal violence. After all, the criminal strikes and moves on, but the state settles down and robs again and again, year after year. Rothbard further argues that the state has an inherent tendency to grow in its power and predation, sucking the life from its host.

So, obviously, Rothbard’s view on war and foreign policy starts from a very different place than most political analysis. Rather than seeing "our state" as primarily a protection from aggressors foreign and domestic, he sees our state as the primary danger to our lives, liberty and property. Furthermore, adding in Randolph Bourne’s observation that "war is the health of the state," Rothbard recognizes that states have an incentive to start wars. After all, during a war the state is able to have the further justification of a war emergency to seize even more property, limit liberties further and generally grow its power. At the very least, this should cause us to cast an extremely suspicious eye on any war urged upon us by the state.

Is there any just war? Rothbard argues that there is in his essay: "America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861." He makes the distinction in this way: "a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination. A war is unjust, on the other hand, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them." Rothbard adds the important caveat though that, "A group of people may have rights, but it is their responsibility, and theirs alone, to defend or safeguard such rights." It is definitely not just, then, for our state to coercively take our money and our young people to go fight a war for someone else’s freedom.

Living for Peace in a World of States

So how does this theoretical framework play out in real life where we live under these predatory states which are regularly seeking to sell us various wars? The first priority, given the literally anti-social destructionist nature of war is to avoid war at (nearly) all costs. Even a just war is better avoided if any options for negotiation present themselves, because war is death, destruction, the growth of states and the decline of civilization. In the case of an unjust war (typically an invasion of some sort) our role is clear: oppose it uncompromisingly.

But what about once a war, regrettably, has started despite our best efforts to prevent it? In For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Rothbard writes, "…so long as the war continues, the scope of assault upon innocent civilians must be diminished as much as possible. Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices to accomplish this goal: the ‘laws of war,’ and the ‘laws of neutrality’ or ‘neutrals’ rights’." It is interesting that general opinion now seems to have almost turned upside down this idea of "laws of neutrality" which seeks to limit the war to the combatant nations. President Bush disallowed neutrality with his statement that "You’re either with us or against us." Internationalist U.N. lovers are not much better as they push for a worldwide "coalition" so that as many nations as possible are involved with all conflicts everywhere. The ancient practice that Rothbard endorses seeks to keep as many people out of the fight as possible. An excellent example of why this principle is so important is World Massacre I, in which the assassination of an Austrian duke in a backwater of Eastern Europe led to global warfare as interlocking alliances dragged one nation after another into what could have been a minor affair.

The "laws of war" focused on limiting hostilities to the armed forces involved in fighting and leaving civilians out of it. Thus, the distinction that we hear so much about but that is so often ignored in practice between combatants and non-combatants. Again, the point is to limit the destructiveness of the war. Rothbard points out that the first major modern deviation from this principle was the strategic bombing of civilians in World Massacre II by Britain.

The practical implications are clear. If it’s not our fight, our state shouldn’t get involved (though we as individuals may voluntarily put our own lives and property on the line for a cause we think worthy). When there is a war, civilians should not be targeted.

Murray Rothbard’s system of thought on foreign policy and war leaves little wiggle room for justifying wars. No sane doctrine would. War is too destructive, and the state too eager for war for a relaxed, vague standard. We must bind the state down with a strong, consistent, principled opposition to unjust wars, foreign interventions, alliances and subsidies. If we truly love freedom, we must love peace.

Important Rothbard Essays on War and Foreign Policy

• "America’s Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861" in John V. Denson (ed.), The Costs of War.
• "War, Peace and the State" in Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature.
• "The Meaning of Revolution" in Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature.
• "National Liberation" in Egalitarianism As A Revolt Against Nature.
• "War and Foreign Policy" in For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto.

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail] is
a working software engineer and a graduate student in the Department
of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis. This
article originally appeared in Washington
Witness.

Stephen Carson Archives

In my defense, part of the reason that the subject is so confusing is because central bankers do not want the essence of what they do to be clear to the masses. As J. M. Keynes (of all people!) wrote in 1919: "There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

I was at a lecture recently by Roger Garrison, author of Time and Money, in which he discussed the parallels between the boom of the 1920s and the boom of the 1990s and started getting into this M1, M2 stuff, (he even mentioned an M13!?). During the question and answer period, I suggested my simple summary of this whole central banking thing. So, just in case there’s anyone else out there who gets confused on this topic like me, here’s my short and sweet breakdown of everything most of us need to know about central banking:

1) Socialist Money

What we have with these Federal Reserve Notes (or any of the other central bank managed fiat moneys throughout the world), is non-private, centrally managed, socialist money. In this system the interest rate and the money supply are not determined by the free interplay of suppliers and demanders of money and loans, they are "planned" and "targeted" by a government agency.

2) Socialist (Mis)Calculation Applies

Because we’re dealing with a socialized aspect of the economy, Mises’ socialist calculation argument applies, (see his original 1920 article on this here). As Mises writes, "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." If the government abolished private ownership in the means of producing steel, the state steel production agency would have no prices to guide it as to how much steel to make, or what quality of steel to make. It would be subject to fads, like a belief that making massive amounts of cheap steel would result in a wonderful "new economy" of industrialization. Since a central bank has a government enforced monopoly on the issuing of money within that government’s borders, the central bank does not face the profit and loss discipline (or guidance) of the market. Therefore…

3) The Fed Is Flying Blind

This means that the central bank is not receiving the crucial signals that a truly private company has to guide its behaviour. Did the Fed print too much money last year? Too little? Should the Fed even be "in business"? Who knows? The monopoly means that crucial market feedback is turned off for the Fed. What should the rate of interest be? Without a free market in money and loans no one knows. Not me, not Milton Friedman and not Alan Greenspan.

4) What We Do Know

No one can really know precisely what the Fed should be doing (besides going away), but something can be said about what it shouldn’t be doing. If the Fed starts printing so much money that we have to use a wheelbarrow to bring enough money to buy a loaf of bread then the Fed has definitely screwed up. But don’t think this means we know that much. We can probably all agree that the Federal Government should not manage the huge tracts of land that it "owns" in the United States by setting off nuclear bombs on them. But that doesn’t mean we really know precisely how it should be managed… How much of the land should be for parks, how much for industrial development, how much for residential housing. Without real prices from a real market, the government simply can’t manage any of the things it socializes in a sensible way.

Turning the Lights Back On

For some reason it’s considered a great critique these days to say, "All you do is criticize… What should be done?" I’ll go for it and lay out my admittedly overly simplistic plan. Socialist money makes as much sense as socialist food or socialist education. The solution is to abolish the socialist system and allow freedom. In the case of money that means abolishing the central bank and getting the government out of the money business. Then what money we use, how much there is of it and the interest rate can all be determined like everything else, through voluntary exchanges and cooperation.

Even many so-called free market advocates think that we should have socialist money when they don’t think socialism works in any other area. I’ll admit it. I’m still confused on why that would be.

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail] is
a working software engineer and a graduate student in the Department
of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis.

Stephen Carson Archives

~ Randolph Bourne

During much of the post World War II era there was a top-notch free market scholar and activist on the Right that made it a top item of his agenda to consistently oppose the warfare state. As you can imagine, he was not very popular among the so-called conservatives that dedicated themselves first and foremost to having a global empire supposedly to combat the menace of Communism. William Buckley of National Review, for example, detested this fellow man of the Right and did everything he could to see that he remained as obscure as possible by accusing him of being a Soviet sympathizer and other lies, (yes, people on the Right get Red-baited too!)

Murray N. Rothbard (1926—1995) was this unusual and heroic American who fought, sometimes seemingly by himself, to keep the memory alive of an American Right that had strongly opposed not only FDR’s New Deal but also entry into the New Dealer’s war: World Massacre II. A Right that opposed the Korean War, the Cold War and was (originally) divided over entry into the Vietnam War. A Right that understood they could never keep a republic at home if the federal government was running an empire abroad.

At first, it may seem strange that opposing the endless wars of the State would become a focus of Rothbard’s political activism. A Jewish New Yorker trained as an economist at Columbia University, he came under the influence of Ludwig von Mises and became a firm adherent of the "Austrian school" of economics, the most consistently free market branch of economics. One of Rothbard’s major scholarly achievements was the publication of one of the few economic treatises of the 20th century, the thousand page tome Man, Economy and State (1962). That was only the beginning of his scholarly output, which included a dozen or so more books including a four volume history of colonial America and a two volume history of economic thought.

Rothbard’s emphasis was always on his libertarianism, meaning his opposition to the State and his support for people and communities being allowed to go about their business peacefully. This was, for him, not a hippie, "drop out" social philosophy. But instead an approach that emphasized the necessity of business entrepreneurs, hard work, saving and personal moral behaviour to the growth of civilization. Given all this, Rothbard found himself making some pretty strange allies in his decades long effort to oppose the wars of the State.

In "Life in the Old Right" from The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right, Rothbard describes his original political home. The "Old Right" came about originally in 1933, in opposition to FDR’s New Deal. This group was by no means homogenous. The most consistently anti-State wing was represented by people like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock and Rose Wilder Lane who desired an ultraminimal government and were libertarian in orientation. The second component were conservative, states’ rights Democrats, mostly from the South. The third group were mostly Midwestern conservative Republicans. The last group were former Progressives and statists led by ex-President Herbert Hoover who felt that FDR was going too far into "fascism".

As Rothbard came of age in the 1940s, he saw himself as a firm part of this "Old Right", albeit clearly in the libertarian/individualist wing. Rothbard explains how when he was young the Old Right turned from its opposition to FDR’s domestic policies to opposition to FDR’s foreign policy: "they realized that, as the libertarian Randolph Bourne had put it in opposing America’s entry into World War I, ‘War is the health of the State’ and that entry into large-scale war, especially for global and not national concerns, would plunge America into a permanent garrison state that would wreck American liberty and constitutional limits at home even as it extended the American imperium abroad."

Unfortunately, by the mid-1950s, the "Old Right" began to fade away. It’s last gasps were in opposition to the Cold War: "All Old Rightists were fervently anticommunist, knowing full well that the communists had played a leading role in the later years of the New Deal and in getting us into World War II. But we believed that the main threat was not the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, but socialism and collectivism here at home, a threat that would escalate if we engaged in still another Wilsonian-Rooseveltian global crusade, this time against the Soviet Union and its client states. Most Old Rightists, therefore, fervently opposed the Cold War, including the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the quasi-debacle of the Korean War."

After the Old Right fell apart, the New Right began to rise to take it’s place. This time William F. Buckley and his magazine National Review played a leading role. Buckley paid lip service to traditional conservative concerns but his main goal was to take the natural anti-communist sentiments of American conservatives and turn them towards unquestioning prosecution of the Cold War. Unlike the Old Right’s pre-eminent concern with not turning the U.S. into a ‘garrison state’, the young Buckley wrote in 1952 that "we have to accept big government for the duration [of the cold war] — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores." Clearly, with Buckley and his Cold Warriors increasingly defining what the American Right was, there would be little room for Rothbard.

So Rothbard was without a political home for a while. But with the Vietnam War and rising popular opposition to the war, especially from the "New Left", Rothbard decided to try to make a tactical alliance between the few libertarians left and these young opponents of the latest American crusade. So Rothbard wrote about how libertarianism is "beyond left and right," making the point that a stalwart of the Old Right like H.L. Mencken was, in the 1920s, considered a "leftist". In other words, "left" and "right" seemed to shift around but the libertarian agenda was consistent: anti-state, anti-war, pro-liberty.

Justin Raimondo in his biography of Rothbard, An Enemy of the State, describes the reaction to Rothbard’s shift: "Without changing his fundamental position one iota, Rothbard had gone from being excoriated as a right-wing extremist to being branded a Communist dupe. The explanation for this was due partly to the fact that these epithets were issuing largely from the same group of people who had been prowar leftists and Popular Frontists during the thirties and were now liberal anti-Communists. Whatever their various line shifts, the leftist cultural and political elites, who dominated the intellectual and political life of New York City, had always been consistent on two points: they were invariably prowar, and always pushing for the expansion of government power on every level."

As the Vietnam War ended, Rothbard took some of these young folks who had learned to call themselves libertarians and started the Libertarian Party as well as the Cato Institute. With organizations of people explicitly dedicated to libertarian ideals, Rothbard hoped that he might focus resistance to the state and it’s wars.

Near the end of his life, Rothbard began to become disenchanted with many of these libertarians, who he felt were selling out on core principles. (His insight seems prophetic now with the Cato Institute largely backing the state’s current global crusade, the "war on terrorism"). He found himself home again with a resurrected "Old Right", now calling themselves "paleoconservatives" and "paleolibertarians". Rothbard’s views, after his death, continue to be championed pre-eminently at LewRockwell.com, AntiWar.com and Mises.org.

What would Rothbard say about the current U.S. War on Terrorism? I suspect he would say that it is another in a long line of government boondoggles which has very little to do with protecting us and much more to do with having an excuse to take away more of our liberties, plunder us even more and extend power even more thoroughly over the whole globe. Do you believe in the (original) U.S. Constitution? Do you believe in a limited government? Do you oppose socialism and centralization? Do you believe the U.S. should be a republic, not an empire? Then remember Rothbard, and oppose the war!

