The Majestic Plural

Black Friday Makes Me See Red

2010-11-27T13:30:00.000-08:00

My eleventh-grade English teacher, the redoubtable Ms. Miler, ingrained in her students a number of rules for effective expression, among them: avoid words whose connotations undercut the intended meaning of a passage. Never write, to cite her example, that "the heroic spirit lurks within everyone," for to do so diminishes the admirability of its subject by depicting it as acting sinisterly. Unless employed deliberately for ironic effect, connotational conflicts detract from the clarity and force of communication. I ponder these considerations every time so-called "Black Friday" rolls around.

The adjective “black,” when used figuratively, almost always connotes evil, suffering, or woe. It’s not for nothing that October 29th, 1929, the date of the infamous stock market crash, came to be called “Black Tuesday.” And the medieval pandemic known as the “Black Death,” far from heralding an opportunity for Europeans to purchase antibiotics at loss-leading prices from their local apothecaries, actually killed in excess of 75 million people. Therefore I find it perplexing that the biggest shopping day of the year, an occasion that retailers and consumers alike anticipate like Druids awaiting the summer solstice, goes by such a grim appellation.

Not until my thirties did I discover that the Friday after Thanksgiving earned its title because the high sales generated by the day’s low prices put retailers “in the black,” an accounting idiom meaning “profitable” or “not in debt.” The phrase dates back to an age when bookkeepers kept handwritten records in pen, using black ink for positive numbers and red ink for negative ones. So in this case, the conflict of connotations is only apparent, not actual. Still, if I were a CEO desperate to offset a lackluster year in a single day, I would probably refrain from associating my efforts with the Great Depression or bubonic plague.

However, “Black Friday” can inspire behavior which makes it merit the primary sense of its moniker. Yesterday’s proceedings gave rise to the following headlines: “Crazed shoppers stampede at Target”; “Marine stabbed at Best Buy”; “Mall food court placed on lockdown after fight, reports of gunshots”; “Police called after 'thousands' rush Toys ‘r’ Us”; “Woman busted after gun threat at toy store.” A tragic spirit animates these figures who want some product so badly that they’re willing to rise before dawn, queue for hours, and perhaps even resort to violence in order to obtain it. As time passes and tensions mount, the darkness that flees the sky finds a haven in their hearts.

Even those who manage to make it home with their souls intact still lose something in the process. If nothing else, they lose their hard-earned cash. Stores hold sales, not out of altruism, but to attract customers - and no matter how much those customers save on their purchases, they still end up with less money than they started out with. The very mechanism that puts shopkeepers in the black puts shoppers “in the red,” that is, leaves them insolvent, owing. Indeed, red, signifying not just deficit but anger and blood, serves as the true color of the day. So next “Black” Friday, put your finances in the black, and stay home. In shopping, as in global thermonuclear war, the only winning move is not to play.

Words of Wisdom, or The Z-Team

2010-07-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

Not every day does the anointing descend upon me and empower me to proclaim prophetic wisdom to the masses. But such a day has now arrived. So listen to the knowledge that I bring:

If you are arrested in a foreign country for a crime you didn't commit, and the local authorities ask you to sign a document written in language you can't understand, don't do it. The very sentence you think means “I swear to God I have no idea how that heroin got in my messenger bag” may actually translate as “not only did I pack that skag into my carry-on, I packed some into my rectum too.” With your signature on the dotted line, what grounds would you have (after the cavity search) to protest before the judge?

This truth has a corollary: If you serve in the legislature of a country facing dire domestic challenges, and the president asks you to vote for a bill that you don't have time to read and couldn't understand even if you did, don't do that either. After the legislation passes, and all its unintended (but eminently foreseeable) consequences come to pass, you won’t get a pass from your constituents come the next election.

Consider the recently passed health care overhaul. The final monstrosity ran to approximately 2,309 pages, exceeding in length the Bible and even Atlas Shrugged. Prior to its passage, its size had prompted concern that the congresspeople voting on it wouldn’t have adequate time to read it first. However, several members of the House of Representatives stepped forward to allay the public’s fears. “You'd have to have hours and hours and hours to be able to do all that,” observed Neil Abercrombie (D-HI). John Conyers (D-MI) commented, “I love these members that get up and say, ‘Read the bill!’ Well, what good is reading the bill if it's a thousand pages and you don't have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you've read the bill?” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) went so far as to declare, “We need to pass the health care bill to find out what's in it.” This rare display of candor allowed concerned citizens to stop fretting over trivial issues, like whether or not their representatives would vote for a bill they hadn’t read, and start fretting over more profound ones, like their representatives’ flagrant intention to do so.

Consider as well the just-passed financial reform package, also about 2,300 pages long. Immediately upon the bill’s passage, Senate Banking Committee chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT), described in one source as “teary-eyed,” pronounced, “It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here.” Then, to fully mark the momentousness of the occasion, he added, “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” Such confidence-inspiring action and oratory is just all in a day’s work for the proud men and women of the United States Congress.

This brazen lunacy tempts the philosopher in me to argue that these politicians either don’t understand what they're doing and are stupid or do understand what they're doing and are corrupt. But the psychologist in me sees another option: they’re ill. These poor officeholders have in all likelihood succumbed to the Do-Something Disease, that dreaded syndrome which compels well-meaning legislators to believe that, when faced with a crisis, doing anything, no matter what it is, is always better than doing nothing. Doing the right thing tragically proves impossible for them: since they have no idea what the bills they support actually say, they have no adequate basis for their “yes” votes and thus no grounds for claiming that they voted correctly even if the bills, once implemented, somehow produce desirable results.

With enough wealth and power to protect themselves from the consequences of their behavior, the afflicted of the 111th Congress stand in little danger of self-harm. Yet in their wanton abuse of the public trust, they pose an imminent threat to society at large. As such, the responsibility falls upon us, the well, to intervene. We must use the ballot box this November to ensure that these pitiable invalids lose office and find the help they so desperately need.

How the West Was Lost

2009-03-09T22:40:00.000-07:00

When the President first announced his intention to repatriate the Statue of Liberty, it caused an immediate uproar. No one had ever transported so substantial an object before, and the nation’s leading commentators said it couldn’t be done. Disheartened at the prospect of such a profound symbolic act being thwarted by petty practical considerations, the President convened a blue-ribbon panel to advise him. Eager to avoid the mistakes of the previous administration, they recommended that the government solicit competing proposals for the contract.

The first proposal came from Heaven & Earth Movers, a cutting-edge logistical facilitation firm in Tel Aviv. They claimed that their proprietary Probabilistic Conveyance Actuator could exploit quantum indeterminacy to in effect “teleport” the Statue to France instantaneously, without it having to traverse the intervening space. The presidential panel gave due consideration to this proposal, but ultimately deemed it unfeasible. The members believed that any public revelation that Israel possessed such advanced technology, even for peaceful purposes, would further destabilize the Middle East, antagonize Iran, and inhibit the peace process with the Palestinians. Having rejected any American role for the Actuator, they then forbade Israel to ever use it themselves.

Bernard Sinclair, a Texas-based British émigré, submitted the next proposal. He asserted that his patented EnormoSeal glue could make Lady Liberty watertight, effectively transforming her into a seaworthy vessel in her own right - one that could sail, or be towed, across the Atlantic. The panel initially found this proposal quite promising. However, they felt compelled to reject it when they realized that this miracle substance had not been evaluated by the EPA under its new authority to regulate greenhouse gases. This lack of oversight left open the possibility that employing it would utilize a disproportionate share of America’s self-imposed carbon allocation and detract from the right of developing nations to pollute more. Not only that, but Mr. Sinclair, as an entrepreneur, stood to profit handsomely from the application of his invention - an eventuality that the panel felt sent the wrong message to working-class Americans.

With months wasted and not a single viable option on the table, the President threw up his hands in exasperation. “How did the Statue of Liberty get here in the first place?” he demanded to know. His advisors had no idea, but they consulted Wikipedia and quickly found the answer: it reached America in pieces. “Well, that settles it,” the President declared. “We’ll ship it back just the way it came.”

The next morning, a legion of highly-paid union workers descended upon the Statue with saws and blowtorches. Over the next six years they painstakingly cut it into minuscule sections, which they deposited into a makeshift chute leading down to a giant barge. When they finally completed their task, the barge put out for Marseilles amidst great pomp. The jobs created by the demolition project, combined with the influx of tourists for the departure ceremony, led to a minor economic revival in the downstate region.

Standing atop the now-bare island marking the entrance to New York Harbor, the President admired his handiwork. Still, he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was missing. What the nation really needed, he concluded, was a new statue for its new ethos. So, as his final presidential act, he commissioned another statue, one less hubristic than the old, one better suited to the new era of compassion, fairness, and hope that he had inaugurated. He commissioned a statue of himself.

BOHICA - or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Embrace the $7 Trillion Government Bailout

2008-11-25T01:05:00.000-08:00

"We destroyed the village in order to save it."

Bend over, America; here it comes again. The nearly $1 trillion dollars lavished by the government on banks and insurers has apparently proved insufficient to stabilize the economy, and now the automakers have demanded a $25 billion bailout for themselves. Detroit's "Big Three" even took out an ad in newspapers across the nation to assert that millions of people would lose their jobs if Uncle Sam failed to pony up. A technical term exists to characterize this sort of behavior: extortion. Of course, Ford and GM haven't threatened to deliberately cause mass unemployment; they have merely suggested that it will naturally result from the status quo. But I feel so frustrated that the subtlety of this distinction fails to impress me much right now.

When I was growing up, both my dad and my stepdad owned small businesses. During the 1980s, they each had to declare bankruptcy after incurring tens of thousands of dollars of debt. So imagine my surprise when, at the end of that decade, Donald Trump avoided personal bankruptcy when banks positively fell over each other to renegotiate the hundreds of millions dollars of debt he had incurred while building the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. From that event I learned a profound financial lesson: the next best thing to having no debt is having so much debt that your insolvency would imperil either the rich and powerful or a sufficient number of innocents for the rich and powerful to take notice. Trump met this criterion; my family, alas, did not.

