The art of aristocrats, the art of enriching life.

- Mary M. Colum

From the book:

Another reason why good literature was more readily accessible [in Nock’s youth] than now is that the proportion of literacy in our population was much lower, and publishers were not under such heavy economic pressure to block up the access to good literature with trash.  In Massachusetts, where literacy would be presumably highest, there were nearly a hundred thousand persons unable to read or write. Things were no better in Connecticut, where one-tenth of the child-population got no schooling at all; and it would be fair to suppose that in the more newly-settled regions of the country the level of literacy would be very considerably lower.  One might assume that as the level of literacy rose, the level of general intelligence would rise with it, and consequently that the economic demand for good literature would also rise.  This, roughly, was Mr. Jefferson’s idea, and indeed it has always been at the root of our system of free public instruction for everyone.  It has, however, somehow failed to work out according to expectation.  The level of literacy has been pushed up very nearly to the practicable limit, but the level of general intelligence seems not to have risen appreciably, and the economic demand for good literature is apparently no greater in relation to a population of a hundred and thirty million than it was to one that was going on sixty million; in fact, one would say it is much less.  The reason for this is plain enough; there is nothing recondite about it.  In his view of literacy, Mr. Jefferson, was only half right.  He was obviously right in premising that no illiterate person can read; but he was guilty of a thundering non distributio medii in his tacit conclusion that any literate person can read.  On the contrary, as I discovered as long ago as my undergraduate days, very few literate persons are able to read, very few indeed.  This can be proven by observation and experiment of the simplest kind.  I do not mean that the great majority are unable to read intelligently; I mean that they are unable to read at all – unable, that is, to carry away from a piece of printed matter anything like a correct idea of its content.  They are more or less adept at passing printed matter through their minds, after a fashion, especially such matter as is addressed to mere sensation, (and knowledge of this fact is nine-tenths of a propagandist’s equipment), but this is not reading.  Reading implies the use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone processing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.

This is a long excerpt, but I feel it is important to quote to whole thing to get a good grasp of what Nock is saying.  There are quite a few times in Nock’s writings where he uses a very familiar word in a rather unconventional way.  In this case, “reading” and “literacy” are words that he uses in his own way, and then makes his definition more explicit later on.

Universal literacy has been held up as a baseline goal for a civilized society for a couple hundred years.  We’ve pretty much reached that goal now, with the exception of a few people that fall through the cracks, and a few other people that are physically or mentally handicapped.

Nock is the first person I’ve ever seen to stop and ask – why is universal literacy assumed to be a good thing, and do the experimental results bear out the presuppositions?

The simple act of asking this question proves that Nock is approaching the issue from an entirely different point of view than what we do today.  Even though many of us reject progressive political theory, we are unaware exactly how much progressive sociological thought we have absorbed and take for granted.  In my case, at least, this is one of those situations.

Progressive sociological thought puts forth the notion that all men are improvable, and that society, through public or private educational systems, should have a hand in improving them.  Being literate is a prerequisite to having the ability to learn other things and to be educated, so universal literacy should be a primary goal of any society.

Nock’s contention is that the ability to read has no bearing whatsoever on the ability to think, and that without the ability to think, the ability to read is at best pointless and at worst detrimental to individuals.  Also implicit in his statements is that the ability to think is not something of which all men are capable.  Expecting everyone to be improvable to the point of being truly literate, sentient beings is folly.

This idea was initially hard for me to accept, given that I know quite a few literate, intelligent people.  However, with time I began to realize that Nock is holding people to a higher standard.  Being “smart” today means one has gone to school, one has a degree in some impressive field or another, etc.  I think about all of the people I know that get classified as “smart”, and start to look at them from Nock’s perspective.  How many have an interest in thinking, as opposed to simply memorizing things and applying algorithms?  This I think is commonly substituted for intelligence today.  One person’s knowledge base of field-specific trivia is larger than another’s, so that person is defined to be “smarter”.  The ability to critically analyze that information and draw true, useful conclusions from it is largely ignored.  By Nock’s criteria, I know very few literate, intelligent people.  I also come away from this exercise fully agreeing with him that the majority of people are incapable of or uninterested in this sort of thought.

Nock’s examples of the downsides of universal literacy are the increasing rarity of good literature as publishing houses begin to cater to the tastes of the masses, increased advertisements everywhere as companies begin to use a new form of communication to influence the weak-minded, and an increased danger from propagandists who see a similar opportunity to that of advertisers.

I did a quick check to see how far this trend as come.  City Journal has a circulation of about 10,000 issues, quarterly.  National Review’s circulation is about 150,000 issues, bi-weekly.  Cosmopolitan has a circulation of about 3,000,000 issues, monthly.  Maxim has a circulation of about 2,500,000 issues, monthly.  That’s right, two percent of the entire population of the country reads either Cosmo or Maxim every month.  City Journal readers are barely a blip on the radar.

This is what universal literacy has brought us.  Billboards along highways, an audience for the Huffington Post, and “What men think about SEX” in grocery store checkout lanes so you can get the birds and the bees conversation with your kids out of the way early.  Universal literacy has its economic upsides - certainly our economy wouldn’t be where it is today without the ability of the average Joe to read and follow basic instructions.  Culturally, universal literacy has increased the speed at which we race to the lowest cultural denominator.

As usual, Nock does not make any recommendations or prescribe any remedies.  He just points out facts.  The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.

I found Kim’s site long ago, maybe a year or so after Kim started blogging.  I had entered corporate America, and much to my chagrin, I discovered that it was mind-numbing boring ninety percent of the time.  Luckily, they provided me with this magic box and a connection to the rest of the world, so I could simultaneously entertain myself and pretend to be working.

As I explored the internet looking for something to read, I ran across Rachel Lucas’ blog.  I remember having to look up “blog” on an on-line dictionary, just to figure out what it was I was reading.  Ah, we were so innocent then…..

One thing led to another, and I ended up reading Kim’s site.  Then Connie’s site.

Then one day I responded to a cryptic blog post asking for resumes for a secret project.  I figured, what the heck?  Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

And that’s how I got to know Kim and Connie.

Unfortunately, the project never got off the ground, but I still remember the hope and optimism I had for those few months.  An end to the drudgery of corporate America!  A work environment that respects the importance I place on homeschooling!  It sounded like heaven on earth.  As it stands, I’m still chained to my desk.  But even having the hope of escape for a few months is a precious memory for me.

At the time, I was a pretty doctrinaire libertarian.  I had a theoretical construct built in my mind as to how the world should work, and it would work great if everyone were just like me.  And that’s the part that bothered me – libertarianism seemed like a great theory that fails the reality test.  Start putting real people, with real foibles and quirks, into that theory, and all of a sudden the theory starts to fall apart.  The theoretical scientist in me wasn’t bothered by such trivialities.  The practical part of me, luckily, the dominant part, had been bothered by this fact for a long time.

I knew that Kim and Connie put forth a lot of libertarian-sounding ideas, but they did not consider themselves libertarian.  On a whim, hoping that maybe their ideas would help me fix this hair that was out of place, I asked Connie to elaborate a bit more on her political and philosophical beliefs.

The following three months were probably the most exciting three months in my intellectual life.  There’s nothing quite like pitching everything you ever knew into the garbage can and starting over from scratch, to get your blood pumping.

It’s hard to describe exactly how I changed.  It’s not something simple and superficial, like deciding you’re tired of supporting this sports team, and now I’m going to support a different one.  One’s ethos should not be chosen on a whim.  If all goes well, one chooses it because it is right, and because through much thought and reflection, one has convinced one’s self of it’s rightness.  I was led to water, I drank, and I realized that everything I knew was wrong.