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail] is
a working software engineer and a graduate student in the Department
of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis. This article
originally appeared in Washington Witness.

Stephen Carson Archives

Q: How did you come to be a conservative?

A: I’ve always been conservative as long as I can remember. I come from a middle-class Jewish family in New York and my parents were sort of FDR liberals. Perhaps in rebellion against that my brother became a conservative, he was 8 years older than I so I followed him. I was living in New York in the u201850s. It was the age of William Buckley and the National Review and Ayn Rand. There were all sorts of conservative resources in New York. I used to go to hear these people speak. That’s how it happened.

Q: Did you do some time in the Rand circle there?

A: Not really. I suppose you could say I’m another case of "it all began with Ayn Rand" because I read Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged pretty early in life. It had a big influence on me. I used to go hear her speak but I never met her or participated in any institutional Randian thing.

Q: Was [Ludwig von] Mises an important influence on you?

A: Oh yes. Again, it came through my brother who was studying at NYU Law School, specifically with a man named Sylvester Petro who was the great conservative Labor Law figure. The man who wrote the book on the Kohler strike and the only conservative voice in the area of Labor Law. He knew Mises and had his students read Mises. I picked up Human Action that way and read it, about age 15, maybe 14 come to think of it. Eventually I attended Mises’s seminar.

Q: You were 17 then?

A: No, I was a child tragedy. You know, I was a child prodigy then I ended up being a tragedy [laughs]. I was 16 when I showed up at college.

Q: Seems like conservatives have often ignored popular culture, except to do passing belittlements of it. I read your book. You’re taking popular culture pretty seriously. Why are you different?

A: First let me say that I think conservatives are making a big tactical mistake by ignoring popular culture. They really are losing a whole generation of students or are severely impairing their ability to speak to them by not being able to speak to students in their own terms. If for no other reason, conservatives ought to take interest in popular culture, along the lines of the cultural literacy argument, that to be able to relate conservative ideas meaningfully to today’s students, you have to know where they’re coming from and where they’re coming from is popular culture.

But I’ll go deeper than that and say that another mistake that conservatives make is: If they truly have faith in the free market, how can they not have faith in popular culture? That is, one of the chief remaining arguments of the Left that has any resonance is that capitalism debases culture. The Left has lost the economic argument; it’s very hard to say that capitalism impoverishes people’s material lives anymore. The Left has basically retreated to a cultural argument, that capitalism debases people’s spiritual lives and that the culture produced by capitalism is base and degraded.

Q: Sounds like Russell Kirk.

A: Yes! There’s a certain way in which the extreme Left and extreme Right meet in their criticism of the middle, and the middle is where people live, and that’s popular culture. It actually behooves people who believe in free markets to defend the free markets on cultural grounds and that’s one of the things I’m doing. Quite frankly, I’ve always like popular culture selectively. I grew up with television, to some extent with popular music. I’ve always thought there were good things in popular culture and bad things in popular culture. I feel our intellectual duty is to sort that out.

In fact, what is called high culture is, not always but very often, yesterday’s popular culture. I don’t have to rehearse it all but Shakespeare was popular in his day, Dickens was popular in his day. In general, the two most popular forms in the 19th century were the novel and the opera. Today they’re regarded as bastions of high culture. In their day they were looked down upon, scorned. People were told not to go to the opera, not to read novels… They’re morally bad for you. There’s a long enough history of this to realize that when very well meaning conservative critics condemn popular culture they’re making a mistake. In my own lifetime, movies moved from a situation where they were not taken seriously to a situation where now they’re regarded as an art form. I’m convinced the same thing will happen with television, is happening. My own prediction is that the video game is going to be the major art form of the 21st century. That what we now scorn and look down upon… The Shakespeare or the Dickens of the video game will come along, probably is already here. We just don’t know, or I just don’t know it.

Conservatives are always saying take a lesson from history. Well, here’s a lesson to take from history: Don’t scorn popular culture. Everyone who bet against the dominant form of popular culture at any point of history has lost the aesthetic bet. Conservatives of Shakespeare’s day hated the theatre, they wanted to close it down and eventually succeeded in doing it in the 1640s. But, again, there’s almost no form of what we now regard as high culture that was not, in it’s own day, condemned. The reason is simple. When a cultural form is popular and alive and vibrant it produces lots of stuff and the majority of it is bad. It is, again, a familiar market argument. What popular culture does is to produce lots of stuff and it has to be sorted out in market fashion over time. You look at products in the marketplace. Most new products are bad and they lose. They lose in the marketplace. At first, it’s easy to criticize them. So, indeed, popular culture is a form of marketplace and, over time, the cream comes to the top and that becomes the source of our great art.

Conservatives… This is the one aspect of their conservatism I quarrel with. Kind of "old fogeyism." They sit back and condemn the popular culture of the present in the name of the popular culture of the past! There’s a little debate on this that broke out on the Internet… I won’t name names. But what’s particularly interesting about this recent little scuffle was that somebody was condemning younger conservatives for embracing popular culture and talking with interest about current movies and television. The guy criticized them in the name of 1950s movies and television. One of the younger generation pointed out: we’ll allow you to hold up Greek tragedy and Shakespeare to criticize us, but don’t try to tell us that the u201860s was the Golden Age of Television and Radio and that by those standards we are shown as being tasteless. All this means is that you’re old and you like those television programs and those movies and you don’t like our television programs and our movies. But your television and movies are no better than ours.

Thomas Hibbs wrote a book called Shows About Nothing, which is a very good and intelligent book and I praised it in print. But the one thing I didn’t like about that was it condemned Seinfeld in the name of I Love Lucy. Again, condemn Seinfeld in the name of Aristophanes, condemn it in the name of Ben Johnson, but not in the name of I Love Lucy! Which was a fine show but is nowhere near as intelligent as Seinfeld, nowhere near as well made. I suspect that a thousand years from now Seinfeld will still be archived and I Love Lucy will be a kind of curiosity. Anyway, there’s a certain old fogey aspect of conservatism that is it’s weakest point. And its weakest point with students is where you take yourself out of the discourse by not realizing what the reference points of students today are. It’s just a major mistake to abandon popular culture to the Left. It’s what makes the Left appear cool to students. It makes it appear "with it," hip. It’s amazing how much currency you can get with students if you can show familiarity with the culture that means something to them.

I got an e-mail just yesterday from a former student desperately trying to convince me to give Eminem a chance. As it happens, I’m not impressed with Eminem, but several of my graduate students have made good arguments for him. I happen to know Greil Marcus and he’s a great defender of Eminem. But it just doesn’t work for me. But I was at least able to say to this kid, not "Who’s Eminem?" I was able to say, "Hey kid! I tried already. It’s not that I don’t know who he is, I happen not to like it." In general, I don’t like rap music. Some people that I very much respect do. I don’t embrace popular culture indiscriminately.

I have always felt that there are very good things coming out of popular culture. I truly believe that if you took the 100 greatest movies of the 20th century they stand up to any form of artistic achievement in the history of humanity with the exception of Shakespeare’s plays. There’s something called the "Shakespeare Fallacy" that nothing stands up to Shakespeare. If you tell me that Shakespeare’s greater than the X-Files, you’re right. But Shakespeare’s also greater than Greek tragedy, he’s greater than Dickens, he’s greater than Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and there’s nothing that can stand up to that standard. But if you tell me that the plays of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus are simply better than the films of Ingar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola… I’m not sure of that. I’ll argue that one. Sit back and think about it, a list of the 100 greatest movies of the 20th century would be an extraordinary body of artistic achievement. And, again, I truly believe that the 100 greatest Victorian novels are not as great as the 100 greatest films. The 100 greatest Italian operas are not as great as the 100 greatest American films. One of the problems you’ve got to recognize is that great achievements occur in new media.

Q: Culture’s happening and it’s passing the conservative movement by.

A: Yeah. The funny thing is that the movie argument is over. Some of the most conservative people I know have gotten together to write a volume about the great movies of Whit Stillman, the genius of Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. When that happens, you know that that argument is won. So now it’s television. 50 years from now when the video game is the dominant artistic form of the world, they’re all going to be talking about the glory days of Seinfeld and whatever. I’ve seen enough of this in my own lifetime. You’d think that people would start to learn this lesson.

Now, again, when I worked on my book I started with an appreciation of the Simpsons and the X-Files, for example. The more I studied them, the more that appreciation increased. I’m now convinced that the X-Files is one of the great artistic achievements of the 1990s. That’s pretty strange to anyone who doesn’t know the show, even stranger to someone who’s slightly familiar, seen one or two episodes. Again, if you took the 30 best X-Files episodes, they hold up against movies!

Q: It’s like Twin Peaks. There’s this level of quality where you’re like, "is this television I’m watching?"

A: In fact, the X-Files is very much modeled on Twin Peaks and stole a lot of stuff from it.

Q: I’m a huge Twin Peaks fan.

A: You could actually become an X-Files fan then. The star of X-Files was in Twin Peaks.

Q: Yeah, I still see him and think of him dressed up as a woman.

A: Well, let’s hope Tea Leoni doesn’t. Quite frankly, most conservatives who argue against popular culture are arguing from ignorance. Often, admittedly so. That’s no way to make an argument. When William Bennett made his negative comments about the Simpsons, he had to admit that he’d never seen it.

Obviously, the difference when we’re talking about popular culture is that we’re in the process of sifting it out. So it’s always easier to talk about Shakespeare, because we know now that he was the greatest playwright of the English Renaissance. There were a couple of other great playwrights: Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson. But when you go down below that rung. When you get to people like John Webster, John Ford, Cyril Tourneur. Those guys are hacks. They’re very similar to violent, semi-pornographic 20th century movies.

Q: The Jerry Bruckheimers of theatre.

A: Yeah, Sam Peckinpah who just loved violence for it’s own sake. We now safely know who was Shakespeare and who was Cyril Tourneur. At the time, people were still sifting that out. Thought it’s interesting, Shakespeare was so great that people began to notice the difference even then. I’ve spent most of my life working on Shakespeare, people who were centuries gone, we’ve been able to sort out what’s good and what’s bad. At some point, I’m abdicating my function as a critic. It’s all very easy to say Shakespeare was great. If I’ve got these talents as a critic, I ought to apply them to my own time. Not be so safe as to say, "Gee, Francis Ford Coppola is a great filmmaker, he made The Godfather, he made The Conversation."

You know, it’s much tougher and riskier to plunge yourself in to something like the X-Files. I have to admit that there were days I wondered if 5 years from now I’d look back and say, "You idiot! You thought that show was good?" It was particularly awkward writing about a show that was still in process. Especially in that case, where at the time I was writing about the X-Files it was clearly in decline. It was a question of how much longer it would last. Soon as my book came out, the show died. Hegel said, "The owl of Minerva takes flight when dusk is falling." Meaning you can’t get wise until the fat lady sings. It was a little tough. I remember there was one person who wrote about the X-Files very early, at the end of the first season I think. He said, the great thing about the show is that it takes itself seriously and they’ll never get post-modern, they’ll never do comedy. The next season they introduced their first comedy episode. I was actually very pleased that I finished the book with about a month left in the 8th season and the 9th season to go and they never did anything to contradict what I’d written. That was very nice of them. To be honest, they confirmed some of my theses even more by the last season. But it is much more risky to confront the culture you live in.

Q: You’re really describing a more entrepreneurial thing and there’s a risk to that. But you’ve already pointed out the risk to NOT being entrepreneurial. Spending all your time praising the safe things. The conservatives have seen the entrepreneurial risk of getting in there and getting muddy with culture as it’s happening but they’re not seeing the other side of it.

A: I’m happy to say that I think I’ve had a very good effect on the conservative movement. I really think I’m the one that went out on the limb and I’m now giving shade to all these young people. I’ve seen several examples. One of the first places I gave papers on popular culture is the American Political Science Association. It went from my giving one paper to having whole panels and now there’s almost a little subset of the American Political Science Association that does popular culture. The book on Stillman came out of that. They never would have done that if I hadn’t given them the example. Similarly, with the Mises Institute I’ve done a couple of papers there, I’ve done things for their web site. I see more and more things coming out on LewRockwell.com. I was very glad to see the debate about Scorsese’s Gangs of New York which just stunned me when I saw it. Here was Tom DiLorenzo’s new Lincoln book put on the screen. It actually happened on Malcolm in the Middle a couple weeks earlier. Dewey is trying to get out of homework… He’s supposed to play Lincoln in the school play. So he says, "Mom, don’t you know he was a dictator and he only issued the Emancipation Proclamation for political reasons?" I can’t believe one of the writers hasn’t been reading Tom DiLorenzo’s book.

Conservatives are afraid of popular culture. In part because they don’t know it. They have a vague sense, largely justified, that it’s more or less left wing. They know that Hollywood’s left wing. They see on every possible cause Hollywood stars generally coming out on the wrong side. They figure this whole thing has got to be wrong. But that’s typical of trying to make a blanket judgment and how that goes wrong. It’s true there’s only one Arnold Schwarzenegger for a hundred Barbara Streisands. Still, there are some conservative people in Hollywood. M. Night Shyamalan, this guys who’s done Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs is not only conservative but religious. Or at least he has great respect for religion.