Since I began writing this, the government has decided not to bail out the "Big Three" - at least not yet. But enough livelihoods hang in the balance of the future of the American auto industry that it will likely receive its lucre sooner or later. In the meantime, the government will be bailing out other companies whose precarious financial positions pose even more imminent threats to the citizens whose future earnings the government is looting in order to bail them out.

Just today, Citigroup received a $20 billion direct investment and another $306 billion of backing for its loans and securities. According to one source, the government has now pledged $7.4 trillion of aid to faltering companies. The Republicans, who traditionally disdain welfare payments to individuals, have apparently cultivated quite a taste for corporate welfare. And the Democrats, who have traditionally disdained corporate welfare, now want even more of it than the Republicans do. Meanwhile, average Americans can only console themselves with the knowledge that, however impotent they feel in the face of forces they did not unleash and cannot control, they would find themselves in even direr straits without this intervention - at least in the short term.

As a taxpaying citizen likely to live long enough to see the bill for all this largesse come due, I demand that it come with certain stipulations. I don't mean increased oversight and accountability. Rather, I hereby call upon the government to create a new national symbol more befitting of prevailing economic attitudes. I want the eagle on the Great Seal of the United States replaced by an emaciated sow besieged by frenzied piglets furiously competing to suckle its last teat. Such iconography would more accurately reflect the actual state of the union. And if I end up having to sacrifice my retirement in order to shovel more swill into the troughs of greedy and incompetent pigs, at least I won't be laboring for a lie.

European Disunion, or Mere Diversity

2008-09-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

The European Union's official motto is "United In Diversity." While the EU's ongoing struggle to implement a constitution mutually acceptable to its 27 member states may impugn its claim to unity, no uncertainty attends its claim to diversity. It has 23 official languages. Its 495 million people probably comprise every known race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and belief system. Such pervasive differences make the degree of unity already attained remarkable. The failure of the Union to achieve even more comprehensive integration may reflect problems less with the European political vision than with the nature of diversity itself.

Nearly every company, school, and government agency today has some sort of statement proclaiming its commitment to diversity. This emphasis apparently finds its impetus in the misconception that diversity is an asset or an attribute which by virtue of its mere presence benefits an organization. But diversity is not a thing, or even a characteristic of a thing, but rather a state of dissimilarity between discrete things. For a group to have diversity actually means that its members lack shared characteristics. Diversity, then, entails the absence of something, not the presence of something. For this reason philosophers would describe it as a "negative" characteristic. To merely have diversity is to not have something, to have no thing, to have nothing. If an organization has no philosophically "positive" characteristics, then, to adapt a phrase from Gertrude Stein, "there's nothing there, there."

The negative nature of diversity makes the EU assertion that its constituent countries are "united in diversity" particularly provocative. If the motto only means that the EU has both unity and diversity, then it is true but trivial. But if it means that the EU is united by its diversity, that its diversity somehow contributes to its unity, then it is absurd. No group could claim unity solely on the basis of its members having in common the fact that they have nothing in common. If such a union claimed to exist, it certainly couldn't claim any positive results from its negative foundation. Hopefully, the EU means its motto to indicate that it has forged unity out of diversity. Diverse entities can unite and make common cause with each other, provided they have at least shared values. But these values must themselves have a positive nature. A group cannot claim unity on the basis of having a shared view of the importance of diversity any more than on the basis of diversity itself. Having in common a belief in the importance of having nothing in common hardly improves upon simply having nothing in common at all.

However, proponents of diversity don't necessarily believe that it promotes or provides a basis for unity per se; they more likely believe that exposure to diversity promotes other, positive values conducive to unity, such as equality and tolerance. But while these values may inspire the acceptance of diversity, diversity doesn't inherently inspire the acceptance of these values. The fact that different individuals appear, behave, and believe differently doesn't imply that no appearance, behavior, or belief can be superior to another. It doesn't even imply that people ought to treat those different than themselves with respect. What is has no necessary bearing on what ought to be; diversity only takes on significance relative to an existing worldview not directly deducible from it. For diverse parties to unite around a value, they must share that value to begin with, and on account of considerations distinct from the simple fact of their diversity.

The EU maintains the core values of peace, prosperity, and unity. While nations and peoples cannot unite around unity any more than around diversity, they can unite around a mutual desire for prosperity and peace. But the struggle of Europeans to agree even on the mechanics of implementing the values which they already share demonstrates the enduring elusiveness of unity. For Europe as for every continent, diversity is but a brute fact of life; unity is the abiding ideal. Nearly everyone wants to see the members of the world's disparate races, ethnicities, genders, orientations, and belief systems united - if not under an exclusive creed, then under the banner of tolerance itself. Ultimately, then, the real challenge confronting humanity is not promoting diversity, but promoting unity - and cultivating the transcendent values that make unity possible.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger

2008-04-17T00:17:00.000-07:00

The Trials of Henry Kissinger, in the words of its producers, presents "a case for a case" against the former secretary of state. It charges him with war crimes, but argues that ultimately an international tribunal ought to determine his guilt or innocence. The film soberly documents how he masterminded the covert bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, supported Indonesia's repression of East Timor's Fretilin independence movement, and sanctioned the assassination of Chilean general René Schneider in order to facilitate a coup against president Salvador Allende. If guilty, Kissinger would certainly qualify as a war criminal. Or would he?

While The Trials, by its producers' own admission, does not attempt to present a balanced portrait of its subject, it does reveal a complex man whose actions defy simplistic moral categorization. His character arc corresponds more closely to that of the protagonist in an ancient Greek tragedy than to that of any of the 20th century's leading tyrants. More than murder, Kissinger stands guilty of hubris - a false pride in his intelligence and abilities which led him to transgress the bounds of human propriety. He may have done evil, but, as he perceived it, he did so only in the context of serving the greater good.

Kissinger's personal history helps to account for his motivations. His upbringing in Nazi Germany doubtless instilled in him a profound recognition of the reality of evil. Later, as the appalled world greeted the revelation of the Holocaust with cries of "never again," he - a young Jew - would certainly have joined in. When the threat of communism replaced that of Naziism as Stalin and Mao generated victims in the tens of millions each, Kissinger must have made a moral leap which most men find themselves unwilling to make. He apparently reasoned that violently subduing communist revolutions, whatever the casualties, would spare lives in the end. Different innocent people would die, but fewer innocent people would die. Kissinger thus prepared himself to commit some evil at the time in order to prevent more evil later.

His deeds demand understanding in this context. By bombing Cambodia, he hoped to prevent the conquest of South Vietnam by the North - a conquest that, when it took place, led to the death and displacement of millions of Vietnamese. The subsequent communist takeover of Cambodia left one third of that country's population dead. While Kissinger's intrigues in Indonesia and Chile seem less justifiable, he plausibly still believed that the negative consequences of communist rule in those countries would outweigh those of his own imperialist incursions. Since he succeeded in these latter endeavors, the world can only know the damage he caused, as opposed to the damage he averted.

While noble motivations do not necessarily make for noble acts, Kissinger's moral logic has hypothetical merit. Many ethicists have argued, for example, that Hitler's genocidal chancellorship would offer an ex post facto moral justification for having killed him at a younger age. However, since humans lack exhaustive foreknowledge, they have no adequate basis for "playing God" by imposing the death penalty proactively. Kissinger's decision to usurp this prerogative of deity convicts him of hubris, which the Oxford American Dictionary defines as "excessive . . . defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis." Kissinger probably did commit crimes against humanity. His legacy consists in absolute political realism, that brand of calculating amorality that people abhor during peacetime and demand in times of war.

I do not intend the foregoing discussion to excuse Kissinger's ethics or his behavior. I do mean to suggest, however, that Kissinger's distinction from other political leaders lies, not in the nature of his objectives, but only in the extent of the power and authority he wielded in pursuing them. For example, Che Guevara once told an English newspaper that, had he had the choice, he would have launched a nuclear strike against the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis; however, his Soviet handlers refused to grant him permission to do so. Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state of the most powerful nation on Earth, serving under a president sympathetic to his ends and means, had unprecedented latitude to use force to shape the world according to his ideology. In fact, in many ways he qualifies as the anti-Guevara: a bourgeois revolutionary who believed that you have to break a few chefs to keep them from making an omelette.

Intriguingly, Kissinger does not necessarily deny the charges which the film levels at him. In his memoirs, he does suggest that certain documents, which will not become public until at least five years after his death, will somehow illuminate his behavior and perhaps even exonerate him. But a statement he makes in the movie proves more telling: "The average person thinks that morality can be applied as directly to the conduct of states to each other as it can to human relations. That is not always the case, because sometimes statesmen have to choose among evils." Kissinger regarded the choice of what he saw as a lesser evil as an act of goodness. Whether this makes him a tragic hero, or simply a tragedy, rests with the world - and perhaps the International Criminal Court - to decide.

Educated Fools

2008-02-07T22:11:00.001-08:00

To my dismay, I constantly encounter that pretentious bumper sticker reading, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." This attempt at pithy sloganeering fails to recognize that education and ignorance aren't actually opposites. Many Americans who have never attended college possess a profound acquaintance with common sense, while many with advanced degrees demonstrate an acute detachment from reality. Ours is a nation replete with educated fools.

I recently encountered such a fool in the person of a professor whose anthropology course had piqued my interest. In conversation, she made a series of assertions so reckless that she could only have entertained them by "virtue" of not considering their logical consequences. Yet she affirmed them with a superciliousness indicative of the worst stereotypes about academia's ivory tower.

She first contended that, since different people perceive reality differently, multiple realities exist. She apparently meant that, since perception ranks as the highest level of reality that admits of certain knowledge, it qualifies - practically speaking, at least - as the actual highest level of reality. I countered that generally something has to exist before anyone can perceive it, and that this something, however unknowable in its essence, constitutes a higher level of reality than that dependent on the mind of an observer. The subjectivity of human perception doesn't imply the absence of an objective reality. Those with different worldviews only inhabit "different worlds" metaphorically. The teacher basically conceded this point.

