Memorial Day

My version of Memorial Day: remembering some of the non-combatant victims of war during the last century or two:

The American South at the hands of Lincoln and Sherman.

Filipinos at the hands of the Americans.

Koreans at the hands of the Japanese.

Up to 1.5 million Armenians of Eastern Anatolia during the First World War, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

Anyone who live in the lands between Russia and Germany during the first half of the twentieth century…at the hands of the Russians and Germans.

Countless millions of Ukrainians at the hands of Stalin’s forced famine.

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, victims of Stalin’s Great Terror.

German victims of Allied bombings of civilian populations.

Up to 14 million Germans forcibly relocated (and up to 1 million killed) after World War Two, at the hands of the victorious Allies.

At least 200,000 Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And here.  And here.  By you-know-who.

Millions of Palestinians (and counting) at the hands of the Jews.  And here.  And here.  And here.

There are many more examples: Chinese at the hands of the Japanese; Koreans in the 1950s and Vietnamese in the 1960s and 1970s – both at the hands of American; pretty much everyone living in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. 

I just haven’t written much about these yet.  Look, don’t blame me: you try to keep up with all of these atrocities.

Conclusion

Anyway, that’s my Memorial Day.

Making America Irrelevant Again

It is easy to say that Trump is failing on the one thing I thought made him a better candidate than most others two years ago and that is on the issue of war and empire.  Well, that and he was a great stick in the eye of those who work hard to control the narrative.

I must admit, in many ways he is turning out even better than I had hoped…well, if we all (literally) survive his time in office.

Internationally, can you think of a time in your lifetime when the United States government so consistently and widely – and openly – made itself a pariah?  For the Europeans, it is the Iran nuclear deal; for East Asians, it is North Korea; for Arabs not associated with the Kingdom…well, that’s pretty much the same as always, but Nikki Haley has a way of putting an exclamation point on it, doesn’t she.

On trade it’s the TPP, NAFTA, China dumping, etc.  Every action drives allies away and drives all players to find ways to circumvent or avoid US markets, the US Dollar, US technology, etc.

Nationally…the election itself made clear the divide in America – the red counties vs. the blue counties; the deplorables vs. the “civilized.”  We have the NFL and the flag – America, love it or leave it has come back in vogue.  All thanks to the Donald.

Trump is doing more to accelerate the decentralization of the empire and the decentralization of the country than any other president in my lifetime.  As libertarianism in theory is decentralization in practice – and as I suggested a year ago – I think Trump is the most libertarian president of my lifetime.

Does this end with the end of his presidency?  I don’t think so.  These trends are all inevitable; we can only thank God that the right man showed up at the right time to accelerate the process.  Whoever comes next won’t matter (although if the deplorables don’t get what they want this time, the civilized might look longingly back on the days of Trump), because the direction is inevitable and won’t be reversed.

Speaking of the end of his presidency, it seems to me that Trump is setting up for a smashing victory in the upcoming mid-terms.  I have suspected for quite some time that he (along with a subset of republicans in congress and some in the administration) are lining up their investigative actions and news leaks to come exploding full-tilt on the scene about four weeks before the November elections.

We know the news already and that it will be bad for the democrats.  Trump is merely orchestrating the timing.  Talk about tearing the country apart, I think we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Like I said, the most libertarian president of my lifetime.

This Will Be Entertaining

I don’t mean my post (as I leave this to you to decide), but the comments section….

Still holding fresh the memory of our little Jordan Peterson slugfest in the comments, I offer a tidbit from a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro.  As it is a video, I will do my best to capture the dialogue; I will only paraphrase it as the two speak very rapidly, sometimes jamming several thoughts into one.  You can hear the dialogue directly, beginning at the 42:00 minute mark. 

Shapiro asks about the meaning of the Tree of Good and Evil from the Garden of Eden; what did man do wrong by eating from the tree?  He constructs his arguments and then answers his question as follows:

1)      The rules for behavior are embedded in the object, and God made these rules in Creation.

2)      What makes a man good is what makes a man unique – his reason.

3)      Acting in accordance with right reason is what makes an action good.

4)      God makes the universe along these lines of right reason; natural law is the human attempt to understand the lines along which God created the universe.

5)      Where humans went wrong is when they decided to separate values from the universe – humans decided that values are a completely separate thing from how God made the universe.