Fundamentally, I grew up.  Intellectually, emotionally, and philosophically, I grew up.  Doors were opened to me that had previously been closed.  Things that I had been told were important but had never been shown why they were important, took on a whole new meaning and urgency.  I had spent the first couple decades of my life wasting time, merely skirting issues of importance.  It wasn’t my fault, really, since I had never had someone to explain to me the importance of history or literature.  It was all just trivia, fact accumulation, stamp collection.  It could be fun, but in the end it was meaningless.  Now, with a new understanding of why these things are important, I’ve been trying re-educate myself, learning all over again all that I knew, in a new intellectual context.  At this point, I’m grateful for what I do know, and I’m humbled by what I don’t.  There’s so much more out there….

Kim and Connie have said that they want to change the world, one person at a time.  That’s the idea behind the Nation of Rifleman, Literate Nation, and virtually every other project they’ve ever embarked upon.  I suspect they realize this, but every individual they touch that is changed results in an exponential ripple effect that they may or may not see.  I have changed dramatically, and as a result, my family is changed, some of my friends and acquaintances are changed, even my California liberal in-laws are changing in subtle ways.  And Kim and Connie are the root cause of all of this.  They have many friends, hundreds of commenters, thousands of readers, and very likely, tens or even hundreds of thousands of people that they have positively influenced during their tenure in the blogosphere.  I suspect they know this at some level, but I think they need to be reminded just how much of an impact they have truly made.  It’s nothing less than heroic.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Kim and Connie for everything they have done for me personally, for the conservative movement in general, and for the world.  You two have been a positive influence on so many people in so many ways that it is impossible to enumerate them all.  You’ve sacrificed much, endured hardships, put up with attacks on your lifestyle and integrity, and have come through it all with grace and dignity.  You are truly talented people, and an example for us all.

Two great lights in the blogosphere go out today, but only after shining so brightly for so long.  Enjoy your blog retirements.  You’ve certainly earned it.

[Social life in the Grand Siecle] is the school of what is called honour, the universal master who shall be everywhere our guide.  Three things we observe there, and find constantly mentioned: that our virtues should be touched with a certain nobleness, our morals with a certain freedom, our manners with a certain politeness.  The virtues exhibited in this society are always less what one owes to others than what one owes to oneself; they are not so much a response to an appeal from our fellow-citizens as a mark of distinction between us and them.

-Montesquieu

It’s pretty normal for one generation to complain about the lack of manners and morals in the next.  Kids these days just don’t have respect like they used to.  I’ve seen some people, liberals mostly, brush this off as anywhere from outright falsehood to true but irrelevant.  Really though, I think there is a lot to it, and it comes down to the fact that a sense of honor is becoming more and more rare in our society.  This is due to a variety of reasons, starting with the no-rules generation of the 60s, where self-restraint became a Bad Thing, and snowballing from there as these people “grew up”, had kids, and began controlling the educational establishment.  Now we’ve got lots of rules, but very few of them have something to do with doing the right thing.

Nock recognized this trend even back in his day.  He uses an anecdote as an example, a news-worthy event in his day known as the Beecher-Tilton affair:

Everyone in those days subscribed tacitly to a pretty fairly uniform code of morals, but there was a snuffiness about the ostentatious pieties and moralities of those concerned in the Beecher-Tilton imbroglio which made it impossible to take their contentions or representations seriously.  What people! one said at once.  What a life!  What a society!  In its dullness, its fatuity, its simian inability to see when it was making itself ridiculous, was there ever anything on earth like it?  My family clearly had little doubt, on the evidence offered, that the scandal rested on a sound basis of fact; that Beecher had been entertaining himself in dalliance with one at least, and perhaps more, of his female parishioners.  But to arraign him for that, and then to get up a great pother about it, all on the sheer score of religion and morality (and afterward, yes, actually, on the score of legality, when Tilton haled Beecher into the civil courts on a charge of alienation) – this procedure would seem the acme of stilted burlesque.

A priest having an affair with his parishioners?  Surely this is something worth getting worked up about.

But taking the priest to court?

Yet to regard a matter with humour and detachment is by no means the same as regarding it lightly.  My parents would have been the last to regard any matter of adultery lightly… On the contrary, their view would naturally be, and I am sure was, much more serious than any which the affair brought to light.  The eye of common sense would see simply that the courts of law, religion and morals were not courts of competent jurisdiction.  Their sanctions were of debatable validity in the premises, and when as egregiously overpressed as they were in the case of Beecher, the effort to apply them became ridiculous.  The court of undebatably competent jurisdiction would be the court of taste and manners.  Whatever law, religion and morals may say or not say, the best reason and spirit of man resents adultery as in execrably bad taste, and from this decision there is no appeal.  Moreover, the three incompetent courts could not take proper cognizance of the fact that Beecher and Tilton were intimate friends.  The court of taste and manners could and would; and a properly enlightened social resentment would be accordingly enhanced, for all but the very lowest of bad manners exempts the wives of one’s friends.

Certainly, adultery is wrong by any standard of religion and morals.  But, how do we judge the act?  Do we declare it wrong because our religion says it is wrong?  The legal issue is even more stark.  In the Beecher-Tilton affair, Beecher was sued for this adultery, the charge being alienation.  Today, virtually all laws against adultery have either been repealed or are completely ignored.  Does that mean that adultery is now acceptable?  I’ve heard many argue that the law defines right and wrong.

What Nock is noting here is the fact that behavioral codes, and judgment passed on the behavior of others, should come from a code of conduct based on honor and decency, not on an arbitrary and flexible standard such as law, religion, or morality.  All of the latter change as prevailing behavior in a culture changes.  Adultery is commonplace now, and we don’t really want to be throwing all of those people in jail, so we repeal or ignore the laws against it.  Even church rules on adultery, divorce, and remarriage have adapted significantly to this new reality.

And yet, through all of this, adultery is still wrong.  It is something that decent and honorable people do not do.  We as a society should not be relying on laws against adultery, or a line in a holy book saying that adultery is wrong.  We should be teaching our children about honor and decency, we should expect honorable and decent behavior of our fellow citizens, and we should use peer pressure and perhaps even social ostracism to encourage conformity.

In addition, law, religion, and morals are very specific, detailed things.  It is impossible encode the proper response to any situation in life in any of these.  Therefore, when taken as they are, they can only provide a guide as to how to react to specific situations.  Honor and decency, however, provide a very general code of conduct, applicable to virtually every situation in which we may find ourselves.  A person well-versed in such a code of conduct knows very well how to react in a given situation, even if sometimes that reaction is contradicted by law or religion.

Whether by one means or another, I was somehow prepared to see, as when I was still quite young I did see, that in our society the purview of legal, religious and ethical sanctions was monstrously over-extended.  They had usurped control over an area of conduct much larger than the right reason would assign them.  On the other hand, I saw that the area of conduct properly answerable to the sanctions of taste and manners was correspondingly attenuated.  One could easily understand how this had come about.  Law is the creature of politics, and the general course of politics, as among others Mr. Jefferson, Franklin and John Adams had clearly perceived, is always determined by an extremely low order of self-interest and self-aggrandisement.

…

The consequences was that the one set of sanctions atrophied, and the other set broke down; thus leaving human conduct bereft of any sanctions at all, save those of expediency.  In other words, each person was left to do that which was right in his own eyes.  What with Bentham on one side and the hierarchs of law, religion, and morals on the other, American society had got itself crosslifted into a practical doctrine of predatory and extremely odious nihilism.

Nock thought it was bad in his day.  If only he could see us now, where legal codes have exploded with laws against faux-crimes (environmental law, I’m looking at you), things actually injurous to others have been removed from legal codes, and honor, fairness, and decency have all but disappeared from our popular culture.  I’m dismayed at the number of otherwise decent people who have no respect for property rights, children who have to respect for anyone or anything, and the commonly heard “it’s only illegal if you get caught”.

Character is what you do when no one is watching.

As usual, Nock discusses the world as he sees it without prescribing any remedy.  I don’t think there is a remedy.  Society cannot and will not be fixed by the likes of Nock.

