On Virtue: Charity

In Mere Christianity CS Lewis points out that the “Christian” virtue of “Charity” is not simply “giving to the poor.”  Rather, it is a classic term for love, or as he says, “Love, in the Christian sense.”  Giving to the poor is part of it, certainly, but not even the greatest part.

The virtue of Charity (I believe it is not unique to Christianity, though Christianity broadens its scope) is about treating people nicely.  It is kindness and gentleness.  It is patience.  Even pagan religions taught charity to one extent or another.  “Love your neighbor as yourself” was an Old Testament teaching.  Other groups at the time had similar directives.  The uniquely Christian spin on the virtue was not that it was wholly new, but that Christ defined “your neighbor” as “your hated enemy.”

What does that have to do with today?  Does anyone say we should not be charitable?

In reverse order: no, no one says we should not be charitable.  Nevertheless people are not charitable.  And their directives to be charitable are usually self-serving.  *YOU* are supposed to be charitable to *me.*

So, in a very real sense, much of our society has abandoned charity.

What does that have to do with today?  Well, it has direct consequences on just about everything.  Are you moaning about how uncivilized our “public discourse” has become?  Then it’s time to start calling for charity.  Are you complaining about judgmental attitudes?  Then it is time to start calling for charity.

But here’s the rub.  If you are going to call for charity, you must practice it yourself.  Otherwise it is simply self-serving sophistry (at best) and self-righteous hypocrisy at worst.

On Virtue

We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst 

--C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man

It is often said that Conservatives can't simply be "against" things, we have "to have a positive message."  Many Conservatives then protest that we *do* have a positive message, it just gets drowned out because we have to oppose all the cultural rot, or the Progressive agenda, or whatever.

While there is a point there, it must be said that our message *does* get drowned out.  So it is good, from time to time, to remember what it is we are for.  But what are Conservatives for?  What do we want to "conserve?"

I would suggest that Conservatives are for Virtue.  Honor, Courage, Justice, Thrift, Sobriety, and Industry are character traits seemingly in short supply.  Anyone who argues against government expansion, but does argue for personal virtue is arguing for chaos.

John Adams is quoted as saying "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

We have fallen into the trap C.S. Lewis mentioned in The Abolition of man.  Every "advancement" of the progressive era has served to remove virtue.  Welfare has assaulted industry and thrift.  The Left's assault on self-defense (see also: Martin, Trayvon) is an assault on courage.  Every HBO or Showtime show seems to be an assault on sobriety, and often justice.

The results have been predictable.  A society which will not maintain its own virtue will require an ever growing government.  A People which does not practice Honor and Justice will become a police-state.  A People which does not practice Thrift, Sobriety, and Industry, will become one constantly on the verge of economic disaster.

Conservatives seek to promote Virtue.  A People of Personal Virtue are a people who do not need a big government.

On Natural Rights

What to write about?

I could write about the Rolling Stone UVA story, but why? At this point, Rolling Stone and “Jackie” have about as much credibility as an unemployed man with a 480 FICO score.

I could write about the riots over the Michael Brown and Eric Garner Grand Jury decisions, but, again, why? Pretty well everything has been said. People made up their minds before the evidence was in; they’re not changing them now.

I could write about CrOmnibus- the Republicans trying to sell out Conservatives once again. I could write about the Use of Force authorization that the SCOAMT wants, but won’t specify exactly what he wants. Sorry, Barry, no blank checks.

With all that’s going on in the news, maybe we need to get back to first principles. Maybe we need to consider why we’re conservative in the first place. It’s always a good idea to review why you believe what you believe from time to time.

So with that, I’ll consider the second* of the first principles: Natural Rights.

 

What are Natural Rights?

Natural Rights are those things (really the only Rights at all) that every human being possesses simply by virtue of being human. No government can grant or remove them. No one has more of them than any other person. Simply being human grants these rights. In many ways, they are simply laws of nature- like gravity or entropy. But, being laws of Human Nature, we often fight against them in various ways.