However, she subsequently asserted that everyone perceives through a filter conditioned by his or her experience of socialization and enculturation. Beliefs, then, have little or no foundational basis which would allow for their valuation either absolutely or relative to each other. In advocating this viewpoint, the teacher failed to recognize that she has no grounds for commending it to others because she cannot exempt herself from its implications. Her belief that beliefs result from socialization and enculturation would itself count as just another belief resulting from socialization and enculturation. No justification would exist for privileging it over opposing beliefs, and no criteria would exist for assessing its truth value. It would qualify as just as true - or just as false - as my own contrary opinion. It would amount to nothing more than an emotivistic decaration such as "I like pizza."

Our conversation reached its nadir when the teacher declared, "By the time you get to college, you have to throw all that truth stuff out the window." This struck me as her most inexplicable pronouncement, because, however false I may regard her beliefs, I cannot imagine that she herself does not regard them as true. Beyond that, the proposition that "truth doesn't exist" refutes itself, because it implies that at least one truth exists - namely, the truth that truth doesn't exist. It has a curious quality such that, if true, its truthfulness makes it false. Only an educated fool could maintain such a belief.

Ultimately, if students took these teachings at face value and ignored the contradictions, then not only would they have to reject most philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders, they would have to reject teachers. If no belief ranks as more true or false than any other - even the belief that no belief ranks as more true or false than any other - and the nonexistence of truth qualifies as the only truth, then teaching emerges as a meaningless endeavor. The appropriate response to this state of affairs would entail, not upper-level social science instruction, but a full Rousseauean retreat from formal education. However, I reject noble savagery as forcefully as I reject extreme postmodernism, so I simply enrolled in a different class. Sadly for the future of the West, not every aspiring scholar is following my example.

Global Warming: The Naked Truth

2007-09-07T21:08:00.001-07:00

On August 18th, 600 environmental activists posed nude for a photo shoot on a Swiss glacier. Their publicity stunt aimed to raise awareness of how rising temperatures are causing glacial recession. They managed to draw attention to themselves and to global warming - in that order. But they unwittingly succeeded in raising the most profound question about climate change: not "is it real?" (it is), or even "are humans responsible?" (they are, at least partially), but "so what?"

I don't mean that rhetorically. The true issue at the heart of climate change involves, well, change. Change in itself doesn't count as either inherently good or inherently bad. It only merits such judgments relative to a standard. Without a conception of Earth's ideal climate, changes in current conditions lack the moral status necessary to justify a response. The value neutrality of change raises the great, unacknowledged question of the climate change debate: what conditions constitute Earth's optimum climate? In the absence of a climatic ideal, the "crisis" of climate change amounts to nothing more than hysteria over brute facts without context.

Glacial recession offers a case in point. During the Wisconsin Glaciation 20,000 years ago, ice stretched as far south as Olympia, Washington. Without glacial recession, my hometown of Seattle would not exist. Alternately, scientists recently discovered that, around 450,000 years ago, boreal forest covered much of southern Greenland. Glacial advancement has presently buried these remains beneath over a mile of ice. Glaciers ebbed and flowed long before the advent of humanity. Earth has had both more and less glaciation that it has now. If humans are presently exacerbating the process of glacial recession, then before taking counteraction, they must first determine the optimal extent of glaciation.

Questions about Earth's ideal climate continue to go unasked and unanswered, and probably defy any definitive response. Earth's "balance" has swung so widely in the past that it offers little guidance. Pre-21st-century temperature averages did not qualify as "just right" so much as just what everyone grew accustomed to. Humans have simply so invested themselves in the status quo that any change, whether the global cooling of the 1970s or the global warming of today, heralds dire consequences for someone. And that, however anthropocentric, serves as the primary reason to act.

But how to act? Should we feverishly alter out behavior in the hope of forestalling climate change's most serious consequences? Or should we proactively strive to accommodate its effects in order to minimize disruption to our lives? Without a "model Earth" against which to measure the present Earth, we cannot comprehend the "message" of global warming and whether our responses to it are working for or against nature. And even nature only reveals what is, not what ought to be.

Ultimately, then, the human response to climate change hinges, not on science, but on philosophy. While descriptions of ecosystems entail the former discipline, prescriptions about them necessitate the latter. When environmentalists promote policies to combat global warming, they engage in what should be termed "philosophical ecology." This fact does not necessarily invalidate their opinions and actions. But it makes them, at best, highly subjective.

Evolutionary War

2007-09-03T14:39:00.000-07:00

Remember eugenics, the "science" of attempting to promote desirable traits in humans through selective breeding? This idea attracted its share of prominent advocates until Hitler's genocidal extension of it prompted the world to declare "never again." Eugenics's more doctrinaire adherents included Charles Darwin, who in 1874's The Descent of Man wrote:

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

You may understandably find something perverse about the notion that inhumanity ultimately serves humanity's best interests. But this passage implies more than that Darwin thought like a Machiavellian social engineer cloaked in a thin veneer of scientific respectability. It implies that evolution is, more or less, not true.

Think about it. Natural selection operates as evolution's "engine." As members of any population compete for survival, those best adapted to their environments live longer and produce more offspring. These offspring increasingly possess the heritable traits which confer a survival advantage. Over time, this accretion of beneficial adaptations produces a hardier species. Given enough time, theoretically, it produces brand new species. In this manner, natural selection ostensibly produced human beings.

However, as Darwin realized, natural selection breaks down at the human level. Humans themselves labor to ensure the survival of the least fit members of their species. Darwin regarded this development as undesirable, but the fact that he regarded it at all presents serious problems for his theory. Since evolution doesn't treat humans as utterly unique from other species, it cannot thereby exempt them from its laws. If the principles of evolution do not dictate human behavior, then whether or not they dictate the behavior of other creatures becomes irrelevant; the principles themselves hold false. And if the principles hold false, then evolution itself holds false - or at least its primary explanatory mechanism proves inadequate.

The mere fact that the opportunity for eugenics ever presented itself demonstrates the failure of "survival of the fittest." Someone can believe in either natural selection or eugenics, but not in both. The fact that Darwin tried to embrace both demonstrates not just the limitations of his character, but of his theory.

Springtime For Hitler

2007-02-21T01:40:00.001-08:00

"The establishment of the Zionist regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Islamic world. The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."
-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at Iran's "World Without Zionism" conference

"Let me first say good morning to the viewers all over the states and let me tell them we have spring weather in Iran. I hope it will be spring all over the world."
-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Diane Sawyer

Last week, Good Morning America's Diane Sawyer interviewed notorious Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad, the subject of profound international consternation over his uranium-enrichment efforts, did his best to allay the world's fears regarding his motivations. "We are opposed to any kind of conflict," he proclaimed, "and, as we have said repeatedly, we think that world problems can be solved through dialogue, the use of logic, and a sense of friendship." He then confirmed that he was "often in tears" over the suffering of innocent Iraqis, Palestinians, and even Americans. His public-relations effort paid off: Sawyer subsequently described him as "dramatically sympathetic."

Sawyer's experience parallels that of former CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, who, after interviewing Ahmadinejad last year, enthused, "He's an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He's obviously smart as hell. . . . I expected more of a firebrand. . . . He comes across as more rational than I had expected."

Well, it sounds like everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Since Mahmoud can trim his beard, appear lucid, and speak for an hour without calling for the annihilation of Israel, then obviously he poses no threat to world peace. Sawyer and Wallace apparently believe that, since they trust Ahmadinejad, everyone else should too. After all, he comes across as "sympathetic" and "rational." So what if he denies the Holocaust and calls Israel a "disgraceful blot" that needs to be "wiped off the map"?

The media has clearly adopted an ideology which inhibits its capacity for sound judgment. In 1887, Lord Acton wrote that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Yet by the late 20th century, cultural emphasis had shifted from the dangers posed by power itself to the dangers posed by inequalities in the distribution of power. This shift replaced the traditional understanding that power inherently corrupts with a belief that power corrupts only in the hands of dominant political classes. Since the U.S. supposedly dominates the world, the revised paradigm prompts journalists to treat noble American intentions with skepticism while assuming the best about dubious foreign ambitions. At its worst, it inspires commentators to denounce the slightest American excess while justifying the most appalling abuses committed by opponents of the United States.

Iran has as much of a right to develop nuclear power - and nuclear weapons - as any nation does. But Iran's president does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, because, his Rasputin-like ability to transfix America's talking heads aside, he has left no doubt of which to offer him the benefit. He stands convicted by his own bellicose rhetoric, and no amount of postmodern political economy can exonerate him. His objectives do not merely herald a shift in the balance of power, they threaten a dangerous accumulation of power. If reporters genuinely feel torn between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and George W. Bush, then they should trust the man whom power has not had the opportunity to corrupt - in other words, neither of them.

The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.

You Can't Do That On Television

2007-01-08T00:32:00.000-08:00

In a shocking 2004 episode of Desperate Housewives, Gabrielle Solis, played by Eva Longoria, cheats on her husband by sleeping with their 17-year-old gardener. She then does something unconscionable: she smokes a cigarette. This final act nearly proved too extreme for television. The creator of the series, Marc Cherry, recalls in an interview, "[The ABC standards and practices department] didn't mind the statutory rape or the adultery, but they were really upset by the fact that she lights up a cigarette afterward. They wanted me to take that part out because it's not good to show smoking on TV - but I guess sinning is OK."

Each year, advocacy groups release reports detailing the extent to which TV shows inadequately represent their constituencies. Yet today, smokers go underrepresented on television far more than members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual minority. This fact undercuts any assertion that art merely reflects life as opposed to promoting certain ways of living. The logic of the situation, so obvious that it doesn't bear elaboration by network executives, apparently dictates that smoking, unlike, say, fornication and adultery, can have negative consequences.