6)      We believe that we can construct the rules arbitrarily; we can depart from natural law.

7)      So eating from the Tree changes the nature of good and evil, from nature coming with God’s rules to humans believing they can use their own intuition to supplant God’s rules with their own rules.

Peterson replies:

1)      That’s associated to some degree with Milton’s warning in Paradise Lost; Milton portrays Lucifer as the spirit of unbridled rationality – which accounts for the Catholic Church’s antagonism of rationality.  (I will touch on the second part of this comment later.)

2)      It is the same idea in the Tower of Babel: human beings have a proclivity to erect their own dogmatic ethical systems and then to expand them into a grandiosity that challenges the transcendent – and that is a totalitarian catastrophe.

3)      For Milton, Satan was the spirit that eternally does this, believing “everything I know is enough.”  This supplants what I don’t know, the transcendent.

4)      How that is associated with the Knowledge of Good and Evil, well you’re making some headway toward sorting that out.

This realization causes Peterson to perhaps reconsider his interpretation of the meaning of the story of the Tree and Adam and Eve.  Of course, if Peterson was a faithful reader of bionic mosquito, he would have come to see this long ago.

If he chases this to its logical conclusion, this understanding will end up causing Peterson – and maybe Shapiro, although I don’t know his thoughts as well – to reconsider his conclusions from the Enlightenment: individual good, group bad (which in his construct already causes some contradictions, as the “individual good” part really has no defense against the infinite number of gender pronouns – the fighting against which has made his fame).

What was the Enlightenment but the final nail in the coffin of supplanting God’s natural law for man’s reason – a coffin which first started taking shape with the Renaissance and Reformation (well, really Adam and Eve, but you understand my meaning) and took full flower with the Progressive Era?  Once man’s reason was no longer chained by an underlying ethic, every path was possible – and the Enlightenment offered us a complete range, from Jefferson to Rousseau.  And worse, but more on this shortly.

At shortly after the 20 minute mark, Shapiro introduces this topic of the wave in current politics of favoring the group over the individual.  He also wants to address divisions within the group of thinkers who are friends of the Enlightenment – of which he includes both himself and Peterson (and Peterson does not object to this label).

Shapiro points to the numerous differences amongst this group of thinkers who are sympathetic to the Enlightenment – to include people like Steven Pinker and Sam Harris.  So what is the possibility of revivifying Enlightenment mentality – because we see the rise of the rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of this group mentality?  We forget: if we toss out this Enlightenment in favor of old-style tribalism, things get ugly.

But tribalism was tossed out with the Enlightenment, and it resulted in the bloodiest century known to man.  How much uglier were things during “tribalism”?  Peterson has to deal with this contradiction as well, as he rightly points to the evils of communism without also reconciling from whence it came. 

In any case, to Shapiro’s statement Peterson replies: that’s the question: what [from the Enlightenment] do you toss out the window before things get ugly?

Conclusion

Nope, that is the wrong question. The question is: what is required to be reintroduced that the Enlightenment destroyed?

Tribes: a group of people formed around kinship, culture, tradition, religion.  Man will forever form tribes.  There is no possibility of individual freedom without such a generally accepted social structure.

Of course, there is “bad” in tribes.  But, to borrow Peterson’s take on patriarchy, that’s not all that there is.  Peterson himself recognizes the value of tribe over individualism – first of all, by valuing the patriarchy; second on his position on open borders.  Regarding open borders and immigration (and I paraphrase):

A complex system cannot tolerate extensive transformation over too short a time.  Arms-open-to-everyone immigration policy is rubbish.  It should not be assumed that citizens of societies that have not evolved functional individual rights-predicated polities will hold values in keeping with such polities.

[And in his dripping, sarcastic tone] Don’t assume that when they immigrate that they will have their innate democratic longings flourish.

What is this other than a statement of the reality of tribes?  Might not be your definition or my definition of a tribe, but it is a statement that recognizes differences in kinship, culture, tradition, and religion.

The only open question: around what values and characteristics will these tribes be formed?  Will it be tribes that humans naturally chose or those forced upon them by the same creatures intent on destroying their naturally chosen tribes?

That is the question, Dr. Peterson.

