On the World's Religions

Here are a couple of books everyone should read and keep handy as a reference.  Religious Literacy, by Stephen Prothero, explains how Americans have become so woefully ignorant about faith, and aims to correct the problem by detailing the most essential things we ought to know about the bible and the world's major religions.  God Is Not One, by the same author, gives a more in depth view of each of the world's major faiths, discussing what each sees as the cosmic problem faced by humanity and the divine answer thereto.

EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED FROM READING THE LORD OF THE RINGS

I first discovered Tolkien when, in 5th grade, I was cast as Fili the Dwarf in a local children's theater production of The Hobbit that ran at the Reed Whipple Center.  Reading the novel was a requirement for being in the Play.  I loved the book, and was annoyed that it was described on the cover as "The enchanting prelude to the Lord of the Rings" rather than being able to be its own thing.  But when I was a bit older, and I read the Lord of the Rings, I understood.  I've re-read LOTR many times since.  It was the book that turned me into a reader, and much of the reading I've done since, even today, has been motivated by an attempt to try to find something like what I experienced in its pages.  Of course that's impossible.  Mainly because I am, unfortunately, no longer 12.  Nevertheless, the book has profoundly influenced my worldview on too many subjects to count, including these:

On materialism and the danger of being possessed by our possessions:

“It has got far too much hold on you.  Let it go!  And then you can go yourself, and be free.”  (Book 1 Chapter 1, A Long Expected Party)

On faith:

 “Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker.  I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.  In which case you also were meant to have it.  And that may be an encouraging thought.” (Book 1 Chapter 2 The Shadow of the Past)

"'Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?'  'A man may do both,' said Aragorn.  'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.  The green earth, say you?  That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day.'"  (Book 3, Chapter 2, The Riders of Rohan)

"And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise."  (Book 6, Chapter 9, The Grey Havens)

On free will:

“The two powers strove in him.  For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented.  Suddenly he was aware of himself again, Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant in which to do so.  He took the Ring off his finger.”  (Book 2 Chapter 10, the Breaking of the Fellowship).

On the Nature and Limitations of Evil:

“The shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.  I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them . . . .”  (Book 6, Chapter 1, The Tower of Cirith Ungol)

On the Persistence of Evil and the Need for Preparedness:

“‘It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, master Warden,’ answered Eowyn, ‘And those who have not swords can still die upon them.’” (Book 6 Chapter 5, The Steward and the King)

On the objective nature of good and evil:  

“‘How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’  “‘As he ever has judged,’ said Aragorn.  ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men.  It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”  (Book 4, Chapter 2, The Riders of Rohan)

On the power of duty, as an antidote to despair:

“‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times.  But that is not for them to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” (Book 1, Chapter 2, The Shadow of the Past)

“‘[M]ay I not now spend my life as I will?’  ‘Few may do that with honor,’ [Aragorn] answered.”

“A time may come soon,’ said [Aragorn], ‘when . . . there will be need of valor without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defense of your homes.  Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.”  (Book 5, Chapter 2, The Passing of the Grey Company)

“He knew all the arguments of despair and would not listen to them.  His will was set, and only death would break it.”  (Book 6, Chapter 3 Mount Doom)

On the Nature of Stewardship: 

“‘[T]he rule of Gondor, my lord, is mine and no other man’s, unless the king should come again.’ ‘Unless the king should come again?’ said Gandalf.  ‘Well, my Lord Steward, it is your task to keep some kingdom still against that event, which few now look to see.  In that task you shall have all the aid that you are pleased to ask for.  But I will say this: the rule of no realm is mine, . . . .  But all worthy things that are in peril as the world now stands, those are my care.  And for my part, I shall not wholly fail of my task . . . if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair or bear fruit and flower again in days to come.  For I also am a steward.  Did you not know?’” (Book Five, Chapter 1, Minas Tirith)

On the corrupting dangers of power, and the basis for conservative politics:

“Do not tempt me!  For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself.  Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.  Do not tempt me!  I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused.  The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength.”  (Book 1 Chapter 2 The Shadow of the Past)

“‘Well, no, the year’s been good enough,’ said Hob. ‘We grows a lot of food, but we don’t rightly know what becomes of it.  It’s all these “gatherers” and “sharers”, I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’” (Book 6, Chapter 8, The Scouring of the Shire.)

On the Restoration of the Gospel and the Second Coming

"For it is said in old lore: the hands of the king are the hands of a healer. And so the rightful king could ever be known."  (Book 5, Chapter 8, The Houses of Healing).

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

James Madison by Richard Brookhiser

This is not really a full throated biography.  We learn little of Madison's upbringing, and only the sparest of details about his relationships with his siblings, parents, or even with his famous wife Dolley.  Given the definitive-for-their-time and exhaustive-as-can-be-managed-in-one-volume biographies we've recently received for Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson (as well as several recent books on Franklin) Madison is obviously due for such treatment, and, as it is now his turn, there is no doubt some famous author is busily researching and scribbling away on such a project right now, for inclusion on some publisher's future Father's Day list.

In the meantime, this will do.  And this is a political biography.  Brookhiser argues that Madison is not only the father of our Constitution but the father of our politics as well.  His admiration for his subject rests in his admiration for Madison's political achievements: as a formidable advocate of religious liberty, as the moving force behind the creation of our Constitution and of its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, and as a leading partner, with Jefferson, in establishing the Virginia Dynasty in our presidential politics.  That's where Brookhiser's interests lie, and that's what he focuses on. 

This focus is helpful, and provident, as Madison's ideas obviously still matter a great deal.  By giving us just a brief narrative background of Madison's early years and family life, Brookhiser is able to slow down and start giving more detail when Madison's life gets to what Brookhiser obviously considers "the good parts."  These would be the political battles in which Madison framed and defended and won acceptance for the ideas and ideals which are still being argued about today.  Rather than be bothered by what some have referred to as the "James Madison Problem" of Madison's inconsistency on some political issues (especially States' rights vs. the strength of the National government, which seemed to vary depending on which office Madison was holding at any given time), Brookhiser argues that no life lived as long in the political arena as Madison's, should be expected to live up to some ethereal ideal of clean and virtuous consistency.  Indeed, Brookhiser encourages us not only to admire Madison's genius for winning and accomplishing that which he wished to accomplish politically, but to also admire, rather than hold our noses, at the muck and tumble and sometimes dirty politics that was necessarily involved.

And it must be said, Madison was consistent in many of the areas where it counted most: especially in standing up for religious liberty, and in the fight to preserve the Constitution as creating a limited national government of enumerated powers.  If he sometimes went too far on this latter point, and, through his and Jefferson's "nullification" schemes set the ideological and intellectual precedents for secession and Civil War, he can surely be forgiven by our generation, which has seen our leaders go far too far in the opposite direction, allowing the Federal Government to become a true behemoth with far more reach into our individual lives than any of the founders, likely even Hamilton, would have approved.  We could use a little Madison around here these days.  Essential reading.

CONSCIENCE AND ITS ENEMIES Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Securalism, by Robert P. George

Having spent my entire life on the losing side of the so-called "culture wars" and believing as I do, deeply, that many of the most persistent problems in our nation and our world are a direct result of the anti-religious, anti-marriage trajectories of our political and social history, it is comforting to know that there are still people who are willing to think and write like Robert P. George.  And to do so with such incredible power.

"The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy and the institution of marriage.  These institutions will stand together, or they will fall together.  Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both of these institutions, and they fully understand the connection between them.  We who believe in the market and in the family should see the connection no less clearly." Robert P. George, Conscience and Its Enemies, p. 13, 2013 ISI Books

This book is an invaluable resource for those who are concerned with the attacks on religious liberty which seem to be key to the left's agenda in the 21st century, and who are looking for strong moral and logical and legal and historical and philosophical counterarguments.  George doesn't just have the scholarly credentials of an ivy league professor (lot's of people have those).  He has the actual intellect too. 