What I take away from this chapter is an exhortation to live up to a code of conduct far higher than that of most of my fellow man, and to teach my children to do the same.  I don’t always succeed, but I always try.  Analgous to “you can’t teach anyone anything they don’t already know”, I think it is also true that “you can’t change the character of anyone who won’t change their character themselves.”

It is up to us to go into the world and be the example of how society should be.  It may not make a big difference, but it is our duty, and our code of honor will not let us do anything less.

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

- Amos Bronson Alcott

Nock begins his book with some anecdotes about his ethnic heritage (French and British), his early efforts at learning to read and spell (he was largely self-taught), and his instinct toward skepticism even from a very early age.  Then he transitions into a more meaty topic, the one mentioned in the quote above.

The net profit of my first few years of life appears to have been a fairly explicit understanding of the fact that ignorance exists.  It has paid me Golconda’s dividends regularly ever since, and the share-value of my small original investment has gone sky-high.  This understanding came about so easily and naturally that for many years I took it as commonplace, assuming that everyone had it.  My subsequent contacts with the world at large, however, showed me that everyone does not have it, indeed those who have it are extremely few.  They seemed particularly and pitifully few when one contemplated the colossal pretensions which, in its modesty, the human race puts forth about itself.  I found myself projected into a society which was riotously pretentious, forever congratulating itself at the top of its voice on its achievements and abilities, its virtues and excellences, its resources and prospects, and calling on all the world to admire them; and yet a society by and large “too ignorant to know that there is such a thing as ignorance”!  I was immensely amused by this anomaly, yet I surveyed it with a mild wonderment; it was something of a puzzle.

Ignorance exists.  Such a simple statement.

But implied in that statement are some profoundly countercultural ideas.  Primarily, that objective knowledge exists, and that someone could be wrong about something.

How many times have we heard the phrase “differences of opinion”, or “agree to disagree”?  We’ve been taught for decades that everyone is entitled to an opinion, that every opinion is worthy of respect, that nothing of significance is provable, that objective reality is a fiction.

And yet, those of us who have put any effort at all into our own education know that all of these modern platitudes are essentially garbage.  Nock encourages us to embrace what we already know, to accept that truth exists, and to accept the fact that a very large fraction of our fellow men have no interest in objective knowledge or pursuit of that truth.

I was initially put off by the astounding arrogance of such a statement.  My fellow men, mostly ignorant fools?  How could you say such a thing?

Still, everyday experience bears this out.  How many people do we know that go through life with no concern for anything except food, drink, and recreation?  How many people do we know that come out of the woodwork for presidential elections to vote for Obama because he’s black, or against him because he’s supposedly Muslim?  How many people want to really examine the truth of a matter, to really understand root causes, to build themselves a base of knowledge sufficiently broad that intelligent choices can be made today with known consequences tomorrow?  Extremely few, in my experience.  Apathy, willful ignorance, superficial logic, and extreme simplification are the norm, nearly everywhere one looks.

What a slap in the face this is to modern society, where equality is the order of the day.  But equality is not truth, equality is a paradigm invented by man.  Ideas are not equal, ideas can be tested.  Men and women are not equal, they are different in very fundamental ways.  Political systems are not equal, we do not take turns out of some sense of fairness, we do not consider something that is sliding downhill but has not yet collapsed to be a success, we look to the truth of the matter and make a value judgment.

We are so afraid to make value judgments, of implying that one thing, person, or idea is better than another, that we have crippled our pursuit of truth.  Our entire society tiptoes around this reality that we instinctively know exists, so as not to offend one another.  Nock wants us to recall that truth does exist, and that there is value in pursuing it.  Even if our fellow men are not interested in following us down that road.

-----

Thus in my early manhood I learned to respect ignorance, to regard ignorance as an object of legitimate interest and reflection; and as I say, a sort of unconsidered preparation for this attitude of mind appears to have run back almost to my infancy.  Moreover, when I got around to read Plato, I found that he reinforced and copper-fastened the notion which experience had already rather forcibly suggested, that direct attempts to overcome and enlighten ignorance are a doubtful venture; the notion that it is impossible, as one of my friends puts it, to tell anybody anything which in a very real sense he does not already know.

In our pursuit of truth, we may one day get the urge to try to spread this knowledge into the world, hoping to wake humanity up, to prevent unnecessary pain and suffering.  It’s a noble instinct, one that is hard to kick.

But if the vast majority of our fellow men are willfully ignorant, what possible good could it do to get out and try to pass truth along to the masses?

This sentence, “it is impossible to tell anybody anything they don’t already know”, has stuck in my mind for years.  I have come to the conclusion that it is absolutely, unerringly, true.  If someone wants to learn something, they will seek that knowledge out themselves.  Knowledge cannot be forced on anyone, on individuals or on a society, without their consent.  And that consent is only given if they have already chosen to seek that knowledge for themselves.

Nock always viewed his role as hanging out a shingle and speaking to anyone that came to him.  He was not interested in taking his message to the world, as he saw the world as largely uninterested and mostly incapable of tolerating or understanding his message anyway.  This passage is the distillation of that philosophy – an exhortation for truth-seekers to stop trying to force their unwelcome knowledge on others, and to vigorously assist any who show a desire to muddle their way through to truth on their own.

-----

As time went on, I became convinced that Calvin’s idea of invincible ignorance had a validity which the Genevese French lawyer did not suspect.  I was also interested to see that this view had a strong indirect corroboration from the practice of those whom for some odd reason – odd, because no one ever seems to learn anything from them – we misname as “the great teachers of mankind.” Apparently they accepted ignorance as a fixed quantity; apparently also their direct attempts at enlightening ignorance were extremely few and futile.  But why should ignorance have persisted as a fixed quantity throughout history, as apparently it has done; and why should the direct effort at enlightening ignorance remain as inveterately impracticable and inadvisable today as it was in the days of Socrates, Jesus, Confucius, Im-hotep, or as it must have been found to be by the wiseacres of the Neolithic period, if any such there were?

These were the questions which interested me, though I was never eagerly curious about them, or much stirred by finding no answer at hand.  Now and then some circumstance would bring them to the top of my mind long enough for me to note the circumstance’s bearing on them, but no longer.  I never broached them for discussion in my student days.  The theory of progressive evolution was top dog everywhere at that time, and its energumens would have met my questions with the “one plain argument” with which Lord Peter met the doubts of his brothers, in the Tale of a Tub.  This flat negation of history and common experience would have done no more than to illustrate the quality from which the questions take their rise, and would therefore have been pointless.  Not until I was well along in years did I come upon a theory of man’s place in nature which provided my questions with a competent and satisfactory answer.

Nock was mostly active in his writing in the 1930s and 40s, a time when progressive ideology was dominant in both the intellectual and political spheres.  The idea behind progressivism is that both mankind and society are perfectible – with sufficient education and social engineering, we can build an ideal society with little suffering, peace, harmony, etc.

Just like our modern paradigm of equality, all one has to do to see the falsity of the progressive paradigm is to look around.  Mankind is ignorant and apathetic – how could he be perfectible?  It is possible that he could be dominated and forced into a mold, but every time that happens, man rebels against his constraints.  To think that society would voluntarily slip into some utopian ideal if only we teach people to be nicer to one another?  The whole idea is just absurd, and to ignore that fact is to ignore the obvious truth of the nature of mankind.

Nock spent most of his life arguing against the progressive and collectivist elements of society, those who persist in their beliefs about the perfectibility of society, either through willful ignorance or outright maliciousness.  Nock says that his arguments are brushed off, just as similar arguments are largely ignored today, in the face of broad popular support.

Truth is not determined by popularity.  Truth exists independent of one’s will and one’s biases.  The desire to seek that truth is rare, and truth cannot be pushed on those unwilling to seek it.  These are seemingly simple concepts that ideally should have little impact.  However, they are so contrary to popular culture and conventional wisdom that as I internalized the implications, they shook me to my very core.  The seeming arrogance in these statements is astounding, and yet, it should be noted that no where does Nock advocate treating our fellow man with any less dignity because of his lack of interest in truth.  More on that will follow in subsequent chapters.