Joe Eszterhas agrees. The screenwriter of such notorious bodice-rippers as Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Jade, Eszterhas started smoking at 12 and contracted cancer in 2000. After having most of his larynx removed, he began crusading against smoking. In a 2002 editorial in the New York Times, he apologized for glamorizing smoking in his films, writing, "A cigarette in the hands of a Hollywood star onscreen is a gun aimed at a 12- or 14-year-old." He is probably right. But while he laments smoking's role in the "sexual subtext" of Basic Instinct, he never laments that sexual subtext itself. Apparently, having Sharon Stone expose her crotch after murdering her lover with an icepick at the moment of climax doesn't aim anything at anyone.

Years ago, my uncle told me, "In the '50s, you used to go into a drug store and say, 'I'd like a pack of cigarettes - and [whispering] some condoms.' Now, you go into a drug store and say, 'I'd like some condoms - and [whispering] a pack of cigarettes.'" His observation has proved more true than he anticipated. In this progressive 21st century, media executives dictate cultural taboos with Tarzanesque simplicity: sex good, smoking bad. Of course, sex can be good, whereas smoking never can. But sex can also be very, very bad - not that anyone would learn this from watching television.

Americans seemingly can no longer agree on any moral imperative of greater consequence than "don't smoke." In the absence of any consensus regarding a transcendent value system, "morally wrong" is rapidly coming to mean little more than "bad for your health." Indeed, if Miami Vice had taken place in 2007, it probably would have featured Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas hanging out at South Beach protecting innocent low-carb dieters from the ill effects of secondhand smoke and trans fats. The traditional song "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" contains the lyric, "Jordan's river is chilly and cold / Chills the body but not the soul." Much of contemporary culture forms the antithesis of the River Jordan: it chills the soul, but not the body.

Ochlocracy

2006-07-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

"Democracy," in the venerable words of Winston Churchill, "is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." He offered this lament upon learning of his own defeat at the hands of the British electorate in 1945, but the poignant truth of it transcends time, place, and individual fortune. The fate of a democratic nation hangs in the balance of the will of its people, and no guarantee exists that a majority of them will act any more justly than a king or a dictator would. Nothing inherent in democracy restrains it from becoming ochlocracy - rule by a crowd or a mob. At democracy's worst, the only difference between it and mob rule is what the mob rules.

Democracy excels at protecting the interests of majorities, but often at the expense of minorities. The world stumbled upon this sobering truth in March, when an Afghan court attempted to try Christian convert Abdul Rahman for apostasy - a capital crime under Islamic law. Bowing to massive international pressure, the presiding judge finally released Rahman on the contrived grounds of his "mental unfitness" to stand trial. German defense official Friedbert Pflueger characterized Rahman's trial as "intolerable," saying that Germany had sent soldiers to Afghanistan to help it "become a democratic country, not so that people can be sentenced to death on religious grounds." Apparently he didn't realize that democracy doesn't stand in opposition to theocracy - not so long as the majority favors the latter.

Rahman's case illustrates why democracy in the Islamic world has often so conspicuously failed to protect human rights: the majority of these nations' citizens do not content themselves with the freedom to practice their own religion, but aspire to use the power of government to compel others to practice their religion as well. In fact, the director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has declared that he ultimately wants to institute Islamic law in the United States - but only, of course, once a majority of Americans convert to Islam. However, democracy can only flourish within a constitutional framework which guarantees the rights to life and liberty. The classical liberal philosophy which inspired America's Constitution and Bill of Rights limits the coercive authority of government to the realm of protecting life and liberty, and allows for persuasion alone in matters of creed.

The need for global religious freedom has nothing to do with Western arrogance and everything to do with the absence of any alternative. As John Locke argued in his seminal 1689 Letter Concerning Toleration, religious coercion is not merely impractical and undesirable, but impossible:

No man can, if he would, conform his faith to the dictates of another. All the life and power of true religion consists in the inward and full persuasion of the mind; and faith is not faith without believing. Whatever profession we make, to whatever outward worship we conform, if we are not fully satisfied in our own mind that the one is true, the other well-pleasing unto God, such profession and such practice, far from being any furtherance, are indeed great obstacles to our salvation.

Behavior can be coerced, but belief must be persuaded. When religious authorities offer execution as the sole alternative to conversion, they indicate that they desire only to secure power, not to promote faith. John Locke commented on this phenomenon as well: "That any man should think fit to cause another man, whose salvation he heartily desires, to expire in torments, and that even in an unconverted estate, would, I confess, seem very strange to me, and, I think, to any other also."

Of course, no one can compel faith in classical liberalism any more than in Islam. But hearts and minds must change in order to avert continued bloodshed. The U.S. cannot achieve this; change must come from within. I pray for the emergence of a Muslim John Locke to prevent the Middle East from descending into ochlocracy, and the tyranny of many from replacing the tyranny of one.

Cruel To Be Kind

2006-04-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

A Colorado high school teacher who drew parallels between George W. Bush's State of the Union address and the oratory of Adolph Hitler was recently reinstated after a brief investigation into his classroom conduct. Though ill-considered and utterly naive, his remarks do not interest me nearly so much as the phenomenon of the invocation of Hitler's name in general. In contemporary discourse, a comparison to Hitler basically expresses the most savage condemnation possible of another human being. However, in the annals of state-sponsored annihilation, Hitler "only" comes in third, after Mao and Stalin.

Mao Zedong, the architect of Chinese Communism, described himself as "a man without law or limit." According to a recent biography, his policies led to the deaths of perhaps seventy million people. This staggering number equals the combined populations of California, Texas, and New York, nearly a quarter of the current population of the United States. Mao's butchery proved so extreme that even the Communist Party of China, in 1981, repudiated his "Cultural Revolution."

Joseph Stalin, regarded for over half a century as the premier mass-murderer in world history, has now been relegated to a close second. He remains responsible for a mere sixty million deaths, an amount equal to the entire population of England. Stalin bequeathed to history his maxim that "a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." His successor, Nikita Kruschev, disavowed Stalinism in the so-called "secret speech" of 1956.

With such competition, Hitler but manages to take the bronze medal in killing. The death toll of Nazi Germany stands at around twenty million, certainly an appalling number, but insufficient to make Hitler history's purest personification of evil. My high school Global Studies teacher observed that "Stalin made Hitler look like a Boy Scout." Why, then, do commentators wishing to castigate heads of state whom they regard as oppressive not then compare them to Stalin, or better yet Mao?

Shockingly enough, while Hitler succeeded in discrediting Naziism, Stalin and Mao somehow failed to discredit communism in the popular imagination of the West - though not for lack of trying. Overall, communism worldwide may have claimed as many as 150 million lives in the 20th century, which makes it a force nearly eight times as destructive as Naziism. Still, many Westerners persist in their desperate romance with communism. Some believe that, if only the right people would implement it, then it would finally work. This attitude ignores Albert Einstein's definition of insanity, "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Others have more nefariously allowed their enthusiasm for what they regard as communism's noble ends to justify its most ignoble means. Such Machiavellian thinking enables them to decry the violence of fascism, while embracing the violence of communism. Who will proclaim "never again" for the victims of not merely Stalin and Mao, but Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Kim Il-Sung? Not the modern apologist of communism; to him, this legion of dead just counts as "collateral damage."

If someone believes that America has squandered its moral credibility in Iraq, he cannot turn around and regard Hitler as the quintessential tyrant. Such fallacious speech demonstrates that he cares, not for human life itself, but only that human life is sacrificed on the altar of an ideology which he finds personally satisfying. This brand of self-indulgent selective indignation represents the lowest moral ground that a person can occupy, for it involves only the barest pretense of morality. Those who truly feel this way should just admit it; but as for me, I stand on the side of life and reject wholesale slaughter altogether.

Anatomically Incorrect

2006-04-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

This post contains graphic language. Reader discretion is advised.

Penis. Penis. Penis, penis, penis. There, I said it. Yet somehow I fail to feel liberated, empowered, or personally authenticated. Instead I feel like I'm 12 again, looking up anatomically correct terms in the dictionary in a desperate, barely pubescent search for sexual gratification. I'm older now, with more satisfying options for accommodating my basic instincts (should I choose to avail myself of them); but as I have matured, culture has apparently regressed. A prominent playwright has repackaged juvenilia as avant-garde literature; her titillating tripe now plays as sophisticated entertainment in theaters and on college campuses across the nation.

Yes, today I had the misfortune of actually perusing Eve Ensler's ubiquitous Vagina Monologues. In so doing, I realized too late that curiosity doesn't merely kill the cat, it violates the soul. This trashy, vapid work purports to somehow elevate the status of women by celebrating the vagina. But with friends like this, the vagina doesn't need enemies. It needs a genuinely talented author to restore its dignity after page upon page of incessant reiterations, contrived euphemisms, and florid metaphors. Ensler strives to lay the vagina bare in her insipid, popular style, and in the process manages to trivialize the very object, that seat of the sacred feminine, that she seeks to venerate. The Vagina Monologues is to women's studies what The Da Vinci Code is to theology.

Often as not, the stories which Ensler adapts fit a peculiar pattern: a woman endures a repressed upbringing and years of bad sex; she seizes on her vagina as a symbol of her self-loathing and relational dissatisfaction; then, upon a profound initiation into the Sapphic arts, she finds healing and contentment. As much as anything else, the Monologues serves as a primer on the virtues of lesbianism. After all, as everyone who's attended high school knows, women would never dare treat each other with disrespect.

This play, to say the least, offers strongly mixed messages. It addresses the truly grievous reality of misogynistic violence, containing a trenchant clinical description of the barbaric "procedure" of clitoridectomy and a gut-wrenching section on rape used as a military tactic during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But it ultimately leaves the reader with the impression that the most serious issue confronting women today is their reluctance to moan loudly during orgasm. I just don't find America as sexually repressive as Ensler does. In a world where "honor killings" persist, I simply can't become exercised over the fact that not all American women feel a moral obligation to "wake the neighbors," so to speak. The Vagina Monologues has inspired a movement, V-Day, dedicated to eradicating violence against women. I can only hope that this organization has a mandate which extends beyond, in effect, changing the Declaration of Independence to read, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all women are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Uninhibited Sex."