Signs was a deeply religious movie, it’s about how only religion can defeat evil in the world. The reviews were negative because the Hollywood press sensed there was something wrong with this guy. Mel Gibson is conservative, so the combination was too much. When you see that film, how can Hollywood deal with a film where the cure for the world’s ills is baptism. Dipping evil people in water. The whole film is about somebody’s loss of religious faith and how he has to regain it and restore his family. I think he’s the greatest young filmmaker to come along since Tim Burton. Unbreakable is so extraordinary the press wouldn’t even touch it because it’s a parable about race relations in America and no one would even formulate what the film says about race relations. It’s a big attack on the victimization mentality.

Here’s a case where if conservatives would watch the film they’d like it. I dragged a conservative friend of mine to Signs who thought he would hate it. He loved it! It’s a great film about family values, the need for religion. That’s the thing. Even within a generally demoralized and demoralizing world of Hollywood films, you find some really positive things like these Shyamalan films. One thing I try to show is that even if the work isn’t intentionally conservative or libertarian it can be used for those purposes. Or at least to open up questions. The Simpsons is my prime example of that. I know it’s mostly written by Harvard graduates. You can tell that the creators of the show are largely left-wing, or at least liberal, in their sympathies. Nevertheless, they are equal opportunity satirists. They can’t resist satirizing everybody so they attack the first George Bush for many years, eventually they went after Clinton. So, in just needing to be even handed it ends up skewering a lot of left wing pieties. I analyze that at length in my book. I tried to show that many of the issues the show raises are issues, particularly that I think libertarians are interested in.

The show ends up debunking the nation state and defending the local things. The most positive lesson of the show is that small is good. The family is good, the small town is good. It even shows that the church is good. Its general message is: the bigger government is, the worse it is. Even though it makes fun of the small town, clearly the small town institutions are preferable to all these distant bureaucratic arms of the state like the IRS and the FBI.

Q: They’re more stupid than evil.

A: Yeah, the local is more stupid than evil. The national is evil. An interesting thing is that you can get students talking about important issues by getting them talking about the Simpsons. I was particularly struck by how much students can articulate about their feelings about the nuclear family and the threats to it by talking about the Simpsons.

Q: That’s just what conservatives have been talking about.

A: Yes! My first lesson to conservatives… You are condemning this show for undermining the nuclear family. It’s the last bastion of the nuclear family on television. At the time it came out, it was after a decade when all sorts of alternatives to the nuclear family were being held up on television. The Simpsons marked a kind of return to the nuclear family. It turned out to be a significant portent in that sense. Now the Simpsons has been embraced. One of the things I pointed out is that it showed that religion has a place in average, daily, ordinary American life in a way that television had been denying for years.

Q: My father’s a pastor. My parents always talked about that. If you just watched our TV and movies, you’d think that no one in this country goes to church… Except to do something terrible.

A: Yeah, religious people are either total saints or they’re completely deranged, fundamentalist maniacs. And here’s Homer Simpson, absolutely average Joe, and he goes to church and it’s meaningful to him. He’s not the most pious guy, yet…

I really took the lead on that. I think I was the first person to go into print and now Mark Pinsky from the Orlando Sentinel [and Tony Campolo] has written a book called The Gospel According to the Simpsons. Christianity Today had an article on the X-Files on how Christian that show was. Lo and behold, the absolute last shot on the last episode of the X-Files was the camera coming in on the cross around Sculley’s neck. I was introduced to the X-Files by a Methodist minister… He said, "You’ve got to watch the show." He thought it was really good but he was also interested in it as a minister and the problems of faith that it brought up. I called him up in Orlando after the last episode and I said, "Jack, you’re right! There it is, the last shot absolutely vindicates you."

Q: But it was going right over the conservatives’ head, even though in a sense this was what they were all hoping for. A return to understanding the value of the family and religion.

A: The central thesis of my book, comparing two shows from the 1960s to two shows from the 1990s, is that the u201860s shows, Gilligan’s Island and Star Trek, really centered around the American nation state and the projection of national power. The u201890s show, the Simpsons and the X-Files, reflected the era of globalization, the decline of the nation state. The decline in the centrality of American lives and the fact that people turned increasingly away from the national and turned, at the same time, to the local and the global. That we see in the Simpsons that these people in a little American small town are in touch with India and Albania and have been all over the world and all the world comes to them. I think that actually captures something about the texture of American life in the 1990s, actually something very positive.

I’m one who thinks that by and large globalization is a liberating process. I think we can talk about that by looking at these shows. The X-Files looks at the sinister side of globalization, it presents in the light of a kind of alien invasion. A lot of conservatives are worried about immigration and how immigration is changing the character of the United States. That’s what the X-Files was about. When aliens weren’t invading from outer space, they were sneaking across the border. We were getting episodes about Chinese Americans and Mexican Americans and African Americans and Haitian Americans.

Q: I felt encouraged by some of the things you saw in your book. What are the signs of hope in the development of popular culture?

A: One aspect of my book that no one has picked up on in any of the reviews is the argument I made about the television medium itself. The switch from what I called the "national era" to the "global era" of television. One of the things I feel encouraged by is that the ’60s was the high point of the centralization of American television. IT was controlled by essentially three networks: NBC, ABC and CBS who at that time had 90% of the prime time audience. I talk about the technological developments that broke the oligopoly of the networks. It’s no accident that my book is based essentially on the Fox network, the two shows I discuss, the Simpsons and the X-Files, are both on the Fox network. That’s an incredibly important point when a fourth network came along which people said was impossible.

Now we have six networks, but we have all these alternatives. One of my points is that this an increase in the free market. All these countries that had nationalized television, they produced very little. Cultural conservatives and elitists drool over the one or two BBC Masterpiece Theatre. They should be forced to watch British television on a 24-hour basis. The best thing ever produced in Britain for television was the show The Avengers and The Prisoner. And they were ITC, they were private network shows. It’s very easy to do Masterpiece Theatre, you get stage actors and you do a script based on Dickens. And, yeah, it turns out to be high culture. But that’s not the point, that’s just television just aping some earlier form. What television is, is the X-Files and The Prisoner… Things that are done for television. One of my points in my book is that there’s a unique form that television created, namely the ongoing series which is in some ways like the Victorian serial novel. People forget how Dickens was read. The books came out over a year or year and a half period. They were written in 3 chapter installments that had cliffhangers. In a way they were rather like American TV serials in the way they were produced and received. I try to show that there are things you can do with this television form that other genres have never done before.

My optimism would come from the fact that the more that gets on television, the more likely it is that great things will be produced. The thing I show is how the three networks really functioned as a gatekeeper and kept a lot of good stuff off the air. The producer of Gilligan’s Island came to my aid with something that he wrote in his autobiography that makes a very Mises Institute—like argument. He claims that what really lowered the quality of television in the 60s was the intervention of the FCC chairman, Newton Minow. By the way, the boat in Gilligan’s Island, the Minnow, was named as a left-handed tribute to Newton Minow. Minow was the man who gave the famous "television is a wasteland" speech and actually maneuvered or forced the networks to assume control over their own programming. Through the 50s, you may remember this, it was the Texaco Milton Berle Show, it was the Boraxo Death Valley Days. Sponsors simply purchased time from the networks and filled it with whatever they wanted to fill it with. The networks were just brokers for time, they were not involved with production of shows. Obviously, there was some level of censorship going on, you couldn’t put just anything on TV. But you had a sort of free market since it was the sponsors who were betting the money.

Q: Essentially, the companies were competing with each other rather than the channels.

A: Yes, and you had more players. Essentially, the networks felt under threat from Newton Minow so that’s when they assumed control of it so sponsors bought time but could no longer put programming on. Schwartz said it was much easier to make a sell to a sponsor, and you had more alternatives. If you didn’t sell it to one sponsor, you found another. But now, to get a show on TV, the decision came essentially from three men, the guys heading programming at ABC, CBS and NBC. There’s a little section in his autobiography on this blaming the decline in programming in the 60s, the increasing uniformity of television on government intervention. That’s a very interesting lesson. I’ve never seen anyone else make the argument. Sherwood Schwartz knows as much about television as anybody. He created Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch.

Several parts of the book I make a libertarian argument like this. The Left does not like cable TV. I found these British so-called cultural materialists. They really dislike the proliferation of channels. They see it as the loss of a center in the culture. Very interesting to see that, you’d think that anyone would recognize that this increases the creativity of television. But, no.

Q: Or even "power to the people" or something.

A: It’s a very interesting lesson in what they really think "power to the people" is, it’s their power over the people.

One of my themes in the book is that technology is liberating. The X-Files is interesting because it stages the Orwell debate. Orwell claimed that technology was going to be the power by which the State enslaved everybody. 1984 was the great warning signal against this. Orwell was right about many things and certainly the great tyrannies of the 20th century have employed technology, even so-called democracies have. The X-Files shows many episodes about that, many Orwellian episodes about the use of technology for control. But, on the other hand, the X-Files is very much the first show of the Internet and of the hacker culture and the World Wide Web. One thing it shows is that technology is also a weapon against the State. In some ways, the central debate of the show is whether technology going to be the tool by which the State finally achieves total control or is it the Achilles Heel of the State, the means by which people will take power back? For every time the State finds a new way of spying into bank accounts, people find a new form of offshore banking, and so on. The X-Files portrayed that well.

I felt I covered enough material in the book to stage this debate. I often didn’t agree with what the shows were saying about globalization, particularly the X-Files. But I felt that by the time I was through, I had actually covered this debate and, very cautiously and with many qualifications, I conclude that freedom is winning the battle. I’m not utterly confident, very worried about some trends, particularly some trends that have increased since I wrote the book but, by and large, I thought the lessons to be derived were that the more technology becomes the issue the more the State is at a disadvantage because the State is slow by comparison with entrepreneurs. It’s always fighting the last war. If technology is really going to be the battle point, I have a great deal of confidence in the side of freedom. Freedom has always produced better technology than unfreedom. Mises used to say that, in one of the most memorable lines I remember him saying was, "on the battlefield, the arms of Krupp will always prevail over their opponents." [The Krupps were the great German arms manufacturers.]

Q: I’m struck by how much you’ve made a conservative move in your book, but it’s really economic insights that are driving a lot of how you’re seeing things in a fresh way. Again and again as I’m listening to you, you’re seeing how the State is intervening, the interventionist argument, the role of competition, etc. Russell Kirk probably didn’t think like that very much.

A: I’m a trained economist and an English professor. I studied with Ludwig von Mises. I’ve read a great deal of Austrian economics. I almost became an economist. I’ve always regretted, in a sense, not becoming an economist. I had felt that I wasted all this training. Now I feel that I’ve actually made up for it, I’ve opened up a new front. There are people like Tyler Cowen who are doing this sort of stuff, that wonderful book In Praise of Commercial Culture. I see that a lot of free market economists, not necessarily Austrians, are coming around to cultural issues. I write for Reason magazine, which is not strictly speaking Austrian, though libertarian and free market. I have no doubt that the fact that I was raised on Austrian economics means that when I look at these problems I think that way. What is interesting is that I certainly did not set out to illustrate these ideas in this material. Gilligan Unbound was not going to be a book, simply a collection of essays.

I’d done work on the Simpsons over the years, on Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island and I was just going to put the stuff together into a loose collection of essays and then the editor asked for 30 pages on the X-Files. I started work and before I knew it I had written 140 pages on the X-Files and I suddenly realized that I couldn’t follow the original plan and maybe I could only have 5 or 6 essays instead of 14… Which essays should I use? I began to sort it out and the key thing was that the X-Files became about globalization and I realized I had a central theme here. I had not intended to write a thing about globalization. The title Gilligan Unbound came to me and I thought it was the coolest title I’d ever heard of. I eventually made the title work for the book. When I first had the title, it meant nothing. In a way, the strange process was creating a book to fit the title. As I worked on the material, it began to fit together into patterns, and that’s where my Austrian training kicked in. Now, as a great accident while I was working, the Mises Institute had scheduled their conference on The End of the Nation State.

Q: On Martin Van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State.

A: Yeah, I started to work on the X-Files chapter in July, the conference was scheduled for October. I put myself down for it, told them I’d do something on the X-Files on television and globalization. I did end up reading the van Creveld book while working up the X-Files chapter and then a couple of other books, the Jean-Marie Guehenno book, The End of the Nation-State, and a couple other things with similar themes. I had tucked in the back of my mind this phrase, "the end of the nation state," and I knew it meant something but I hadn’t read any of the books. As I was writing on the X-Files, I said, "Hey! This series is about the end of the nation state, I’d better find out what this debate is all about."

I did not start with the van Creveld book or any of the other books and impose these ideas. They grew out of the X-Files and they got me interested, which I then was able to use to analyze more fully and in more analytic detail what was going on. There was this marvelous convergence of that Mises conference coming together with my work and it really helped me, along with meeting van Creveld. He was kind of tickled to hear that this was revealed in American television… Completely baffled by it but he thought it was the cutest thing he’d ever heard. In that sense, the book took shape, and then the shaping it up naturally engaged my own impulses to think of things in Austrian terms and economic terms. There’s basically one little page in Sherwood Schwartz’ book about the Newton Minow problem, I think it would go right by most people and they wouldn’t see it was an issue of government intervention. But I was ready to pounce when I saw that.