Epilogue

Regarding Peterson’s comment about the Catholic Church’s antagonism to rationality: I am certainly no expert on this matter, but have done enough reading about the Middle Ages and the Church to at least comment.  Everyone can point to an example supportive of Peterson’s view here or there on this matter, but all of it is without context and in any case ignores the larger trends.

Monasteries were the foundation of a medieval industrial revolution; law was based on the rational natural law; medieval society offered a true liberalization – of slaves, women, checks on absolutism, etc.; the Catholic Church stood against socialist sects; the Church played a key role in decentralizing governance and saving the west.  Is that enough rationality for you?

Finally, one last Peterson contradiction: for one who leans so heavily on myth, it seems strange to label the Catholic Church as antagonistic to rationality.  Both Peterson and the Church look(ed) to the Bible for rationality.

Man’s reason cannot explain everything nor understand everything.  Peterson both accepts this and rejects this.  This seems irrational.

P.S.  But I still find good aspects in his work.

A Touch of Velvet?

Recent events in Armenia afford me the opportunity to integrate a couple of topics of interest: geopolitics and the value of common culture.

The 2018 Armenian revolution were a series of anti-government protests in Armenia from April to May 2018 staged by various political and civil groups led by member of parliament Nikol Pashinyan (head of the Civil Contract party). Protests and marches took place initially in response to Serzh Sargsyan's third consecutive term as the most powerful figure in the government of the Armenia and later against the Republican Party-controlled government in general. Pashinyan declared it a Velvet Revolution.

Not to be confused with an earlier Velvet Revolution, that of the former Czechoslovakia and the end of one party communist rule in 1989.

The Armenian constitution was amended in 2015.  Whereas the position of president was previously the most powerful political position, under the new constitution this power would be concentrated in the prime minister.  Convenient for Sargsyan, who was to be term-limited out of the office of president after ten years in power.  He vowed that he would not take the position of prime minister, but did anyway.  Hence, the protests.

Geopolitics

The entire situation can be compared and contrasted with events in Ukraine.

Euromaidan was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on the night of 21 November 2013 with public protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti ("Independence Square") in Kiev. The protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government's decision to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union.

What are the similarities?  Both Armenia and Ukraine are former Soviet Republics; both lie along the periphery of Mackinder’s world island; both lie in regions valuable for the west to disrupt if troubling Russia is of benefit. 

What are the differences?  Well, the demonstrations in Ukraine have led to war, unrest, a dividing of the country.  The demonstrations in Armenia have led (so far) only to a peaceful transition in the government. 

Unlike Ukraine, it is not clear that the demonstrations in Armenia were instigated or accelerated by external actors; unlike with Ukraine, those who so forcefully speak against the expansion of the empire (e.g. The Saker, Stephen F. Cohen, Paul Craig Roberts) have not discussed the transition in Armenia at all (to my knowledge) – or at least not at all in comparable terms.

So, maybe the west was not involved, or maybe Armenia is not seen as posing the same risk of instability along Russia’s frontier.  I will leave to others to examine the first possibility; I will focus on the second.  I will do this by also comparing the situation in Armenia with that of Ukraine.

Common Culture

Ukraine is a country of multiple languages, religions and traditions; the borders have been very malleable even in recent history.  To highlight (and I will greatly simplify):

What is Ukraine today includes (as recently as one hundred years ago): Poland, Austro-Hungary, Russia.  This divide can most easily be seen in the conflict today: the western portion of Ukraine looks to the west; the eastern portion looks to Russia.

According to the latest census (2001), 77.8% of the total population is Ukrainian. Russians form 17.3%, mainly in eastern Ukraine. Belarussians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, and Jews each account for less than 1% of the population. About 700,000 Rusyns (Ruthenians) live within the country, but they are not an officially recognized ethnic group.

Of course, given the relatively recent border changes, I suspect even the 77.8% Ukrainian can be further segmented.

Ukrainian is the official language and is spoken by about 67% of the population. Russian is spoken by about 24% of the population. Other languages include Romanian, Polish, and Hungarian.

Religions: Ukrainian Orthodox - Kyiv Patriarchate 19%, Orthodox (no particular jurisdiction) 16%, Ukrainian Orthodox - Moscow Patriarchate 9%, Ukrainian Greek Catholic 6%, Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox 1.7%, Protestant, Jewish, none 38% (2004 est.)