Superfluous Man - …an individual, possibly of talent and capability, who does not fit into the state-centered pattern of employment.

- Wikipedia

Superfluous.  I’ve often felt superfluous, working a job that I feel contributes little of importance to anyone, holding political views that are unpopular and definitely out of the mainstream, voluntarily choosing a fairly isolated labor-intensive lifestyle for reasons that most people cannot even begin to comprehend.  I’m eccentric, I guess.  But it’s more than that.

A few years ago, I read a book that literally changed my life.  It turned the way I look at the world upside down, not by changing my outlook on things, but by giving me the courage and clarity of thought to embrace what I already knew in my gut to be true.  I’ve been meaning to write about it in detail for quite awhile, but the timing never seemed right.

This book is titled Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, by Albert Jay Nock.  Now, I feel the timing is right, and I’m reading and writing for myself more than for anyone else.

Reading this book is a centering exercise that I try to do at least once a year.  Being in contact with Nock’s ideas and wisdom helps me “take the long view”, and to remember that there are more important things in life than who wins next week’s election.  Nock initially infected me with shock and confusion, combined with a profound sense of finally finding my place in the world.  There are people like me out there, but they are rare.  Over time, Nock has led me to a profound sense of peace, along with instilling in me a sense of mission.

One of Nock’s main theses is that there exist a group of people called the Remnant.  The idea is explored fully here, and it doesn’t really get fleshed out in this book.  However, it is clear who Nock’s intended audience for this book is – the Remnant and people who aspire to that ideal.  After reading this book, I found myself craving a community of like-minded people, literally craving interaction with people of similar goals and ideals.  On several occasions I went on a hunt to find these people.  Nock told me I would fail – these people are rare, they do not draw attention to themselves, and they typically live quietly in whatever community they find themselves.  He was absolutely right.  I found no community, but I did find an occasional website with a snippet here, an essay there.  Part of my reason for writing now is to provide another signpost for people who discover Nock after me, to let them know that even though life can be lonely, you are not alone.

Nock wrote the book as an autobiography, but not a typical autobiography.  He wrote it as an autobiography of the mind, of ideas, of thoughts and ideals that led to a certain way of living.  It is not a recounting of his life, though he does occasionally use anecdotes from his life to illustrate some points.  The book is more a manifesto, an extended statement of a personal philosophy, than an autobiography.  In Nock’s words, it is “the autobiography of a mind in relation to the society in which it found itself.” His goal is to impart knowledge of truth, but not in the way that a teacher passes knowledge of addition and subtraction to his students.  Rather, the intent is to hang ideas out for examination, allowing people to take or leave them as they will.  His goal was always “to see things as they are,” to find truth, to help others find the truth, and to leave his own personality out of this process as much as is possible.  He felt that what is right, is infinitely more important than who is right, and as such, he led a secretive life avoiding all temptation of groupies and hangers-on.  In addition, he put the whole unvarnished, unpleasant truth out there, knowing full well that many are not equipped to handle it.  He felt it is no service to anyone to hide the truth, nor to try to impart truth to minds that were incapable of handling it.  Thus, his passive mode of communication, hanging his ideas out for all to see, letting them come and accept them, or go and reject them, as they pleased.

He was 73 when this book was published, and he died two years later, in 1945.  It was an era of collectivist sentiment, at home and abroad, and his ideas of liberty and individualism were largely drowned out by the prevailing political winds of the day.  But then, and in years that have passed since, people have found him and people continue to find him. 

I’m tempted to discuss some of the specifics of his ideas here, but I think it is best to preserve this entry as nothing more than what it’s title states – an introduction.  So to that end, I will close with a quote.  This is Nock’s introduction to a different book, “The Works of Rabelais,” where he states the value of that book in identical terms to how I would describe the value of this one:

It must be laid down once and for all, that the chief purpose of reading a classic like Rabelais is to prop and stay the spirit, especially in its moments of weakness and enervation, against the stress of life, to elevate it above the reach of commonplace annoyances and degradations, and to purge it of despondency and cynicism.  He is to be read as Homer, Sophocles, and the English Bible are to be read… The current aspect of our planet, and the performances upon it, are not always encouraging, and one therefore turns with unspeakable gratitude to those who themselves have been able to contemplate them with equanimity, and are able to help others to do so.  In their writing one sees how the main preoccupations, ambitions, and interests of mankind appear when regarded “in the view of eternity,” and one is insensibly led to make that view one’s own.  Thus Rabelais is one of a half-dozen writers whose spirit in a conspicuous way pervades and refreshes one’s being, tempers, steadies, and sweetens it, so that one lays the book aside, conscious of a new will to live up to the best of one’s capacity, and a clearer apprehension of what the best may be.

Nock is not interested in how to do and to get, he is interested in how to be and become.  One’s spirit is to be nurtured, truth is to be found and embraced, and excellence is to be sought.  Reading this book, even for the fourth time, helps me remember these things, to once again reorganize priorities in my life, to remember that while the masses are fair weather friends, true self-worth and true joy come not from the approval and agreement of others, but in finding, cultivating and appreciating excellence wherever it may be found.

Nock is a rare character in the history of the world, and I am proud to know him.

First, let’s examine “intellectualism”.  It seems to me that intellectualism is a state in which one is open-minded to new ideas, is able to critically analyze those new ideas based on facts and experience grounded in a good knowledge of history, and is willing to make judgments on those ideas with extreme prejudice.  In addition, one should have a moral grounding upon which those analyses can be based, because making value judgments about public policy, for example, is impossible without a moral code.  In sum total, what is required of an intellectual person is character, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as a willingness to out go out into the world and apply these traits to all aspects of life.

It seems to me that the common definition of intellectualism, one that liberals tend to support and conservatives tend to oppose, is merely the state of having a degree from an Ivy League school.  The state of intellectualism is reached by getting the right diploma, usually conferred in an insular, wealthy, largely liberal environment reminiscent of an echo chamber.  The ideas associated with such intellectualism are rarely tested by merit or by morality, they are simply the most popular ideas put forward by that crowd.  As such, those ideas generally reflect the values and culture of the urban and suburban rich, as well as the ideas of an academic culture largely isolated in its ivory tower for decades on end.

Is it any wonder that Joe Sixpack is going to react against this sort of intellectualism?  It is simultaneously arrogant, dismissive, and frequently amoral, and it leads to conclusions that clash head-on with the common sense morality instinctively embraced by many Americans.

On the flip-side, the charges that Joe Sixpack is uninformed, incurious, uncultured, ignorant, and apathetic, are frequently true.

The charges of elitism and anti-intellectualism are not simply a contest between those who believe in education and those who don’t.  It is a proxy for a clash of cultures – rich, urban, and “educated” versus poor, rural, and not.

Really it is not about intellectualism at all, it is about belonging to the right exclusive club, keeping the riff-raff out, while the riff-raff stand outside telling each other “we don’t need them”.  Elitism versus anti-intellectualism is just a cover that latches on to one of the differences between the cultures, while making one side seem inherently superior to the other.

In the end, both sides miss the point entirely, much to their detriment.  True intellectualism is grounded in real education, something that neither side seems much interested in these days.

There’s no story to most of these books.

No protagonist, no antagonist, no dramatic tension, no conflict, no resolution, no climax… nothing at all.  Typically just animals talking to each other, doing cute yet utterly pointless things.

Maybe that’s why Harry Potter is so popular.  It has a story, and an interesting compelling one at that.

This all let to a discussion with my son about what defines a classic.  It’s interesting walking through different sections of the library.  The kid’s section is packed with books, most of them garbage.  Then there are other sections with books fifty or a hundred years old.  There was plenty of junk published back then too, but over time, the junk is forgotten and the quality endures.  Unfortunately, the librarians and presumably the patrons as well don’t seem to insist on quality for new books.  Just throw everything on the shelves, and every twenty years we’ll throw out the stuff that no one has read in ten years.