Q: You talk in your introduction about how your style is in contrast to typical academic pop culture analyses. Your style is pretty different. I don’t know how much you’re a first in this.

A: I’m certainly not the first. Let me say, for example, that Greil Marcus is a magnificent stylist. He’s written Lipstick Traces and Dead Elvis, one good book after another from a rather liberal to left-wing perspective. He’s just a superb stylist. He’s a columnist for Interview magazine and writes for Rolling Stone. He’s actually a real journalist. He’s not a professor but he’s a scholar.

Q: You might be a first coming from academia.

A: I would never claim to be a first in this regard. There is a vast amount of writing in cultural studies that is in very bad prose. Part of it is that the movement was founded out of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in a book Dialectic of Enlightenment which was written in Hegelian prose and very badly translated into English. The founding text of this movement is a bad, turgid English translation of pretty bad German prose to begin with, but better than the English translation. So much of it reads like a bad English translation of German. It’s quite extraordinary in that sense.

Raymond Williams writes very well and he really is the founder of cultural studies. Some of the English write well. There’s an amazing amount of bad writing and writing that is completely out of touch. There’s a hilarious passage where Horkheimer and Adorno attempt to describe Donald Duck. It’s like when Hegel tries to describe anything. You read this impenetrable paragraph and then you realize that was Don Quixote he was talking about. Then you read this thing, "and that is, of course, the problem with Donald Duck." Oh is that what it was about?

Q: You don’t write in an academic style.

A: The book actually became heavier than it was originally intended. You think it’s not academic. Some people have never seen a footnote before. It’s actually more academic than you think. My academic instincts did kick in.

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

But critics of Hogwarts had little sympathy for Dumbledore’s position. “Of course he would say that,” stated the head of NOM (National Organization of Muggles), “He’s going to defend the magic-privilege that keeps him and his buddies in their elite positions in society. They have a self-perpetuating magicocracy. The only way that magic skills will become more widespread is for non-magic persons to have access to institutions of magic learning. They’re just afraid of the use of magic becoming democratized.”

To be able to bring in the mandated number of non-magical students, Hogwarts will have to accept applicants with a combined score of -200 on their MATs (Magical Aptitude Tests). A professor at Hogwarts, on condition of anonymity, noted that scores this low mean, “not only does the student have zero chance of mastering the simplest charm, but they actually put off a field of magic resistance that will interfere with the other student’s spells.”

With the admission of non-magical persons to the school, there will be other changes mandated by the government. Quidditch, traditionally played in the air on flying broomsticks, will have to be played on the ground so that non-magic persons can participate. Top players from each of the four student houses of Hogwarts resigned their positions in protest. Ian Smith, Seeker for Hufflepuff house, complained “Quidditch on the ground?! That’s just not Quidditch. It’ll be totally boring. It’d be more exciting to spend my time brewing potions.”

Lew Rockwell issued a statement defending Hogwarts as an institution independent of the state and emphasizing the importance of the division of labor and the fundamental role that Witches and Wizards have in the development of civilization. He was quickly denounced by everyone respectable for this, though there was no discernible connection between his statement and their accusations.

“What he’s really saying is quite clear to anyone who can decode his thinly veiled references. He’s a virulent anti-Muggleite who hates America. There’s no place for people like him in the democracy of equality and fairness that we’re building.” read a statement from the Jaffa Institute.

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

This kind of hostile reaction is neither unique to John Yatt nor unique to our time. It’s been going on since The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954—5 in the U.K. and 1965 in the U.S. Tom Shippey writes in Tolkien: Author of the Century that “In 1956 Edmund Wilson, then doyen of American modernist critics, had dismissed The Lord of the Rings as ‘balderdash’, ‘juvenile trash’, a taste which he thought was specifically British (…a prophecy about to crash in flames as the American market conversely took off).” (p. 307) Shippey notes a “general phenomenon of intense critical hostility to Tolkien, the refusal to allow him to be even a part of ‘English literature’, even on the part of those self-professedly committed to ‘widening the canon’.” (p. 305)

I had the good fortune to attend a lecture by Tom Shippey after having read his recent book on Tolkien. He is now a professor at St. Louis University and is also, by the way, an informative and hilarious speaker. During the Q&A, I read out a few phrases from John Yatt’s article and asked Shippey to talk more about why Tolkien continues to get these hostile reactions from the literary establishment.

Shippey’s first response was “They’re bastards!”

There is a historic conflict, he argues, between the literati, products of departments of English literature and philologists like Tolkien and Shippey who used to be from departments of English (Anglo-Saxon) language. Tolkien felt that to understand literature, one ought to understand the language, the roots and history of the words used. His works of fiction derive from this very approach to literature (Shippey’s book discusses this extensively), and he has inspired a whole new genre of literature, “fantasy”. As Shippey points out, in the academic arena the English literature world won and departments of English language are no more to be found. “The misologists [haters of the word] won, in the academic world; as did the realists, the modernists, the post-modernists, the despisers of fantasy.” (p. xvii)

Yet, Tolkien has had the last laugh, “But they lost outside the academic world. It is not long since I heard the commissioning editor of a major publishing house say, ‘Only fantasy is mass-market. Everything else is cult-fiction.’ (Reflective pause.) ‘That includes mainstream.’ He was defending his own buying strategy, and doubtless exaggerating, but there is a good deal of hard evidence to support him. Tolkien cried out to be heard… he found listeners, and they found whatever he was saying worth their while.” (p. xvii)

What is meant by the “literati”, these folks who consider themselves the arbiters of what English literature is? Shippey talks about this in the context of the critical reaction to the polls in the late 1990s that controversially named Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the century. “These results were routinely and repeatedly derided by professional critics and journalists (the latter group, of course, often the products of university literature departments). Joseph Pearce opens his book [Tolkien: Man and Myth] with Susan Jeffreys, of the Sunday Times, who on 26th January 1997 reported a colleague’s reaction to the news that The Lord of the Rings had won the BBC/Waterstone’s poll as ‘Oh hell! has it? Oh my G-d. Dear oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear’. This at least sounds sincere, if not deeply thoughtful; but Jeffreys reported also that the reaction ‘was echoed up and down the country wherever one or two literati gathered together’. She meant, surely, ‘two or three literati’, unless the literati talk only to themselves (a thought that does occur); and the term literati is itself interesting. It clearly does not mean ‘the lettered, the literate’, because obviously that group includes the devotees of The Lord of the Rings, the group being complained about (they couldn’t be devotees if they couldn’t read). In Jeffrey’s usage, literati must mean ‘those who know about literature’. And those who know, of course, know what they are supposed to know. The opinion is entirely self-enclosed.” (p. xxi)

The literati are not just humble scholars of English literature. They want to control what is considered English literature, to some degree past literature, but particularly the present and future. The success of Tolkien’s books drives them crazy because it shows that they do not control what literature is. Readers do. Shippey writes, “This is probably at the heart of the critical rage, and fear, which Tolkien immediately and ever after provoked. He threatened the authority of the arbiters of taste, the critics, the educationalists, the literati.” (p. 316)

Tolkien was a literary entrepreneur, breaking many literary conventions, completely flouting the conventional ideas of “what sells”, and yet outselling all the favored sons of the literary establishment. These literati are would-be central planners. No wonder that we often find them rather annoying (or just irrelevant) and find Tolkien and his work to be heroic and inspiring. The metaphor I’m using here for Tolkien of a literary “entrepreneur” isn’t purely metaphor. After all, Shippey estimates that the publisher Stanley Unwin has made about a billion pounds and the Tolkien estate another billion pounds on the Lord of the Rings. Unwin thought that The Lord of the Rings wasn’t going to make any money so he had Tolkien pay for part of the publishing costs and split the profits 50/50. Oops!

There are other reasons that the literati hate Tolkien. Tolkien completely rejected the Modernist movement which has been unquestioned orthodoxy among the literati. Tolkien’s priorities and themes were not that of the literary establishment.

Shippey further argues that the literary establishment, by any objective measure, is failing. He says that if they were a business, they would have gone out of business a long time ago. The number of students going for degrees in English literature is falling drastically relative to the population. I can personally attest to this negative effect of the literary establishment. When starting college, I was torn between majoring in Computer Science and majoring in English literature. I ended up majoring in Computer Science and minoring in writing. Part of the reason is that I had read some modern literary criticism and I thought it was rubbish. I didn’t want to spend 4 years “learning” their politically correct, unperceptive literary theories. If I could have studied under Tolkien or someone like him, I would have gone for it like a shot.

Thus, Tolkien’s ongoing (and, with the films, increasing) popularity contrasts painfully with the increasing irrelevance of the literati and their favored literature.

Why Do We Love Him?

Tolkien stands in stark contrast to the socialist-leaning, Modernist, elitist literati that hate him so much. As Mingardi and Stagnaro have demonstrated, Tolkien understood that socialism was unworkable and made little distinction between “left” and “right” socialism. Shippey notes that the literary coterie that “ruled and defined English literature at least for a time, between the wars and after World War II… were committed modernists, upper class, often Etonians, often professed Communists, often extremely rich, well-entrenched as editors and reviewers in the literary columns.” (p. 316) In another article, Mingardi and Stagnaro show that far from being a statist as so many of the literati were throughout the 20th century, Tolkien identified himself as an anarchist (of the private property sort, not the socialist, bomb-throwing sort).

Furthermore, he commits a cultural/political crime that for our socialist literati is unforgivable. He likes the middle class and writes about them affectionately in the guise of the Hobbits. No sense of alienation! No sense of looking down on the middle class snootily from a lofty vantage point! Unforgivable!

Shippey discusses this particularly in his discussion of The Hobbit, the prequel to The Lord of the Rings, “Bilbo is then defined from the start by time, class, and culture. He is English; middle class; and roughly Victorian to Edwardian. Hobbits in general will prove to be all these things even more definitely than Bilbo, except that some of them will be working class (the Gamgees), though none quite reach the upper class, not even the Tooks and Brandybucks.” (p. 11) The Hobbits, then, in their adventures in the rest of Middle Earth which they really know very little about except through legends stand in for Tolkien’s readers as they join the Hobbits in trying to figure out this odd world where wizards, dragons and orcs are not just legends but real and dangerous. As the films and books make clear, the hobbits in their own, humble way become the heroes of the tale. This demonstrates Tolkien’s affection for his own roots, “Tolkien indeed had nothing against middle-class Englishman, for he was one himself: and, unlike so many of the English-speaking writers of his time, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, he did not feel in any way alienated, nor have any urge to reinvent himself as working-class, non-English, in internal exile, or any other glamorous pose. It is one reason why he has never found any favour with the determinedly cosmopolitan British intelligentsia.” (p. 11)

Another difference with most of the literati of his time is that far from being militantly atheistic or aggressively secular, Tolkien was a staunch Catholic. He played a key role, in fact, in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity. This, by itself, has created no end of trouble for the literati as Lewis’ fiction and apologetic works continue to offer a reasoned and popular defense of beliefs that the modernists had thought safely dismissed as reactionary, backwards and Medieval a long time ago. Shippey makes clear that The Lord of the Rings is not directly a Christian work. Middle Earth is set in a time long before Christ, though the “pagans” in Tolkien’s world are rather virtuous pagans, not practicing human sacrifice for instance. What Shippey does not say, though, is what isn’t in Tolkien’s work as a result of his very orthodox Christianity and his anti-Modernist stance. Unlike, say, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s torturous feminist retelling of the King Arthur myth, The Mists of Avalon, Tolkien’s work is not a thin veil for modernist, politically correct preoccupations.

In fact, reading The Lord of the Rings, one gets the impression (which I gather is quite correct) that Tolkien was perfectly comfortable with older things and deeply suspicious of the brutal drives toward modernization that characterize the Left and, now, the Neoconservatives with their plans to bomb various peoples into the 20th century. Our modernist elite is obsessed with being modern. There are few curses more lethal from these folks than that you are a reactionary, a throwback, standing in the way of progress. Needless to say, the happy LRC crew must surely be about as “reactionary” as they come… Even gladly using the label “paleo” to distinguish ourselves, which simply means “ancient”.