My point?  To call someone Ukrainian does not do justice to the different religions, languages, and traditions to be found in the country. 

What of Armenia?

Language: Armenian 97.7%, Kurdish 1%, Russian 0.9%, and other 0.4% (2001 census).  Armenian is the only official language.

Religion: According to the Census of 2011 the religion in Armenia is the following: Christianity 2,862,366 (94.8%) of whom 2,797,187 Armenian Apostolic (92.5%)….

Ethnic groups: 98.1% Armenian.

The first historical reference to Armenians is 2500 years old, and people who considered themselves Armenian have lived in the region continuously since at least that time.  Armenia became the first country to adopt Christianity, in 301 A.D.

Conclusion

Whatever the geopolitical background of the demonstrations and change in government in Armenia, things seemed to have settled down quickly.  While there are still risks, the events transpired with no bloodshed, no police crackdowns, no snipers of unknown origins on the rooftops, and no visits by US senators or state department personnel announcing “we are with you” while handing out cookies. 

Most importantly, no civil war or war of secession.

Perhaps the reason for the difference in outcome vs. that of Ukraine has something to do with the common culture and long-lasting traditions of the Armenian people.  An interesting statement when one considers the issue of nationality and borders.  Armenia’s borders work to unite and defend; Ukraine’s borders work to divide and weaken. 

Maybe borders work best when they are formed by people with a common culture and tradition.

Perhaps it is time for decentralization in Ukraine.

Would You Pull the Plug?

I would like to explore something, actually a couple of things that have been raised on and off in the libertarian world.  The two topics:

A private law society will be right-libertarian.  I have heard this view more than once from libertarians.

If you could pull the plug on the state, or push a button to end it, would you do it?  Several libertarians have asked and answered this question.  The answer comes back affirmative.

I do believe the first of these to be true: a private law society will be right-libertarian, or certainly conservative.  The idea and possibility is completely consistent with my view of medieval law as being about as close to libertarian law as the west has experienced.  The idea is also consistent with my view that a society organized on left principles will self-destruct.

I should somewhat modify: I believe the first to be true in the long run – if we can get to the long run.  Which is why I incorporate the two topics together – the second topic does not contemplate a transition, the reality today, etc.

Perhaps underlying this call to pull the plug there is a contemplation of a transition given the reality today – that the transition after pulling the plug has been explored.  If it is explored, I would welcome a link.  In the meantime, I will do a little of my own exploring.  Mostly, just questions.

Now…I know there will be readers out there who will read the following and conclude something like: “that bionic, I knew he was trending statist, he is no longer libertarian.”  You are free to conclude that, but you would be wrong – and wrong for at least two reasons:

1)      If libertarians don’t have good answers for the many questions that come up about the transition, talk of pulling the plug just adds to the belief that libertarians have a utopian theory without practical application. 

2)      The issue comes right into the intersection of libertarianism and culture.  Libertarians that don’t contemplate this just add to the belief that libertarians have a utopian theory without practical application.

I personally do not believe that libertarianism is a utopian theory without practical application. 

Again – I do not say that these things have not been contemplated, and I welcome any references.  But in the shorthand of this discussion, I haven’t seen or heard any of it.  Finally, because I feel that it needs to be said: my intention here is not to criticize, but to explore the topic and to advance the discussion.

So, let’s begin.

If the plug was pulled today, on what basis would we expect that a private law society would result? 

No Turning Back

When there is no turning back, then we should concern ourselves only with the best way of going forward.

-        Paulo Coelho

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, by Robert Nisbet

In an industrial and mobile age, of what relevance is the understanding that “community” (family, kin, tribe, church) plays a foundational role in maintaining a relatively libertarian order?  It is a question I often ask myself; it is a question that will begin to be explored in this post.

There was a time when life was not possible outside of these traditional community institutions; this is no longer the case.  Today the individual is set almost absolutely free from reliance on family and church.  Absent these functional roles, is it reasonable to expect that such institutions are capable of playing a culturally binding role? 

The problem is moral, intellectual, social and political – in an environment drastically different than the traditional.  The solution will not be found in a longing for the past:

[The solution is in no way] compatible with antiquarian revivals of groups and values no longer in accord with the requirements of the industrial and democratic age in which we live and to which we are unalterably committed.