Then what’s left after a couple iterations is the classics.

I’m glad this filtering mechanism exists, it makes it a lot easier to pick books.  It’s also why I tend to look at the copyright date of kid’s books before anything else.

New - *toss*
New - *toss*
New - *toss*
Old - ahhh, now this we need to look at more closely

It’s not a sure thing, of course, but it works pretty well.  And it filters out all of the multicultural and environmentalist garbage out, right off the bat.

Another thing I’m finding interesting is how much classic literature is actually ancient mythology repackaged for modern audiences.  Last night, Thumbelina was going to be forced to marry the rich mole.  Persephone and Hades, anyone?

Good stories never die.  Bad stories only clutter up the shelves and make the good ones harder to find.

The forum I typically inhabit is awash with liberals gloating at their candidate’s impending victory.  The gloating is becoming downright rude and obnoxious.

Then, someone comes along and says that a vote for Obama is unconscionable, simply because the guy is a socialist and such policies are doomed not just to failure, but to actively work to the detriment of the entire country.  Man, you want to see a bunch of libs simultaneously get their panties in a bunch, that is the way to do it.

I was shocked to hear people not argue the merits of socialism, but to argue that it is impossible for one to say that one political or economic system is provably better than another.  The conversation literally dissolved into “there is no objective reality, you can’t prove anything”.

I had to bow out at this point, before my head exploded.

How does an adult get to be an adult and still deny that reality exists?  I can understand how one might argue that the moral judgment necessary to declare one economic system over another is arbitrary.  I would contend then that how one makes that moral judgment determines if one is a sociopath or a well-adjusted human being, but at least the ambiguity has been pushed down to the morality of the issue at hand as opposed to the existence of reality itself.

Politics is a popularity contest.  Reality is not.  It is this misconception that has screwed over academia, our cultural values, and our political system for decades.  I don’t think people have become any more wise over time, on average, but I do think they are far more willing to ignore the very real and very observable downsides of the fairy-tale land they want to take us to, while playing up the gumdrops, rainbows, and drum-circles aspects of it.  They are more willing to take this collectivist ideal and beat their neighbors over the head with it, using government coercion to bring everyone into the fold.

That, in itself, is scary.

Do I think Obama means the end of the world?  No.

I do however feel his ascendence signifies a very dangerous throwback to hippie ideals and collectivist political thought.  I haven’t heard the phrase “the end of capitalism as we know it” spoken in polite society ever until this past month.  And I was shocked and dismayed to see how many people pranced with glee at the prospect.

With Obama, the fox is getting the keys to the henhouse.  It remains to be seen exactly what he will do with them, but there is no way anything good will come of it.

Heck, I don’t remember the last time I was that angry about anything.

To top it off, that was the week that my mother-in-law was visiting.  We don’t get along.  She’s a multiculturalism and women’s studies professor, with all of the liberal hippie garbage that goes with it.  Worse, after 50-some years, she still hasn’t figured out that kids need discipline and manners.  She encourages the kids to become little hellions when she’s around.

I’m driving home from work, and I’m trying to figure out a way to blow off some steam.  It’s not often that I shoot as therapy, but that day was one of those days.  I walked through the door, told my wife that I was going to do some shooting, grabbed a few pistols, and went shooting with my son.  Five clips later, I was still angry, but I could manage.  I had put the situation in it’s place, it no longer dominated me.

Twenty minutes later, we sat down to dinner.  Mother-in-law was sitting at the place next to me.  She was acting a little strangely.

Then it hit me – she was terrified of me.

The in-laws don’t do guns.  Father-in-law is a Canadian GFW who would be happy to see all guns confiscated.  Mother-in-law is your typical liberal who sees that maybe someone might want a gun for hunting, or maybe farmers might find guns useful, but otherwise there really isn’t any need for them.  We had spent many years hiding the fact that there were guns in the house when they were around, just to protect their delicate sensibilities.  After ten years, I got tired of the charade and dropped it.  But I had never actually done any shooting with either of them around until that day.

She was terrified - jerky movements, a bit of a shake, no eye contact, etc.

I learned something very important that day.

Liberals don’t understand violence.  At all.

On a personal level, they don’t understand that anger can be directed and vented without causing harm, emotional or physical, to anyone or anything.  They don’t understand that instruments of violence can be used in a way that doesn’t actually hurt anything.  I think most importantly, they don’t understand that the inherent instinct to violence in men can be molded and shaped into a protective instinct rather than a predatory instinct. 

With their misconception that all violence is inherently predatory, the only solution is that all violence must be banned.  Thus – peace rallies, gun bans, and metrosexuals.  They believe there is never (or perhaps, only extremely rarely) a justified use of violence, so all acts of violence are equally abhorrent, all people capable of violence need to be reprogrammed, and all instruments of violence need to be confiscated or rendered impotent.  They fear violence, and those capable of it, so they seek to control people and things capable of violence via government.

There is a huge culture gap in this country, between liberal and conservative, and even more so I think between urban/suburban and rural.  Walking into my house, this suburban liberal got a dose of rural culture that day.  I don’t know what she took away from her experience that day, I didn’t ask.  Something tells me I didn’t make any friends.

Even though they are flaming liberals, I find my in-laws to be more of an annoyance these days than a real problem.  I feel a bit bad exploiting their fears, but uninvited liberals in one’s home using their influence to corrupt one’s children makes normally distasteful tactics more acceptable.  One thing is for certain – these people will not be teaching their version of morality to my kids.

Not in my house, not on my watch.

And yet, I always reflexively give people the benefit of the doubt.  I don’t know why, and it’s kind of a pain.  I’m supposed to learn from my mistakes.

Such feelings naturally roll over into politics.  I don’t want to be forced to pay for other people’s avoidable mistakes.  If they dig themselves into a hole, the last thing I want is for the government to be taking tax dollars out of my pockets to subsidize their mistakes.  Mistakes are supposed to hurt.  Then there is some incentive not to make that mistake again.

This is not to say I’m opposed to charity, I’m all for it.  I just want to be selective and personal about it.

My cynicism and distrust of the rest of the world grew into a libertarian political philosophy.  I felt that I’d rather be totally independent than have the weight of other people’s failures resting on me as well.  I, in essence, wanted to be legally cut off from the rest of society.  My nation starts at my property line.  Trespass at your own risk.

It was only upon reading Nock that I started to break out of this mold somewhat.  Not so much breaking down my walls and opening up to the world - more of understanding why I felt the way I did and learning to approach the world in a more mature manner.

Nock compares the masses of humanity to dogs.  Not in a condescending way, but in a behavioral way.  Dogs are only capable of certain things, and we do not expect more than that of them.  We don’t expect our dogs to climb up on the easy chair, pull out a pipe, and discuss philosophy with us.  They are utterly incapable of doing so, and to expect them to do so makes us the fool, not the dog.

The same is true of the masses of humanity.  The masses are only capable of certain things, and to expect more of them is folly.  Look at pop culture, pop music, pop fashion, look at the mindlessness of it all, and understand that it is so prevalent because that is what people want.  Then look at modern politicians and political campaigns.  We should not be surprised that the superficial nature of politics mirrors that of the culture.

Are the masses capable of more?  Nock contends they are not.  After much thought and observation, I have come to agree.

This simple observation brought me much peace.  Why be angry at the masses for being foolish?  Your dog is going to pee on the floor once in awhile.  It makes you angry, but it’s a dog.  You expect that sort of thing once in awhile.  The masses are going to eat up mindless campaign fodder, randomly select a candidate, and then occasionally elect a socialist.  Same as the dog peeing on the floor – it’s in their nature.  To expect anything different is to exhibit a fundamental misunderstanding of mankind.

In the end, two things have changed.  One, I look at the antics of the masses more with amusement than with anger these days.  That by itself has done wonders for my attitude and demeanor.  Two, I am no longer a libertarian.  I have come to understand that cutting one’s self off from society cannot and will not work.  One must either live in utter isolation, which is virtually impossible, or one must learn as much as possible about the nature of one’s society and learn to live within it.  That’s one of the lynchpins of conservative philosophy – understand the people, accept human nature for what it is, and do not try to change people into something they are not.