The Natural Rights are generally summed up as “Life, Liberty, and Property.” Some guy who was really smart in other ways nevertheless screwed the pooch and changed that last one to “pursuit of Happiness” in our Declaration of Independence. We can forgive him that, I guess, though that wording has cause great harm.

Each right really deserves its own post, and may get one, but they deserve a little bit of illumination here.

The Right to Life is perhaps more specifically “the Right to sustain and protect one’s life.” The Right to Life includes things like the right to self-defense and the right to bear arms. It includes the right to feed one’s self (which is a bigger thing than you might think).

It really should not be mistaken for a reverence for life. While I am pro-life when it comes to the abortion argument, it is not because of my belief in the Right to Life. Here, a baby has no more “right to life” than a man being eaten by a bear. Less, in fact, simply by the fact that the man being eaten by the bear has some chance of defending himself. He can be his own agent of life protection and sustenance.

The Right to Liberty is both the “right to be left alone” and the “right to do as you please.” From it we derive things like the freedom of the press, the right to assemble, and the right to work.

The Right to Property is the right to accumulate property. It includes the right to purchase and own a home, as well as the right to build wealth.

 

Why are natural rights important?

A belief in God is the foundation of the United States of America (if you don’t believe that, go re-read your history). The Natural Rights are the pillars standing on that foundation holding the rest of the structure up. All of the Constitutionally protected (not granted) rights are either direct applications of, or logical derivations of Natural Rights. I mentioned some in the previous section. The Right to Life is the one where we derive the Second Amendment, for example. The prohibitions against double-jeopardy and bills of attainder also have roots in the Right to Life. The Right to Property is where we derive things like the 3^rd and 4^th amendments.

Natural Rights are also important because if you do not realize from where your rights come, you might agree to any sort of nonsense. If Rights are not Natural, then they must be granted by some agency. If some agency grants them, then that same agency can rescind them. If they can be rescinded, then they are not “rights” at all.

I said previously that no government can either grant or deny the Natural Rights. No matter how restrictive the regime, no matter how devoted to Communism and/or oppression, you cannot be deprived of your Right to Life, Liberty, and Property. The exercise of those rights can be legally forbidden and therefore punished, but the rights themselves exist and you retain them fully.

That may seem trivial. What good is having a Right to Property if exercising it is going to get you imprisoned and all your stuff confiscated? But it is just the fact that people lost sight of the Right to Property that caused them to agree to stop exercising it. Communism cannot exist if the People remember their Natural Rights and vigorously defend them.

One example that might seem trivial. My brother (sorry, bro, but it highlights the point) and I were talking at Thanksgiving, and he mentioned a device had been invented which could be added to a circular saw (or table saw, or maybe either) which would sense when your finger came too close to the blade and stop the blade nearly instantly. He further asserted that this device would add only pennies to the cost of a saw, and expressed disbelief that people making saws were fighting a regulation which would mandate the use of this device.

But, of course, if you really believe in the Natural Right of Liberty, you immediately see why such a mandate should be prohibited. My Right of Liberty says that I can do what I want. Maybe I want to add this safety device to *some* saws and charge a higher price. Maybe I know that some people have uses for circular and table saws which would be interfered with by this device, so I want to continue making them without it. Maybe I just don’t want to add the device to the saws I make. Why should it be the government’s business?

And so we come to the end of this primer on Natural Rights. It is our belief in these Rights which lead first to the Declaration of Independence, and then the Constitution. Our continued belief in them is what motivates the various Tea Party organizations. It is why Conservatives are so upset with Boehner’s CrOmnibus. Belief in the Natural Rights is why we side with Darren Wilson and George Zimmerman over Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin. Our commitment to them is why false charges of rape such as those made by Rolling Stone are met with such condemnation. It is why we oppose rioting for any reason.

*-Yep the 2^nd. As alluded to, the first First Principle is a belief in God. All the founders where Christians of one sort or another.

Conservatives, Liberals, and Socrates' Cave

In Plato's Republic, he relates a (probably fictional) story about a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon in which Socrates postulates a set of prisoners bound in such a way that they had to face a wall on which shadows of the real world played out.  He first posited that those prisoners, raised thus from birth, would believe what they were seeing to be "the real world."  He further expounded on the difficulties if just one of those prisoners was let free, and then even compelled to see more and more of the real world.  Finally, he suggested what would happen if that prisoner, finally having acclimated to the world outside the cave, returned to that cave to try to educate the other prisoners.