This is an incredible book.  I have returned to portions of it again and again since I first read it.  A book that belongs on every conservative's bookshelf.  A first source for the best and deepest and most important arguments about a variety of our political questions.

"What has also become clear is that the threats to the family (and to the sanctity of human life) are necessarily threats to religious freedom and to religion itself--at least where the religions in question stand up and speak out for conjugal marriage and the rights of the child in the womb.  From the point of view of those seeking to redefine marriage and to protect and advance what they regard as the right to abortion, the taming of religion (and the stigmatization and marginalization of religions that refuse to be tamed) is a moral imperative."  Id. at p. 9.

Five Stars Out of Five.

Great Theodore Roosevelt Quotes on Reading

Some great quotes on reading from Theodore Roosevelt, taken from "Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States" complied by Daniel Ruddy (Harper 2011 -Trade Paperback Edition) Part I, On Writing History / History as Literature:

"Books are the greatest of all companions. Ah, I like books--like to look at them, like to see them standing there so learnedly on the shelves, like to read them, review them, and would, if I had time, like to write them. I like to read better than anything else. I am forever reading. It is history, in great party, history with action to it, which most attracts me." 

"I admit a liking for novels where something happens.  I want ghosts who do things.  I don't care for the Henry James . . . kind of ghosts.  I want real sepulchral ghosts, the kind that knock you over and eat fire, ghosts which are ghosts and none of your weak shallow apparitions."

"I am old fashioned, or sentimental, or something, about books.  Whenever I read one I want, in the first place, to enjoy myself, and, in the next place, to feel that I am a little better, and not a little worse, for having read it.  It is only the very exceptional novel which I will read if He does not marry Her, and even in exceptional novels I much prefer this consummation.  I am not defending my attitude.  I am merely stating it."  

Revolutionary Characters, by Gordon S. Wood

Although my sympathies were not always in the same place as the author’s, I found this short book to be a wonderful and vitally important read for anyone wishing to understand the revolutionary period, and the founding of the United States.  It sets the stage with an introductory chapter on the Enlightenment, and then gives us brief vignettes of eight of the leading figures of the founding era: Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Paine, and Burr.  It then concludes with a chapter on public opinion, describing how the founders established a democratic nation which abolished the very system which had made their own elitist class, and its contributions, possible.

The book is clearly meant as primarily an intellectual history.  This should not be surprising. Gordon S. Wood is one of America’s most lauded and well respected academic scholars of the Revolutionary era, and he is as interested in the historiography of the time--the history of how historians, and Americans in general, have treated and seen their founders in subsequent decades-- as he is in the founders’ actual lives.  He is steeped in the scholarly and academic debates over this time period which university professors, writing for a limited audience, each other, in scholarly journals, have engaged in both recently and in the past.  He sees himself as one who can be an arbiter in these issues (as in his treatment of whether there is “a James Madison problem”). He is also less interested, at least in this volume, than a popular historian (McCullough, for example) might be, in the events which the founders lived through and influenced, and also less interested in their personalities, than he is in their intellectual writings and contributions and the value and effects of their political and philosophical ideas.  One major exception to this is Washington, who was not a deep thinker, but a man of action, whose importance Woods nevertheless explains in one of the first chapters of this volume, entitled simply and without irony, "The Greatness of George Washington."

The impression left by this approach is far different than that which would come from reading a lengthier biography of any of these men.  And it has its pros and its cons.  There is, after all, more to a person than merely their ideas.  McCullough’s John Adams is a personal hero of mine, for the way he lived his life, and the beauty and sincerity of his writings on a variety of subjects, reaching far beyond politics.  Wood’s John Adams becomes irrelevant after his contributions to independence, because his constitutional theories had become obsolete (with no connection to the more important Federalist Papers) by the time he wrote them down, in a post-aristocratic America.

On the other hand, the chapters on Jefferson and Hamilton, focused as they are on these two men’s political ideologies, provide an extremely handy primer and distillation of where and how they and their fellow Republicans and Federalists differed from each other.  It would have been helpful to have read these chapters in this book before reading any of the much lengthier biographies of Hamilton and Jefferson currently available, to better understand why those biographies matter.  As anyone who starts reading heavily about the founders will soon learn, to understand the differences between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians is a key to understanding much of our history.  Theodore Roosevelt once claimed that Lincoln had bridged the gap between these two philosophies, finally giving us a united Hamiltonian Nation, but founded on Jeffersonian democracy.  TR’s statement requires a lot of background knowledge and information to even understand, let alone agree or disagree with.  And this book provides the shortest possible method for understanding what he meant.

Key takeaways and/or my own personal impressions developed while reading this book:

-Washington’s greatest deed, which brought him international fame and established the basis for a free American republic, was the return of his commission to the Continental Congress, after successfully winning the revolutionary war.  America is one of the only nations on earth which, after experiencing a military or otherwise violent overthrow of the existing order, did not find itself led by a despotic military dictator, installing himself into office for life.  There would be no Cromwell, no Napoleon, no Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein in America, and this would be the case for one reason: George Washington’s greatness in refusing to pursue any such course.

-Franklin, like Hamilton, rose through the ranks of his society due to the patronage of wealthy and well-placed men, in a system of patronage which was a key feature of the society at the time, and its primary method for lifting talent out of obscurity.  He loved Britain, and after gaining the wealth and fame which allowed him to retire in his 40s, he aspired to a position of rank and importance within the British Empire, which would allow him to positively influence its continuing success.  He was Americanized when these hopes were denied.

-The great irony of the FDR-created shrine to Jefferson in Washington D.C. is that none of its quotes include the theme which was nearest and dearest to Jefferson’s heart and about which he wrote as much as anything: the need to keep the United States government small, its judiciary weak, and the focus of power in all but foreign affairs in local State hands.  Still Jefferson probably qualifies as a modern day liberal.  His affection for the French Revolution, despite its excesses, and his alignment with Paine’s views on religion and criticism of Washington (though he would never have written about either of these subjects with the directness or viciousness Paine employed), and his belief in the future rather than the traditions of the past, all make him look very much like a forbear of later American Marxists, willingly blind to the evils of Communism.

-Hamilton wanted America to be a great nation, like unto Britain, a fiscal-military state.  He would have loved the modern United States.  He would have loved our sophisticated banking system and stock exchanges and financial institutions.  He would have cheered the independence and strength of our judiciary (if not all of its decisions). He would have loved the social mobility afforded by free enterprise and business.  He would have loved our strong and well funded military and the taxes which allow its strength, and he would have been immensely proud of our CIA and our Pentagon.  He would have loved that most Americans think of themselves, first and foremost, as Americans, and that their patriotism is generally directed at their nation rather than their State.  He would have loved that we abolished slavery.  But he would have been horrified by how democratic and egalitarian we have become.

-Madison was more nationalistic, and a bigger advocate of centralized government, than even Hamilton, going into the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, and the Virginia plan which he sought to pass at that convention was even more federalist than anything the federalists would have dreamed of, reducing the States to what Woods describes as little more than bureaucratic administrative units of the Federal Government.  Nevertheless, after the Constitution was enacted, he quickly allied himself with the small-central government, pro-states-rights Jeffersonian Republicans.  This inconsistency is the “Madison Problem” which Woods tries to argue, but not very convincingly in my opinion, doesn't really exist.

-While many would criticize Madison’s inept handling of the War of 1812, which led to the burning down of the American capitol, Madison was extremely proud that the nation made it through the crisis without devolving into a fiscal military state.  (Here is a great mystery of American history.  The founders feared the threat to liberty represented by a standing army.  America today has the largest standing army in the world. But, unlike many other nations which have experienced various military coups, our military has, for decades, served us well, and never posed any real threat to our liberty that I can think of.  Why is that?  This would be a topic worth someone writing a book about.)