I guess in the end, I still look like a cynic.  I don’t feel like one though.  Does accepting reality make one a cynic?  Perhaps it does, when the rest of society has a collective delusion about the nobility of the masses.

This is the first presidential election cycle where I’ve been actively avoiding the news.  I read a few blogs and get a “good enough” perspective on what is going on from there.  I’d like to say I won’t be paying attention on election night, but that’s just not true.  I always vow to stay away and I always fail.  I get too emotionally invested in this sort of thing.

I realized not too long ago that my perspective on elections has changed since the last election cycle, and it took me a bit to figure out exactly what it was that changed.  Then I realized – it was Nock and his writings.  Every time I hear anything from the media about the election, a couple of Nock’s phrases repeat over and over in my head…

…just a bunch of people rooting for sports teams…

…it’s nothing but boob-bumping…

Nock was very cynical about democracy.  He felt that the people certainly had a right to have a say in their government, but just because they had that right didn’t mean that they had the wisdom to use that right effectively.  In fact, what he saw around him was people viewing politics as just another competition, with people lining up to mindlessly root for one side or the other, and the majority of the political process dedicated to banal stunts that might influence this mindless herd of people.

I’m not quite that cynical about democracy.  I think many people make rational decisions about which side to support, though I’m sorry to see that the values of our nation has a whole have slipped to the point that centrism is where it is today.

What drives me nuts is that the candidates and the media seem to play hard to the idiot demographic though.  Yes, Obama misspoke, probably due to suffering from intense fatigue.  Can we get back to talking about how he is a commie?  Yes, McCain has a bunch of houses and hates poor people.  Perhaps we can talk about why he still believes in global warming now?

No, instead we get inundated with stupid inconsequential stuff.  Every single day. Even news outlets that should know better get caught up in it.  National Review in particular is a magazine that I read for its ideas.  Every once in awhile they get caught up in politics rather than ideas, and during election season, it shifts almost all the way to pure politics.  I don’t care about the speculation surrounding McCain’s VP choice. Let me know who it is once he’s picked, and I’ll decide whether or not I can stomach it enough to pull the lever.  (Don’t pick Leiberman.  Please.)

Perhaps the American people aren’t that interested in ideas, and both the media and the candidates are reacting to that.  Or perhaps some fraction on either side is interested in ideas, but there are enough people that are not that a pandering campaign can bring a candidate to a majority.  Or perhaps the only voters who are actually undecided are the ones that are most easily influenced by a circus.

Regardless of the reason, I can’t take it anymore.  Wake me up when it’s time to pull the lever.

With a little skill at computer photo manipulation, one can undo the false colorization and other attempts at hiding detail NASA has used in their photos taken by the Mars rovers to obscure the truth about Mars.  Not only are there people, but also buildings, vehicles, and frighteningly enough, evidence of a major US military presence.

It is my belief that we are waging a significant war on Mars right now, and that this entire military campaign is being hidden from the population of the United States.  Someone in our government is after something on Mars, but they don’t trust the population enough to let us in on the secret. Clearly this is a plot that needs to be exposed as soon as possible.  The people deserve to know what their sons are dying for.

-----

I’ve been doing some reading, and I’ve come to a stunning conclusion.  There are only a handful of people in the world that truly grasp the core ideals of Western civilization to the point of being able to effectively pass this information down to future generations.

It’s all detailed here, in an essay by Albert Jay Nock.  In it, he draws a distinction between the masses and the remnant.  According to Nock:

The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct… The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance.  The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them.  The masses are those who are unable to do either.

That is, the Remnant the few members of our society that are civilized, upstanding, moral, knowledgeable in the arts, sciences, and humanities, capable of recognizing and cultivating beauty, etc.  The masses are… everyone else.

It is my belief that no matter what happens to the rest of society, this Remnant forms the backbone of a civilized society.  Upon the onset of decadence in a society, these people are shoved into the background, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not.  It is at this point that the quiet civilizing force that allows a culture to be both good and great goes into hiding, while the rest of the society decays in large part due to the absence of the influence of the Remnant.  Then, the Remnant quietly try to survive to lend their civilizing force to whatever society rises from the ashes of the previous one.

The Remnant walk among us.  They are not tattooed or branded or otherwise identifiable by sight.  We can only identify them by meeting them and learning of their character and knowledge first-hand.  We should do our best to help them in any way they can, and try ourselves to live up to the standards that come so naturally to them.

-----

A couple of weeks ago I was introduced to a forum of people that generally fit the stereotypical conspiracy theorist mold.  Among the more bizarre people I ran across was someone that was using desktop photo manipulation software to “undo” the false coloring and “stretching” of images taken by the Mars rovers.  It was clear to her, after these distortions were removed, that not only was there life on Mars, but there was a breathable atmosphere, a thriving civilization, and US military units.

Where she saw men in fedoras, everyone else saw piles of rocks.

There were a couple of people that gave her ideas some thought, but most ended up ridiculing her.  It was decided that she was either a spectacularly tenacious troll, or mentally ill.  Judging by what I read, my suspicion was that she was paranoid schizophrenic.

This person claimed to have special knowledge, knowledge that only she was sufficiently capable to unearth and bring to the attention of the world.

What bothered me about the whole thing was this: how is that so different from Nock?  Nock claims knowledge of a special class of vitally important people that move in society largely unnoticed by the community at large.  They typically chose to live in the background, and their influence on the society as a whole is subtle.

Not only that, but Nock claims that this hidden class of people is better than everyone else.  Nock claims special knowledge of special people, people on whom the very survival of our civilization depends.

When I first read this, my reaction was split.  The audacious arrogance of it all hit me first, followed by a gut feeling that Nock is absolutely right.

Some of you may be familiar with Nock and the spirit in which his words are intended.  Nock writes and presents his ideas in a very factual manner, without intending them to be arrogant or showy.  He presents the world as he sees it, without concern for the reaction of the reader to those ideas.  Nock did not see himself as one of the Remnant, so he certainly wasn’t writing in an attempt to put himself on a pedestal.  Nor do I think he was writing to give people an opportunity to declare themselves Remnant and pat themselves on the back.  Rather, I think he was writing to encourage people to look inward and find ways to improve themselves, to work more towards living and being that ideal called the Remnant.  One of Nock’s platitudes is that one cannot improve the world, one can only improve one’s self.  However, one might work toward improving the world by encouraging others to improve themselves.  Rather than singling out individuals for praise, I suspect this was his intent – to describe what he saw as the ideal human state, and even though few reach that state, many can be encouraged to improve themselves and strive toward that ideal.

I have been very reluctant to discuss some of Nock’s writings in public, his idea of the Remnant in particular, because of how his claim to special knowledge comes across to people.  Those of us who prefer moral honorable behavior, and who value learning, knowledge, and understanding of our culture, already come across as strange to much of the populace.  Now to push forth a theory that people like us, maybe even we ourselves, are the rock upon which civilization depends?

That comes across not only as astoundingly arrogant, but also cultish and kooky.  Maybe not quite as bad as the fedoras on Mars lady, but close.

Is it possible to verify Nock’s assertion?

Typically any claims, bizarre ones in particular, are tested via the scientific method.  The fedoras on Mars assertion is rather shallow, in that the lady’s claims to see things in the photographs was obviously false unless one has a spectacularly overactive imagination.  But even so, we have cameras and rovers on Mars – those rock formations could be investigated close up.  She claimed that NASA covered up evidence of human habitation by doctoring pictures.  Raw data from these pictures can be found and analyzed.  Some of this was done, all in vain, because the woman was not interested in a scientific analysis of her claims.  However, this is a good example of the algorithms we instinctively go through to prove an assertion right or wrong.