The Wikipedia article on the story is pretty good.  Go check it out before you get to the rest of this post.  I'll wait.

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Good.  You're back.

I don't know why I was thinking about this the other day, but I was, and I think I hit on a glimmer of understanding.  People, in general, are those prisoners in the cave.  The Media (by and large) are the ones who stoke the fire, decide what order people cross the bridge, and who make sure the prisoners don't break free on their own (not a hard thing to do, once they're acclimated to their position). 

Conservatives are that prisoner (by and large).  We have, by whatever means, broken free from that imprisonment.  At first it was painful and frustrating.  The world shouldn't work like this.  The world didn't work like this.  But, as time passed and we re-verified our new perceptions, we came to accept the real world for what it is.

Liberals, on the other hand, fall into two or three camps.  The first are the prison guards.  They are in league with the Media (actually, the other way 'round.  The Media is beholden to them), and like the situation as it is.  They want people to remain ignorant.  I won't even say that all of them have wholly nefarious motives.  Some of them really believe that "ignorance is bliss" and that those prisoners "aren't capable" of understanding/coping with/dealing with the real world.  Many of them, however, like the power they exert for its own sake.

The second set of liberals are the people walking on the bridge.  They know what the real world is.  However it happened, they are not in the cave.  Some of them escaped.  Others were never in the cave to begin with.  But they never think of the people in the cave unless something happens to bring them sharply to mind.  They support the prison guards for a variety of reasons.  Some of them believe that the prisoners are dangerous- why, they wouldn't be prisoners if they weren't dangerous.  Some of them believe that the prisoners "deserve it" somehow- they'd never be able to tell you how.  Still others believe that if the prisoners were loosed, their own station would suffer.

The third set of liberals are the prisoners themselves, or are a subset of them.  They are comfortable with what they know, and any attempt to instruct them otherwise is heresy.  They believe that conservatives are crazy, and that our tales of the real world are fanciful, even deranged, projections.  They don't believe in the prison guards, because they've never seen them for what they are.  If they give any thought to the possible existence of the guards, they assume that the guards have their best interests at heart, or are doing what they're doing for some justified reason.

Democrat politicians and the Major Media Outlets are the prison guards.  They have allowed some to be free in the sure knowledge that those can be counted on.  Hollywood "limousine Liberals" and other Celebrity liberals/moderates are the people carrying the bundles.  They know how the world works, because it works that way for them especially (Hollywood gets far more targeted tax breaks (read: any) than "Big Oil").  For their various reasons they either don't consider the plight of the prisoners to be something worth worrying about, or (worse) they believe that it is good for them for people to remain in the dark. 

The few principled liberals (about as common as a Conservative Democrat) are the liberals still chained up.  They believe that (for instance) Government should "take care of the people."  They believe the trite that "hard work should always lead to success."  They believe, deep down, in "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."  Any attempt to warn them, to teach them, to give even the most minor shake to their illusion will be met with hostility.

Racist Eugenicist Margaret Sanger to Rachel Carson: "Well Done."

Update: This is what happens when I don't get enough caffeine.  Yes, Rachel Carson, not Corrie.  Corrected below.  *sigh*

From the Competitive Enterprise Institute comes this piece, detailing how Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was basically completely wrong.  Check out their piece (video and PDF).

I want to make a different point though, going back to the "perfectibility of man" premise so many Liberals accept.  Rachel Carson wrote a book which basically called anyone who used DDT mass murderers.  She claimed there were side effects of DDT which were harmful to humans (beyond those in any chemical- including natural ones- there aren't), and then said they made bird eggs super-duper fragile, so that birds weren't hatching.  Now, there has never actually been any scientifically rigorous proof of that, either, but let's grant it for the moment.