But to delve deeper into why many of us have responded so deeply to The Lord of the Rings, I must explain Shippey’s brilliant, and I believe original, analysis of 20th century literature. He begins his book with this sentence, “The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic.” (p. vii) His list of examples already begins to make his case, “when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau and The War of the Worlds…” (p. vii)

Why has the fantastic as a literary mode been used so many times and produced such popular books? “A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers — the millions of readers of fantasy — should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.” (p. viii) He later adds C.S. Lewis, T.H. White and Joseph Heller to the list. (p. xxx)

Why have these fantastic books connected so much better than most of the literature in the modernist canon? The modernist novel has a marked tendency to be very inner directed. Tom Wolfe comments on this hilariously in his essay “My Three Stooges” in which he critiques the excessive inwardness in the works of modernist darlings John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. But Tolkien, and many of these other authors of fantastic novels, are oriented differently, “…although [Tolkien's] concern and the concern of the authors I mention is not with the private and the personal (the themes of the ‘modernist’ novel), but with the public and the political, it should be obvious that to all but the sheltered classes of this century, the most important events in private lives (and even more, in deaths) have often been public and political.” (p. xxxi)

Shippey is more blunt later in his book about what these "traumatized authors" were all dealing with, “Most of these authors, then, had close or even direct first-hand experience of some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century, horrors which did not and could not exist before it: the Somme, Guernica, Belsen, Dresden, industrialized warfare, genocide. Their very different but related experiences left all of them, one may say, with an underlying problem. They were bone-deep convinced that they had come into contact with something irrevocably evil. They also… felt that the explanations for this which they were given by the official organs of their culture were hopelessly inadequate, out of date, at best irrelevant, at worst part of the evil itself.” (p. xxx)

Thus, bringing our focus back to Tolkien, we find the other meaning of Shippey’s title, “Tolkien: Author of the Century”. Not just might he be the most important author of the century, but he was, despite the fantastic setting of his fiction, very much an author of the 20th century. We respond to Tolkien, in part, because he is wrestling with the horrors of our century in a very deep way. Thus his literary approach is in line with his anarchism that rejected both left and right socialism. Tolkien was not interested in the half measures that went over so well with the literati time and time again: "No, no, it must be Left socialism, not Right socialism"; "No, it must be Democratic socialism, not totalitarian socialism." Tolkien saw, as many of these other authors saw in their own way, that we were facing radically destructive evil and that we must be radical in our approach to understanding it.

The theme of The Lord of the Rings is that the Ring, the ring of power that is so tempting, must be resisted. If it is not resisted than the individual who gives in becomes a ringwraith. “…people make themselves into wraiths. They accept the gifts of Sauron, quite likely with the intention of using them for some purpose which they identify as good. But then they start to cut corners, to eliminate opponents, to believe in some ’cause’ which justifies everything they do. In the end the ’cause’, or the habits they have acquired while working for the ’cause’, destroys any moral sense and even any remaining humanity. The spectacle of the person ‘eaten up inside’ by devotion to some abstraction has been so familiar throughout the twentieth century as to make the idea of the wraith, and the wraithing-process, horribly recognizable, in a way non-fantastic.” (p. 125)

No wonder we love Tolkien so much! In an extremely original and artistic book, he gives us a vision that we are longing for. Not another variation on the themes that gave us the horrors of the 20th century, but a principled refusal to play the game of power at all. In Tolkien’s moving vision, the good comes not by massive righteous slaughters and crusades to stamp out badness but by the strength of will of “small” people to protect the ordinary, beautiful things of family and home and to resist the temptation to use power to do it.

Seen in this light, Tolkien’s book has a powerful and very relevant message for those of us who are Hobbits in a world controlled by wraiths. No matter how dark it gets, don’t give up hope. Stay true. Have courage. Help may come from unexpected places.

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

An article on real panic rooms in the Observer notes that “Security experts have revealed a huge surge in demand for so-called panic rooms since the 11 September attacks and recent rises in violent crime and burglaries.” In other words, the State is failing at its job of protecting us from attackers foreign and domestic, so entrepreneurs are stepping in to fill a rising demand for real defense. (The real panic rooms described in the article sound exactly like the room featured in the film, by the way. So if you’re curious about these rooms, check the film out). As usual, this new innovation is being bought first by those who can afford to pay the steep early adopter prices, companies and rich individuals. Most famously, the Observer notes, “Celebrities understood to have invested in the hi-tech safe rooms include Madonna and Sir Paul McCartney — whose fellow Beatle, George Harrison, was stabbed 10 times when a deranged intruder broke into his 120-room mansion in 1999.” But the market is quickly doing its usual miracle of bringing yesterday’s expensive novelty to the masses today. The article notes that panic rooms can be had for as little as 2,000 and a security firm representative predicts that “In a few years every new home may be constructed with a protected room that acts as the last bastion of safety and is resistant to attack. There are already thousands of such rooms in existence.”

All that is interesting enough. But what really led me to write about Panic Room was a more melancholy thought. The design of these panic rooms usually includes a separate phone line so that, once inside, the police can be alerted. The Observer article notes that these rooms “are designed to withstand an attack from a determined intruder for up to 30 minutes.” So the point is not to withstand a sustained siege, but to hold out long enough for the troops to come riding over the hill. But what if the attacker is the police? Or the BATF? How much of a difference would some panic rooms have made at Waco for the Branch Davidians? The State, unlike an ordinary criminal, can just sit outside whatever private defense we can construct and wait us out or roll over our panic rooms with tanks. If the centralized State comes for it’s own citizens with mass murder in mind, as happened numerous times throughout the twentieth century, who do we use that dedicated phone line to call? The city or state governments? That’s a joke. Local and regional governments have been reduced to extensions of our central government. If we call our security companies they’re not going to help us, they’ll be held accountable by the government as “accomplices” and there is no truly independent judiciary to judge between ourselves, our security companies and the State. Panic rooms may truly be effective in offering another line of defense from criminal or terrorist attack. But from attacks by the State, there are no panic rooms left.

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

Mr. Farah writes: "Libertarians make a fundamental mistake about the nature of man. Man is not inherently good." I’ve heard this charge before and, for Christians, it is a very serious one. It says, in essence, that to be a libertarian one must accept a view of human nature contrary to the scriptural view. In other words, these critics are charging that libertarianism is a heresy.

I argue that libertarianism is not a heresy on two grounds. First, libertarians do not believe, or need to believe, that man is inherently good. Second, the Christian conception of human nature is rather more nuanced than "Man is not inherently good." The orthodox scriptural view of human nature turns out to cause no problems for libertarians. Quite the contrary.

This charge that libertarians believe man is inherently good is a strange one. It betrays a serious misunderstanding of libertarianism. Let me briefly slip into Christianese to make this point clear to Christian readers. Libertarianism is the Law, not the Gospel. A libertarian society is the very opposite of a libertine society in which we trust the "natural goodness" of men. In the libertarian society, no one is above the law, not even presidents and kings. No man’s "natural goodness" is trusted. As Jefferson so eloquently put it, "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution [the Law]." If you really understand libertarianism than you should be more concerned about where grace and mercy fit into the libertarian society. As libertarians love to say, "the rule of law, not the rule of men." They’re really serious about this.

I am rather more understanding in regards to Farah’s implied summary of the Christian view of man. There is no quick way to summarize the Christian view of human nature. Merely saying "human nature is good" or "human nature is bad" doesn’t actually determine very much. I have heard people argue for both libertarianism and statism from both premises. The Christian view is a bit more nuanced than either of these assessments. In fact, either statement can mask views of human nature that are heresies rejected by orthodox Christianity (e.g., that man is irredeemable or, alternatively, that man has no need of redemption).

The Christian view is that, first, mankind was created by the Lord. When man was initially created, he was designed perfectly and was declared "good" by the Lord. Man was made to live in harmony with the Lord, the natural world, himself, and other humans.

But this understanding of the creation leaves us with an incomplete and unsatisfying picture of man, who now murders, steals, and blasphemes the Lord. The scriptural account goes on to record that man abused the freedom of choice that the Lord had granted him. This "Fall" from the originally created situation of harmony created disharmony between man and the Lord, man and nature, man and himself, and man and other men.

In sum, Christian orthodoxy attests that a benevolent and loving creator made man out of his overflowing love in perfection and with the gift of freedom of choice. Man then used this gift to rebel against the Lord which was the first of many wrong choices that has resulted in the fractured and blood-drenched world we now live in.

So is human nature Good or Bad? Obviously, Christian orthodoxy tells a story that is too nuanced to fit into such a simple-minded question. Let us ask a more useful question: Given the originally perfect but now fallen nature of man, how should a society construct its institutions so that the most harmony results? Does Christianity have anything to say to this?

The answer is that it certainly does. First, Christianity preserves a record of a civil law inspired by the Lord. A careful study of this "Mosaic" law reveals that certain kinds of rules are most likely to yield social harmony. These rules are largely "negative," that is, they do not instruct the people in society what to do so much as what not to do. These prohibitions may be usefully summed up as "Do not harm others or their property and don’t break promises you have made." Later, Y’shua (Jesus) adds "Don’t even think about doing these things" as an obviously not legally enforceable command.

It should be noted that though Christians certainly hope that adopting the Christian faith will yield people more likely to obey this civil law, this "natural" law can be known and obeyed by all humans (Paul writes about this in the first chapter of Romans).

Now, having laid this groundwork let us return to the question of whether libertarianism is a heresy. Whether libertarianism teaches that "human nature is good" or "bad" seems to me entirely unclear. The libertarian tradition does not speak with anything like one voice on such things. What is quite clear though is that the libertarian tradition argues that it is morally right and also yields a more harmonious society for individuals to not harm others or their property and not to break the promises they have made. Furthermore, libertarians argue that this rule ought to be applied to all individuals whether they are kings, presidents, or laborers, Christians or non-believers. Libertarians argue that when this rule is ignored it yields disharmony; when it is ignored systematically it yields Power which corrupts and kills. But the good news is that when this rule is obeyed it yields harmony, when it is obeyed systematically it yields an incredibly complex and beautiful system of cooperation which results, not in utopia, but in incremental improvements in the condition of man according to his own judgement.

I have written all the above without reference to my personal beliefs but merely to clarify the Christian and libertarian traditions and their relationship to each other which is, I believe, clearly not one of deep opposition. But I would like to add a personal note. As someone who was brought up with a Christian worldview and came to study the libertarian tradition later in life, there are two things that I find continually striking and to the Glory of the Lord. First, when the natural law is systematically ignored the results can be phenomenally destructive. R. J. Rummel was quite correct to update Lord Acton’s dictum based on the bloody 20th century: "Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely." But I have also seen with wonder and even awe that when the natural law is systematically respected, the results are beyond what any utopian dreamer could have imagined. Who, even of libertarian forebears like Thomas Jefferson, could have imagined that social cooperation under law could yield jet planes, open heart surgery, computers, and the elimination of poverty throughout Western Europe and the United States? If Jefferson had predicted such things he would have been considered a crazed utopian.

In both these ways, the goodness and rightness of the Lord is revealed. When His law is respected, the blessings are beyond our imagining. When His law is treated with spite, the destruction threatens to swallow up whole peoples. As a Christian and a libertarian, I urge you to stop finding rationalizations for ignoring His law. If you wish well on yourself, your family, and your people, then live consistently with the Lord’s law and demand that your leaders do as well.

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

First, we see the current Jews as descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That is, the current Jews in some sense inherit the blessings and promises that the Lord gave to these patriarchs. In particular, He declared to Abraham, "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you." (Genesis 12:2-3). We understand this promise to still hold for Abraham’s descendants and definitely want the Lord’s blessing rather than His curse.

Secondly, we have been deeply affected by the slaughter of 6 million Jews by the National Socialists during World Massacre II. We connect this spiritually with previous attacks on the Jews, like the failed attempt by the wicked Haman to massacre the Jews in the Persian Empire recorded in the book of Esther and regularly commemorated to this day on Purim. Because the Jews are "the apple of His eye" (Zechariah 2:8) they are a special target of the Lord’s enemy, Satan. Though we remember and honor the many Christians who hid and otherwise defended Jews at that time (like Corrie ten Boom), we are haunted by the thought that Christians might have done more and determined to never turn a blind eye while Jews are mercilessly slaughtered again.

Thirdly, (and this only applies to some of us, mostly those who hold a pre-millenial eschatology), we see the re-constitution of Israel as a glorious fulfillment of biblical prophecy. We feel a special kinship with Israel as the very land and people that produced our Lord Jesus to be a "light for the Gentiles, that [he] may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." (Isaiah 49:6) As my father has controversially put on billboards around Saint Louis, "Christianity is the most successful Jewish movement in history." We see the Jewish nation as still having a spiritual destiny to, among other things, eventually "look on me [the Messiah], the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son."

What I would like to argue, though, is that many of us have gone from these admirable motivations to a mistaken conclusion: that to support the Jewish people, we must back the Israeli government come hell or high water. There are a number of reasons that this leap is not warranted, no matter how many neo-conservatives say it is. I’ll mention a few.

First, the people and the government ruling over them are not the same thing! Call me paranoid, but it sure seems like the government often acts against the interests of the people it rules. I think most of us have an easier time seeing this in our own country. If we hear someone opposing actions of the US government, we do not automatically assume that they are "anti-American." In fact, it is quite common among my conservative evangelical brethren to be deeply suspicious of the government’s schools, it’s push for a "culture of death," and it’s generally anti-religious stance. Why just the other day our own Dr. Dobson strongly suggested that Christians in California should pull their children out of the government schools. Whether individual Christians agree with Dr. Dobson’s recommendation or not, I doubt they would say he was motivated by anti-Americanism. Rather, it is understood that he is deeply concerned for American Christians and is warning them of a danger from the government to their efforts to raise their children "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."

Just as we can distinguish between support of the American people and support for the US government and its policies, so we must also learn to distinguish between support for the Israeli people and support for the Israeli government. Perhaps you believe that the current Israeli government is doing the exactly best thing for the Israeli people. But at least grant me this point, that it is imaginable that the Israeli government could do things that are not in the interests of the Israeli people, that are in fact diametrically opposed to the interests of the Israeli people.