Despite (or maybe because of) its overall lack of redeeming value, Eve's opus has captured the public imagination, and it does have its appeal: artistically, to those who mistake crudeness for genius; socially, to those who believe that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle; and politically, to those with a highly selective sense of indignation. I shudder to envision the reaction if a man wrote something like this, but as the saying goes, only a woman knows what a woman really wants. And if women really want this, I think I'm going to become gay.

Basic Instinct 2: Back To the Drawing Board

2006-04-03T15:41:00.000-07:00

One of the least anticipated sequels in cinematic history, Basic Instinct 2, opened in theaters last Friday. In three short days, it emerged as a critical and commercial failure of monumental proportions. It finished with the weekend’s eleventh-highest total gross, behind not merely Ice Age 2 but Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector and even Slither, a horror-comedy about killer slugs. What could possibly account for such a fiasco? A crowded field of film options? The ongoing box office slump? Paul Verhoeven, the director of the original Basic Instinct, has a different scapegoat in mind: George W. Bush.

Mr. Verhoeven apparently cannot conceive that a sufficiently shameful - or shameless - film may cause potential moviegoers’ self-protection instinct to override their sexual instinct. To the contrary, he offered these startling insights into the American artistic climate: “Anything that is erotic has been banned in the United States. Look at the people at the top. We are living under a government that is constantly hammering out Christian values. And Christianity and sex have never been good friends.” Ahhh, it all makes sense now. Audiences didn’t flock to partake of farcical sex and ludicrous dialogue because of the Puritanical values of the Bush regime. Soon I expect to hear that Bush bears responsibility for the extinction of the dinosaurs as well.

Of course, the freewheeling Clinton administration couldn’t save Verhoeven’s 1995 skinflick Showgirls from its own ignominious, career-destroying fate. And while Christianity and sex have had a tempestuous relationship, judging by the success of the porn industry America and sex seem to be getting along just fine. Perhaps true eroticism would draw Americans out of their bedrooms and back into theaters, but these days, lurid, voyeuristic thrills are a dime a dozen. Most adults are fully acquainted with what naked bodies look like, so for a movie to show them something they’ve never seen before, it would have to show them genuine insight into the human condition.

Religious conservatives often speak of what they perceive as the profound disconnect between Hollywood and the rest of America. They suggest that the profit motive alone cannot account for the discrepancies of taste between studios and their audience. Such commentators often exaggerate the truth, but in this instance their characterization proves totally correct.

Incidentally, Paul Verhoeven belongs to the Jesus Seminar, an organization that gained notoriety in the late ’80s and early ’90s by having its members vote to determine the authenticity of the quotes attributed to Jesus in the Bible. This group judged the vast majority of the words of Jesus as either false or dubious, and published an edited version of the New Testament reflecting its conclusions. Verhoeven’s directorial efforts and public statements do not tend to inspire confidence in his competence as a Biblical scholar, or in any organization that would employ him in that capacity. It goes to show that people should take much of popular Bible “scholarship” with a grain of salt.

All Go and No Show

2006-02-05T03:39:00.000-08:00

His rugged countenance grips you like the militant equivalent of a UNICEF poster child. But what precisely does his gaze compel you to do? To rebel against your government? To have a stiff drink? To undress a supermodel? Such is the dilemma posed by the photographic legacy of the 20th century’s most glamorous revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Since his death, his iconic visage has accompanied Parisian student riots, advertised Smirnoff vodka, and even adorned Gisele Bundchen’s brassiere.

The commercial use of images based on Alberto Diaz’s classic 1960 photograph have reduced Che to a cog in the very capitalist machine he fought to destroy. This irony has not been lost on Che’s family and supporters. In 2000, Diaz successfully sued Smirnoff’s parent company to force it to stop using Che’s image as a promotional gimmick. Now, Che’s widow Aleida plans to initiate a campaign of lawsuits against companies she believes continue to exploit the image. "We can't attack everyone with lances like Don Quixote, but we can try to maintain the ethics [of Che’s legacy],” she explained. She intends to helm this effort from the Che Guevara Studies Center, set to have opened in Havana in late 2005.

I have absolutely no enthusiasm for Che Guevara, but I staunchly support Aleida’s efforts. Though I find Che’s doctrines and methods deplorable, I must acknowledge that he believed passionately in a cause and pursued it relentlessly. I cannot say the same for the companies which manipulate his iconography, unless reckless profiteering counts as a cause. They have brazenly turned Che into a generic symbol of vague and fashionable antiauthoritarianism, a motif for restless youths to express their disaffection with such amorphous entities as “the man” and “the system.” Che’s life and work demand to be taken seriously, more so than they have been by corporations, and more so than they have been, it would even seem, by his wife. I agree with her as to the paramount importance of preserving his legacy, but I radically disagree with her as to the true nature of that legacy.

Che rose to international prominence as Fidel Castro’s second-in-command during the Cuban revolution. An admirer of the Soviet Union and China, Che once declared, “I am one of those people who believes that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain;” he named his first son Vladimir in honor of Vladimir Lenin. However, he behaved more like Stalin after Castro appointed him as state prosecutor. In that capacity he liquidated the antagonists of the revolution, establishing Cuba’s first forced labor camp and even executing numerous former comrades who refused to embrace Castro’s dictatorship. By Che’s own account he played a key role in bringing Soviet ballistic missiles to Cuba, precipitating 1962’s missile crisis; in a later interview with an English newspaper, he stated that, had he had the choice, he would have launched a nuclear attack on the United States. In his will, he wrote of the “extremely useful hatred that turns men into effective, violent, merciless, and cold killing machines.”

If history demands the preservation of Che’s legacy, then truth demands the accurate recounting of it. While this selective biographical sketch does not fully illuminate Che’s complex character, which doubtless had some positive aspects, it serves to demonstrate that his ultimate legacy consists of pure amorality. His personal code dictated that the end justifies the most atrocious means, that the cause trumps all other conceivable considerations. Like his icon Mao Zedong, a self-described “man without law or limit,” Che embraced the venerable maxim that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Che never even approached the death tolls of Mao and Stalin, who between them killed over 100 million people, but not for lack of trying. Have the “omelettes” of the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba justified their sanguinary seasoning? Perhaps Che’s legion of t-shirt toting devotees have all along been raging against the wrong machine.

Be Afraid... Be Very Afraid

2006-02-05T03:35:00.000-08:00

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter - or so the saying goes. This statement holds true, at least, as a cynical expression of popular perceptions. A divisive figures like Yasser Arafat may remain a hero to his supporters and an utter scoundrel to his opponents. And the line does sometimes blur. Even the generally respected Nelson Mandela had occasion to resort to unprincipled violence in his younger days. But the issue persists: do subjective considerations alone distinguish terrorists and freedom fighters?

The United Nations experienced intense difficulty last year when it attempted to draft a definition of terrorism acceptable to its member states. In order to avert further international controversy, I humbly offer a solitary criterion which substantially contributes towards distinguishing freedom fighters from terrorists: freedom fighters content themselves with attacking the people actually responsible for oppressing them. Terrorists, conversely, delight in assaulting symbolic targets, in slaughtering the innocent in order to “make a statement” or draw attention to their cause.

Do you know what strikes terror into my heart? The fact that certain individuals and organizations in the world today regard me as a legitimate target for assassination simply because I am white, or American, or Christian, or “Western.” That I have never committed a hate crime, that I have only the most indirect say in my country’s foreign policy, that I am centuries too young to have participated in the historical atrocities of my religion, and that the “West” has been systematically dismantling its cultural heritage for decades fail to detract from the overarching symbolic value that my head upon a pike would have. “The cause” takes precedence over my life - and yours. Do you want to know how to tell the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? Ask yourself whether or not he wants you dead.

This strain of thought which justifies murder does not merely appeal to fringe groups of foreign nationals and religious extremists. Ward Churchill, until last year an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, offered this startling terrorist apology in a February 2005 interview with the syndicated program Democracy Now!:

“As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved, and they did so both willingly and knowingly. . . . [They were] too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind, and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.”

Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann oversaw the logistics of implementing Hitler’s “final solution” during the Holocaust. The Jews who worked at the World Trade Center, having perished in the conflagration of September 11th, will never have a chance to respond to the accusation of being “little Eichmanns.” The immigrants working as cooks and custodians and the single mothers laboring as secretaries will not have the opportunity to address whether or not their days consisted of “power lunches and stock transactions.” But none of this matters to Mr. Churchill, who joins with Mao Tse-Tung in declaring that “you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.” Nor does it matter to my own school, Shoreline Community College, which invited Churchill to speak on campus late last year for a no doubt hefty honorarium. Churchill received a fast track to tenure at UC Boulder by masquerading as a Native American, prompting genuine Natives to dub him “Walking Eagle,” as in, “He’s so full of shit that he can’t fly.” If only the country, and the world, would so join in repudiating him, his ilk, and the homicidal ideology they advocate.

"You Shouldn't Have Worn That Dress."

2005-12-14T05:41:00.000-08:00

When a terrorist speaks, you must take care to distinguish between what he says and what he actually means. For example, a terrorist may savagely denounce the Israeli occupation of Palestine. But beyond the rhetoric, his words amount to little more than:

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

Not that I equate terrorists with rapists. Far from it. I clearly recognize that while today’s fanatical Islamist finds it entirely virtuous to indiscriminately decapitate Jews and Christians, he finds it utterly unconscionable to look upon the face of any woman besides his wife. By attributing this attitude to the terrorist, I mean only to express the fact that in his sociopathic megalomania, he exploits the mere presence of innocent people peacefully tending their affairs to justify his homicidal indignation.