Is she saying that birds are more important than people?  I'm sure she would tell you otherwise.  See, she believes in the perfectibility of man.  One consequence of the concept of the perfectibility of man is the resulting concept of the perfectibility of man's designs.  See, if man is perfectible, so is anything to which he sets his hand.  So any negative consequences of anything humans do are completely unacceptable.  Anything which has any negative side effects at all must be banned.  Those who use it anyway must be shunned.

However high-minded this philosophy may think it is, it fails to apply its own test to itself.  For, if man is perfectible, and therefore anything man does should be perfect, then any negative consequences are unacceptable, and the enterprise must be abandoned.  When we apply that rubric to the idea of the perfectibility of man, however, we find the concept of the perfectibility of man also has negative consequences, and so must be abandoned. 

The concept of the perfectibility of man required that Rachel Carson and her compatriots oppose DDT and other pesticides.  As a result, more millions of African babies have died than those ever aborted by noted Racist Eugenicist Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood ever has.  Those deaths are negative consequences, so, by their own rules, the opposition to DDT must be abandoned.

Of course, there's one other option.  Maybe Rachel Carson just hates black people.

The Imperfectibility of Man

I've already posted this morning on Bob Costas's ignorant (at best) comments on Sunday Night Football last night.  I've also posted about San Bernardino going all "Thunderdome."  AoSHQ Moronette AlexTheChick posted over at Double Plus Undead an open letter to Costas and Whitlock which I highly recommend you read.

But I want to get a little more into this mentality that says "Guns bad."  It's the same nanny-state mentality that says that more Government is always the answer, and any failure of Government is not due to the fact that Government is incapable of doing certain things, but due to the fact that the Government needs absolute unchecked power.  This idea is based on a fallacy to which it seems both Whitlock and Costas fall prey.

There is an idea, ascribed to by teenagers and leftists, known as the perfectibility of man.  According to this idea, if people would just "be nice" to each other, and if the right rules were in place, all the evils in the world would go away.  This is the core premise behind such failed ideologies as Marxism and other collectivist systems.  It ignores the facts of human behavior.  People are not perfect, and no rules or enforcement thereof will make them so.

Case in point: perhaps my favorite quote directed to Messrs. Costas and Whitlock is this, "What caliber did OJ use?"  Human beings are violent, jealous, lazy, evil beings.  People don't like to acknowledge this, but it's true.  All that cursing you use?  It's a form of violence.  It's a very minor way to vent your aggression so that you don't actually become physically violent.  Human nature is evil. 

Now, this is a hard concept for two reasons.  One, if you accept it, you have to accept your own evil.  In the case of Bob Costas and Jason Whitlock, I'm sure they would vociferously deny that charge.  Second is that it means you must accept that evil will occur in the world, often for no good reason. 

It is the concept of the perfectibility of man that caused people to look for someone, other than Al Qaida and Osama Bin Laden, to blame for 9/11.  It is the concept of the perfectibility of man that causes bleeding hearts across the globe to try to "understand" murderers and rapists.  It is the concept of the perfectibility of man that says if we'd just take all the weapons away, no one would ever be violent again.

However, man is not perfectible.  Indeed, a central truth you must accept if you wish to actually address the balance of evil in the world is man's imperfectibility.  If man is not perfectible, then Government cannot be the solution, since it is run by imperfect men.  If man is not perfectible, then a better armed society is safer than a less armed society, since such a society would give the (relatively) innocent the means by which to protect themselves.  If man is not perfectible, then we do not have to wonder "why" atrocities occur; we can blame the perpetrator for their actions and treat them accordingly.

It's All The Same

The American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution.  What do these things (and, likely, every other "revolution" in the history of mankind) have in common?  An oppressive upper class which seemed to view the labor class as fodder for their own enrichment.

Now, each of these was wildly different in other respects, which is why one has been (until recently) a wild success, one was a miserable failure, and one looked like a success when viewed in poor light but led to hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths and eventually also failed.  But, at bottom, they all came back to one thing.  The ruling class- whoever they were- did not pay attention to the ruled class.  To their peril.