Secondly, if you find yourself enraged by criticisms of the Israeli government, let me remind you of some other people who have criticized the Israeli government in the past: Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, Elisha, …you get the idea. No one who takes the Bible seriously can say that the special status of the Lord’s chosen people exempts a Jewish government from criticism, even very harsh criticism. What if, when we support Ariel Sharon or another Israeli administration, we are not supporting an Israeli leader like David or Solomon, but one more like the rule of Ahab and Jezebel?

Thirdly, let us recognize what the Israeli government is… Not what we hope and believe it to be someday, but what it is right now. It is an avowedly secular, and generally socialist state. It just might possibly be that such a government would do things of which we would not approve and would certainly not want to be seen as endorsing. Could the well known sympathy of American evangelical Christians for the Israeli state be compromising our witness? We must be very careful what we are endorsing, especially when politicians are involved.

Finally, I would point out that biblical Israel was repeatedly told not to ally itself with the big boy on the block of the time (e.g. Egypt). The Lord told the Jewish people then to rely on Him and His protection rather than on fickle human allies. The US government is an unreliable and clumsy ally for Israel, that may very well be enabling the Israeli government to do wicked things that will only bring endless tsuris (trouble, aggravation) for the Israeli people.

Beware of the neo-conservatives. They do not share our concerns, which are to act in harmony with the whole testimony of the scriptures and to always stand against evil deeds no matter who does them… Be they Kings, Emperors, US Presidents or Israeli Prime Ministers. Let us be "wise as serpents and gentle as doves" as we "pray for the peace of Jerusalem."

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

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First of all, even though I’ve been working on a Master’s degree
at Washington University, it was through LRC that I became involved
with all this. I was on the campus more back when I received my
bachelor’s in Engineering in 1991. Now, as an older student with
a ten year career in my field behind me and a lot already keeping
me busy, I had mostly been in the habit of just coming to campus
for my classes and not looking for involvement in that bizarre twilight
zone world of political correctness and hedonism we call “campus
life”. But then Dan McCarthy had an article published on LRC (see
his great
archive), and the description of him at the end mentioned that
he was a student at Washington University. So I just e-mailed him
and suggested that it would be nice to meet a like-minded fellow
going to the same University. We arranged lunch together and, Dan
being the savvy organizer of men he is, by the end of the meal he
had talked me into writing (for free) an article for the conservative
student paper he co-founded, The Washington Witness.

It’s about a year since that lunch and I’ve had a regular column
in every issue since… Still for free, of course. I use my column
to discuss many of the issues that are raised regularly on LRC.
Two recent articles, for example, were much inspired by Hans-Hermann
Hoppe’s critique
of democracy. My articles were titled “Liberty vs. Democracy”
and “Democracy vs. Peace”. One of my articles ended up coming to
Lew’s attention without me even submitting it to him and was published
on LRC as “The
Wrong Response”, and then picked up from LRC by Pravda!

At least two of the speakers we’ve brought to campus are regularly
featured on LRC: Humberto
Fontova and Paul
Gottfried . (By the way, Paul Gottfried is speaking this Wednesday,
February 13th at 4pm in January 110 if you’re in the area.) Another
speaker, Don Livingston, we know from an event at the Mises Institute
which is headed by Lew Rockwell. These events, often with rather
politically incorrect themes, have gotten great audiences through
some great work on the part of the students in promoting the events.
One that particularly thrilled me was Don Livingston’s talk on secession.
One of our posters had the Dalai Lama next to General Robert E.
Lee and the caption “Secessionists and Heroes”. The event was well
attended. Professor Livingston gave a calm, well-informed lecture
on secession from a political philosophy perspective. What amazed
me is that I don’t think a single person got up and left (usually
quite common at a student event). I’m seeing that there is a hunger
for well-reasoned, radical thinking on the campuses if they can
only find out about it.

Another great event organized by the conservative students was a
panel debate on the war on terrorism. Though a bit nervous, I agreed
to represent the paleo anti-war position. I was paired with a leftist
professor against a Randian professor and a neo-conservative student
on the pro-war side. Because of my involvement with this, my picture
ended up on the front page of the student left-wing paper which
is something I definitely never expected to happen. Again, the event
was well attended and conducted in a thoroughly professional manner.
The audience had probing questions and left in a thoughtful mood.
I did my best to emphasize that, though paired with a socialist,
I saw my anti-war position as entirely consistent with being a theologically
conservative Christian (theologically liberal anti-war people are
a dime a dozen) and a fan of capitalism. In putting forward a conservative
anti-war position I was representing the bulk of our conservative
activist students who are heavily influenced by Murray Rothbard,
in particular his book For
A New Liberty. Though nervous going into my first debate
I left excited and ready to go at it again next chance I get.

One more thing related to the Mises Institute is that those of us
who have been to some of their great events are encouraging more
Washington University students to take advantage of these great
opportunities to interact directly with scholars LRC readers already
know and love like Paul Gottfried, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ralph Raico,
David Gordon, Joseph Stromberg and, of course, Lew Rockwell himself.
The big event of the year for undergrads is the week long Mises
University late in the summer. There are a couple week long
seminars for graduate students as well. We’re even planning to take
quite a few students to the upcoming Austrian
Scholars Conference so they can be exposed to cutting edge Austro-libertarian
scholarship. (We’ll be having one Wash. U. economics student, Art
Carden, presenting a paper at the conference this year.) It’s a
12 hour drive for us to get to Auburn, Alabama but it is more than
worth it when we see how radicalized and energized students are
after attending one of these events.

Because we’re scholars and not just activists, Dan McCarthy has
had a smaller group of us in a reading group. The book we’re on
right now is After
Liberalism by Paul Gottfried. We’ve purposely arranged it
so that we’ll have completed our own reading and discussion of his
book in time for him to be at our campus so that we can arrange
a smaller get-together with him after his big lecture to discuss
his book. Similarly, when Humberto Fontova was at our campus we
took advantage of his time to get with him in a smaller group and
ask him questions about his view on the Cuban revolution.

Do you have similar stories to tell about paleo-libertarian activism
at your campus? E-mail me and tell me about it. If you don’t, why
not? We don’t have any special magic. Are you wondering how we got
funding to bring in these speakers? How we had the chutzpah to invite
intimidatingly brilliant scholars like Paul Gottfried? Perhaps you
feel overwhelmed at the thought of publishing a campus paper or
getting people to come to hear a controversial speaker. I’d like
to answer your questions or direct you to the other students who
can tell you more specifics about how we made these things happen.
Maybe if there’s enough stories and questions, I’ll put together
a follow-up article so that we can learn from each other. Let’s
have two, three, many Washington Universities!

February
12, 2002

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail]
works
as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate
level at Washington University and works with inner city children
in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of
Films on Liberty.

LRC
needs your support. Please donate.

~
Jeremiah 5:3

I
was reading in the book of the prophet Isaiah. Israel is in trouble
again as it so often is. There’s a huge army backed by a much larger
nation surrounding Jerusalem, they’ve already taken all the other
fortified cities of Judah and now it’s time for one final mop up
and the Jews will be slaves in their own land.

The
scene is classic drama, though I wouldn’t want to have been there.
The Assyrian general starts making a speech about how Israel’s ally
of the time (Egypt) isn’t going to help them, how their god is not
going to help them anymore than the gods of all the other peoples’
who Assyria has taken down. The Jewish king’s servants ask the Assyrian
to not talk so loud in Hebrew because the people on the city walls
can understand. He says, “Was it only to your master and you that
my master sent me to say these things, and not to the men sitting
on the wall – who, like you, will have to eat their own filth and
drink their own urine?” The general urges them to just give up now
rather than be starved and then slaughtered.

Clearly,
Israel is in deep tapioca. I stopped my reading at the end of the
Assyrian’s ultimatum and reflected. I didn’t remember precisely
how this one turned out but I realized that I already knew that
the next thing I read would give away the end of the story. There’s
a pattern to how these things go, you see. If Israel responds in
an arrogant way, if they thumb their nose at the enemy and boast
about how great they are and how they are going to kick the Assyrian’s
all the way back to Assyria like they’re some red-faced gorilla
from the World Wrestling Federation, then they’re going to be in
for it. The Lord is going to watch while they have visited upon
them all the judgement for their sins that has been building up
since the last time this happened. And with the Assyrians as the
Lord’s imprecise instrument, the judgement is going to get real
nasty.

But
if Israel responds in that peculiar way that the Bible holds up
as a model there is hope. Fortunately, in this case, King Hezekiah
leads the nation in a response that pleases the Lord. He tears his
clothes and puts on sackcloth, (definitely a good start), and sees
that the other leading men do the same. Hezekiah prays with humility
and desperation to the Lord, asking that He would deliver them.
He sends word to the prophet Isaiah to find out what the Lord says.
The Lord is pleased and Jerusalem is miraculously delivered without
the Hebrews even having to leave the city. The Assyrians run back
to Ninevah with their tails between their legs.

Hezekiah
had, from the Biblical point of view, the Right Response. Even though
there was a scary enemy provoking him, he did not immediately respond
to that enemy but instead took the situation to the Lord. This may
seem like a strange thing to do to our modern secularized mind,
after all shouldn’t he be doing something more directly in response
to the enemy surrounding his city? Shouldn’t he be strategizing
or giving a big pep rally to his people to keep them united? But
his response does make sense from the point of view of someone who
really believes in a powerful, good Divinity. A higher power who
is just and holy but also wants the best for His people.

Often
in the scriptures, this Right Response is accompanied by a sincere
searching for sin among the Lord’s people. They examine their conscience
and search through the community for injustice, for wrongs that
should be righted. They really believe that letting sin and injustice
stand is an invitation for retribution. Responding to a vicious
attack by searching your own conscience for error may seem like
a counter-intuitive thing to do, but it makes sense from the perspective
of actual belief in a just God who runs an, ultimately, just and
moral universe.

Sin
in the Camp?

This
meditation left me feeling rather melancholy about much of what
I’ve seen of my own people’s response to the vicious attack of September
11th. It seems to me that there’s been a lot of patting ourselves
on the back about how great we are, how we represent freedom and
goodness in the world and we just have to “smoke ‘em out” and destroy
these fools who dare think they can mess with the mighty United
States.

In
short, a lot of what I’m hearing, especially from our political
leaders, is the Wrong Response. There’s hardly any humility that
I can see and, especially at first, nearly a media black out on
the whole issue of what sins and injustices we might have on our
consciences.

But
imagine if we had the Right Response. Imagine real humility at this
time, sackcloth and ashes, and searching for anything that our people
has done to bring the Lord’s wrath. I suspect with such an attitude
through the land there would be a lot of discussion about the million
Iraqi civilians that are dead because of the U.S. military. That
might be an injustice worth talking about. I suspect there might
be even more than this horrifying atrocity that we might re-examine
in such a climate of humility.

While
my imagination is running wild, let’s imagine that we not only identified
some things that our government was doing that we weren’t so proud
of, but then really did something to change them. Imagine the response
from the rest of the world to a United States that didn’t just pay
a bunch of lip service to justice and freedom but really tried to
act consistently with those divine ideals. I don’t know if it would
end all terrorist attacks forever, but it certainly seems like it
would be a much more constructive step than adding, now, the murder
of Afghan civilians to our conscience.

But,
oh well, so much for my little thought experiment. It looks like
pride doesn’t just go before the fall. In our case, it seems to
come after as well.

October
31, 2001

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail]
is a working software engineer and a graduate student in the Department
of Political Economy at Washington University in St. Louis. He prepared
this for Washington
Witness,
the conservative WUSTL paper.

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The
contemporary charges against Western culture are many and varied,
but the one that is really puzzling me is that the West is insufficiently
interested in diverse cultures and out to destroy them. The solution
offered to this ill seems to be to de-emphasize
or even abolish traditional Western learning (about Greece,
Rome, Christianity etc.) and replace it with Womens Studies, studies
of a very African Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, etc. The charge
against the West, in a word, is that it is provincial, blinded
to the rich cultural treasures all around by its patriarchalism,
Christian monotheism and general Western arrogance.

What
confuses me so much about this charge is that it doesn’t seem to
be at all true.

The
Vatican Museum in Rome, for example, must surely be one of the centers
of patriarchal, Christian, Western evil. Yet what I found there
didn’t quite fit the provincial stereotype. The persecutions of
pagan Rome being fresh in the long memory of the Catholic church,
you would think they would destroy any memory of this bitter enemy
(as, say, ancient South American kingdoms were in the habit of doing.)
Instead, huge halls of the Museum are filled with the best of Roman
art and culture. Similarly with the Greeks and even the Egyptians,
(including a spell from their Book of the Dead… A bit too broad-minded
of the Vatican if you ask me.)

In
all this, the Vatican shows itself to be culturally liberal in the
old sense of the word. Someone who was liberal in this sense was
judiciously open-minded to the best of other cultures and points
of view, generously giving the benefit of the doubt to things at
first strange and alarming. To be culturally liberal now seems to
merely mean being undiscriminating, taking the twisted, evil & mediocre
along with the good from whatever source. This changes the meaning
of liberal from an attribute of cultivated wisdom to one of foolishness,
an attitude on par with welcoming
change without regard to what sort of change it is.