And the fault always falls at the victim’s corpse. If only he had not been a Jew; if only he had not lived where he did; if only he had not had the audacity to assume that he could walk the streets in broad daylight unmolested; if only he had never been born, his remains would not litter the sidewalk or his severed head would not lie rotting on the floor.

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

In preparation for the upcoming release of Steven Spielberg’s historical drama Munich, I have been reading One Day In September, by Simon Reeve. Reeve’s book recounts in detail how eight Palestinian guerillas infiltrated the athletes’ quarters during the 1972 Munich Olympics and took eleven Israeli team members hostage. The terrorists ultimately executed all eleven, but in the course of the initial confrontation they “only” killed two. Apparently the Israeli wrestling coach had objected to being held for ransom at gunpoint, and forcibly resisted; one of his captors shot him dead in the street. According to actual “Black September” conspirator Abu Daoud, “One of the athletes, a heavily built man, tried to grab one of the [terrorist’s] guns, and so he was forced to shoot him, otherwise they would all have died. It’s logical to shoot someone in self-defense.” Self-defense. On the part of a machine-gun-toting assassin detaining an unarmed man against his will. If only the victim had just recognized his own culpability.

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

In October, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described Israel as a “disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the map.” Yesterday he denied the Holocaust, calling it nothing more than a pretext for European powers to force Zionism on the Arab world. Many critics believe that Israel has brought such hostility on itself, yet Islamist plans for Jewish genocide predate the 1948 establishment of modern Israel. Haj Mohammed Amin al-Hussein, the “Grand Mufti” or Sunni ruler of Palestine from 1921-1948, spent part of World War Two in Germany with Hitler, trying to persuade him to bring his “final solution” to the Middle East. At that time there were no occupied territories, no West Bank and Gaza Strip, just Jewish immigrants who in fleeing one Holocaust nearly staggered into another. Still, terrorists and their sympathizers insist on what they have reiterated for over 50 years:

“You shouldn’t have worn that dress.”

Let Freedom Ring

2005-08-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Democracy came to China last week, as millions of voters lifted Li Yuchun to an unprecedented election victory. With 3.5 million votes, Li triumphed over rivals Zhou Bichang and Zhang Liangying to claim the title of Super Girl, the Chinese equivalent of American Idol. 400 million viewers watched Friday's finale, and eight million of them cast ballots. Of course, technically they did not really vote; rather, they sent "text messages of support" to their chosen candidate via cell phone. However, this semantic distinction failed to appease a regime concerned that the outburst of enthusiasm generated by the show might lead to demands for greater public involvement in more profound arenas of life. State-run China Central TV (CCTV) has threatened to shut down the unofficial program, labeling it vulgar, manipulative, lowbrow, and worldly. Not only that, but the advertising revenues generated by Super Girl surpassed those of its official CCTV competition.

So, the communist Chinese government has made grudging allowances for both free markets and popular elections. Unfortunately, private firms may only profit to the extent that their profits do not exceed those of the government, and public citizens may only vote concerning matters which do not actually affect their lives. Paternalism runs amok and unabated behind the bamboo curtain. As I argued in Caveat Emptor, the government of the "People's Republic of China" stands "for the people" only in the sense that it believes it knows what best serves them, and gives it to them whether they want it or not. Apparently the over one billion Chinese people can handle bread and circuses, but can never rival the wisdom of the benevolent despots who maintain their yoke. Who says America is the new Rome?

Everything I Never Wanted To Know, I Learned In High School

2005-08-19T15:06:00.000-07:00

In 1993, Robert Fulghum stunned the world with his phenomenal bestseller Everything I Need To Know, I Learned In Kindergarten. Now, I intend to write a book entitled Everything I Never Wanted To Know, I Learned In High School. His platitudes pale in relevance compared to the savage lessons in group dynamics I endured during those tumultuous years. Fulghum contented himself with ideal prescriptions for human behavior. I would confine myself to real descriptions of it, and I just might save the world in the process.

Like most educational institutions, my high school, by the ’90s, had taken to emphasizing group problem-solving over individual achievement. Ironically, though, if high school taught me anything, it taught me that if you want something done right, nay, if you want something done at all, you have to do it yourself. During my junior year, for example, my World Civilization teacher assigned me and six other students to film a newscast covering the events of the decade between 1090 and 1100 AD. After an exasperating two months during which no group member attended a single one of of the scheduled work sessions, I abandoned hope of any concerted effort, and I executed the project almost single-handedly in two days. Thus it turned out that the very exercise intended to instill a group spirit in me accomplished the exact opposite. I concluded that groups themselves constitute the ultimate “group problems,” and I learned to solve them by taking matters into my own hands.

The cooperation, compromise, and consensus so appreciated by my alma mater remain the core values of the United Nations today. These dubious virtues have wreaked far more havoc on nations than they ever could on students. If a group of high-schoolers cannot come together to complete a history project, how can a body such as the UN Security Council resolve border conflicts between Israel and Palestine or defuse nuclear tensions in Iran and North Korea? The dramatically higher stakes of international crises in theory would seem to lend added impetus to resolution efforts, but in practice the opposite apparently holds true. The specific stakes, though higher for everyone, differ from country to country. Any potential resolution benefits some countries more than other, and every nation involved has something to lose.

The practicality of cooperation rests on the premise that all parties have a mutual interest in the outcome of a particular situation. Yet while all parties certainly share an interest, they do not necessarily share the same interest. For example, my history teacher assumed that each of his students had a vested interest in receiving a good grade on the project. This assumption proved all too false. One student in my group had two deceased parents, and consequently would receive social security payments until his 19th birthday so long as he remained in school. He attended, but rarely completed his assignments; by his junior year, he had not amassed sufficient credits to progress beyond freshman status! After turning 19, he simply dropped out. Some group members had performed so poorly in class up to that time that they could not pass no matter what grade they received on the project - so they simply elected not to participate. Yet another student wanted a good grade, but figured that if he bided his time, a more conscientious student would emerge and assume the bulk of the responsibility. So that left me, and some generous friends who helped me even though they weren’t in my class to begin with. Would participating in the project have benefitted everyone’s enlightened best interest? Yes. But would doing so have benefitted their immediate self-interest? Definitely not. The same distinction applies in international relations.

By writing this, I do not at all mean to denigrate cooperation. I have benefitted from the benevolence of others more times than I can count. But I do mean to emphasize that, the existence of newspaper “human interest” sections to the contrary, not all humans truly share the same interests, at least not consciously. High-stakes situations, from the classroom to the war room, are not the most effective times to attempt to enlighten others as to the ideals to which they ought to aspire. In life, success, and even survival, often depend on knowing whom to trust and count on.

Caveat Emptor

2005-08-09T17:04:00.000-07:00

Actor-comedian Eddie Murphy once delivered a stand-up routine in which he mocked advertising slogans emphasizing the purportedly low prices of retail goods. He recounted his experience in a particular store, which featured some product accompanied by a sign declaring, “What a bargain!” A true bargain ought to be self-evident, he reasoned, and any item requiring special notice to that effect, if purchased, probably wouldn’t live up to its billing. Murphy’s comedy bit underscores the venerable maxim caveat emptor, “Let the buyer beware.” Shoppers should not automatically take advertiser’s claims at face value.

This phenomenon, intolerable enough in the world of sales, has an egregious parallel in the geopolitical realm. It counts as a supreme and perverse irony that certain of today’s most oppressive governments have allowed for their nations the most populist-sounding names. The Oxford American Dictionary defines a republic as “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives,” and democracy as “a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state.” Nonetheless, the regime in China, which imprisons and even massacres its own citizens for ideological “crimes,” evinces no ironic sentiment regarding its country’s full name, the People’s Republic of China. Nor does North Korea’s megalomaniacal dictator Kim Jong-Il appear to find facetious the official name of his personal totalitarian backwater, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. These names make specific claims about the state of political life in their respective countries, claims which stand in stark and outrageous contrast to established facts.

The inclusion of the ambiguous adjective “People’s” in both names adds a provocative new layer to the issue. Unlike “republic” and “democracy,” “People’s” does not denote a specific form of government. However, a compelling definition emerges from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In his immortal line “of the people, by the people, for the people,” Lincoln suggests as criteria for a “People’s” government that the people must actually institute, comprise, and benefit from it. If America does not always live up to these ideals, at least its constitution provides a legal framework which, in principle, makes their achievement possible. Conversely, China and North Korea make a pretense of populism only in shameless rhetoric designed to intimidate anyone who would call attention to the rank hypocrisy of their leaders.

Yet lest their lofty self-identification prove nothing more than a cruel charade, the Chinese and North Korean governments have distorted Lincoln’s third criterion in order to qualify as “for the people” in one profane sense. Like deranged parents who believe that abusing their children prepares them for the hard realities of life, China and North Korea have adopted a paternalistic mentality which maintains that, contrary to appearances, they actually do act in the best interest of their citizens. The fact that the citizens themselves do not recognize this, and continue to clamor for freedom of expression and political self-determination, merely reflects the very immaturity which their rulers intend to beat out of them. One can almost imagine Jong-Il or China’s Hu Jintao telling his subjects, “This hurts me far worse than it hurts you.” These tyrants have masqueraded as having offered their people a bargain, but the people have rejected it as a raw deal. Americans should too, acknowledging that communism’s alleged populist republicanism has never amounted to anything more than a farce.

The Meaning Of Life?

2005-06-06T00:22:00.001-07:00

2005 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the noted Austrian psychologist Victor Frankl. The late Dr. Frankl established a school of thought which maintained that the desire for meaning acts as humanity’s primary motivating force. His technique of “logotherapy” sought to treat certain forms of depression by helping the depressed to fill the “existential vacuum” in their lives. His birth’s centennial has invigorated the efforts of different groups attempting to complete a project initially proposed by Frankl: the construction of a “Statue of Responsibility.”