When the North American Patriots revolted against the English Crown, the proximate cause was the Stamp Act.  Many things went into that, including the fact the taxes had to be paid in silver or gold, which the colonists largely did not have, due to prior tax acts.  But the ultimate cause was that the English government saw the Colonies as little more than a piggy bank to be raided at will for more funds.  We were lucky that the Patriots were made up of men like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

When the French rose up against their monarchy in a bloody revolution, the ultimate cause was also an assumption on the part of the noble classes that the commoners would simply surrender the produce of their own labor indefinitely, regardless of the results.  Whoops.

When the Russian Soviet rose up for the second time in about a year (the Tsars already having been overthrown and a "provisional" government already in place), it was because they believed that the Ownership classes- the Bourgeois- were seeking simply to replace the Tsars with themselves (the Bourgeois), not to actually establish a government, as we might say, "By, of, and for the People."

(Note: none of this investigates whether the people were correct in their beliefs, it simply gets back to what they believed).

What this shows is that people will bear up under a great deal of tyranny, but there is a breaking point.  Usually, if History is any indication, that breaking point involves people realizing that they are not in control of the produce of their own labor.  For if a man is not in control of the produce of his own labor, he is nothing more than a slave- whether to a private entity in the institution of Slavery, or to the Government.

On Doing Right and Doing Wrong

Just the other day, my son hurt his little sister.  They were playing in his room; he was bouncing off the walls, and she was sitting playing with one of his toys.  Everything was great.  Suddenly, she started crying in that "ouch, why did you just hit me?" cry.  So I walked into the room and the first thing my son said was, "I didn't mean to!"

My five year old is a liberal.  Now, that's to be expected; he's too young to fully comprehend the facts of life, though we're teaching him as quickly as he'll learn.  The fact is though, he believes money comes from Mom and Dad (we're working on that), he believes that his intent matters more than the results of his actions (we're working on that, too), and he believes that everything should be "fair," (yep, we're working on that, too).  He's a Liberal.

So I explained to him that it didn't matter that he "didn't mean to," it mattered that he he had hurt his sister.  I think it's time for us to address the fact that this how liberals view right and wrong.  To them, there is only one factor in whether your actions were good or not- your intent.  If your motives are pure, they'll claim, then the results are secondary, at most.  If you want to end poverty, but your actions increase it... well, that doesn't matter because you meant well.  If a formerly fairly Westernized society (Egypt) starts moving quickly to becoming an Islamist state, well, that's okay because our support of their rebellion was well meaning.  And so it goes.

However, Conservatives believe there are two factors to consider.  Motive is one of them, yes.  The other is the result.  Consider this:

	Result	GOOD	BAD
Motive	GOOD	G	B
	BAD	B	B

If your Motive is good, but the results bad, you have done a bad thing.  If your motive is bad, but your results good- you've still done a bad thing, or, at least, you shouldn't be credited with the good results.  If your motive is bad and the results are bad, you've done a bad thing.  Only if both your motive and your results are good have you done a good thing.

This is why Conservatives are not merely "Results Oriented."  We're perfectly willing to use people's bad motives to a good result, because we're realists and realize that most people are at least a little bit selfish.  Denying that helps no one.  However, we don't believe that someone acting on a bad motive deserves any particular credit for the good that arises.  Similarly, we don't believe that people who act with disastrous results should be lauded for their high motives.

In the end, this means that doing good is much, much harder than doing wrong.  It requires deliberative thought and planning.  It's no good to say you want to end poverty, if your policies simply increase it and/or have other bad side effects.  You must plan your policy in such a way that you achieve the planned result.

This is but one more reason Conservatives oppose so many Liberal policies.  It's not because we necessarily have different motives, but that we put equal emphasis on motivation and result.  Only when both are good has laudable action occurred.  Policy must reflect this paradigm, and must be crafted accordingly.

On Taxation

Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming.  The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo. -Lord Havelock Vetinari, Jingo

With the last post on the Budget and Taxes, I breezed through some ideas which, in retrospect, I should have spent more time.  One blog post is not enough to cover all of them, and there are other subjects I will be addressing, but I will try to get back to them as I can.  The first of those is the false idea too many have that tax rate is somehow directly commensurate with tax receipts.