Nock’s assertion about the Remnant does not lend itself nearly as well to such testing.  Can we identify someone definitively as Remnant?  Can we even make a definitive list of what characteristics such a person would have, in sufficient detail as to make identification possible?  Can we provide concrete support for the claim that embodiment of this list of characteristics makes a person somehow better or more valuable than someone else?

I think the answer is no, because the crux of the argument lies on a personal value judgment.  If one is interested in good outcomes for one’s self and one’s fellow man, one is led to have a moral code.  No one is forced down this path, and this choice can not be proven to be better in the same sense that those rocks can be proven not to be a man in a fedora.  To most of us, the good outcomes of morality are clear evidence of its superiority over the bad outcomes of nihilism.  But nihilism is easy and self-indulgent, and thus many are drawn to it.  When they ask for proof that your way is better, a very different value judgment way back in step one can make it impossible.

However, once one has moved past that step and accepted that good personal and societal outcomes are inherently better than bad outcomes, I think the rest of Nock’s argument follows.  Western civilization is the culmination of thousands of years of trial and error, in many different ways.  In terms of cultural habits that drive personal interaction.  In terms of what we expect of our neighbors, from cleanliness to politeness.  In terms of political systems that encourage freedom and discourage systematic oppression.  In terms of economic systems that give everyone an opportunity to succeed, and with time, provide everyone who cares to take part a way to provide for their own basic needs.  Knowledge of and belief in the superiority of these governmental and economic structures requires not just a grounding in western morality, but also in history and the other social sciences.  Many can simply understand that system X means I have freedom and food, and system Y means I starve and get daily beatings.  But do people understand why personal behaviors A, B, and C are intimately tied into the success of system X, while behaviors D, E, and F break down system X and move it inexorably toward system Y?  Most, even those that understand the superiority of X over Y do not.

That, I believe, is where the Remnant comes in - as a societal storehouse of the knowledge necessary to build a prosperous and functional society.  Even if the current society were to break down, the Remnant would go on, as their knowledge of what is good and right goes beyond mere knowledge into the very core of their beings and behavior.  They and their knowledge will always be there to draw upon, if ever society has need to call upon them.

Nock’s claim of special knowledge of special people can come across as nutty in a similar way as the fedoras on Mars lady to those whose value system diverges from ours at step one.  Unfortunately, it seems that as our culture coarsens more and more, those who value the ideals embodied in the Remnant become increasingly marginalized.  Ideas like the existence of the Remnant get swatted down simply because our new definition of democracy has been socialized - it is a culture in which no one is better than anyone else, and anyone claiming special knowledge or special status is some combination of kooky and dangerous.

For that reason, I don’t go out of my way to shout Nock’s ideas from the rooftops.  But it comforts me to know these people are out there, and I take great joy in occasionally meeting one personally.  In the meantime, I do my best to bring their ideals and knowledge into my own life, for my own enrichment as much as for that of society as a whole.  If I can raise children that carry on those ideals to future generations, I will consider my life to have been a success.

I thought about the voices of all the people I’d met on the campaign trail.  ...  It wasn’t just the struggles of these men and women that had moved me.  Rather, it was their determination, their self-reliance, a relentless optimism in the face of hardship.  It brought to mind a phrase that my pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., had once used in a sermon.

The audacity of hope.

That was the best of the American spirit, I thought – having the audacity to believe that despite all evidence to the contrary that we could restore a sense of community to a nation torn by conflict; the gall to believe that despite personal setbacks, the loss of a job or an illness in the family or a childhood mired in poverty, we had some control – and therefore responsibility – over our own fate.

It was that audacity, I thought, that joined us as one people.  It was that pervasive spirit of hope that tied my own family’s story to the larger American story, and my own story to those of the voters I sought to represent.

I initially took on the exercise of reading this book, though perhaps burden is a more appropriate word than exercise, to better know my enemy.  It took me a little longer to articulate exactly what my goal was – to understand the man and his beliefs, rather than just assume he is a caricature of the typical progressive.  It is easy to demonize one’s opponents without really understanding them – you just stick them in a pre-made box and attack the box.  Frequently in that case, one’s attacks come across as cliched and petty-sounding, only marginally suitable for a real thoughtful critique.

I learned something.

I learned that in this case, at least, the caricature isn’t a caricature.  It’s real.

With very few exceptions, Obama is the party-line progressive of the last 100 years, repackaged in a youthful, charismatic, minority box, ready for immediate consumption by today’s modern, hip, Democratic voter.  There’s rhetoric galore about getting along, about meeting people’s needs, about subsidizing people’s lifestyle choices – all things that are great if you live in San Francisco or Boulder or some politically and culturally homogeneous place where people actually want all of the stuff that he’s selling.

For the rest of us though, it seems that the options presented to us are to get with the program, or get out of the way and hand over our wallets.  I don’t want the culture he’s selling, no matter how many times he pretends that it’s a culture of community and fellowship.  It’s coerced community and forced fellowship, with his cult of personality and a big fat welfare state as it’s centerpiece.

I don’t want the economy that he’s selling either.  He’s very clear that corporations exist to employ people, and their rights in and of themselves are minimal.  Bluntly, it seems that there is nothing that cannot be taken away from a corporation, no limit on what the accommodations they can be forced to make.  You make too much money?  We confiscate it and redistribute that wealth.  You have inflexible working hours?  We force you to negotiate new working hours with each and every employee (no kidding, reference to this was made in passing in the epilogue.) This is part and parcel of the fixed-pie economy method of thinking – corporations exist to hand out jobs and nothing more.  Any second-order effect on the economy, like prices going up in response to mandated inefficiencies, is to be ignored.

At night, the [Lincoln Memorial] is lit but often empty.  Standing between marble columns, I read the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address.  I look out over the Reflecting Pool, imaging the crowd stilled by Dr. King’s mighty cadence, and then beyond that, to the floodlit obelisk and shining Capitol dome.

And in that place, I think about America and those who built it.  This nation’s founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent.  And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union.  And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and their grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams.

It is that process I wish to be a part of.

My heart is filled with love for this country.

What grabs me the most in this whole thing is how Obama can love this country, without understanding it, even a little.  Those Founders didn’t just imagine a nation unfurling across a continent, they imagined a stable and free government in which people could govern themselves in self-determination without fear of oppression and interference.  All of this, and I mean all of it, seems to have gone right over Obama’s head, in favor of his view that the Founders set up a system by which the working man can bang his fists on the table and demand a larger piece of pie.

That’s not America.  And that’s not a vision of America to be proud of.  That’s greed, thuggery, and no matter how you dress it up, that’s democracy subverted into bullying. But it seems that as long as you give people a sense of community in their bullying, it suddenly becomes acceptable.  Everyone else is doing it, ya know?

I, too, wish for a change in the culture.  I want people to work together, to join forces in helping the less fortunate, to push for higher personal and public standards. But I want them to do it voluntarily, to make the choice to live better lives and to demand better from others.  One cannot impose community or cooperation from above – that’s effectively fascism.

I think it would be excessive to say that Obama is the worst thing to happen to this country.  I don’t think his platform differs all that significantly from any of the last few Democratic presidential nominees.  He’s right in the mainstream, as far as Democratic thought is concerned.

But that progressive ideology is something that must be fought tooth and nail every step of the way. Those of us on the right who understand what such things do to our culture, our moral fiber as a people, know that we can’t take much more of what progressivism has already brought us.  There are those who would see us be more like Europe… and there are those who understand and appreciate the uniqueness that America is in the world.

It seems that most people who say that there is no difference between the candidates are those who have an unattainable ideal in mind for what this country should be.  We aren’t going there, like it or not.  What we do have, today, right in front of us, are two candidates – the progressive liberal and the moderate.  I can’t say where the moderate will take us, and I’m as skeptical as the rest of you about him.

However, I now know exactly where the liberal wants to take us, and it is to a place of substantially greater taxes, greater control of your children, greater control of your health care choices, greater control of your diet, justices on the highest court of the land that feel no compulsion to respect the rule of law, etc.  I, for one, cannot sit idly by and pretend there are no differences between the candidates.