Frankl believed that responsibility constituted the very “essence of existence.” He taught that people ought not to concern themselves with their expectations of life, but rather with life’s expectations of them. When questioned, so to speak, by life, they could only answer for themselves through responsible behavior. By responding responsibly to their individual circumstances, they thereby actualized the unique meaning of their lives. Frankl left it to individuals to determine the appropriate object of their responsibility, though he identified conscience, family, society, and God as possibilities.

Frankl’s work had political as well as psychological dimensions. In his seminal 1959 book Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl wrote, “Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibility. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” This observation demonstrates penetrating insight into not merely the human condition in general, but into America’s unique political heritage.

The political philosophy which so influenced America’s founders had a negative concept of liberty - not negative in the sense of bad or harmful, but in the sense of involving absence. Classical liberals such as John Locke believed that freedom entails the absence of coercion. One person’s freedom ends when it infringes on the life, liberty, or property of someone else. A government exercises force only to protect those rights from violation. This view of freedom gave rise to classical liberalism’s distinction between the moral and the legal. Governments, like citizens, may persuasively promote virtue, but immorality falls within the government’s legislative purview only so much as it involves the infringement of life, liberty, and property.

Nonetheless, the concerns of a nation exceed the jurisdiction of its government. For a society to survive, a critical mass of its population must behave in a moral fashion. In a country with a classical liberal heritage, the citizens must take up that responsibility voluntarily. Thomas Jefferson declared that “we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Liberty can only endure in conjunction with responsibility, and where responsibility fails, so too ultimately will liberty. Victor Frankl understood this principle, and his recommendation draws attention to its importance.

The Statue of Responsibility Foundation and The Statue of Responsibility Endowment stand out most prominently among the no less than seven organizations and individuals currently laboring on Frankl’s vision. Daniel Boltz, president of the Foundation, has stated that “the Statue of Responsibility, as a companion to Lady Liberty, would spark a national dialogue on the intrinsic worth of both. It will result in more responsible actions, personally and collectively, toward each other, our neighbors on the planet, and our common home - the Earth.” Whether or not such a statue would actually accomplish all this, it certainly would draw attention to the neglected but necessary counterpoint of the freedom Americans so cherish.

E.T. Phone Home

2005-06-01T00:42:00.000-07:00

A recent survey conducted by the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute and the National Geographic Channel revealed that approximately 60% of Americans believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life. The poll also predictably revealed that a majority of college graduates believe in such life, whereas a majority of regular churchgoers do not. These results contribute little knowledge and no insight to a topic that ought to fascinate. The poll should have asked not what people believe about life on other planets, but why they believe what they do.

While most scientific debates hinge on the interpretation of evidence, in the case of extraterrestrial life no evidence exists to interpret. Because opinions on this issue remain entirely speculative, they reveal far more about their holders’ worldviews than about the issue itself. Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer with the SETI Institute, has asserted, “It is quite likely that there is life elsewhere in our galaxy, and there's a real possibility that we will find evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life by the year 2025.” However, he never articulates exactly what makes such a discovery likely. It certainly qualifies as possible, but so do many other hypothetical eventualities. Dr. Shostak’s prediction has no more scientific merit than a prospective date for the return of Christ. While his beliefs do not reflect either positively or negatively on him, they obviously do reflect more deeply held nonscientific beliefs on his part.

One potential line of reasoning in his favor claims that the universe encompasses such incomprehensibly large dimensions that it simply must contain other intelligent beings. Obviously, this argument has no logical force; the size of a vessel has no relationship to its specific contents. Furthermore, recent scientific research has demonstrated that an extraordinary number of precisely tuned factors must prevail for life to even possibly exist in the universe, let alone actually exist on Earth. The remote probability of just one inhabited planet existing makes the existence of another such planet even more improbable. Disregard for teleological considerations reveals a common, though not a necessary, corollary of belief in extraterrestrials: the belief that life randomly originates through purely natural means.

Another potential argument bypasses logic altogether and instead passes a moral judgement. It accuses those who disbelieve in extraterrestrial intelligence of arrogance. This argument actually presupposes the existence of extraterrestrials, for exclusivity only implies arrogance if the exclusive claim is false. Beyond that, it serves no purpose to “rebuke spirit by size,” in the words of G. K. Chesterton. Human significance would not diminish on account of extraterrestrial life any more than one child diminishes in value when his mother gives birth to another. A collection of significant beings does not make for collectively less significant beings.

While some scientists undoubtedly research extraterrestrial intelligence purely in the spirit of abstract inquiry, the popular quest for alien life primarily involves human concerns. Whether revealing the secrets of cold fusion, teaching revelatory spiritual insights, or diabolically gestating in a human belly, aliens serve as an artistic motif for expressing hopes and fears about the destiny of the human race. These hopes and fears find their source in highly subjective personal conceptions of progress and regress. Such notions have an inherently philosophic or religious character with which the scientific method cannot concern itself. Ultimately, science works best when inspired by a worldview which invests scientific proceedings with transcendent significance. But scientists, and those who emulate and follow them, must take care to identify where science ends and science fiction begins.

Interpret This

2005-05-24T21:15:00.000-07:00

The recent film The Interpreter managed to generate a fair amount of controversy on its first day of release. Certain prominent national critics praised it on account of its sympathetic treatment of the United Nations, while Seattle's own Michael Medved castigated it for that very same reason. However, to evaluate the film on that basis alone misses its more subtle, and more sinister, implications. The Interpreter's positive portrayal of the UN merely acts as a facade for its true agenda: the promotion of a perverse understanding of justice which inverts the proper relationship between government and citizen, to the detriment of the latter.

The plot of The Interpreter involves a genocidal African dictator who intends to appear before the United Nations to defend his policies. An interpreter played by Nicole Kidman overhears discussion of a plot to assassinate him. When she alerts the authorities, she finds her credibility strained because she participated in a movement to forcefully overthrow that leader after her family perished at the hands of his minions. She claims that she has since disavowed violence, and that she joined the UN to contribute to peacefully resolving such conflicts.

Kidman’s character illustrates her notions of justice and vengeance by speaking of a fictional African tradition in which a murderer is bound and cast into a river on the first anniversary of his crime. If the family of the victim lets him drown, they will have their vengeance, but they will endure a lifetime of mourning. Conversely, if they rescue him, they will not have their vengeance, but they will experience peace. To sum up her view, she declares, "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief." For the afflicted citizens to kill or violently remove the dictator would thus constitute vengeance, and vengeance, by implication, is wrong.

Her naive parable completely confuses forgiveness with elimination of punishment. The aggrieved family members might well benefit from forgiving the killer in their hearts, but the society would still need to punish murder. Kidman’s interpreter more sophisticatedly applies her perspective to her present situation. She believes not that her countrymen ought to suffer the dictator to remain in power, but rather that they ought to remand his case to the International Criminal Court. The ICC could presumably impose a penalty identical to that of her former comrades, but only the ICC has the authority to do so. In her mind, the distinction between justice and vengeance hinges solely on the identity of the adjudicating body. Since she automatically equates vengeance with injustice, right and wrong themselves hang in the balance.

Such a conception of vengeance markedly departs from the commonly accepted definition. Vengeance has traditionally been defined as an act of retribution motivated by personal anger or grief as opposed to a desire to satisfy an abstract principle of justice. This distinction involves the motivation, not the identity, of the punishing body. Governments have been known to take revenge with a ferocity that the limited power of private citizens could never allow. Furthermore, even vengeful motivations do not automatically imply unjust punishments. Personal anger or grief can in fact motivate people to satisfy the abstract demands of justice, and provided the punishment remains proportionate to the crime, it involves no inherent injustice. The Interpreter’s grave concern to associate injustice with individuals and justice with governments reveals that its primary target is not vengeance at all but rather vigilantism.

Developed countries do prohibit taking the execution of justice into one's own hands, but not because it would inherently involve injustice. Quite to the contrary, the individual’s right to execute justice forms the basis of the government’s right to do so. The classical liberal tradition which birthed American democracy offered a theoretical justification for government which began with the rights of the individual. That school of political philosophy envisioned a hypothetical society with no formal government. Those living in this “state of nature” would have the right to life, liberty, and property, and the right to defend those rights against encroachment and punish those who violated them. However, humanity’s fallible nature would give rise to conflicting claims of violation and excessive punishments, which individuals would attempt to enforce against each other. An anarchic state would prevail, prejudicial to the interests of the community as a whole and to its individual members. To preserve order and promote progress, the people could, by mutual consent, create a government and assign to it in a “social contract” their right to enforce their rights. This government’s judicial authority would thus be derived from the governed, who alone possess such authority by nature.

The Interpreter, however, has no concept of natural rights. It regards the United Nations much as medieval monarchs regarded themselves. The UN, by its decisions, solely determines what constitutes justice. To undertake a course of action not endorsed by the UN is to commit a vengeful injustice. The governed thus enjoy only those privileges the government deems fit to bestow. While the nations and peoples of the world receive their authority from the UN, the exact source of the UN’s authority goes unaddressed. In John Locke’s era, kings used the doctrine of original sin to assert the essential unfitness of commoners to govern themselves. In response, Locke demanded to know that if all humans are sinful, what makes the king more fit to rule than anyone else? A similar question be asked of The Interpreter: what makes the UN more fit to govern than a national assembly, an indigenous movement, or a single citizen? The only answer given is the only answer that can be given: nothing. The concept of natural rights, however basic to human dignity and responsible government, has remained a thorn in the side of those in every age who believe themselves possessed of an inherent superiority which entitles them to dominate their contemporaries.

Ultimately, The Interpreter does not so much endorse the UN as attack natural rights. In doing so, it undermines the foundation of the most effective system of government the world has ever known. Ultimately, the filmmakers probably did not intend to produce such an explicit polemic. Far from offering a cohesive ideology, they have instead presented a convoluted pastiche of ideas. But if taken seriously, and taken to their logical conclusions, these ideas herald the collapse of modern civilization. From a purely cinematic perspective, The Interpreter lacks much distinction at all. Hopefully, audiences will not find its political notions any more compelling than its artistic merits.