Personally
I’m glad that the Christian West was judiciously open-minded towards
these ancient cultures, preserving Homer & Cicero while not continuing
to bury live servants with dead leaders like the Pharoahs or force
slaves to fight to the death like the Romans.

In
Florence, with all its great Renaissance figures, I was reminded
of how the West does not just borrow from safely dead cultures.
Navigation technology, many ancient Greek writings and much else
had been preserved or discovered by the great Saracen Empire. First
Mediterranean Europeans and then the rest of Europe were glad to
adopt all this from their Muslim foes.

And
this culturally liberal attitude continues to this day among Christians
in the West. My family and church have long supported the mission
organization New Tribes Mission.
They specialize in learning the language of tribes that have no
written language. They spend years, sometimes decades, learning
the language from the tribe, giving the people an alphabet and then
translating the Bible into the tribes language, (historically one
of the surest ways to have a language preserved). Without their
work, many tribal languages and cultures would be lost.

Reverend
Edmund Opitz, a grand old man of the liberty movement, once sent
me an article of his on the importance of the liberal (or libertarian)
arts. Among other things, he argued that those with a firm and confident
grounding in their own culture are the ones in the best position
to truly appreciate and learn from other cultures. I have learned
the truth of this in recent years in my close friendship with a
man from the south of India. Working together shortly after he arrived
in the U.S., he found our non-discriminatingly liberal co-workers
confusing and could find little common ground with them as someone
who took the morals, traditions and religion of his own ancient
culture very seriously. He quickly latched on to me and, later,
my parents as people who took life seriously. Despite my narrow,
intolerant Christian attitude towards his Hinduism, we spend wonderful
hours together educating each other about our respective cultures.

So
if I am correct that the Christian West has long excelled at appreciating
other cultures, what does this new multicultural movement bring
to the table? As far as I can tell, only one really new thing: the
desire to destroy a culture, namely the Western culture.

For
myself, in part because I want to appreciate the best that the multitude
of cultures has to offer, I will continue to deepen my knowledge
of the patriarchal, Christian and not so provincial heritage of
the West.

July
3, 2001

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail]
works as a software engineer, studies political economy at the
graduate level at Washington University, and works with inner
city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See
his reviews of Films on
Liberty.

The Hrad is not a single castle so much as a whole palace town enclosed by walls. Whoever has ruled the Czech lands has ruled Prague, and the rulers of Prague always occupy the Hrad including the Communist government of the post WWII era and now the administration of President Vaclav Havel. But the buildings of civil administrators are limited in their charm and character. Far more interesting to me is the magnificent St. Vitus Cathedral which dominates the third courtyard of the Hrad. (By the way, the fabulous photos of the Hrad and St. Vitus linked above are by Philip Greenspun. He is my favourite photographer of nature & architecture. Check out more of his excellent work, all available for free from his web site.)

Built on the site of a 929 A.D. cathedral, (in turn built on the site of a heathen altar), the current cathedral was begun in 1344 and not completed until 1929! In the software business, we call this a “schedule slip”.

The first thing that strikes the eye once inside, after the sheer immensity of the place, are some truly outstanding stained glass windows. My favourite are several by Frantisek Kysela, who uses an unusual technique that makes the windows look like they’ve been shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. There is also one by the Art Nouveau master (and Czech national treasure) Alphonse Mucha whose distinctive & joyful illustrations you almost certainly know, though you may not know his name.

After these dazzling features are absorbed though, some of the most culturally important features remain. The patron saint of the Czech is honoured in the Chapel of St. Vaclav, (we know him as Good King Wenceslas). Vaclav was born in 907 and dedicated himself to promoting Christianity throughout the land. He was murdered by his pagan younger brother Boleslav the Cruel who 10 years later repented, converted and had his brother’s body transferred to the spot that now has the chapel. The chapel itself is quite remarkable: the gilded walls are inlaid with about 1,372 semiprecious Bohemian stones, (1372 commemorating the year of the chapel’s creation).

Further along towards the head of the church is the tomb of St. John of Nepomuk built in 1736 to honour a priest who was killed by the king in 1393. The legend is that he refused an order to divulge the Queen’s confession and so was thrown off the St. Charles bridge bound and gagged. Though the details of his resistance to the State are disputed, the history of Christian martyrs who opposed the State deserves an articles of it’s own. While in Moscow, for a final non-Holy Roman Empire part of my tour, I learned of the martyr Philip. Metropolitan Philip denounced Ivan the Terrible for the horrifying sin of murdering his own son. Ivan had his servant Malyuta Skuratov strangle Philip for this. Just in case the stand of the church was unclear, Philip was promptly canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church after Ivan’s death. There may be a clue in these sorts of episodes to the hatred of contemporary statists for real Christians.

The details about St. Vitus that I’ve mentioned so far only begin to describe all the ways in which the cathedral is interwoven with the art, heroes & character of the Czech people. As if to encapsulate what I had realized, I found a painting in Prague that simply uses the St. Vitus Cathedral to represent Prague and the Bohemian people. (Similarly, Tchaikovsky uses the haunting melody of a Psalm sung by the Russian Orthodox to represent the Russian people in his 1812 Overture).

This integration of St. Vitus with Czech history and culture is not unique to the Czech. I could just as well have described the Duomo & Florence, St. Mark’s & Venice, the Mathias & Budapest, the Dormition & Moscow or Westminster Abbey & London.

I say all this to make a simple point. Separation of church and state is a very different thing than separation of church and nation. The first is relatively unproblematic for the Christian and the libertarian. It simply means excluding the use of aggressive force from being used either against or on behalf of the church. This should be unproblematic for Christians since, as St. Irenaeus of Lyons said: “with God there is no coercion.” The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, not the blood of the pagans.

But separation of church and nation, (by nation I mean here the people and their culture), for an historically Christian nation involves a radical tearing of a people from it’s own history and culture. Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow describes successive campaigns by the militantly atheist Bolshevik regime to separate the Russian nation from the Russian Orthodox church. They wanted to demolish churches and cathedrals without sparking a peasant revolt. So they decided to establish a precedent by taking just the church bells while spinning some story about a greater need for the metal in the bells. The Russian peasantry often were not fooled and would try to prevent the taking of the bells or the demolition of their village church. Many were shipped to the Gulag for their efforts.1

Militant atheists killed 2,691 priests & 3,447 nuns in Russia, 6,832 priests & members of religious orders during the Spanish Civil War, millions of Russian Christians and made a ferocious attack on Judaism that nearly decimated European Jews altogether. Richa rd Wurmbrand suggests a different interpretation of the 20th century than a battle between two systems of political economy. He and his wife, having lost relatives in the mass murders of the National Socialists because of being Jewish, then were tortured and imprisoned for many years by the Romanian Communist regime for preaching Y’shua (Jesus) as the Messiah. Wurmbrand wondered what the ferocious attack on religion had to do with a humanitarian concern for economic equality. Why did Communists in Romania force prisoners to perform black masses, with feces as ‘bread’ and urine as ‘wine’? (Solzhenitsyn reported similar things from the Soviet gulags). Wurmbrand argued that the 20th century was a titanic spiritual battle above all, with the arguments over political economy a subsidiary element to the real struggle against Judaism and Christianity.

Interestingly, in investigating Karl Marx, Murray Rothbard came to strikingly complementary conclusions despite a rather different perspective as a secular Jew. Rothbard argues that most fundamental to understanding Marx is understanding his almost religious millenarian vision which preceded his work on economics. Even this vision was in turn preceded by a youthful turn towards “militant atheism”. Rothbard writes that “It was this hatred of God as a creator greater than himself that apparently inspired Karl Marx.”2

The ideological descendents of the Bolsheviks are our American progressives and multi-culturalists. They continue, in a more constrained way, a battle to separate church and nation even now. They praised Communists while they were murdering Christians by the millions, apologizing for, concealing and just plain lying about these terrible crimes, (what would you say about someone with a track record of openly cheering for people who mass murdered Jews?) They are not above using the sword of the state to enforce their wishes on a nation. And they are certainly not above pursuing their evil goals while masquerading under the libertarian slogan of ‘separation of church and state’.

In the 1930s under Stalin, the Soviets destroyed the largest cathedral of Moscow, the golden domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral, and replaced it with a pool. Built almost 200 years ago to commemorate the Russian defeat of Napoleon’s French Revolutionary invasion, this church was nearly as striking a landmark of Moscow as the Kremlin itself. A highlight of my trip was to see the completely rebuilt Cathedral, just completed in 2000, towering once again over the former capital of militant atheism.

Stephen W. Carson [send him mail] works as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate level at Washington University and works with inner city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of Films on Liberty.

Stephen Carson Archives

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"My
kingdom is not of this world." ~ Y’shua

How
can someone who holds the Bible to be true and sacred be an anarchist?
What about the respect for authority and the emphasis on obedience
throughout the scriptures, (both the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures,
as well as the B’rit Hadashah, the Greek or u201CChristianu201D scriptures)?
Doesn’t G-d ordain our government leaders? Didn’t G-d directly select
the first two kings of Israel, Saul and David? Doesn’t the sinfulness
of man require a government to restrain our evil? And, for followers
of Y’shua (Jesus), what about the words of Paul commanding obedience
to secular rulers?

By
clarifying what precisely we mean (and don’t mean!) by anarchy as
a political system and what the Scriptures teach I hope to answer
these objections and explain how I both hold the Bible to be the
revealed Word of G-d and also desire society without the State.

Though
the teachings of the Bible can be followed and applied under any
system of government, the Scriptures do give us some fairly strong
clues of what forms of government are ideal. First and foremost,
there is the Torah. The Torah, which is the first five books of
the Tanakh, includes lengthy passages describing a system of law
for the newly freed nation of Israel. This "Mosaic Law"
is directly dictated by G-d to Moses and it is the clear testimony
of Scripture that this Law is good and trustworthy.

Besides
passages having to do with the sacramental life of the new nation,
the civil law portion is very compatible with libertarian notions
of law. The civil law consists primarily of prohibitions like: "You
are not to murder. You are not to adulter. You are not to steal.
You are not to testify against your fellow as a false witness."
(Exodus 20:13)

Most
of these prohibitions and their prescribed punishments deal with
violations of person and property, just as libertarians emphasize
the law should. Also, there is no notion of prison in this Law,
the system of justice is largely based on making restitution to
those who were harmed.

But
most telling is what the Mosaic Law leaves out. There is no establishment
of what we would now call an executive or a legislative body. There
is no establishment of taxes (the religious rules require a tithe
to support the priests but there is no punishment specified for
failing to tithe). Civil order is kept by adherence to this legal
code, private justice in the case of infractions of the code and
private courts in the case of disagreements. In modern political
terminology, this political system is called "anarchy."
Anarchy literally means "without rulers." Modern libertarian
anarchists (i.e. anarcho-capitalists), envision a system very much
like this Mosaic system with no tax-funded political authority but
with a system of private justice for mediating disputes and assigning
restitution.

But
it gets even more clear! Eventually, after a period under this Mosaic
"anarchy," the Israelites ask the prophet Samuel for a
king. Given our contemporary faith in the State, you would think
that G-d, through his prophet, would praise the Israelites for realizing
they needed a ruler, a strong leader to unite them and provide them
direction.

Reading
what G-d actually says through Samuel is a sobering reminder of
how deeply heretical our modern faith in the State is:

And
the LORD told him: "Listen to all that the people are saying
to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected
me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them
up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods,
so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly
and let them know what the king who will reign over them will do."

Samuel
told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking him
for a king. He said, "This is what the king who will reign
over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with
his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots.
Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders
of fifties, and others to plough his ground and reap his harvest,
and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots.
He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers.
He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves
and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain
and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants.
Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and
donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your
flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day
comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen,
and the LORD will not answer you in that day." (I Samuel 8:7-18)

Here,
the Bible makes it absolutely clear that the change from the Mosaic
anarchy to what by today’s standards would be a "limited government"
will have terrible consequences and shows a tremendous lack of faith
in G-d. This passage makes clear that the people of Israel committed
a grievous sin when they rejected G-d’s anarchy for a State.

The
continuing record of Israel under kings shows that Samuel’s warning
was all too accurate, if anything understated. Most of the kings
are terrible for the people of Israel, getting them into wars, leading
them into sin and stealing whatever catches their eye, (even the
best king, King David, steals a man’s wife and then kills the man).

With
all this in mind, let’s address the questions we began with: "How
can someone who holds the Bible to be true and sacred be an anarchist?"
Given the Torah, the Prophets and the records of Israel’s kings,
I think we should rather ask: ‘How can someone who holds the Bible
to be true and sacred NOT be an anarchist?"

"What
about the respect for authority and the emphasis on obedience throughout
the scriptures?" The emphasis on obedience in the scriptures
is, first and foremost, an emphasis on obedience to G-d. When G-d
is your king, as Samuel implies, you should desire no other. Nevertheless,
even when the government is not ideal, the scriptures charge G-d’s
people to be respectful of established authorities. It is faith
in G-d that will bring us liberty, not constant rebellions.