Nothing in this book changed my mind about who I would vote for.  But it did cement my reasons for doing so.  I love my country too, but unlike Obama, I love it for the freedom and stability that it provides.  Not just for the coffers that can be plundered and handed out to loyal voters.

Please vote for McCain in November. The future of our nation depends on each and every one of us doing the right thing on election day, even when it hurts our principles to do so.

As someone who long ago decided, along with my wife, that only once of us would work outside the home so that the other could raise the children and homeschool, I find Obama’s talk about the hardship of raising kids in a two-working-parent household to be disingenuous and obnoxious.  On one meager salary, my wife and I bought a small house and lived acceptably well.  Now, it’s a crisis because people can’t send their kids to top schools and have ballet lessons unless both parents are working, and of course, the government needs to help.

Cry me a river.

It’s a manufactured crisis, because people want it all.  They want big nice houses and choice communities, they want two nice cars, big TVs, etc etc etc.  It’s hard to have all of this stuff on one income, so people choose to have both spouses work.  Then they complain that they are stressed and sleep-deprived, and the kids suffer for it.

This is NOT a crisis, except among people with incomes well below the middle class range.  This is a choice people make, a choice with consequences that people want to escape.  Populist Obama, of course, is very happy to promise people assistance in escaping these consequences.

The solution, of course, is “high-quality affordable day care for every family that needs it.” Federal and state day care tax credits, subsidies to middle-class and low-income people, and improved licensing and training for day-care workers.  And since we’ve already got the schools as a pseudo-day-care system, he proposes longer school days, summer school, and more after school programs.  Cap it all off with paid parental leave laws, requiring employers to give people paid time off for parental duties.

What all of this amounts to is forcing someone like me, a father in a single income household, to pay taxes that end up subsidizing the lifestyle choices of others, in greater governmental support of day care and schools that I don’t use. Perhaps a large tax credit for homeschooling would be an appropriate offset, but fat chance you’ll see that anywhere in his agenda.

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If there’s one thing that social conservatives have been right about, it’s that our modern culture sometimes fails to fully appreciate the extraordinary emotional and financial contributions – the sacrifices and just plain hard work – of the stay-at-home mom.  Where social conservatives have been wrong is in insisting that this traditional role is innate – the best or only model of motherhood.  I want my daughters to have a choice as to what’s best for them and their families.

I can’t even begin to describe how irritating I find this passage.

When people make choices about how to run their families and their lives, they typically need information from others to weigh the pros and cons of their choices.  It is usually somewhat difficult for people to experiment with family arrangements to determine what works best for them.  Therefore, people rely on observation of others, as well as tradition and societal wisdom to figure out how to structure their lives.

I agree completely with Obama in wanting my daughters to have choices.  However, unlike Obama, they will be taught early on that choices have consequences, and that not all choices are equal.  Obama wants women to be able to do whatever they want, with the government filling in the gaps to raise their kids via schools and daycare.  His message to women is that no matter how thin you spread yourself, no matter how many tasks you take on, the government will be behind you helping to take up your slack.

That is an awful message to send, one that hurts families and hurts children.  Children need parents, not daycare workers.  There is absolutely no question in my mind that a stay-at-home mom is the best situation for raising children, and in the interests of promoting guilt-free choice for women, Obama is content to blow away all evidence that this is the case and all value judgments about how women choose to live their lives.

I understand completely that compromises need to be made, that some women would prefer to work, that sometimes for financial reasons women have to work. That’s fine, I’m not going to throw stones at women with jobs. People make their choices, and they accept the consequences.

What I can’t stand is a culture that pretends that there are no consequences, or at least no consequences that can’t be effectively mitigated by a federal program.  It’s a big feminist lie – one designed to give women the freedom, even the compulsion, to buck their instincts without guilt, to the detriment of themselves, their families, and society as a
whole.

This chapter is fascinating simply as a presentation of how liberals look at foreign policy.  It’s not often that you see it all in one place.  The chapter starts with a brief summary of American history.

An interesting lesson learned about the liberal perspective - our alliances won the Cold War.  Not our military strength or our economic prowess.  This is so perverse I don’t even know what to say.  Our alliances were necessary but not sufficient components of our victory.  If they were as important as Obama thinks they are, why didn’t the Cold War end the day NATO was formed?

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I have to give Obama some credit here.

...at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan’s worldview.  I didn’t understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile.  I couldn’t be persuaded that US multinationals and international terms of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries to steal from their people.  I might have arguments with the size of Reagan’s military buildup, but given the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed a sensible thing to do.  Pride in our country, respect for our armed services, a healthy appreciation for the dangers beyond our borders, an insistence that there was no easy equivalence between East and West – in all this I had no quarrel with Reagan.  And when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.

If he’s telling the truth, that’s a surprisingly mature view coming from someone on the left.  On the other hand, I’m skeptical that this is the outright truth and that it hasn’t been sanitized a bit.

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As expected, a good chunk of this chapter is dedicated to Iraq.  The book was written in 2006, so some of the material in here is outdated and mostly irrelevant, other than to note that his stance is and always has been that our presence in Iraq is illegitimate, and that we should leave no matter what.  His consistency to a fault is interesting, especially now that we know he wouldn’t even in hindsight have supported an effective policy (the surge) if he knew it was going to be effective.  He’s not one to let practicality get in the way of ideology, apparently.

Then he goes on to talk about foreign policy in more general terms.  There are the typical cliched criticisms - “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma?  Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?” - followed by the statement that we have no coherent foreign policy, and we need one.  It seems to me that for someone to reach the conclusion that we have no coherent foreign policy, one must engage in a fair bit of willful blindness.  Regardless, Obama first states that he has no “grand strategy in my hip pocket”, but of course, he has some suggestions.

First, we must recognize that isolationism is the wrong approach.  Excellent start.

Second, we must recognize that the world has changed – that the major threats to our security come not from “great powers”, but from states on the margins of the civilized world.  We need to maintain our ability to “play the role of the world’s reluctant sheriff”, and yet, our military is too large and should be cut.  He doesn’t say by how much.  In addition, we need to reconfigure the military to be less “fancy hardware” and more troops.  In my mind, more fancy hardware means less dead American troops.  While I can nitpick here, particularly on the military cuts, I generally agree with the philosophy of his statements.

Third, “the United States, like all sovereign nations, has the unilateral right to defend itself against attack,” up to and including a preemptive strike against an imminent threat.  Merely stating this is virtually meaningless though, as conservatives and liberals are typically going to have widely varying concepts of what an imminent threat is, what constitutes an attack on our nation, as well as what constitutes an appropriate response.

Fourth, any international use of force beyond self-defense should be a multilateral action, with “hard diplomatic work ... obtaining most of the world’s support for our actions.” Then, paradoxically, he states that the UN Security Council should not have a veto over our actions.  So in essence – he’s willing to buck the veto of Russia or China, but only if the rest of the world gets on board.  Given the limp-wristed response of Europe to pretty much everything lately, requiring their consent for action is de facto deciding to voluntarily tie our own hands.  Which, to much of Obama’s base, is exactly the idea.

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I have to give him a lot of credit for this, though the devil is in the details:

I believe critics are wrong to think that the world’s poor will benefit by rejecting the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy.

Absolutely true.  He states that he recognizes that the American system has flaws, but he also recognizes that local movements like Hugo Chavez’s socialism or Sharia theocracy are not the way to alleviate people’s suffering.  That’s a stunningly mature observation, and I didn’t expect it of him.

However, he also says that democracy cannot be delivered by the barrel of a gun, and that the only way to true reform is via a home-grown movement.  This is rather naive, given the obvious counterexamples of Germany, Japan, and dare I say it – Iraq.

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Oh, the irony:

I wonder, sometimes, whether men and women in fact are capable of learning from history…

Surely not, or his candidacy would not have gotten this far in the first place.