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

2004-12-05T03:27:00.000-08:00

Christians have long lamented the secularization of Christmas - the transformation of the former holy-day of Christ’s Mass into the more religiously neutral holiday of today. This phenomenon, though indeed lamentable, is at least understandable. Christianity’s influence in public affairs has been declining for years in response to a growing emphasis on religious diversity. While a majority of Americans still identify themselves as Christians, the traditions and values associated with Christianity no longer qualify as products of a cultural consensus. What does not remain understandable, however, is the figure whose image has persisted in Jesus’ wake. Santa Claus, with the surreal legends associated with him, increasingly reigns preeminent in the public iconography of the season.

As the story goes, Santa inhabits the North Pole with his faithful wife Mrs. Claus. He and his diligent band of elven laborers toil year-round to produce toys for the good boys and girls of the world. On Christmas eve, he departs on a toy-filled sleigh pulled by a herd (or perhaps a flock) of flying reindeer. Traversing the entire planet in a single night, he lands on the rooftop of the home of each worthy child. He enters by descending through the chimney, whereupon he fills the stockings on the hearth and places presents beneath the tree. Then he leaves as he entered, mounts his trusty sleigh, and embarks for the next house. After circumnavigating the globe he returns to his Arctic abode, presumably to begin preparations for the next year’s journey.

Though Santa at times goes by the name Saint Nicholas, Santa’s exploits dramatically differ from those of his namesake. The historical Nicholas presided as bishop of Myra, in present-day Turkey, during the early 4th century. He reputedly gave dowries to poverty-stricken young ladies, thereby enabling them to marry and avoid lives of prostitution. According to tradition, he also raised to life three children whom a butcher had chopped to death. In time he became the patron saint of Russia and Greece, and of charitable fraternities and guilds, children, sailors, unmarried girls, merchants, and pawnbrokers. The Protestant Reformation herald the demise of Nicholas’ cult in Europe, except in Holland, whose citizens referred to him as Sinterklaas. Dutch colonists brought stories of him to America, where English-speakers appropriated him under the name of Santa Claus. There the traditions surrounding him coalesced with Nordic folk tales about a magician who rewards good children and punishes bad ones. Not until the 19th century did the modern portrait of Santa emerge.

Despite this inexplicable metamorphosis, Santa may still appear benign, if preposterous. However, a more insidious portrait of the man and his work emerges from the songs composed in his honor. The children’s favorite Santa Claus Is Coming To Town presents a particularly disturbing conception of him. It begins:

You better watch out, you better not cry
You better not pout, I’m telling you why
Santa Claus is coming to town
He’s making a list, checking it twice
Gonna find out who’s naughty and nice
Santa Claus is coming to town

Already, the lyric s describe Santa as an intimidating authority figure. They call upon children to behave in an upright fashion, and imply that Santa’s arrival will hasten a reckoning for those who fail to do so. He comes to town as Wyatt Earp came to Tombstone, Arizona. In the past a mother may have chastised her disobedient children by informing them of what their father would do had he witnessed their transgressions, but on the basis of this song one can now imagine the mother invoking Santa as the fearsome disciplinarian instead.

Yet the subsequent lyrics make the initial ones pale by comparison:

He sees you when you’re sleeping
He knows when you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness’ sake

Incredibly, the lyrics have progressed from merely characterizing Santa as a judge dispensing rewards and punishments to asserting his omnipresence and omniscience. Beyond the obvious absurdity of these affirmations lies a great and perverse irony. Monotheistic religions have traditionally regarded God as an omnipresent, omniscient judge who rewards people according to their deeds. The ascription of these qualities to Santa is therefore tantamount to an attribution of divinity to him.

This apotheosis seriously impeaches Santa’s ability to represent the modern, religiously pluralistic Christmas. It raises the question of what fundamentally differentiates the “cult of Santa” from the Christianity it supplants. Both have a core narrative construing their central figures in divine terms. Both have millions of adherents, who sing hymns extolling the miracles of their respective founders. Both deal with the issue of sin and its consequences, and promote a moral agenda. Both have a strong tradition of evangelism. The most glaring difference seems to reside in the fact that not even Santa’s followers actually believe in him. This distinction apparently legitimizes Santa as an acceptable public symbol in a diverse nation. Since not everyone has faith in Jesus Christ, he ranks as too contentious for such a role. However, since no one has faith in Santa, he does not generate that sort of controversy. In tolerance-crazed America, it seems, it is only socially acceptable to proselytize when the faith involved is universally regarded as untrue.

However, the ultimate indignity occurs when those who disbelieve in Santa conspire to indoctrinate the innocent and unwitting into believing in him. These adults proselytize their own and others’ children, only to later disabuse them of the very notions they themselves had inculcated in them. While such efforts may bespeak noble intentions, they cannot by definition amount to anything besides intentional deceit, a behavior commonly known as lying. Unfortunately, when it comes to Santa Claus, this concept of “noble deceit” has a venerable history. For example, in 1897, the New York Sun received the following letter from a girl named Virginia O’Hanlon:

“I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it's so.’ Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”

To this sincere question, the Sun staked its authority and reputation on a grotesque, six-paragraph response. Excerpts from it include:

“Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. . . .
“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! . . . There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. . . .
“No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.”

No motivation, however well-intentioned, could possibly justify this reply. Though it rightly asserts the existence of realities beyond the senses and the mind, it treacherously links belief in Santa to belief in love, generosity, devotion. faith, poetry, and romance. It even suggests a link between belief in Santa and belief in God. Since Santa’s existence is not merely uncertain but manifestly false, The Sun’s ghastly logic implies the same conclusion for all the others. When Virginia grew up, she probably did not abandon her faith in these things along with her faith in Santa. She likely adopted a more nuanced view of truth which allowed her to accept her answer in the disingenuous spirit in which it was offered. In doing so, she lost the very childlike simplicity the newspaper intended to commend.

What would compel a person to promote a ludicrous fictional character and lie to children about him? Another notable Christmas song may hint at an answer. “It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” the song of the same name declares. It then goes on to list many reasons for this assertion, such as the jingling of bells, the congregating of friends and family, the hosting of parties, the toasting of marshmallows, the singing of carols, “mistletoeing”, and, strangely enough, the telling of ghost stories. Yet people can make noise, gather, party, eat, sing, kiss, and talk at any time of year; these activities do not gain any special significance by occurring in a particular season, during a particular month, or on a particular day. Neither do they create some mystical synergy by taking place simultaneously, or all within the context of a single celebration. The traditions of Christmas alone, however enjoyable some may find them, simply fail to make the holiday nearly as wonderful as the song suggests. For Christmas to achieve that superlative degree of wonder, something truly wondrous must make it so. Some fact, event, story, or state of affairs must exist which places the celebration of Christmas in a context such that the practices associated with it take on a significance which they lack in and of themselves.

Unfortunately, in this postmodern age, an “incredulity towards metanarratives” dominates the intellectual climate. This philosophy excludes any practical possibility of people sharing an overarching explanation which could contextualize the human experience and invest it with meaning. Thus, while individuals can personally discover wonder-conferring Christmas narratives, they cannot absolutize those narratives to apply to anyone beyond themselves. This phenomenon works to the detriment of cultural cohesiveness, since a community derives identity and unity from shared traditions and values. National holidays like Christmas, which create an expectation of participation on the part of all, make the need for a common frame of reference particularly acute. Through Santa Claus, society has devised an ingenious resolution to this issue. Precluded from concurring on the truth of a metanarrative, it has concurred on the falsity of one and embraced that instead. This arrangement allows people to celebrate Santa’s fanciful tales without assenting to their truth, thereby enabling language about him to serve as a sort of contrived lingua franca for the pleasant exchange of holiday wishes. Since Santa demands not loyalty but lip service, he facilitates an otherwise improbable unity amongst people of diverse perspectives. And innocent children truly do find him wondrous.

Recent developments, however, could eventually render this entire discussion obsolete. If a prototypical postmodernism encouraged the origination of Santa Claus, then an exaggerated form of it may herald his demise. Certain cultural elements, opposed to the prominence of religion in general and Christianity in particular, perceive Christmas as incorrigibly Christian and cannot tolerate even a secular Santa. Advocating not freedom of religion but freedom from religion, these forces wish to eradicate him, along with any vestige of the holiday he represents. This course of action, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would leave Frosty the Snowman as the only neutral symbol of a season which would amount to just that: a meteorologically distinct but otherwise unexceptional three-month period between autumn and spring. This attitude evinces more consistency than that of those who would reject Jesus but not Santa, since it regards promoting either individual as equally unacceptable. But its underlying rationale proves even more dubious, because it does not appeal to any standard of truth or honesty, only to a severe antagonism towards Christianity. It is exceedingly ironic that the most strident opposition to Santa comes, not from those concerned with the fact that he embodies falsity, but from those concerned about his relationship to a religion whose adherents regard Jesus as the personification of truth. Of all the reasons to dispense with the foolish pretense of belief in Santa, his arbitrary association with Jesus counts as the worst.

Christmastime features other celebrations besides Christmas itself: religious holidays like Hanukkah, non-religious festivals like Kwanzaa, and all the traditional rituals associated with the season and practiced by those of various religious dispositions. This diversity of opinion and expression makes honesty the only appropriate response. While human beings will never unanimously agree as to what constitutes absolute truth, they can certainly unite in repudiating absolute lies. Santa Claus qualifies as just such a lie, and humanity must refuse to perpetuate the myth of his existence any longer. If parents insist on teaching their children about Santa, they must divest him of his pseudo-divinity and explicitly portray him as a legendary figure, who, like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill. symbolizes traits valued by his culture of origin. All people everywhere must henceforth confine themselves to only making statements which they themselves actually believe. The particulars involved may seem insignificant, but the principles remain profoundly consequential.