The idea seems to be that the higher a tax rate, the higher the government's income.  This is false, and has been proven so over and over again.  Whether from sales taxes, or income taxes, or tariffs, the government usually takes in less money when taxes increase and more money when taxes decrease.  An economist named Art Laffer was perhaps the most famous, in recent memory, to describe this phenomenon, and economists talk about it appending his name to the idea to which he gave voice: the Laffer Curve.

Laffer's idea was that the intersection of tax receipts and tax rates exists on a curve.  That at very high or very low rates, the government always receives a small amount of revenue, while somewhere in the middle taxes bring in the maximum amount of money.  As Lord Vetinari would say- they bring in the maximum amount of milk with the minimum amount of moo.

Democrats, however, seem to believe that taxation exists on a line.  They seem to believe that as the tax rate goes higher, the amount the treasury receives also climbs.  This is despite several decades worth of evidence to the contrary.  Most recently, when George W Bush cut and consolidated tax rates in the early 2000's, revenues to the treasury soared.  "Record Revenue" was a phrased used more than once.

Yet Democrats' only answer to rising deficits, to "unfairness," and to a host of other ills- real or illusory- is to raise taxes.  They talk about tax cuts in terms of "cost to the government," as thought that money is the government's by right, and you're lucky they are letting you have any of it.  They talk of tax increases on the group of people already paying around 50% of the nation's total tax burden as "fair."

Granting them mere ignorance on the issue, that ignorance is inexcusable.  Yet they also seem determined to let us know that it is not mere ignorance.  Whenever they talk of raising taxes on specific items, like gasoline or cigarettes, or alcohol- the reason there is always the same: to help limit consumption. 

So, on excise or sales taxes, at least, they seem to understand that higher taxation modifies behavior.  Yet they claim not to know the exact same thing about taxes on income.  This is either the most stark example of cognitive dissonance in current practice, or deceit on a breathtaking scale.  Either they truly do not understand that my income is mine, and the government is taking some of it- in which case they view us all as servants of the government, or they do understand that, but would rather play demagogic games in order to exert more power and control.

In either case, they are not suited to wielding the knobs and levers of an area of such importance to normal families.

Pure Philosophy: Nuture or Nature: Are we locked into one station in life?

On the face of it, especially to conservative thought, this question is so ridiculous as to have no meaning.  The United States of America was founded on the principle that you can make of your life whatever you want, given the effort and ability.  Not for us, those silly notions of "the Nobility" or the "Aristocracy."  We don't subscribe to the ideas of Castes or Classes.

And yet.

Our normal rhetoric embraces some of these concepts.  What is "The Rich" other than an epithet for "High Born?"  What is "poor" other than a euphemism for "low class?"  Oh, certainly those terms have their own meanings.  We just rarely use their actual meanings. 

The problem here is an old one.  We can trace it back to the days before our Great Republic, if not even further.  Perhaps at its height in the Middle Ages, the idea of being born "high" or "low" was hardly new even then.  The Founding Fathers rejected this notion, and believed that everyone was "Created Equal."  That is, that personal wealth was not the same as personal worth.  There were still those, however, who believed that people were "born to a station."  That someone born to the Nobility was, simply by birth, of more worth than someone born to a common family.

This is an important distinction which exists even today.

Though they won't admit it, Liberals believe (or, at least, much if their philosophy is based upon the idea) that a person born into certain circumstances is locked there for life.  At the least, they won't be able to "move up in life" without assistance and/or extreme measures.  Thus the idea that the poor go into the army to escape their poverty.  It is this belief that leads them to the idea that Government must "do something" about poverty.  Since those "low born waifs" have no prospects of advancement on their own, the Aristocracy must (noblesse oblige) assist (read: subsidize) them.

Conservatives, however, believe that a person is what a person does.  We believe that your birth station does not limit your options, in itself.  We believe that a struggling college kid, selling custom built computers out of his car, can become a CEO of a leading computer company.  We believe in upward mobility.  We believe that the Aristocracy, even granting it the highest motives, does more to harm those born to lower circumstances than it can ever do to help them.  We believe that the best way to help the poor is to enable them by getting government out of the way, and letting them find their own solutions to their poverty.