-The one virtue/ideal/ideology on which all of the founders seem to have agreed was the importance of what they called disinterestedness: that is to say, their duty to involve themselves in public affairs for the benefit of the public, and of the entire nation, without the hope of thereby acquiring personal or financial gain, beyond an honorable reputation.  If the greatest thing Washington ever did was to imitate his Roman hero Cincinnatus, by returning his commission at the end of the revolutionary war, it was based on this value and virtue.  Similarly, the greatest thing Hamilton may have ever done, motivated by the same virtue, was to work tirelessly to keep the Federalists in congress from throwing the tie vote between Jefferson and Burr towards Burr.  Despite his own fears that Jefferson’s political ideology might undo everything he, Hamilton, had accomplished through his Federalist allies in the Nation’s first twelve years, Hamilton believed there was something even worse that could happen to America than the election of a President whose political views were radically different than his own: the election of a President, Burr, whose every instinct was to use political office for personal gain, and who did not believe in disinterestedness.  That’s a great story, and one that all Americans, Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, can appreciate, as a part of our legacy we ought to be proud of, and, to the extent necessary, try to reclaim.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956, by Anne Applebaum

This was the perfect book to read after completing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, telling, as it does, the rest of the story, of what happened after Hitler's death and the fall of Nazi Germany, to the Eastern European nations "liberated" by the Soviet Union.  The story of how the Soviet Union sought, from the years 1945, until the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956, to convert the citizens of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Ukraine into committed communists is absolutely fascinating, and highly disturbing.

They tried, at first, under the pretense of cooperating with the other WWII Allies, and perhaps even believing that their ideas deserved to be implemented on their own merits, to have the people of these nations "choose" communist leaders (somewhat) democratically, through elections which were only partially corrupt. When that proved a complete failure, and it became clear that the citizens of Eastern Europe didn't want what they were selling, the Communists quickly gave up all pretenses of democracy (though they still utilized the word, as well as many others) and banned opposition political parties, took over the control of all private organizations, starting with scouts and other youth organizations, formally banned the newspapers they had previously simply refused to provide with paper, and took over formal control of the radio, the remaining newspapers (utilized to editorialize about the evils of reactionary religion), previously private businesses, large and small, and implemented their command economy and totalitarian political system.  Soon, soon, soon, they told the cooperative people (the ones who weren't being arrested and sent to the Gulag or shot) prosperity will come.  It never did, while in Western Europe, the economies flourished.  And after 44 years, the Soviet Communists finally gave up and went home.

I have a relative who is a Marxist professor of Latin American studies at a University in the United States. He told me once that Marxism had never been tested or tried in its correct form, so there was no way to actually claim that its theories had been proven false.  The next time someone tells me that, I will use this book . . . to hit them repeatedly in the nose.

One positive thing must though be stated in favor of the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe, which I learned from reading this book back to back with the Rise and Fall.  When they finally conceded the reality that their experiment was an unsustainable failure, and withdrew from the nations of Eastern Europe, the Soviets did at least leave behind living citizens, psychologically traumatized from the decades long effort to kill their souls, to be sure, but still alive, residing in nations that were at least sufficiently established to be withdrawn from.

Had the Nazis won WWII, and fully implemented the plans they had already begun to execute while the war was still waging in the early 1940s, there would be no Poland, no Hungary, no Czechoslovakia for anyone to have left in 1989, and no native populations of living Polish, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian or Ukrainian citizens to turn their countries back over to.  Hitler's plan was to leave the peoples of these nations completely destitute, and reduce the "inferior" slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia to absolute slavery.  The vast majority of them were to be slaughtered, or simply left to die in the inevitable post-War famines.  As for the rest, they were to be denied education.  They were to be denied religion.  And they were to be enslaved, either to farm their own prior lands for the benefit of Germany, or as imported slaves living within Germany. The Soviet Union at least pretended to be striving to build a better world for the people of these countries, and many Soviets may have actually believed in the propaganda. After all, communism was a powerful idea, which continues to deceive many otherwise intelligent people even today.

I've always been bothered that "victory" in WWII still left the peoples of Eastern Europe (including Poland, on whose behalf Britain had declared war against Germany in the first place) enslaved by a foreign dictatorial power.  So, understanding the difference between what was offered by the Nazis and what was offered by the Soviets does at least give me some comfort.  Communism was, at least, the lesser of the two evils.

Still, Communism has ultimately left behind even more corpses than Naziism did, if not all of them in Eastern Europe.  Its beliefs and ideology, and why they are false and why they fail, needs to be understood.  So too, how leftists seek to dominate the institutions of a society in order to propagate their ideology must also be understood.  For the cold war between atheist collectivists and religious believers in free enterprise never really ended.  It just became more subtle, and moved, geographically, from Berlin to the United States of America.  It's a war that will never be completely over, because it is, essentially and at its core, the same war described in the Book of Revelation and the Pearl of Great Price.  With the same competing ideologies.  As a wise man once said, in history, the sets and costumes may change, but the plot never does.  This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of left-wing totalitarianism and it deserves to be far more widely read than it will be, and to be promoted far more vigorously than it has been (by our own leftist-dominated educational, media, and similar institutions).  It is dedicated "to those Eastern Europeans who refused to live within a lie."  I greatly fear there will continue to be a great need for such people in the future.  If we can find them.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

What can be said about this book?

It deals with some of the most important subjects a person can study in this lifetime: (a) the causes of WWII, in simple numerical terms, the single most catastrophic event in human history, causing the death of 60 million people, more than any other plague, war, or catastrophe on record; (b) the attempted, and almost successful, genocide of the Jewish people in the world's most horrifyingly bureaucratic holocaust; (c) the simply incredible methods and means by which, in one of Western Civilization's great stronghold's, a government and a ruler who were dedicated, wholly and openly and overtly, to monomaniacal evil, came, through bluff, aggression, and dark luck, to seize and then maintain absolute power over an enthralled populace; (d) the equally incredible methods and means by which that government and that ruler, aided and abetted at every turn by its own neighbors' greedy participation, or war-wary appeasement, took control over a large section of central Europe without having to fire a single shot, in a series of coups which could have been turned back at any time by a single act of intestinal fortitude on the part of France or Britain, had they been willing to exercise it; (e) the waging of a total and complete war, for the purpose of killing off and/or enslaving the "lesser" Slavic peoples of Europe; (f) the abject ruination of the lands and people of Poland and other Eastern European states as they were first divvied up by the Germans and the Russians, and then used as their battlefields; (f) the nature of totalitarian government; (e) the setting of the scene for the establishment of the iron curtain and the beginning of the cold war.

The book tells this story from a very focused perspective.  We don't learn much about what is going on in the U.S. or in Britain or the Soviet Union during these years, except as they relate to events in or caused by Germany.  It is Germany's history we are learning, but not from a friendly source.  William Shirer does not pretend to be writing a detached, objective, or academic history.  He is telling an amazing story and doing so as accurately and as compellingly as he can. That's not to say he is sloppy or breaks any rules.  If the specifics of an event are disputed, he'll give us more than one account and tell us the sources and offer his own take on which version may be the most accurate and why.  But he is not interested in academic debates about economic or philosophical causes and effects. He is a working journalist, who was living in and writing from Berlin during most of these events, and he is willing to relate his own personal reactions, and to describe his perception of the German people's moods and responses.  He takes sides.  He despairs at the stupidity of the allies at certain key moments.  He is appalled by the Germans.  (When translated, the book was not well received in Germany.  Its author was accused of being anti-German by West Germany's prime minister. The book clearly discomfited the German people, who wanted to believe that Nazi-ism was a phenomenon which could arise among any people, given the right conditions, and was not a peculiarly German evil.  The German people may have been right about this  -- that is an argument for another day. But the point here is that Shirer tells a great story, because he isn't afraid to call it like he sees it.)  

Most importantly, Shirer did his homework.  He dug through the Nazi journals, diaries, and official but secret histories in the archives which the allies seized at the end of WWII, rifled through briefly for the trials at Nuremberg, and then stuck in a warehouse somewhere until Shirer, Indiana-Jones-like, came along to dig in and find their treasures.  We know what key German leaders were thinking before and after the major events.  But our narrator, having lived also through these events, can still get us emotional about them.  It is the best of both worlds: a personal account, with footnotes.  The book is a page-turner.

Yes.  It's very, very, long.  Any given chapter could have been made, with a few more paragraphs, into its own short book, which would have stood as one of the most detailed accounts ever published of any particular portion of this history.  Yes, even though it was always a compelling page-turning read, I set it aside for a few months at least twice to read other books that were of more immediate interest to me in a particular time period, and then came back to finish it later.  But that may have had more to do with the book's subject matter than its length.  The book deals with a great deal of darkness.  Sometimes I just needed to read something else for a while, instead of a book that made me want to puke.

There are some books that I feel each of my children should read. Some books that I think it would be wonderful if every American could read.  This is a book that everyone on the planet ought to read, at some point in their lives.  It's that important to know what happened here and to come to terms with it.

Coolidge, by Amity Shlaes

"Debt takes its toll."  Could a book with that as its opening sentence have been published at a more opportune time?   Well, yes, it probably could have.  A few years ago, before it was too late.

It is difficult to imagine a President less likely to stir the interests of modern readers than Calvin Coolidge. He was a reticent man with a non-flamboyant personality, and, therefore, inherently less interesting to read about than say, Theodore Roosevelt.  He presided during times in which nothing of great historical significance occurred: no depressions or world wars or civil wars or major social movements.  And, so, I'll admit that, at times, this new Coolidge biography by Amity Shlaes was pretty dry stuff.  Nevertheless, after learning more about him, he might just be one of my favorites.

Utilizing the theory of "scientific taxation" (which we would recognize today as essentially supply side economics) he was able to improve the economy and the government's ledgers.  Coming into office at a time when the country was not doing well economically, and the government was in debt, he embraced a philosophy that was the opposite of our current President's, who came into office under similar circumstances.  Instead of doubling down on debt through massive Keynesian stimulus packages, Coolidge reduced taxes, and let the citizens of the United States, with more of their own money in their own hands, improve the economy.  At the same time, he reduced government spending.  The result?  The economy improved, and government revenues increased.  Reaganomics without the (needed and appropriate cold war- ending) military spending increases.

Coolidge was slow to heed calls for federal aid to disaster stricken regions of the country, believing that State governments should be primarily responsible for their own citizens' well being, and that private, rather than governmental, welfare should be drawn upon first.  And he insisted on maintaining tight control over budgets in the executive offices and its departments.  In short, he may very well have been the last President of the United States who actually believed in the Constitutional notion of a Federal Government of limited and enumerated powers, and, though I haven't looked it up, it must certainly be the case that federal spending per year during his Presidency was lower than it has ever been since.

Alas, his successors did not heed his example.  As economic clouds erupted a few years after he left office, his predecessors, such as Hoover and FDR, met those crises with a new deal of unprecedented governmental spending and ever more intrusive federal governmental involvement in the affairs of the economy.  And, despite the many ways in which that federal intervention likely prolonged the agony of the depression, we have never looked back.

But, if we ever do look back, and if (in some far distant future generation, when the Obama era's debts have finally been paid down) we seek to understand how it was that, once upon a time, we were able to live within our means and not mortgage our entire economy to China, Calvin Coolidge would be a good place for us to start.

Is America’s Decline and Fall Inevitable? A Pessimistic View of the Current State of America. Part I: Introduction

My reading of late has been incredibly pessimistic. But, just as third and fourth century Romans had reason for pessimism as they viewed the state of their society and warily meditated on the barbarian hordes beyond their gates, there is, today, real cause for pessimism.  It is unfortunately all too easy to conclude that Western Civilization is about to see another historic fall.  If so, then, as America, not Rome, is now the center of the west, the fall of the U.S may be where the decline will happen most dramatically.

The portrait of a society on the brink of ruin: 

-U.S. Debt as a percentage of GDP: 1981 32.5% ; 2012 100.8%
-Number of Workers per every social security recipient: 1950 16.5 ; 2012 2.8
-Percentage of population living in a home receiving governmental benefits: 1983: 30% ; 2012 48%
-15 to 24 year old suicide rate: 3 times what it was in 1950
-Percentage of children born to unwed mothers: 1960 5.3% ; 2013 48%
-Statistical probabilities for children of unwed mothers: More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime; roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school; a third more likely to drop out before completing high school; 80% percent more likely to live in poverty.

Maybe there is a way out, but it looks a lot like our society is doomed to implode sometime soon, and anyone who doesn’t see the danger has his head buried in the sand.  The sand in question is admittedly very inviting. For many, life is good in Western Europe and the United States right now, but it is good in a way that is economically and demographically unsustainable.  It is being financed by borrowing billions of dollars from other countries, and passing those bills on to the next generation.  But the decline in fertility throughout the western world means there will be no next generation to pay those bills, unless the Muslims being imported into Europe to replace the missing generation vote to keep paying these taxes for the elderly heretics they support, and the third-world, poorly skilled, poorly educated immigrants being imported into America want to keep paying taxes for recipients of this largesse with whom they will share no particular cultural or ethnic affinity.  The “promise” which liberal Utopians have been advertising for years, an ambition-crushing cradle to grave welfare state, in which millions get to live like prisoners, or trust fund beneficiaries, being fed and clothed, but never accomplishing anything that might lead to a valid sense of self-worth and justified satisfaction, turned out to be achievable after all, just not sustainable.  It’s a party that only one generation, or maybe two, will get to enjoy before the bills come due and there’s nobody around to pay them.  Socialists always run out of other people’s money, and this trend is accelerated when the people themselves disappear.

Such are the happy thoughts you get to think after reading books like Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration, How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (Penguin Press 2013); Jonathan Last, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, America’s Coming Demographic Disaster (Encounter Books 2013); How the West Really Lost God, a new theory of secularization by Mary Eberstadt; and reviewing old favorites like Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation, or The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet.

So, how did we get here?  It has been said that every civilization is only one generation away from collapse, if it fails to transmit its core values to the barbarian horde of newborn babies which arrive every year.  After 500 years of ascent and dominance, Western civilization’s last two generations have now failed to meet that challenge.  The values of Western Civilization were not transmitted to those in our society who are now under 35.  Instead, those values were deconstructed and critiqued by a news and entertainment media and academia whose ranks were filled with red diaper babies and other societal skeptics, acting as the vanguard of the non-believers.  And so, most citizens of the first world democracies no longer believe what their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents believed, and they no longer behave as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents behaved. And, as culture and behavior and ideas and beliefs matter, the nations of the west have fallen into decline, with America the last holdout, whose citizens no longer know what they were holding out for.

What Is Western Civilization?

I love the idea of Western Civilization as a three-legged stool, based on the interplay between biblical, Judeo-Christian religion inherited from Jerusalem, the love of reason and art inherited from Athens, and respect for the rule of law, rather than the rule of might, inherited from Rome. This is a concept of Western Civilization that is beautifully expressed in an article by George Weigel, “The Handwriting on the Wall” which can be read here: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-handwriting-on-the-wall.

A stool needs three equally sturdy and equally lengthy legs to stand.  Cut or unduly emphasize the importance of any of the legs of our society, and the society will fall.  This is why it is such bad news that, one by one, the values westerners inherited from Athens, from Jerusalem, and from Rome, are collapsing.

Is America’s Decline and Fall Inevitable? A Pessimistic View. Part II: The Fall of Athens: The End of Reason and the Rise of Emotion.

“No wonder your President has to be an actor, he’s gotta look good on television.”  Doc Brown, Back to the Future.

TechnoUtopia

Many would argue that we are, today, living in an era in which our inheritance from Athens is stronger than ever.  We have allowed scientific inquiry to raise us to heights previous generations could have only dreamt about.  Before I was five years old, we had put a man on the moon.  But the phone in my pocket now holds more computing power than the rooms full of computers that helped us to put him there.  Clearly, we are living in the age of reason, science, technology, and intellectual advances.  As for art: our movies and television dramas, the 20th and early 21st Century’s favorite mass medium pop cultural events, integrate music, storytelling, art, design, costuming, acting, and state-of-the-art special effects to create spectacles that would have made the groundlings in Shakespeare’s globe weep.

When it comes to upholding our cultural inheritance from Athens, many would argue, we have nothing to fear.  We believe in reason, science, technology, and the arts.  We are standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants and reaching, literally, for the stars.

The Stupidity Problem

The problem with this rosy scenario is that it ignores a few inconvenient facts, about how stupid the vast majority of Americans have become in this age of “reason” as our electronic devices, technologically impressive wonders that they are, make the humans who use them increasingly less impressive. As Mark Bauerlein has argued in his book, The Dumbest Generation (Tarcher Penguin 2008), television, video games, social networks on the internet, mobile phones, and other video devices have had the effect of completely killing reading among the emerging generation, and that in turn has killed much of the functional capacity of their brains.

Troubling signs of the times include: The incredibly tiny percentage of the population that has the slightest idea how their mobile phones actually work, but play with them for hours which used to be spent, by their grandparents, reading or learning to play a musical instrument; the numbers of American Ph.D recipients in medicine, science, and technology who were raised in foreign, non-Western, countries, compared to the percentage of native-born American citizens who are qualified to pursue a similar education; that when an American calls a help-line to assist him or her with a technological conundrum, the Indian on the other end of the line has been trained, not without reason, to think of Americans as fairly stupid, and to patiently help them through their issues using the simplest language possible; that while the percentage of High School graduates pursuing college has increased, so also has there been an increase in the number of American college students, even those arriving on government funded scholarships, who require remedial course-work during their first year; that most Americans cannot identify any of the literary, historical, biblical, or classical allusions referenced in their most popular entertainments; and that a large majority of High School graduates will never voluntarily read a book after leaving High School (and that’s the statistic for the graduates).

The End of Reading and the Rise of Screens.

The most telling blow to the idea that we are living in an age of reason and appreciation for the arts is to be found in the decline of reading, and the concurrent decline in participation in other forms of art.  It has now been almost a decade since the National Endowment for the Arts published its landmark study, “Reading at Risk”.  Key take-aways from the press release that accompanied that 2004 report:

“Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey . . . .  Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline - 28 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups.  The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers. . . .  Reading also affects lifestyle, the study shows. Literary readers are much more likely to be involved in cultural, sports and volunteer activities than are non-readers. For example, literary readers are nearly three times as likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times as likely to visit an art museum, more than two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to attend or participate in sports activities. People who read more books tend to have the highest level of participation in other activities.”

This is not a portrait of a culture that has retained its ties to the values of Athens.  Reason requires reading.  Appreciation of art does as well.  You don’t have to have researched a book on this subject, like Mark Bauerlein, to know intuitively where to place the blame. It lies, clearly, on the most destructive invention in the history of the world: the screen, be it the television screen, the movie screen, the videogame screen, the computer screen, the internet screen, or the smartphone screen.

Here’s an experiment: Find a precocious second or third grade student, one who is considered bright, and capable of reading far above the average ability in his or her grade level.  Choose a book to read together that was written for the-mid elementary years: for 8 to 10 year-olds.  But choose a book that was published before the advent of television.  Ben and Me, by Robert Lawson, would be one appropriate example.  You will likely find something very sad.  The book is no longer written for today’s precocious nine year olds.  Its vocabulary is too advanced. The background facts one would be expected to understand to pick up on the book’s nuances are out of reach. You’ll have to wait a few more years for most children to get there, years interrupted by their viewing of screens.

We are no longer a nation of readers.  We are a nation of watchers.  And since the medium is the message, this means we are no longer a nation that thinks.  We are, instead, a nation which emotes.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love movies.  I really, really, do.  Few Americans from my generation (around 11 when Star Wars hit the big screen, about 15 when Indiana Jones outran that giant boulder) grew up without developing a deep fondness for the movies.  And television has become much better in recent years, with its serialized adult dramas, like Lost, now telling lengthy stories on the (once) small screen.  But this has come at a horrible price.

The Educational Cost.

During a child’s developmental years, reading activates and develops different parts of the brain than those developed by watching television, or playing video-games. The neurological connections which are, or are not, formed in early childhood, have lifelong implications.  Denying the rising generation of the neurological connections which will enable them to prosper later in life is a form of neglect.

The reports and statistics on life outcomes for struggling vs. proficient readers are not difficult to find.  Take two third graders, one of whom reads at or above grade level, and enjoys reading voluntarily, for fun; and another who reads below grade level, and never reads for fun.  The gap between the sheer volume of reading material read by the first student versus the second will begin to grow exponentially, and will obviously concurrently increase the gap in their relative reading skill and proficiency.  Studies have shown that this will affect not only academic ability, but personality, with readers tending to be more empathetic than non-readers, as their immersion in fiction exposes them to the reality that other people have inner lives and feelings.  In the latter part of the third grade, the so-called “Matthew Effect” (named for the Gospel in which the parable of the talents appears) will then begin to kick in.  As more and more school reading is done, not to learn to read, but to learn other subjects, the non-reader will fall further and further behind his peers.  The student who falls behind will become ever more frustrated with and detached from schooling.  This will profoundly affect statistically probable life outcomes, in areas that go far beyond academics.  The slower reader is more likely, not just to get bad grades, but to drop out of High School early, and is more likely to become involved in juvenile delinquency and crime.  He is more likely to need government assistance at some point in his life, and more likely to have difficulty keeping a job, or maintaining a stable marriage.

The Political Cost.

In our adult years, we can’t hope to really understand what political forces were behind the big drama down at the County Commission hearing this evening, if all we know about it is the two minute blurb the local tv station gave us, and we don’t bother to read the lengthy articles and editorials in a special feature of our local newspaper.  And so politicians get away with more crap, and have to reach us at a much more basic, and base, level, than was once the case.  If you can’t convince an American of the validity of your cause with a two or three word bumper sticker (or better yet: a symbol on a bumper sticker that doesn’t even have to be read at all, let alone thought through), in the age of television, your cause is doomed.

Think what a tragedy this is for America, given our history.  Until a few decades ago, we had always been a nation whose politics were fueled by passionate readers, and it has always been the written word which has moved our history forward.  The Founding Fathers, almost to a man (Washington being the major exception) became prominent because they were writers, whose words found access to local presses, and were consumed, enthused over or argued about, by partisan readers.  Benjamin Franklin’s satirical, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One”; James Otis’s speeches against the Writs of Assistance and the Stamp Act; John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” essays, against the Townshend Acts; Samuel Adams’ “The Rights of the Colonists as Men”; The Novanglus letters, by John Adams, making the legal case for the sovereignty of the colonies; “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” by Thomas Jefferson, setting forth a similar argument in response to the Intolerable Acts.  Each of these writings strengthened the colonists resolve to create their own continental congress, and propelled into prominence the men who would play leading roles in the drama of the American revolution and founding of the Constitution (although Franklin was already famous).

Common Sense, a 46 page editorial, which drew heavily on stories from the bible that most Americans had learned to read by, swayed public opinion in favor of independence just in time to give the Second Continental Congress political cover for declaring that independence. (Cagey guy, wasn’t he, that bible-quoting Thomas Paine–who later found his anti-Christian voice when writing to a much different audience of anti-clerical revolutionaries in France).  Before the Revolutionary war had even been won, the presses were churning with essays on the problems with the articles of confederation, and the need for a new Constitution, to unify the colonies, such as Hamilton’s “The Continentalist.” Our proposed new Constitution was ratified by the States only after it had been passionately defended, primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, in the Federalist Papers (and its potential pitfalls foretold with eerie prescience in the Anti-federalists’ writings).  Later, the country’s political unity was reaffirmed by George Washington’s farewell address, not actually an address that was ever spoken at all, and mainly written by Hamilton, but which was published in all the major newspapers of the Country, and read by virtually everyone, and which is still quoted today. Later, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America told Americans what was right about their country. The Lincoln Douglas debates were not viewed, but read, all over America, as were the other great speeches, books, and narratives that led to the Civil War and ultimately spelled the violent death of slavery: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglas’s autobiographical narrative, Lincoln’s Inaugural addresses and his speech at Gettysburg, and the fiery indignation of the radical abolitionist newspapers.  The era of civil service reform, the demand for an end to the spoils system and political machines, greater health and safety regulations in our meat packing plants: they were all influenced by books, newspapers, and the written word.  How might all of that history have been different, if we’d all been sitting around watching reality television, too entertained to read, laughing at Lincoln’s funny hair.

Visual imagery, accompanied by the right music, is much less likely to touch our brains, and much more likely to touch our heart.  This is not always a bad thing.  The images of wounded American soldiers which were seen during the Vietnam war, and in many subsequent conflicts, has probably made it far more difficult (as it should be) to drum up American enthusiasm for military conflicts. But, more often than not, politics based on emotion and visual images, rather than words and carefully presented logic, is overly simplistic, more easily subject to demagoguery, and less capable of the nuance that can lead citizens to understand that almost all of their political choices will be neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but will be subject to trade-offs, and have offsetting costs and unintended consequences.  In my lifetime, as Americans have debated changing the definition of our most basic institution, marriage, emotions and sanctimony have run high.  Words and written arguments?  Not so much.  Oh, lots of law review articles and legal briefs and even a few books have been written on both sides of the subject, but virtually no one has read them.  A bumper sticker with a yellow equal sign on a blue background tells you all you need to know, namely, that the American intellect is dead.

Our laws are still written in words.  But they are now sold to us on the basis of imagery.  It is, accordingly, increasingly the case that the laws in question have less and less to do with the basis on which they were sold.  Sell the sizzle, not the steak, is the mantra of the dishonest salesman.  It is a mantra which visual images are particularly adept at exploiting. We learn about virtue, duty, honor, by reading books, especially religious texts.  These are difficult ideals to show on a movie screen, which is far more adept at showing us fun, excitement, and enjoyment, arousing our anger, rather than our logic.

The Cultural and Historical Cost.

It has been argued, and not without some basis, that the rise of a post-literate screen-driven society spells the end of adulthood: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/11/03/secret-society-of-adults/  

And so our culture suffers.  Politicans and government officials can be less responsive and responsible, because no one will read about what they are doing.  And so they become more corrupt. Newspapers can unfairly target their political foes, via headline scandals which don’t seem particularly scandalous if you read and reason through the text of the article, but that doesn’t matter because no one does that.  And so they become more corrupt.  Businesses can tout wares which have long since been exposed as not living up to their promises.  But that doesn’t matter because no one has read those exposés.  And so the businesses become more corrupt.  Corruption, unchecked, increases the power of the few over the many.

And, as a medicine taken on an empty stomach may be overly potent, what little that is read has an increasingly powerful effect upon its recipient, regardless of its coherence, logic, or honesty.  It becomes easier to lead us astray.  Having no training in sophisticated and critical analysis of what we read, we peruse an article someone linked to on a facebook account (about whether vaccines cause autism, or a really weird trick that will help us lose belly fat) and we are unable to ask the critical questions which might debunk or strengthen the claims being presented.

But, most devastatingly of all, we don’t read history, and so we don’t remember our past, and so we have no past, and American culture means nothing because it never existed.  Like an Alzheimer’s patient who no longer remembers his wife, we might as well have never had a wife.  We might as well have never fought WWII, as we no longer honor those who won it, and, in winning it, ended a war started by Germany and Japan which took 60 million lives.  Instead, we see something on Youtube about Hiroshima and conclude that our nation was the guilty one, and does not deserve our respect or our loyalty. We might know different if we had read any books about WWII, but who does that anymore?

As Bruce Feiler has argued eloquently in the New York Times article, “The Stories that Bind Us” March 15, 2013, the children of a family which tells positive stories about itself are given great psychological benefits, as they come to understand their family’s narrative, and see their own roles in the generational story.  The same is true of military units, who have found that when recruits learn more about the history of the military branch or unit in which they serve, individual perseverance and group coherence are strengthened.  Id.  The same is true of companies and businesses.  And of nations.  A United States whose citizens understand the triumphs represented by the Declaration of Independence, victory in the Revolutionary War, founding of the Constitution, settlement of the west, abolition of slavery, and which understands the great moral good which was done by their country when it helped to defeat Naziism and Japanese military imperialism, and Soviet communist totalitarianism, is a nations whose citizens will love their country, and will believe that we can overcome current challenges, if we will get back on to a sensible path.  But our children don’t read enough to know any of that history, and, when they do finally become interested, they are more likely than not to be given Howard Zinn to read, instead of something truthful or even partially positive.  No wonder they decide it isn’t worth it to try to live within our means, but instead, with nihilistic self-contempt, fail to challenge a government whose debt will crush millions, in generations yet unborn, of our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.  Why should these modern nihilists care?  They know nothing of their country’s past, so what reason do they have to care about her future?

Is America’s Decline and Fall Inevitable? A Pessimistic View. Part III: The Fall of Jerusalem: The Collapse of Traditional Christian Morality and the End of the Traditional Family

The biblical Judeo-Christian religious leg of Western Civilization had many aspects.  One of those aspects was its sexual moral code.  The sexual code varied to some degree between Catholics and Protestants, and there is some historical debate about how closely it was adhered to among the general population in different times and different places.  But until recently, it was never, in majority-Christian nations, completely rejected as at least the ideal.  At its essence, Christian sexual morality included, to a greater or lesser degree of strictness depending on the religion involved, some version of each of the following: (1) the principle that there should be no sex before or outside of marriage between a male husband and his female wife (only in the 21st Century has it become necessary to use gender adjectives for the meaning of these ancient words to be clear), which prohibition thereby excluded homosexual acts; (2) the ideal that marriage was indissoluble and divorce illegitimate, or, in its less strict form, the ideal that divorce was generally immoral, but allowed if based on a betrayal by the other party, such as through adultery, cruelty, or abuse; (3) restrictions on access to birth control, especially for the unmarried, and obviously including restrictions on the most morally dubious form of birth control, abortion.

Taken as a whole, if this code were an arch, its keystone would be conjugal marriage between a male husband and a female wife as the only appropriate context for sexual intercourse.  Thus, the entire code rests upon a proper understanding of "marriage" and the surest way to destroy the entire structure is to destroy marriage.  This is being accomplished in our day by treating marriage as such a malleable concept that it is essentially meaningless.  When people no longer agree on the meaning of a word, that word uses its usefulness.  This is a minor tragedy for effective communication when a minor word, toaster oven, say, begins to mean different things to different people.  But when the word in question is as fundamental to our understanding of life's expectations and societal ordering as marriage, it is a major tragedy.  Marriage is not just being redefined, but essentially defined out of existence, and abolished completely, as no longer being a word, or concept, let alone an institution, that has any common and universally understood meaning.

This marriage-centered sexual moral code was admittedly difficult for many people to live under.  It kept some people in unhappy or loveless marriages.  It prevented some people from having the kind of sex they wanted to have.  It could be oppressive to single adults and to women.  And so, one by one, especially over the course of the past 50 years, as society began to focus increasingly on the wants of the individual rather than the needs of the society, each of the components of this code was rejected.  See, Mary Eberstadt, How the West Really Lost God, a new theory of secularization (Templeton Press 2013). This rejection was generally argued for on the grounds of compassion for the individual whose needs did not conform to the options available under the code.  But, given the incomparable advantages which children who are born to and raised by their own two married parents enjoy, how much compassion do we truly have towards individuals if we create a society where more than ½ of individuals will not be raised, from childhood to adulthood, by their own two married parents, and where almost ½ of them may never know their father, let alone enjoy his daily provision and care?

Here’s how this happened:

Divorce.  The prohibition against divorce was the first to fray, and the no-fault divorce laws of the 1970s, allowing for unilateral divorce by a spouse who had not been betrayed by the other party to the marriage, including where the other party did not want a divorce, represented the final victory over this component of the code.  (This might have been foreseen: Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount that divorce had been suffered to enter into the law of Moses due to human weakness, but that Christ’s higher law required a return to God’s original ideal that a divorce could not be terminated save in the case of adultery.  Thus, the apparently historical Old Testament pattern of the law of indissoluble marriage eventually giving way to allowances for divorce, was refuted by a Christian theological position against no-fault divorce, which itself later fell out of favor, in a pattern which repeated and echoed earlier events.)  It doesn’t matter now that you have vowed to honor your spouse and provide your children with a stable home.  If you are unhappy in your marriage, or “unfulfilled,” you are allowed to move on, and seek and obtain a unilateral divorce, with no need to allege cruelty or unfaithfulness on the part of a spouse who wants to stay married, and the financial and emotional consequences to your spouse and children are nobody’s business.  This change has undoubtedly been a positive development in some people’s lives, even while targeting other groups (mainly unmarried women and their children) for increased risks and rates of poverty.

Birth Control and Extramarital Sex.  Laws and religious prescriptions against birth control fell at roughly the same time as the advent of no-fault divorce.  Many factors contributed to this change. Since children have historically been seen as the ultimate form of social security, the rise of approval for birth control roughly corresponded, unsurprisingly, with the enactment of federal social security benefits.  No longer would the elderly count, as they had for millennia, on their children’s compliance with the Fifth Commandment (honor thy father and mother) to be taken care of in their elder years. Rather, a federal benefit, which you were eligible for whether it was being funded by the taxes of your own children, or somebody else’s children, replaced familial bonds of duty and severed some of the ties between the generations.  The consequences? Well, despite all the claims of Marxist theory to the contrary, human beings are not angels, but respond to incentives.  Why spend time and energy and money to raise a child who will take care of you in your old age, if someone else’s child, who someone else spent time and energy and money to raise, can be forced by the government to take care of you?  The rise of a non-agricultural economy had already weakened the incentive for having children.  Federal social security benefits, which led people to look to the government for something their children had previously provided, killed it off completely.  The larger the government, the smaller the family (both metaphorically and literally).  Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court case which overturned laws against access to birth control, then played its part.  And, of course, the technology of “the Pill” obviously accelerated this process even more.  Roe v. Wade, which legalized post-conception birth control, was the final nail in the coffin. Restrictions on birth control were ejected from the code, or, at least, this component of the old code was ejected from American life. Unmarried persons could now have sex purely for recreational pleasure, and, supposedly, without risk.

While I am personally gratified that married people can now better plan their families, it cannot be doubted that the main promises made by those who initially advocated loosening restrictions on birth control, namely, that it would lead to fewer unwanted births, have proven to be among the most completely and utterly bogus predictive claims made in all of human history.  Number of illegitimate births in 1960: less than 6%; Number of illegitimate births in 2013: approaching 50%.  (And yet, with every attempt to introduce planned parenthood as our children’s sex-ed teachers, and make condoms freely available to minors in the school nurse’s office, we keep hearing these same bogus arguments, as though the statistical evidence and actual experience of the past 40 years debunking these promises never happened.)

Why did the promise of birth control, a world of no more unwanted babies, fail?  The story is actually very simple.  Once birth control was legitimized, there was no longer any strong basis, it was argued, for requiring sexual abstinence outside of marriage.  The risk of an unwanted pregnancy could be avoided, so why not enjoy sex merely and purely for the pleasure it brought?  However, just as the heightened sense of security which was engendered by the advent of seat belts in automobiles actually led to riskier driving and higher vehicular death rates, the perception of reduced risk for extramarital sexual activity led, in reality, to a higher number of out-of-wedlock births.  Apparently all that birth control didn’t always work as advertised.  As the number of out-of-wedlock births increased, the stigma associated with the same decreased, and soon it became impolite and impolitic to criticize a single mother or a pregnant high-schooler.  Meanwhile, the government’s “war on poverty” by subsidizing illegitimacy, made things even worse. The era of the single-mother had arrived.  Sexual abstinence was jettisoned from the code.  Birth control for married couples has its benefits, and, among major Christian denominations, only the Catholic church, but no longer most of its members, still preaches against it.  But the concurrent rise in extramarital sexual promiscuity which accompanied access to birth control for singles has been a disaster for the notion that children deserve to be born within the bonds of matrimony, so they can, if at all possible, be raised by their own mother and their own father.

Redefining Marriage.  As western culture ceased speaking of homosexuality in terms of acts and behavior, and began instead to identify and label certain persons as "homosexuals" having a certain "sexual orientation" (both relatively recent ideas in western thought) rather than focusing on the morality of particular sexual acts, it was inevitable that a culture obsessed with ensuring that all minority subgroups within it (except people of faith) be provided with rights and protections against the tyranny of the majority, would come first to pity, then tolerate, then protect, and eventually to promote and celebrate homosexuality. It’s been a fascinating phenomenon to live through, having been born and raised to young adulthood in a time when virtually everyone, including the non-religious, were disgusted by the very idea of homosexual sex, and to have then lived through an additional 25 years as such attitudes have been so completely routed that it is now those who advocate against homosexual behavior who are stigmatized.  Nevertheless, based on the prior pattern, it should not have surprised anyone that this element of the so-called “culture wars” would also be lost by the traditionalists, and this element of the code also rejected.

Once a minority subgroup is created, it will inevitably seek and potentially be granted legal protections, which will inevitably involve a narrative of an oppressed minority being liberated against the forces of hateful bigotry.  Thus, the focus on homosexuals as a category of person, rather than as a type of conduct, led to the need to sort ourselves: are we a member of the morally superior class who loves our minority friends? Well of course.  Who wouldn't want to be so identified?  What to do to prove our membership?: rail against and stigmatize those who have not caught up with the times, which means attacking religion.  Each new victory leads to a new need for new sorting on some new issue.  So, finally, the enlightened secular liberals amongst us have now determined that marriage itself must be redefined as the union of any two persons, regardless of gender.

But here is the problem: if you "expand" the definition of a triangle so that it may now refer to both three-sided and four-sided polygons, what you have really done is abolish the concept of a triangle from your vocabulary all together, and, with it, the ability to teach certain mathematical truths and theorems.  The same is true of marriage: by "expanding" the definition, we merely prove that the word is meaningless, as meaning whatever anyone wants it to mean.  Marriage as an institution geared toward procreation and family life, and designed to ensure and promote the ideal that every child deserves to be taken care of by the biological mother and father who brought them into this world, with exceptions based solely upon the child's (not any adult's) best interests, passes from the scene. As it does, so too does the idea that a child needs a father, or that a man needs to step up to being a father, and all the other theorems which once flowed from the idea of marriage as previously defined, which we can no longer teach.   Based on the outcomes we have already lived through as earlier elements of the Christian sexual code have been rejected, it should be obvious that, once again, we will learn that rejecting yet another element of the code will come at a cost.  But this time it's even more serious: As stated, the institution of marriage formed the crux of the entire Christian sexual moral code, in terms of defining the context for socially approved sexual relations: namely sexual relations within the bonds of an institution which ensured that every child has a father and a mother. This function is the institution’s most vital point for existing in the first place. Surely there are other reasons for the institution of marriage in addition to its relationship to procreation and child-rearing.  But no one who has seriously thought about the issue can doubt that the institution’s rise and maintenance, in virtually every society on earth, across virtually all times and all cultures, is due to the fundamental facts of human existence: that we come in two genders, that only a combination of those genders can create a new baby, that human babies do not arrive ready to face the world, but take years of often arduous care to raise to a healthy and self-sufficient adulthood, which care requires both full time nurturing of the child for the first years of its life, as well as financial and material sustenance, which dual needs can generally only be provided either in large extended families, or, in smaller families, if one parent leaves the nurturing to the other and goes into the world to hunt, sow, or gather.  If any of these elements of human nature were different, if we reproduced asexually, or if our newborn babies took only weeks to walk and talk and function independently, it is highly doubtful that marriage would have ever developed among human beings, let alone been so ubiquitous throughout the generations and for virtually every culture on earth.

As the communists discovered when they tried to ignore the basic characteristics of humans (that they are selfish and respond to incentives), it is inevitable that a society which tries to ignore human reality in favor of ideology will reap unintended adverse consequences.  So also, we will inevitably learn that redefining marriage in a manner which has no relationship to the basic facts of human existence will cause harm.  That harm comes in the form of denying children of their natural, prima facie, prepolitical right, to be raised by their own mother and father.  Any-two-persons marriage deprives children of a mother and a father.  It does this in two ways: directly, as when a same sex female couple have a child through artificial insemination from a sperm donor, or a same-sex male couple in the adoption market insist that they must be treated as absolutely equivalent to a male-female couple seeking to adopt a child, with no preference for the male-female couple being allowed; and indirectly, by promoting the societal belief that children do not need fathers, and that sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing may properly be treated as disparate, atomized, and unrelated, rather than as integrated concepts.

Marriage defined as the union of any two persons sends a message that children do not obtain any benefit from a father that they could not receive from a second female parent. (It also sends the opposite message, with respect to mothers not being necessary, but does so far less frequently, and with far less impact, given the biological facts which bond a child and his or her mother together, such that the concept of motherhood is far less reliant on social values, laws, and religious customs, for its support, than is the concept of fatherhood.)  This official rejection of marriage as an institution whose purpose is to tie children to their own mother and father, in favor of the proposition that children are adaptable, and should be required to adapt to benefit adult desires, inevitably spills over into heterosexual relationships as well, teaching young men that children do not need a father, so there is no reason for them to commit to any higher purpose than their own pleasure when they engage in sexual activity.  This, in turn, leads to fatherless children.

It is no statistical accident or mere coincidence that, for the first time in our nation’s history, over 50% of children born to mothers under thirty are born to an unwed mother, and that those members of society who are under 30 are also the most likely to support redefining marriage as the union of any two persons.  Rather, each of these statistics are strongly related, as they each represent the values of a generation which has turned its back on the idea that a child needs both a mother and a father, if providing a child with that benefit will get in the way of the pleasures adults can obtain from sex, or the pleasures their neighbors can obtain from designating themselves as morally superior to any one who has not caught up with the times. Both of these statistics for those under-30 represent the values of a generation which does not believe that sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing are integrated concepts, but see them instead as separate and distinct, alien to each other, and having nothing to do with each other.  Of course, none of these attitudes are their fault: They learned these lessons from their elders.

None of this is intended as a claim against the inherent dignity and rights of those with a minority sexual orientation.  It should of course be noted that homosexuals are entitled to be treated with fairness and dignity in our law and in our culture; that they are entitled to have their deepest relationships respected and preserved and afforded the same inheritance and similar rights as other couples (all of which could have been done, however, without revising the definition of our society's most ancient and stabilizing institution).  It should also of course be clearly stated that homosexuals are not primarily to blame for the impending world of even more single-parent children which is now on our doorstep.  The vast majority of children who will be deprived of either a mother or (almost always) a father in the coming generations will be so deprived as a result of selfish and irresponsible choices by heterosexuals. And it is the past selfishness of heterosexuals, in their enthusiasm for extramarital promiscuity, no-fault unilateral divorce, universally accessible birth control, abortion, and all the rest, which created the circumstances which homosexual activists were smart enough to exploit to ask for a change in the law which would have been unthinkable without these prior, heterosexual, attacks on marriage.  If marriage had not already been so degraded as to lose its meaning almost entirely anyway, the any-two-persons marriage movement would have made no sense, because people would have remembered what marriage really was.  Heterosexuals have already severed the tie between marriage and sex and procreation and child-rearing, and therefore have had no moral leg to stand on in resisting demands for redefined marriage.  Nevertheless, marriage as the union of any two persons, will forever alter the understood definition of the institution which has always heretofore stood at the heart of Christian sexual morality, and will thereby prove to be not only the final nail in the coffin of Christian sexual morality, but the irrevocable nail which prevents us from ever again reviving that code, as its keystone concept (the institution of marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual relations, so as to ensure that every child has a mother and a father) will have been abolished from the entire arch

The Price We Have Paid.  The rejection of each element of the Christian sexual code has been seen by liberals as cause for celebration: as individual liberties and freedoms increase, as old-fashioned social mores fall, we have been told, time and time again, that we are heading towards a new age of Aquarius.  However, what has actually happened, time and time again, is just the opposite: a new age of selfishness and nihilism. The idea that the rejection of each element of “archaic and repressive” Christian sexual morality represented an unqualified and unmitigated, cost-free advance for human happiness, and that a sexually amoral world could be enjoyed without any negative offsetting consequences, or price, has, time and again, proven simplistic in the extreme.  The old sexual code stood for the proposition that sex, marriage, procreation, and child-rearing should be integrated and whole and unified processes, so as to ensure that most children would be raised by their own mother and father, which in turn is the least restrictive means (requiring the least amount of governmental involvement) to raise children to responsible, law-abiding, self-sustainable adulthood.  The rejection of each element of the code stood for the proposition that adult desires should preempt these claims, even if children were thereby rendered less likely to have their wants and needs fulfilled, by a mother and a father, and therefore more likely to require the assistance of the State. It takes a lot of provender to raise a human child, both emotional and material, and a mom and a dad, preferably one’s own mom and dad, simply provides humans with their best possible chance at a successful and happy life. (This is what is so bizarre about so-called libertarians' support for any-two-persons marriage.  This is a group that claims to want smaller government, but is blind to the fact that a morally permissive society can NEVER hope to enjoy a small government. The two concepts are simply incompatible.) Therefore, the old code ensured that a child would not be denied of its prima facie right to a relationship with his or her own mother and father, except and unless when in the best interests of the child, and never merely to gratify adult desires. The old code stood for the proposition that the needs of society’s most vulnerable class (newborn children) should have priority over the wants of society’s most powerful class (adults).  The new code stands for the opposite proposition, that the wants of the most powerful should preempt the needs of the most vulnerable, including the need of a child to have both a father and a mother.

The future?  More children will emerge from childhood with psychological trauma scars instead of psychological strength.  More families will be unable to provide for their children, so that the State will have to become increasingly large, to provide for them instead: acting as caregiver to the young unmarried mother and her children, and, eventually, as disciplinarian to her sons.  But there will be fewer and fewer adults who have the psychological capability to keep a job to pay the tax burden which will be required for the State to provide this intervention.  And round and round the vicious cycle goes, like all vicious cycles, in the direction of a flushing toilet.