"Doesn’t
G-d ordain our government leaders? Didn’t G-d directly select the
first two kings of Israel, Saul and David?" After warning the
people of Israel, to no avail, that they should not reject His rule
for that of a human ruler, G-d selects that ruler through His prophet.
The Bible often records how G-d meets people where they are. If
we do not have enough faith to live with G-d as our only king, then
He will try to work with us through the system we choose. Suffice
it to say that when G-d ordains rulers, that does not constitute
a ringing endorsement of the State as the best system of government.

"Doesn’t
the sinfulness of man require a government to restrain our evil?"
The sinfulness of man means that putting the awesome power of the
State into the hands of sinful men is asking for trouble ("Power
tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely"). G-d
made it clear how the sinfulness of men should be constrained in
society: the Law. Libertarian anarchists agree.

"For
followers of Y’shua (Jesus), what about the words of Paul commanding
obedience to secular rulers?" The passage is from Romans: "Everyone
must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no
authority except that which G-d has established. The authorities
that exist have been established by G-d… if you do wrong, be afraid,
for he does not bear the sword for nothing. He is G-d’s servant,
an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer." (Romans
13:1,4)

In
this brief article, I cannot fully address the teaching of Paul
and the rest of the Greek scriptures on authority and the calling
of followers of Y’shua. A few thoughts, though, to suggest how this
instruction is in harmony with the anarchistic Torah. Paul was not
spreading a gospel of political revolution. The message of Y’shua
is spiritual. The follower of Y’shua believes that healing in our
broken relationship with G-d is the foundation for healing in the
other areas of our lives, like our system of government.

The
method of the Christian is persuasion and good conduct, not violence.
In an interesting parallel, Paul instructs Christian slaves to obey
their masters and even returns a converted slave to his Christian
master (Philemon). But note carefully what he says: "Each one
should remain in the situation which he was in when God called him.
Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you – although
if you can gain your freedom, do so." (I Corinthians 7:20-21)

Is
this instruction incompatible with the abolition of slavery? Surely
not. Likewise, Paul’s instruction to individual believers to submit
to existing authorities does not preclude a people’s return to G-d
being our only king under a just Law.

One
final objection. Isn’t anarchy a utopian political system? In the
literal sense of utopia, "no place,"anarchy is not utopian.
The Tanakh records just such a society. Anarchist researchers have
found other historical examples. Several hundred years ago, the
notion that the slave trade could be ended and then chattel slavery
itself abolished certainly seemed utopian. But British evangelical
Christians began to make the moral case against it and within a
century or two slavery was abolished throughout the wider European
world.

Do
we have less faith than those British evangelicals? Is the State,
which has slaughtered over 100 million civilians in the 20th century
alone, a lesser evil than chattel slavery? Shall we wait until a
couple hundred million more are slaughtered before humbling ourselves
before G-d and asking Him to be our only king once again?

With
faith in G-d and a Biblically based submission to His good and eternal
Law, let us work towards a time when the State will be seen for
the unnecessary evil it is and the cry will go up in the land a
second time: Abolition! Abolition! Abolition!

June
7, 2001

Stephen
W. Carson [send him mail]
works as a software engineer, studies political economy at the
graduate level at Washington University, and works with inner
city children in St. Louis through a ministry of his church, which
also has a special mission to the Jewish people. See his reviews
of Films on Liberty.

While
I certainly agree that dealing with this problem is going to take
more than government, (if indeed government has anything useful
to offer at all), I strongly disagree with the analysis implied
in the rest of his comment. I'll go out on a limb and make this
claim: Even if we removed all hints that "violence is the way
to solve our problems" from our culture, removed all violent
video games and movies, banned guns and made kids sing "Peace
Train" every day there would still be boys beating up other
boys at government schools. The problem is not, or at least not
primarily, "culture".

Allow
me to share some of my own experience. Being a scrawny boy, a bit
eccentric and a pacifist I was an ideal target for "bullying".
This "bullying" in my case meant about 8 years of physical
abuse through elementary, junior high and high school. One incident
I remember in particular from junior high involved two boys. One
held my arms behind my back while the other slapped my face repeatedly
as hard as he could. The sense of violation was far worse than the
pain. I had done nothing in particular to get this treatment, merely
been someone they perceived as vulnerable. I remember the sense
of dread throughout this period of my life as I approached the especially
dangerous parts of my school day: the bus stop, the hallway between
classes, the locker room.

For
myself this nightmare did not come to an end through adult authority.
While I was in high school, my family took in a black inner city
youth, (to this day a beloved "foster" brother), and he
started attending my high school. He was decidedly not scrawny and
a lot scarier than I was. He made it clear to the other boys that
I was under his protection and that stopped the abuse and made for
a much happier time in my childhood. It should be noted that all
this occurred in one of the richest and best government school districts
in my state over 15 years ago. By all accounts, the situation in
government schools is even worse now.

How
could all this happen with adults supposedly in charge? Let us assume,
as economists are wont to do, that I was a rational child weighing
the costs and benefits of my actions. If I "snitched"
on one of my abusers to my parents or school authorities, the most
I could hope for was a slap on the hand: perhaps a stern lecture
or, if they were really serious, a week-long vacation, (i.e. suspension),
for the bully. So perhaps I would have a break from that particular
bully for a week. But then, having broken the schoolyard code, I
would be subject to revenge. And the kids would have a thousand
ways of making my life miserable that the adults wouldn't catch.
With a ratio of 20 or 30 prisoners to every guard, I'm sorry, students
to teachers combined with the adult's inability to exercise any
substantive discipline there was little chance that adults would
be able to protect me from the wrath sure to follow my breaking
of the unwritten code. So I lumped it.

William
Golding's novel The Lord of the Flies has helped me to understand
what I experienced. In that novel, a group of children find themselves
stranded on an island without adult supervision and quickly revert
to their natural savagery. For children are savage, even the girls
in their own way. They do not need a "culture of violence"
to teach them this. It is a civilized culture that teaches children
to restrain their natural violence. We are born barbarians. It is
the job of responsible adults to train their little barbarians into
people who know how to respect the person and property of others.

Our
government schools have been failing more and more in this essential
task. These are not the schools that my parents experienced. These
are not even the schools I experienced. The Lord of the Flies mentality
that rules the government schools is now being revealed in the most
tragic manner possible.

I
have a question for you from my younger self: Where are the adults?

March
16, 2001

Stephen
W. Carson is a working software engineer and a graduate student
in political economy at Washington University in St. Louis.

The Hrad
is not a single castle so much as a whole palace town enclosed by
walls. Whoever has ruled the Czech lands has ruled Prague, and the
rulers of Prague always occupy the Hrad including the Communist
government of the post WWII era and now the administration of President
Vaclav Havel. But the buildings of civil administrators are limited
in their charm and character. Far more interesting to me is the
magnificent St.
Vitus Cathedral which dominates the third courtyard of the Hrad.
(By the way, the fabulous photos of the Hrad and St. Vitus linked
above are by Philip Greenspun. He is my favourite photographer of
nature & architecture. Check out more of his excellent work, all
available for free from his
web site.)

Built on the site of a 929 A.D. cathedral, (in turn built on the
site of a heathen altar), the current cathedral was begun in 1344
and not completed until 1929! In the software business, we call
this a “schedule slip”.

The first thing that strikes the eye once inside, after the sheer
immensity of the place, are some truly outstanding stained glass
windows. My favourite are several by Frantisek Kysela, who uses
an unusual technique that makes the windows look like they’ve been
shattered into hundreds of tiny pieces. There is also one by the
Art Nouveau master (and Czech national treasure) Alphonse Mucha whose distinctive
& joyful illustrations you almost certainly know, though you may
not know his name.

After these dazzling features are absorbed though, some of the
most culturally important features remain. The patron saint of the
Czech is honoured in the Chapel of St. Vaclav, (we know him as Good
King Wenceslas). Vaclav was born in 907 and dedicated himself to
promoting Christianity throughout the land. He was murdered by his
pagan younger brother Boleslav the Cruel who 10 years later repented,
converted and had his brother’s body transferred to the spot that
now has the chapel. The chapel itself is quite remarkable: the gilded
walls are inlaid with about 1,372 semiprecious Bohemian stones,
(1372 commemorating the year of the chapel’s creation).

Further along towards the head of the church is the tomb of St.
John of Nepomuk built in 1736 to honour a priest who was killed
by the king in 1393. The legend is that he refused an order to divulge
the Queen’s confession and so was thrown off the St. Charles bridge
bound and gagged. Though the details of his resistance to the State
are disputed, the history of Christian martyrs who opposed the State
deserves an articles of it’s own. While in Moscow, for a final non-Holy
Roman Empire part of my tour, I learned of the martyr Philip. Metropolitan
Philip denounced Ivan the Terrible for the horrifying sin of murdering
his own son. Ivan had his servant Malyuta Skuratov strangle Philip
for this. Just in case the stand of the church was unclear, Philip
was promptly canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church after Ivan’s
death. There may be a clue in these sorts of episodes to the hatred
of contemporary statists for real Christians.

The details about St. Vitus that I’ve mentioned so far only begin
to describe all the ways in which the cathedral is interwoven with
the art, heroes & character of the Czech people. As if to encapsulate
what I had realized, I found a painting in Prague that simply uses
the St. Vitus Cathedral to represent Prague and the Bohemian people.
(Similarly, Tchaikovsky uses the haunting melody of a Psalm sung
by the Russian Orthodox to represent the Russian people in his 1812
Overture).

This integration of St. Vitus with Czech history and culture is
not unique to the Czech. I could just as well have described the
Duomo & Florence, St. Mark’s & Venice, the Mathias & Budapest, the
Dormition & Moscow or Westminster Abbey & London.

I say all this to make a simple point. Separation of church and
state is a very different thing than separation of church and nation.
The first is relatively unproblematic for the Christian and the
libertarian. It simply means excluding the use of aggressive force
from being used either against or on behalf of the church. This
should be unproblematic for Christians since, as St. Irenaeus of
Lyons said: “with God there is no coercion.” The blood of the martyrs
is the seed of the church, not the blood of the pagans.

But separation of church and nation, (by nation I mean here the
people and their culture), for an historically Christian nation
involves a radical tearing of a people from it’s own history and
culture. Robert Conquest in The Harvest
of Sorrow describes successive campaigns by the militantly atheist
Bolshevik regime to separate the Russian nation from the Russian
Orthodox church. They wanted to demolish churches and cathedrals
without sparking a peasant revolt. So they decided to establish
a precedent by taking just the church bells while spinning some
story about a greater need for the metal in the bells. The Russian
peasantry often were not fooled and would try to prevent the taking
of the bells or the demolition of their village church. Many were
shipped to the Gulag for their efforts.1

Militant atheists killed 2,691 priests & 3,447 nuns in Russia,
6,832 priests & members of religious orders during the Spanish Civil
War, millions of Russian Christians and made a ferocious attack
on Judaism that nearly decimated European Jews altogether. Richa rd
Wurmbrand suggests a different interpretation of the 20th century
than a battle between two systems of political economy. He and his
wife, having lost relatives in the mass murders of the National
Socialists because of being Jewish, then were tortured and imprisoned
for many years by the Romanian Communist regime for preaching Y’shua
(Jesus) as the Messiah. Wurmbrand wondered what the ferocious attack
on religion had to do with a humanitarian concern for economic equality.
Why did Communists in Romania force prisoners to perform black masses,
with feces as ‘bread’ and urine as ‘wine’? (Solzhenitsyn reported
similar things from the Soviet gulags). Wurmbrand argued that the
20th century was a titanic spiritual battle above all, with the
arguments over political economy a subsidiary element to the real
struggle against Judaism and Christianity.

Interestingly, in investigating Karl Marx, Murray Rothbard came
to strikingly complementary conclusions despite a rather different
perspective as a secular Jew. Rothbard argues that most fundamental
to understanding Marx is understanding his almost religious millenarian
vision which preceded his work on economics. Even this vision was
in turn preceded by a youthful turn towards “militant atheism”.
Rothbard writes that “It was this hatred of God as a creator greater
than himself that apparently inspired Karl Marx.”2

The ideological descendents of the Bolsheviks are our American
progressives and multi-culturalists. They continue, in a more constrained
way, a battle to separate church and nation even now. They praised
Communists while they were murdering Christians by the millions,
apologizing for, concealing and just plain lying about these terrible
crimes, (what would you say about someone with a track record of
openly cheering for people who mass murdered Jews?) They are not
above using the sword of the state to enforce their wishes on a
nation. And they are certainly not above pursuing their evil goals
while masquerading under the libertarian slogan of ‘separation of
church and state’.

In the 1930s under Stalin, the Soviets destroyed the largest cathedral
of Moscow, the golden domed Christ the Saviour Cathedral, and replaced
it with a pool. Built almost 200 years ago to commemorate the Russian
defeat of Napoleon’s French Revolutionary invasion, this church
was nearly as striking a landmark of Moscow as the Kremlin itself.
A highlight of my trip was to see the completely rebuilt Cathedral,
just completed in 2000, towering once again over the former capital
of militant atheism.

Stephen
W. Carson [send him
mail] works
as a software engineer, studies Political Economy at the graduate
level at Washington University and works with inner city children
in St. Louis through a ministry of his church. See his reviews of
Films on Liberty.

Stephen
Carson Archives

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