I am reminded of something from chapter 15 of Rothbard’s For A New Liberty:

The clock cannot be turned back to a preindustrial age….We are stuck with the industrial age, whether we like it or not.

Yet I am offered a conflict, as Rothbard continues:

But if that is true, then the cause of liberty is secured.  For economic science has shown, as we have partially demonstrated in this book, that only freedom and a free market can run an industrial economy.  In short…in an industrial world it is also a vital necessity.  For, as Ludwig von Mises and other economists have shown, in an industrial economy statism simply does not work.

Liberty, it seems to me, cannot be secured strictly on a foundation of industrialization.  We see – both in our age and Nisbet’s work – that it is that same industrial age that has helped to reduce the influence played by the institutions that traditionally afforded man liberty. 

 Returning to Nisbet:

Historically, our problem must be seen in terms of the decline in functional and psychological significance of such groups as the family, the small local community, and the various other traditional relationships that have immemorially mediated between the individual and his society.

Such groups played a perceptible difference in the maintenance of life.  Such groups play little if any functional or psychological role today.  Absent playing such roles, on what basis would these groups then have standing to play their traditional mediating role?  We see today that they have no standing.

Our present crisis lies in the fact that whereas the small traditional associations, founded on kinship, faith, or locality, are still expected to communicate to individuals the principle moral ends and psychological gratifications of society, they have manifestly become detached from positions of functional relevance to the larger economic and political decisions of our society.

Mutual aid, welfare, education, recreation, economic production – no longer are these provided by “small traditional associations.”  Without this functional and psychological role, it cannot be expected that these associations can play their mediating (decentralizing) role.  The reasons for an individual’s allegiance to these associations are absent.

But is this to be blamed solely on the industrialization and mobility of our age?  Nisbet offers an examination of the impact of humanitarian reforms brought to economically underdeveloped regions, yet his words ring true even for the most advanced economies:

Community Found

Nothing can survive in a vacuum

No one can exist all alone

-        Turn the Page, Rush

The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, by Robert Nisbet

You might think from the title of Nisbet’s book and the title of this post that I have reached the end of Nisbet’s analysis.  Wrong.  This post will cover chapter two.

Out of intimations of dissolution and insecurity has emerged an interest in the properties and values of community.

Remember, this book was published in the early 1950s; you might think, in reading this line, that it is a more modern analysis – something akin to the backlash of the right in both Europe and the United States.  In any case – as I imply by my title, that community was “found,” – you might be curious: is this nothing more than an ode to the storybook version of the Eisenhower years? 

Let’s give Nisbet more credit than this.

It is in the conservative philosophers that the desire for community is both examined and understood.  Nisbet finds the roots of this in the conservative reaction to the French Revolution, where the greatest crimes “were those not committed against individuals but against institutions, groups, and personal statuses.”

It is not an easy idea for one so grounded in valuing the individual to get my mind around; it seems that the idea is something along the lines: it is bad enough that people were killed by the tens of thousands; even worse, the institutions that helped to form community were killed off for untold generations.

These philosophers saw in the Terror no merely fortuitous consequence of war and tyranny but the inevitable culmination of ideas contained in the rationalistic individualism of the Enlightenment.

This theme keeps coming up in Nisbet’s work – the connection of the Enlightenment to many of the horrors that came after.  I believe the roots can be traced even further back in European history, but I agree with this line of thinking.

…the Revolution had opened the gates for forces which, if unchecked, would in time disorganize the whole moral order of Christian Europe and lead to control by the masses and despotic power without precedent.

It is these institutions – family, community, religious association; or, as Burke wrote, a partnership of the dead, the living, and the unborn – that support man’s freedom:

Release man from the contexts of community and you get not freedom and rights but intolerable aloneness and subjection to demonic fears and passions.

Nisbet saw in his time a revolt against this individual rationalism – a desire for identification with race, culture, religion and family.  He saw Protestant leaders showing respect to traditional doctrines that bear the mark of Catholic or Jewish orthodoxy.  It took me some time to understand where he was and where he was headed; let’s see if my understanding makes any sense to others.

The key to unlocking this puzzle is to understand: in what institutions is man turning to for community?  It is not in the traditional, relatively voluntary organizations, but in the institution that has assumed the role of all other institutions: