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James Blish’s “At Death’s End”: An Early View of the Prospects for Indefinite Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

James Blish’s “At Death’s End”: An Early View of the Prospects for Indefinite Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
March 14, 2015
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At-Deaths-End-ASF-May-1954-900

                “At Death’s End”, written by James Blish (1921-1975), was published in the May 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Surprisingly, this short story is still only accessible in hard copy, within the original Astounding Science Fiction edition. Apart from a brief review by Robert W. Franson, who introduced me to this work, there is today surprisingly little literary analysis devoted to “At Death’s End” – even though it offers a fascinating glimpse into how a science-fiction writer from an earlier era perceived the prospects for indefinite human longevity, from the vantage point of the scientific knowledge available at the time. The world portrayed by Blish is, in some respects, surprisingly like our own. In others, however, it overlooks the complexity of the treatments that would be necessary to achieve actual radical life extension.

                The future (shortly after 2000) that Blish depicts is one where national governments are obsessed with “security” and “defense” – much like the United States today. It appears that the Cold War is still underway in this world (and it could be said that it has been resurrected in ours as well); however, space travel and space colonies are also prominent. The protagonist, Colonel Paige Russell, is himself a spacefarer who begins the story by journeying to the headquarters of pharmaceutical firm Jno. Pfitzner & Sons, Inc., to bring back soil samples from Ganymede and Callisto. In the midst of a society where an entrenched military-industrial complex has taken hold (even to the point of top positions – such as head of the FBI – becoming hereditary), a fundamentalist religious revival has also emerged, though the religionists often use machines to preach in their stead. This development, too, bears striking similarities to the rise of televangelism and the fundamentalist “religious right” in the United States during the late 1970s and 1980s. The overall society depicted by Blish is more permeated with religion than our own, as the alternative to the preachy fundamentalist religiosity of the Believers is portrayed as being a more subdued but still inextricable personal faith. Paige claims,

I’ve no religion of my own, but I think that when the experts talk about ‘faith’ they mean something different than the shouting kind, the kind the Believers have. […] Real faith is so much a part of the world you live in that you seldom notice it, and it isn’t always religious in the formal sense. Mathematics is based on faith, for instance, for those who know it. (17-18)

Even many religious individuals today would disagree with the notion that mathematics is based on faith – and certainly the many atheists and agnostics who are fond of mathematics and of the scientific method would rightly recognize that these logic-based and evidence-based approaches are as far from faith as one can get. And yet Blish intends Paige’s position to be the level-headed, sensible, rational one, compared to the alternative – showing that Blish did not foresee the extent to which skepticism of religious faith would become a widespread, though still a minority, position.

                Blish’s extrapolation of medical progress is remarkably prescient in certain respects. Paige learns of the history of medicine from Anne Abbott, the daughter of Pfitzner’s leading researcher:

In between 1940 and 1960, a big change came in in Western medicine. Before 1940 – in the early part of the century – the infectious diseases were major killers. By 1960 they were all but knocked out of the running. […] In the 1950s, for instance, malaria was the world’s greatest killer. Now it’s as rare as diphtheria. We still have both diseases with us – but how long has it been since you heard of a case of either? […] Life insurance companies, and other people who kept records, began to be alarmed at the way the degenerative diseases were coming to the fore. Those are such ailments as hardening of the arteries, coronary heart disease, the rheumatic diseases, and almost all the many forms of cancer – diseases where one or another body mechanism suddenly goes haywire, without any visible cause. (20-21)

The shift from infectious diseases being the primary killers, to the vast majority of people dying from the degenerative diseases of “old age”, is precisely what happened during the latter half of the twentieth century, throughout the world. The top killers in the early 20th century were infectious diseases that have been virtually wiped out today, as this chart from the Carolina Population Center shows. (For more details, see “Mortality and Cause of Death, 1900 v. 2010” by Rebeca Tippett.) Additional major progress is evident in the 54% absolute decline in mortality from all causes during the time period between 1900 and 2010.

                Blish was foresighted enough to attempt a conceptual decoupling of chronological and biological age. Anne Abbott explains to Paige that “Old age is just the age; it’s not a thing in itself, it’s just the time of life when most degenerative diseases strike” (21). She recounts that “When the actuaries first began to notice that the degenerative diseases were on the rise, they thought that it was just a sort of side-effect of the decline of the infectious diseases. They thought that cancer was increasing because more people were living long enough to come down with it” (21). Anne then proceeds to discuss findings that some cancers are caused by viruses – which is actually the case for a minority of cancers (approximately 17.8% of cancers in 2002, as estimated by the World Health Organization). In the world portrayed by Blish, a rising incidence of degenerative diseases caused by viral infections led the National Health Service to fund research efforts by companies like Pfitzner, in an effort to address the threat.

                Incidentally, Blish also foresaw the rise in major government expenditures on medical research. Anne explains that “the result of [the first world congress on degenerative diseases] was that the United States Department of Health, Welfare and Security somehow got a billion-dollar appropriation for a real mass attack on the degenerative diseases” (22). Of course, in our world, major scientific conventions on degenerative diseases – both governmental and private – are far more routine. Indeed, a small but dynamic private organization – the SENS Research Foundation – has itself hosted six world-class conferences on rejuvenation biotechnology to date. In the United States, billions of dollars each year are indeed spent on research into degenerative diseases. The budget of the National Institute on Aging exceeds $1 billion annually (it amounts to $1,170,880,000 for Fiscal Year 2015). Unfortunately, in practice, even this level of funding – from both private and governmental sources – has thus far proven wholly insufficient to comprehensively reverse biological senescence and defeat all degenerative diseases.

                In Blish’s imagined future, the battle against senescence could be won far more easily than in our present. Pfitzner’s key project is a sweeping solution to all lifespan-limiting ailments – a broad-range “antitoxin against the aging toxin of humans” (36). In this world, Paige, who later becomes trained in Pfitzner’s research techniques, can pronounce that “We know that the aging toxin exists in all animals; we know it’s a single, specific substance, quite distinct from the ones that cause the degenerative diseases, and that it can be neutralized. […] So what you’re looking for now is not an antibiotic – an anti-life drug – but an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug” (36). If only it were that simple! Today, even the most ambitious engineering-based approach toward defeating senescence, Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s SENS program, recognizes not one but seven distinct types of aging-related damage that accumulate in the organism. Dr. de Grey’s strategy of periodically reversing the damage is more straightforward than the alternative approach of re-engineering the tremendously complex metabolic processes of the body that malfunction over time, and which are still quite incompletely understood. In Blish’s world, a single company, working covertly, with relatively modest funding (compared to the funds available to research organizations in our world), can develop an “anti-agathic” drug that does for senescence what antibiotics did for deadly infectious disease.

                Without spoiling the ending, I will only mention that it is friendly to the prospects of radical life extension and portrays it in a positive light – one additional reason for recommending that “At Death’s End” be included within the canon of proto-transhumanist and life-extensionist literary works. Furthermore, the viability of indefinite life extension in Blish’s vision is closely intertwined with humanity’s future as a spacefaring species – another progress-friendly position. Blish comes across as a thoughtful, scientifically literate (for his era) writer, who extrapolated the world-changing trends of his time to arrive at a tense, conflict-ridden, but still eminently hopeful vision for the future, where the best of human intellect and aspiration are able to overcome the perils of militarism, fundamentalism, decay, and death.

              The author of “At Death’s End” himself succumbed to death at the age of 54, on July 30, 1975. He did not live to see the world of 2000 and compare it to his prognosis. Unfortunately, Blish seems to have disregarded the tremendous harms of tobacco smoke and was even employed by the Tobacco Institute from 1962 to 1968. A genealogical profile lists Blish’s cause of death as “Recurrent cancer per smoking, metastasized.” This brilliant, forward-thinking mind unfortunately could not escape one of the most common collective delusions of his time – the fascination with and normalization of one of the least healthy habits imaginable, one that is the most statistically likely to lower life expectancy (by about 10 years). This is quite sad, as it would have been fascinating to learn how Blish’s projections for the future would have been affected by additional decades of his experience of societal and technological changes. One of the major trends in longevity improvement over the past several decades has been a major decline in the smoking rate, which decreased to an all-time low in the United States in 2013 (the latest year for which statistics are currently available). Surely, to come closer to death’s end, as many humans as possible should abandon what are now known to be obviously life-shortening habits.

              While an anti-agathic drug is not in our future, James Blish’s vision of the defeat of senescence can still serve to inspire those who endeavor to solve this colossal problem in our world, during our lifetimes. Let us hope that, through the efforts of longevity researchers and through increases in funding and public attitudinal support for their projects, we will arrive at death’s end before death ends us.

We Must Proudly Reassert Free Speech and Universal Western Values – Video by G. Stolyarov II

We Must Proudly Reassert Free Speech and Universal Western Values – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
January 12, 2015
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The horror of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine – the murder of 17 people – journalists, policemen, and ordinary shoppers – by Wahhabist Islamist fanatics in Paris on January 7-9, 2015, highlights the stark threat that religious fanaticism poses to Western civilization. The perpetrators of this barbarism have thankfully been eliminated due to the concerted, decisive, and careful work of French police, who managed to destroy the murderers and hostage-takers without harming or terrorizing innocent, peaceful civilians in the process. But unless the Western world resolutely affirms the untrammeled right of free expression of ideas, the already commonplace heckler’s veto over speech will turn into the murderer’s veto.

Mr. Stolyarov explains the need for an assertive revival of Western Enlightenment values (which are also universal human values) and a widespread, unconditional defense of freedom of speech – in order to prevent humankind from relapsing into the muck of barbarism.

References

– “We Must Proudly Reassert Free Speech and Universal Western Values” – Article by G. Stolyarov II – January 12, 2015
– “Excellent News from Turkey Regarding the Possibility of a More Humane Islam” – Post by G. Stolyarov II – November 28, 2008 – Excellent News from Turkey Regarding the Possibility of a More Humane Islam
– “German Newspaper Attacked After Publishing Charlie Hebdo Cartoons” – The World Post – Kirsten Grieshaber – January 11, 2015
– “These Are The Charlie Hebdo Cartoons That Terrorists Thought Were Worth Killing Over” – The Huffington Post – Catherine Taibi – January 7, 2015
– “Transhumanism” – Wikipedia
– “Wahhabism” – Wikipedia

We Must Proudly Reassert Free Speech and Universal Western Values – Article by G. Stolyarov II

We Must Proudly Reassert Free Speech and Universal Western Values – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
January 12, 2015
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je_suis_charlie_fist_and_pencil

The horror of the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine – the murder of 17 people – journalists, policemen, and ordinary shoppers – by Wahhabist Islamist fanatics in Paris on January 7-9, 2015, highlights the stark threat that religious fanaticism poses to Western civilization. The perpetrators of this barbarism have thankfully been eliminated due to the concerted, decisive, and careful work of French police, who managed to destroy the murderers and hostage-takers without harming or terrorizing innocent, peaceful civilians in the process. But unless the Western world resolutely affirms the untrammeled right of free expression of ideas, the already commonplace heckler’s veto over speech will turn into the murderer’s veto.

Anything but complete, unconditional condemnation of this attack allows the murderers and thugs to win. Anyone who claims, “I condemn the attack, but…” is blaming the victims and suggesting that any provocation, any motivation is capable of forming an acceptable causal connection between peaceful expression of ideas and murder. For those who resolutely defend the Western values of individual rights and secularism, the only question should be, “Does the expression of a viewpoint ever, under any circumstances, justify the death penalty?” If the answer is a resounding “No!” – as it should be – then there can be no “but…”.

The Western values that developed over millennia of philosophical evolution and finally emerged brilliantly during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment are universal human values – affirming human dignity and decency, the potential for peaceful cooperation among diverse viewpoints, the superiority of the creative mind over brute force, the potential for the human condition to be elevated through reason and persuasion, not intimidation. The Age of Enlightenment tamed Christianity in the West, turning it from a religion of bloodthirsty Crusaders, superstitious witch-hunters, and intolerant inquisitors, into a relatively soft cultural force that, at any given time, largely echoes the prevailing moral climate some thirty years prior. Christians who have been influenced by the Enlightenment – and even those who reject it, who have nonetheless found it necessary to adapt to the world it shaped for over two centuries – accept, with the exception of a fringe of fundamentalist fanatics, the basic preconditions for life in a civilized society, including the respect for the political, economic, and philosophical freedoms of those who think differently from them.

The Islamic world still awaits its own Age of Enlightenment, though some Muslims have, to their credit, accepted the Western Enlightenment as their own or attempted a courageous modernization of Islamic theology. Those Muslims who say “Je suis Charlie” are my allies, and I wish to see more Muslims embrace this attitude. But they have an uphill battle to fight – not just against their fanatical co-religionists, for whom no human life is sacred, but against the purveyors of postmodernist political correctness in the West, for whom the avoidance of giving offense trumps the necessity of standing on principle when the stakes are high. And the stakes are high indeed: if the murderer’s veto can result in any idea becoming inexpressible due to self-censorship and pressure from the “reputable” elements of society, then it does not matter what laws or constitutions say. If a sufficiently large element of society exists, whose members have a hair-trigger for offense and will kill you if you infringe upon their arbitrary taboos, then freedom of speech becomes a legal fiction, and de facto blasphemy law is the reality.

The best protection for freedom of thought is its frequent and prominent exercise by as many people as possible. Had prominent newspapers and magazines given frequent circulation to the wittily and refreshingly irreverent cartoons that Charlie Hebdo produced – which does not, by the way, rule out also publishing critiques or rebuttals from any other peaceful perspectives – then the murderous quartet that planned the Paris attacks would have had trouble choosing a target. Indeed, much about Western culture and lifestyles “offends” Wahhabist Muslims today, yet we do not see Westerners being routinely shot for failing to pray five times per day, facing Mecca. Almost everything about Western science, representational art, music, and clothing is inimical to Wahhabist Islam, yet the purveyors of these ubiquitous aspects of Western life – many Muslims among them, too – go unharmed by the fanatics. If politically correct fears are allowed to marginalize any form of expression for fear that it might “offend”, then any person who dares stand up for that expression – as is that person’s inalienable right – becomes a target for those who would relinquish even their own lives in order to cow a society into submission to their twisted, progress-stifling ideology. Political correctness accelerates the transformation of rights into taboos, until nothing of importance can be said, and any act of substance, any design to improve the human condition, would involve maneuvering through a minefield of hysterical, volatile, contradictory, and irrational “sensibilities” of the offended parties du jour.

So what is the solution? The elimination of the murderers themselves does not guarantee that similar murders will not recur. Indeed, the few courageous newspapers that reprinted the Charlie Hebdo cartoons have themselves become victims of threats and even an actual attack on the Hamburger Morgenpost in Germany. The solution is to resolutely reject victim-blaming, and for the prominent political, journalistic, and cultural figures of the Western world to themselves espouse the sentiments that the murderous fanatics considered so enraging. “Je suis Charlie” is a decent start, but a reiteration of the messages of particular cartoons would be far more effective. If the cartoons were republished on whitehouse.gov, parliament.uk, and elysee.fr, as well as the websites of all other national governments and publications with large readership, then a strong signal would be sent that Western societies still stand for the complete ability of any intellectual expression to occur, without its author receiving the death penalty or the kind of politically correct condemnation that invites the executioners to try. While it is not the role of governments to opine on matters of religion, it is their role to protect the rights of their constituents against infringement. Standing by the Charlie Hebdo cartoons – and similar critiques of any religion – would be a stand for the safety of anyone who would express a controversial or unpopular idea. Without a clear promise that such safety will be pursued, free speech means nothing in practice, since the expression solely of bland, prevailing, or popular ideas can occur in any society, with or without legal protections. We should be thankful to the few publications that did re-post the Charlie Hebdo cartoons – such as the Huffington Post, which presented a prominent sample here.

To encourage the expeditious arrival of an Islamic Enlightenment, a clear distinction between “moderate” and “radical” Muslims should be made. Every cultural figure of prominence should emphasize the following minimal criteria to be considered a “moderate” Muslim:

  • Complete rejection and denunciation of any killing motivated by religion
  • Opposition to the enactment of blasphemy laws or any laws prohibiting the criticism of any religion
  • Opposition to the legal establishment of Islamic sharia law in the West
  • Opposition to the persecution and/or prosecution of any person, Muslim or otherwise, who refuses to adhere to sharia law
  • Opposition to the persecution and/or prosecution of “apostates” who choose to leave Islam for any reason
  • Opposition to all laws that bring special restrictions upon women, homosexuals, atheists, and others, based on gender, sexual orientation, or lack of religious belief
  • Support for the right of those who disagree with any tenet or practice of any variant of Islam to peacefully express their disagreement or criticism, even if such expression is uncomfortable to some Muslims and offends their sensibilities
  • Recognition that any individual should have the right to draw Mohammad or any other religious figure, and the choice to exercise that right or not is a purely personal matter.

Finally, the alarming tendency of many long-time residents of European societies to drift toward fundamentalist Islam should be culturally combated by means of a New Renaissance of Western culture. For those who consider, rightly or wrongly, contemporary Western life to lack a sense of purpose or direction, there are far better antidotes than a murderous creed of militant fanaticism, whose spread is explained by its function as a “mind-virus” that short-circuits logical thinking and renders its carrier impervious to empirical evidence. Here, the damage done by the postmodernist critics of Western culture and its universal human values should also be reversed. In particular, the idea of progress – of the ability of humans to dramatically improve their condition through the application of reason, science, and technology – should be revived and asserted with renewed vigor in all areas of life. Beyond survival, what is the purpose of life? To achieve progress, to uplift human lives by harnessing the laws of nature to solve previously insoluble problems.

The humanism of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment should be extended into its logical next phase – transhumanism: the application of science and technology to overcome age-old limits to the human condition. The deployment of the next generations of technologies – from medical breakthroughs to efforts to colonize other worlds – should occur as rapidly as possible in all fields. No amount of help is excessive in pursuing this goal, and so anyone can find meaning in contributing. While we implement such a decisive push forward along the path of progress, we should also remember that we stand upon the shoulders of giants. Great historical achievements of Western art, music, science, literature, architecture, and engineering should be emphasized and celebrated. The achievements of Middle Eastern thinkers of the early Islamic era – prior to the lapse into doctrinaire orthodoxy that occurred due to Al-Ghazali’s influence during the 11th century – could also be incorporated into this celebrated legacy, as doing so would show many Muslims that their own cultural history offers a way out of the quagmire of fanatical intolerance. New cultural monuments should emerge, inspired by the achievements of the past but also embodying an aspiration toward a better future. The legacy of the Enlightenment, in particular, could by itself create an exquisitely sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and proudly assertive cultural manifestation that would have far more to recommend itself than an orthodoxy based on a seventh-century creed ill-adapted to a hyper-pluralistic world of accelerating technological progress.

The murder of human beings for the expression of ideas draws humankind back into the muck of barbarism. It has no place in the twenty-first century, and no part of the world can claim itself to be civilized unless it decisively resists and neutralizes such threats to free speech. The threats, however, have metastasized beyond the individuals who carry them out. A major reassertion of the universal human values of the Enlightenment must happen in order to defuse the hostile environment in which these threats incubate. All decent human beings everywhere are welcome to take part in the revival of these values. Perhaps one day all of us can once more raise our eyes to the stars, without the fear of descending into the quagmire of savagery in which humans murdered each other over disagreements for vast stretches of history, until the Enlightenment raised some of us out.

Superstitions Kill: An Analysis of Witch Hunts in Europe During 1480-1700 (2005) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

Superstitions Kill: An Analysis of Witch Hunts in Europe During 1480-1700 (2005) – Essay by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 28, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2005 and published on in six parts on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007.  The essay earned over 21,500 page views on Associated Content/Yahoo! Voices, and I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
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~ G. Stolyarov II, July 28, 2014

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The Factors, Motivations, and Superstitions Behind Witch Hunts

 

The persecution of “witches” in Europe was a horrid practice during a time when the modern values of toleration, reason, due process, and gender equality were far more seldom manifested than today.

When examining the causes of the witch craze from 1480 to 1700, consideration must be given to those attitudinal conditions which, in later eras of European history, were far less prominent. Among these were the expectation of religious orthodoxy and behavioral uniformity, the lack of restraints on politicians’ desires to thrive at the expense of their subjects and competitors, and a widespread distrust of women and the aged.

During the Pre-Enlightenment era, the ideas of individual intellectual and religious freedom were largely anathema to mainstream thought, and opposed by a both a Catholic church striving to re-assert its temporal authority and the leaders of the Protestant Reformation attempting to aggressively gain control over mass followings.

Pope Innocent VIII wrote “The Witch Bull” in 1484, during the late Renaissance, when the Catholic Church was infamous for its pomp, love of worldly wealth, political scheming, and economic corruption. Part of the motive for this edict may have been the restoration of the Church’s prestige in the eyes of many fervent Christians, who held great disappointment and frustration at the Church’s perceived departure from spiritual matters.

By embarking the Church on a quest to purge spiritually “tainted” individuals, the Pope might have hoped to restore the image of his organization’s intense religiosity, while the Church’s political and worldly authority only increased. Indeed, the Holy Inquisition, which was just beginning to arise during this time, was greatly empowered by The Witch Bull to spread its physical power to all places where suspicions of witchcraft were present, effectively giving the Church the doctrinal means to implement a near-absolute ideological stranglehold over the Catholic world.

The tremendous success of both the Catholics and the Protestants at using the fear of witches to entrench their domination over the masses could only have been made possible by the masses’ tremendous susceptibility to such irrational superstition. A diary from a young Protestant boy illustrates a child’s fear of supernatural terrors, such as the devils that perpetually tormented his mind. Children, not yet having had adequate exposure to the workings of reality, are even today often pervaded by fears of monsters and other bizarre harms emerging from the unknown, but this boy lived in an age when the adults did not discredit such worries.

Indeed, because one church or another exerted a monolithic control over people’s intellectual lives, an individual would grow up in an environment where his childhood fears would only be further fed and fueled by the messages emanating from the religious orthodoxy. Entire generations would grow up in this manner, convinced since their earliest days that any individual oddity, coincidence, or uncommon occurrence was a sign of supernatural evil. Such masses were willing audiences to whatever ideological craze churches would concoct to extend their authority over individuals’ lives.

Anti-Female Prejudices Displayed in The Malleus Maleficarum

 

The 1486 book, The Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches) was among the most violently prejudiced writings in history; it claimed the inferiority of women to males in every respect and blamed on this inferiority women’s alleged susceptibility to witchcraft. This book’s teachings inspired a bloody series of witch hunts that ravaged Europe for the next two centuries.

According to Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger in The Malleus Maleficarum, female susceptibility to superstition and witchcraft has among its causes women’s excessive credulity. The devil prefers to target the more credulous since “the chief aim of the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he rather attacks them” (1). Kramer and Sprenger thus imply that the devil seeks to destroy religious integrity in the largest number of souls, and that his odds of success at this are greatest when targeting women. Women’s impressionability, defined by Kramer and Sprenger as the readiness “to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit” (1), renders their souls wide open to the devil’s manipulations.

Moreover, according to Kramer and Sprenger, women’s general inability to keep a secret, illustrated by their “slippery tongues” (1), is claimed to be a cause for the frequent public exposure of their witchcraft. Continuing their presentation, Kramer and Sprenger assert that women are intellectually inferior to males, and in this respect analogous to children, devoid of the knowledge of such fine disciplines as philosophy, which could have shielded them from maleficent influences. Furthermore, women are portrayed as being more motivated by bodily lust than males, and are, throughout the text, characterized as having insatiable carnal demands. This is derived from the inherent nature of woman, who obtained this defect as a result of her formation from an improperly bent rib.

Kramer and Sprenger claim that “The Malleus Maleficarum portrays the vices of deviousness and envy as pervasive in women. Kramer and Sprenger contend that women’s displays of emotion are insincere, since “[w]hen a woman weeps, she labours to deceive a man” (2). Women’s constant conniving and treachery are due to the jealousy that even the best women exhibit toward both their female counterparts and males. Even among the holy women of the Bible, Kramer and Sprenger find numerous examples of this trend, and assert that its harm will be magnified even further if it is directed against males. Female witchcraft, then, is the material manifestation, by means of manipulation and treachery, of the rampant envy that women exhibit.

Though Kramer and Sprenger assert that women are susceptible to irrational superstition, it is they, the authors of The Malleus Maleficarum, who fell prey to the most disastrous of superstitions: superstitions that enabled the killing of thousands of innocent people.

Witch Hunts as a Form of Anti-Female Discrimination

 

The witch hunts that took place from 1480 to 1700 were in part facilitated by the negative perceptions of women during the time period of their occurrence. Alan Macfarlane’s statistics reveal that females typically comprised about 80% of the total amount of “witches” executed, implying that, for every male victim, four females lost their lives.

Writing The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum),the monks Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger entrenched this misogynist bend into official witch-hunting doctrine. Kramer and Sprenger describe a woman as inherently more fallible than her male counterpart, and from her very nature as one originating from an improperly bent rib, prone to evil. However, Kramer and Sprenger also write that, though women are susceptible to evil influences, they can also be “very good” when they use their impressionable qualities in a certain manner.

Given the heavily patriarchal nature of their time period, the monks may have been suggesting that the proper place of a woman is to obey male influences, so that her imperfections may be compensated for by the males’ lack of such fallibilities. The threat of being branded a witch more readily than a male would be might have served as a deterrent for women from defying the commonplace expectations imposed on them by the social and religious paradigms surrounding them.

Women like Alice Prabury, who diverged from the expected role of a woman as a mundane housekeeper and instead obtained uncommon skills to cure people and animals of diseases, were targets for persecution. The Churchwardens of Gloucestershire may have filed their accusation of witchcraft against Prabury due to their disapproval of the excessive independence that the woman manifested, as exemplified in her refusal to tell others, including the representatives of the dominant paradigm, the unique means by which she went about to performing work.

Additionally, women, like Walpurga Hausmannin, who exercised initiative in romantic relationships, were suspect of being in league with the Devil. In the patriarchal society of that age, romantic advances by females were considered highly improper and threatening to the social order. Perhaps Hausmannin’s death was a result of the dominant paradigm’s attempt to criminalize such behavior under the guise of witchcraft, but with the true purpose of enforcing male domination in relationships.

The creative, individualistic, and independent women were most often the targets of the two-century-long spree of witch hunts. Such persecution unfortunately destroyed many talented individuals who could have lived fulfilling lives and made tremendous advances in the arts and sciences.

How Martin Luther and John Calvin Conducted Witch Hunts and Persecuted Dissenters

 

The early 16th-century Protestant reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin were not enlightened, forward-thinking individuals. They were brutal, superstitious, intolerant, and repressive individuals who exploited popular stereotypes of “witches” in order to persecute those who disagreed with their views.

The Protestants’ use of the witch craze to enforce religious orthodoxy was no less dramatic than that of the Catholics. One of Martin Luther’s tools for attracting a mass following to his breakaway movement from the Catholic Church was the use of powerful emotional imagery. Just as he compared Rome to Babylon and the Pope to the Antichrist following his rejection of papal authority during the Leipzig debate in 1519, Luther was ready to brand eccentric or ideologically divergent individuals as “the Devil’s whores.”

Luther, in his 1522 sermon, charged the “witches” with a litany of supernatural behaviors, including transformation into different animals, accusations which, to the rationally thinking mind, would be ludicrous indeed. This further demonstrates that Luther’s motive for breaking away from the Catholic Church was not to defend freedom of individual thought, but to establish a religious orthodoxy of his own.

Luther, in addition to his intense anti-Semitism, strived to encourage the adoption of his version of Protestantism as the state-sponsored religion of numerous German principalities, at the expense of the religious freedoms of those principalities’ citizens. His intolerance extended even to the Zwinglians in Switzerland, with whom he exhibited only a minor disagreement over transubstantiation. Luther would undoubtedly have been eager to use the fear of witches as yet another weapon to direct mass hostility against those whose views diverged with his own.

John Calvin’s description of witches in the Institutes of the Christian Religion even more transparently revealed his true motives of combating dissension from his version of Protestantism. Calvin draws, from his passage on witchcraft, the conclusion that “we have to wage war against an infinite number of enemies.” Calvin might have included under this category anyone who did not conform to the dicta of his strict church government in Geneva.

Calvin’s policy was to stringently oversee people’s private lives, church attendance, and intellectual expression, and ensure that nothing they said or did would displease God. It should therefore come as no surprise that Geneva experienced a far larger number of witch hunts than most other major European cities. H.C. Erik Midelfort’s statistics show Geneva as having experienced 95 cases of witch persecution over 125 years, almost two and a half times more than had occurred in the entire Department of the Nord in France during 137 years.

Calvin was frank about his use of the witch craze to enforce the power of his own theocratic order, stating in the Institutes that he had brought up the entire issue “in order that we may be aroused and exhorted,” i.e., rallied behind Calvin’s religious movement.

The Political Motives Behind Witch Hunts

 

Aside from religious motives, the witch hunts that took place from 1480 to 1700 were made possible by the time period’s lack of restraint for political practices that provided only a flimsy cover for outright theft of property and politicians’ wanton attempts to destroy both their subjects and each other.

The personal avarice of many politicians of the time period impelled them to seek to thrive at the expense of others’ lives and suffering. The canon Linden, in his account of the persecutions in Trier, Germany in 1592, describes many of the city’s prominent magistrates as victims of the witch hunts, while others, including numerous political officers and the men hired by them, grew wealthy off the confiscated possessions of victims.

Indeed, Linden’s description suggests that witchcraft was “mass produced” and that the furnishing of accusations was a profitable industry for those on the receiving end of the property. The vehemence of a large segment of the population in supporting the witch executions might have been reinforced by the material gains those people would expect to obtain from them, gains that Linden personally witnessed when observing such men as the executioners.

Linden, himself a canon, saw many of his fellow canons lose their lives in the witch-hunting frenzy, and evidently considered himself at risk as well. His critical attitude toward the persecutions further illustrates that the witch hunts were an attempt of one class of people to prosper at the expense of others, and recognized as such by their victims.

Political rivalries, too, were motives for accusations of witchcraft. Among the victims of such ploys was Mayor Johannes Junius, who, though entirely innocent, was confronted with a trial whose proceedings were clearly not aimed toward an objective determination of guilt or innocence, but rather at causing Junius to “confess something, whether it be true or not.” The trial was rigged against Junius, and there was to be no possible outcome but his death. Such a case could not have existed had Junius not possessed rivals who wanted him eliminated at all costs. A vacancy in the post of mayor could, after all, assist someone’s political ambitions, either to occupy the position or place into it a man acceptable to some religious or political faction with the means to carry out witch hunts.

Roger North’s account also shows that witch hunts were often approved of by officials who themselves feared persecution by the masses. North, the brother of a chief justice, clearly sympathizes with those judges who were intimidated by mass fervor into condemning individuals accused of witchcraft, lest the judges themselves became targets of mass rage.

Even though most judges and officials, especially in the late seventeenth century, toward the end of the witch-hunting period, were sufficiently educated and rational to recognize the belief in witchcraft to be an “impious vulgar opinion,” those who stood on their principles could often find their careers, reputations, and even lives at risk.

Hatred of the Elderly as a Motivation for Witch Hunts

 

The era of witch hunts (1480-1700) exhibited a noticeably smaller life expectancy than the modern age, and living until an age even as advanced as sixty was extremely rare. Older individuals were seen as abnormal and thus, to the conformist mindset prevalent at the time, a threat.

W. Fulbecke expressed this view in writing, claiming that the bodies of the old become increasingly decayed and impure, and thus susceptible to corruption and evil. Having no rational, scientific explanation for the aging process, Fulbecke suggests that people senesce because they are “by the Devil whetted for such a purpose.”

The scientific ignorance of the witch-hunting period thus provided fuel for the creation of severely negative stereotypes on the basis of which aged individuals were persecuted. H.C. Erik Midelfort’s statistics show that the median age of accused witches across Europe was most frequently sixty, and at least fifty-five.

Given a general state of physical incapacitation among the elderly of the pre-modern era due to the lack of adequate medical knowledge, another reason for the frequent witch hunts against the senile may have been the inability of many of the latter to support themselves independently.

An English householder, as described by Thomas Ady, had a reputation for accusing of witchcraft those elderly beggars who had come to his door asking for assistance. The householder considered it his religious duty to give his aid to the poor, and would ask God’s forgiveness for denying it to an elderly woman, but would subsequently accuse the same woman of witchcraft. Perhaps, by the invention of such charges, the householder attempted to eliminate those elderly beggars whom he would otherwise have been compelled to support out of his Christian principles, likely to the detriment of his own economic well-being.

But even in such a time, more scientifically oriented individuals, such as the physician Johan Wier, had attempted to “fight with natural reason” the cruelties inflicted upon the aged. Wier refers to commonsense observations regarding the harmlessness of old individuals and the natural origins of the diseases which often clouded their reasoning.

Wier’s ideas were progressive for his time, and were used to argue for the humane treatment of the elderly. Nevertheless, the pervasive dominance of religious dogma over rational thought during his era left a mark even on Wier, who attributes witches’ false confessions to devilish influence, as opposed to the physical, this-worldly threats of torture they were faced with.

As the Enlightenment swept through the Western world during the early 18th century, the attitudinal conditions facilitating the persecution of witches were steadily moderated or eliminated. Religious orthodoxy gave way to greater toleration for a variety of faiths, and even strains of thought such as deism and atheism, whose advocates would not be accused of witchcraft.

The ideas of universal natural rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property made due process a legal priority and rendered it tremendously difficult for politicians to employ transparently artificial charges to wantonly expropriate the population or eliminate their competitors. The belief in the limitless potential of the rational faculties of all individuals, male or female, young or old, rendered misogyny and hatred of the elderly far less prevalent than previously. Along with the ideas that fostered it, witchcraft was relegated to the dustbin of history.

How Dictators Use Religion as a Means of Oppression in Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the Butterflies” (2002) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

How Dictators Use Religion as a Means of Oppression in Julia Alvarez’s “In the Time of the Butterflies” (2002) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
July 26, 2014
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Note from the Author: This essay was originally written in 2002 and published  on Associated Content (subsequently, Yahoo! Voices) in 2007, where it earned over 2,300 page views.  I seek to preserve it as a valuable resource for readers, subsequent to the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices. Therefore, this essay is being published directly on The Rational Argumentator for the first time.  
***
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 26, 2014

*

In Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, the sisters Minerva and Patria observe two portraits of Jesus and the Dominican dictator Trujillo, side by side, and compare them (53). Patria knows of the various atrocities committed by Trujillo against her friends, acquaintances, and countrymen, and she is aware of the constant terror and destruction that the government wreaks upon her people, but refuses to apply this knowledge to her own existence.

Psychologically, Patria is erecting a mental barrier against the suffering through a credulous faith in the “virtues” of a passive God and a devastating dictator. She refuses to acknowledge the evil around her as real and thereby feigns an illusion of security for herself. These, after all, were the icons she had been groomed since childhood to submit to and not question.

Minerva flies in the face of the dominant and repressive paradigm, which urges one to sacrifice one’s self-interest to Trujillo and then some to God. The culture in the Dominican Republic is replete with institutional mental barriers, even as superficial as the artistic enhancements of Trujillo’s portrait, which serve to reinforce Patria’s mindset of willful separation from the truth.

Deliberations concerning the nature of a deity lead one to the insight that almost all of today’s major religions had been invented during antiquity, when (with few exceptions) the world was governed by fragmented tribal monarchies, and a God was fashioned in the image of the only ruler a people possessed as a model, a dictator.

The resemblances between dictatorship and non-modernized versions of the major religions are astounding in this novel and in real life, as one learns of the repressive theocracies in the Middle East. Both teach, overtly in many cases, the cult of submission, of subordination to the rule of a capricious autocrat; be he located in a palace or in heaven. The source of the dictates is considered more significant than their actual validity and benefit, and thus Patria, despite learning of the horrors of Trujillo and becoming disillusioned with Jesus and the Catholic faith is unable to fully relinquish both as she had fallen prey to the subservient paradigm in a manner that Minerva had not.

The author, however, conveys a certain philosophical recognition that Patria obtained despite her block, which is illustrated by the last sentence, “And the two faces had merged!”, which implies the congruence of all forms of submission and self-abnegation, no matter how divergent or incompatible they may seem on the surface.

 

A Critique of Russell Kirk’s “Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries” (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

A Critique of Russell Kirk’s “Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries” (2009) – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
Originally Published June 28, 2009
as Part of Issue CXCVIII of The Rational Argumentator
Republished July 24, 2014
******************************
Note from the Author: This essay was originally published as part of Issue CXCVIII of The Rational Argumentator on June 28, 2009, using the Yahoo! Voices publishing platform. Because of the imminent closure of Yahoo! Voices, the essay is now being made directly available on The Rational Argumentator.
~ G. Stolyarov II, July 24, 2014
***

Russell Kirk’s 1981 essay, “Libertarians: The Chirping Sectaries,” is a shallow, unsophisticated ad hominem attack on the American libertarian movement. It contains an abundance of fallacies, mischaracterizations, false blanket generalizations, and outright lies about libertarians. Moreover, its intentions are hostile and destructive: Kirk wishes to prevent the possibility of what might have been productive intellectual and practical cooperation between libertarians and some of the more reasonable conservatives. Here, I will endeavor to thoroughly refute Kirk’s arguments and to show that libertarians are not the chaos-loving demons Kirk depicts them as being.

Kirk begins his essay with a manner of intellectual intimidation, claiming that conservatives form a “majority” of the American public, while libertarians constitute a “tiny though unproscribed minority” (345). During the time the essay was written, the latter may have well been true – although undoubtedly the number of libertarians has increased since then and especially since Kirk’s death in 1994. After all, Ron Paul gathered approximately 1.2 million votes in the 2008 Republican primaries – meaning that while libertarians are still a minority, they are not a tiny minority, but are rather somewhere on par with American Jews. The former claim – that conservatives constitute a majority of the American public – is unlikely to be true. But even if it were, what is the point of Kirk’s including it in a paper comparing the contents and the merits of the two ideologies? Surely, the truth of an idea is independent of the number of its adherents. Is it Kirk’s purpose to say to libertarians, “We are more numerous than you, and you exist at our mercy? How generous we are for not proscribing you!” Or is it to make the argument, “Most people agree with it, so it must be right!”? (I am sure that Kirk would disagree with the same statement when it came to popular music, clothing, or lifestyles.) Suffice it to say, the inclusion of this comparison is not a logically necessary part of Kirk’s argument and serves to simply poison the well against libertarians by appealing to the lower prejudice in some reason that might (i.e., numbers in elections) makes right.

Judging by the detestable behavior of the Religious Right and the so-called “conservatives” of the Bush administration in recent years, I am all too tempted to agree with Russell Kirk’s thesis that conservatives and libertarians have nothing fundamental in common, but this is far too hasty a judgment in my more thoroughly considered opinion. While many conservatives in the United States – especially many conservative opinion leaders – are proto-fascistic in their agendas, many others are decent, reasonable, and well-intentioned. While the former yearn for the Ancien Regime union of a militant church and an absolutist state, the latter at least claim to be espousing the principles of the American founding – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is for the sake of the latter kind of conservatives that I write this essay, urging them to reject Kirk’s insular and alienating claims and find some common ground – any common ground they can – with libertarians.

Kirk alleges that libertarians “carry to absurdity the doctrines of John Stuart Mill,” (345) thereby equating libertarianism with Mill’s utilitarianism. While Mill’s philosophy certainly has many elements that many libertarians would find praiseworthy, there are many other intellectual sources for libertarianism – many of whom would have serious disagreements with Mill and the other extremely famous utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham. The foundation for libertarianism that differs most from Mill’s thinking is the natural rights philosophy, whose varieties are espoused by John Locke, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and many others. Even if one does not follow the natural rights route, one does not have to embrace Mill’s and Bentham’s formula of “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” One can be a libertarian for reasons that have nothing to do with individuals’ subjective emotional states. For instance, one can argue that in a libertarian society, individuals will be wealthier, more productive, more moral, less violent, more refined, more differentiated from one another, or longer-lived – and any of these can be seen as ends apart from happiness if one is inclined to so consider them. I myself am an advocate of natural rights on a consequentialist foundation; I believe that absolutely embracing the principle of natural rights will enable people to maximally pursue and extend the most important of all values – the life of each individual. My kind of libertarianism does not depend on how anybody feels, and for me the existence or non-existence of the individual is more important than his happiness or lack thereof – although happiness is nice, too. Moreover, unlike many utilitarians, I do not ascribe the same degree of “valuableness” to all individuals, although I do believe that all individuals are worthy of a baseline level of respect for their natural rights and a baseline level of common courtesy. There are about as many kinds of libertarianism as there are libertarians, and Kirk is simply wrong to reduce all libertarianism to the thought of one person – even a brilliant person such as Mill.

While Kirk is not far from the truth when he alleges that libertarians consider personal freedom “as the whole end of the civil social order,” (345) he is grievously mistaken when he claims that libertarians also consider it the whole end “of human existence” (345). To most libertarians, freedom in itself is a means, not an end. Freedom serves to enable the individual to pursue and attain other values – such as prosperity, self-improvement, intellectual endeavors, personal relationships, esthetic enjoyment, and entertainment – without needing to fear the coercive interventions of others. To paraphrase Rothbard, freedom may be the highest political end, but it not the highest of all ends. Rather, libertarians recognize that the political sphere is best suited for the attainment of freedom, but is miserably suited to the attainment of any other end, as numerous failed experiments presupposing the contrary have demonstrated.

While I, a libertarian, have serious disagreements with aspects of Mill’s utilitarianism, I also have a great respect for Mill and find it necessary to defend him against some of Kirk’s attacks. Kirk heaps invectives on Mill’s upbringing by a “sour,” “austere,” and “doctrinaire” father, who gave him a better education that Kirk or possibly anyone else ever had. This is not an insult to Kirk, as few can equal the genius of John Stuart Mill, but I do find it rather disconcerting that Kirk does not respect Mill’s colossal erudition. While Kirk acknowledges Mill’s breadth and depth of learning, he alleges that “his intellect was untouched by the higher imagination” and that “Mill became all head and no heart” and “turned into defecated intellect.” What base and shallow accusations – especially coming from a man whose lack of imagination led him to disdain all of the wonderful possibilities of modern technology – including automobiles, highways, television, and computers. Premodern conservatives often accuse libertarians of having no imagination, while at the same time disdaining the technology that has cured so many great human ills without even knowing much about that technology and the ways in which it might be used beneficially. Moreover, I do not consider it having “no heart” to believe that human lives and human societies could be fundamentally and qualitatively better than they currently are – a notion that conservatives of Kirk’s stripe, believers in a fixed, unchangeable human nature and human social dynamics – emphatically reject. Embracing premodern conservatism amounts to a resignation to the massive human death, disease, conflict, and misery that have pervade the world since before recorded history. Embracing libertarianism offers an eventual way to rid ourselves of many of the perils we presently face. You decide which position displays more “heart,” if by “heart” one means a compassion for human beings and a desire to eradicate the suffering they do not deserve.

Kirk compounds his vitriol by mentioning Mill’s attachment to another man’s wife – forgetting that Mill did not actually do anything to infringe upon her marriage until her husband’s death dissolved it. It is not a mark of vice to simply have a desire which lacks legitimacy or may pose complications if actualized; it is only a mark of vice to act on this desire – which Mill did not. Mill was indeed the paragon of personal virtue; he delayed his gratification until he could do so in a manner that would not be adulterous and would not harm any human being. The same could not be said of many popular conservative leaders today – hypocrites, adulterers, money launderers, petty and large tyrants, and militant advocates of destruction. While Kirk himself was a moral though oddly dogmatic character in his personal life, the worldview he demands had many far less admirable exponents.

The essence of Kirk’s criticism of Mill’s absolute principle that the sole purpose of government force is to prevent harm inflicted by some against others is that liberty is desirable in some cases, but not desirable in others. Yet, who is to decide in which cases liberty is desirable? Can we trust any human being, however virtuous, to make that decision – whose consequences can be grievous for others – and to implement it using the force of the state? While some people are clearly more rational and virtuous than others, no person is free of flaws. The purpose of libertarianism is to minimize the impact on others that any given person’s flaws might have. It is impossible to reliably prevent an individual’s follies damaging himself, but libertarianism endeavors to confine that damage solely to himself to as great an extent as possible. It is thus that each man may govern himself as he pleases, for good or for ill, but when it comes to governing others as a master and not an impartial referee, the potential for and magnitude of damage is far too great – as history repeatedly teaches us.

The fascistic strain in Kirk comes out when he writes, “It is consummate folly to tolerate every variety of opinion, on every topic, out of devotion to an abstract ‘liberty’; for opinion soon finds its expression in action, and the fanatics whom we tolerated will not tolerate us when they have power” (346). I do not see the problem here, for words and ideas are different from actions. One may hold fanatical or simply wrong ideas and express them using words, but this does nothing to change the state of society until the ideas are actually implemented. In a libertarian society, it is legitimate to use force to stop any implementation of coercion – so where is the problem? The moment the fanatics begin to use violence, they get punished; until then, they are merely stating their opinions. Since their ideas are false, they can be countered with true ideas; the battle at this stage should occur entirely on the level of voluntary persuasion, and force should only be used when force has been initiated. To claim that opinion necessarily finds its expression in action is absurd. If I believe that I ought to have a club sandwich, that does not mean that I will go out and get it; there may be obstacles in my way that I cannot overcome – such as poor weather or pressing work commitments. Moreover, what I mean by a club sandwich might not be what you think I mean by a club sandwich. Maybe I mean a sandwich that looks like a club, or a sandwich that is eaten in a social club or off of a golf club, so what you think I want may not be what I actually want. Whenever any two people use words, the definitions of those words may be so highly peculiar to each individual that it becomes impossible to predict in advance how any given person will be motivated by any given idea. Human actions, not human ideas, can be known with certitude – and there is no deterministic pathway by which a given idea becomes translated into any given action.

But, ironically enough, Kirk’s brand of conservative is precisely the kind of intolerant fanatic who would use overwhelming force if he were to achieve power – force that would be used to abolish numerous technological advances, mandate religious belief and observance, persecute non-coercive lifestyle choices such as premarital cohabitation, homosexuality, and marriage outside of mainstream churches, and require theological instruction for the masses. Anything that the center and far left are doing today to coerce the American people would pale in comparison to a premodern conservative theocracy in the United States. But suffice it to say, a person who is intolerant and advocates persecution of contrary opinions rarely does so on a whim; he typically believes the contrary opinions to be in some way dangerous if implemented. So Kirk’s position is no different in kind from the position of an Islamic fundamentalist theocrat — say, a Taliban cleric or an Iranian ayatollah, who also considers opinions contrary to his own to be very dangerous indeed, especially when it comes to the “higher things,” if they were put into practice. Kirk might impose different prohibitions from the Islamic fundamentalists, and to a different degree, but his mode of thinking is quite similar.

Kirk believes that the great danger of our time is “the lust for novelty; and that men will be no better than the flies of a summer, oblivious to the wisdom of their ancestors, and forming every opinion merely under the pressure of the fad, the foible, the passion of the hour” (347). But this is precisely what libertarianism helps protect us against! By having freedom from coercion, the individual is protected if he chooses to defy societal fads! If the past does indeed contain much wisdom (and I believe it does), then those who refer to it will live more successful lives – if they are not punished for doing so or forced to do otherwise. By establishing the state as an agency primarily working to prevent this kind of compulsion, libertarians ensure that every individual can become as erudite, sophisticated, long-term-oriented, and respectful of the great things that occurred in the past as possible. Most libertarians acknowledge an intellectual heritage that stretches back for millennia – with vestiges of libertarian thinking found in Socrates, Diagoras, Aristotle, Theodorus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, and many other thinkers of antiquity. Moreover, most libertarians eagerly embrace the technical accomplishments of our ancestors – the technology we enjoy today in all aspects of our lives – as well as their societal accomplishments, such as the elimination of absolute monarchy, the separation of church and state, the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, and the great diminishment of racial and ethnic discrimination.

Kirk then contradicts what he just wrote in the previous paragraph by lamenting that “The perennial libertarian, like Satan, can bear no authority temporal or spiritual. He desires to be different, in morals as in politics” (347). So what do you want, Dr. Kirk? You seem to dislike people blindly following fads, but then you also resent them being different! You need to pick one or the other, because the two possibilities are mutually exclusive and encompass the complete set of possible outcomes. One is either able to be different, or one is not. If one is able to be different, then one may decide not to follow a self-proclaimed authority in matters that do not involve coercing others. If one is not able to be different, then one may not be free to defy the cultural authorities that dictate the ever-changing fads that Kirk criticizes.

Kirk proceeds to make the stale and hackneyed equation of libertarianism with libertinism (347), an accusation that requires only a modicum of empirical observation and/or study of the abstract theory of libertarianism to debunk. Many libertarians – including, as we have seen, John Stuart Mill – were and are impeccably moral in their personal lives and acknowledge that their range of desirable behavior in society is limited by moral principles so as not to harm others. Many libertarians also care about their reputations and personal respectability and so will not act in complete disregard of the opinions and preferences of others. To the extent that they desire to get along with their friends, co-workers, and acquaintances, many libertarians voluntarily embrace certain kinds of conventions and modes of behavior – but they reserve the right to violate or modify those conventions if it makes rational sense to do so. I personally follow a great deal of societal conventions that are not legally mandated, but I do not believe that it is inherently wrong to defy some of these in certain circumstances. Where human values and conventions conflict, the conventions need to go; in most other cases, there can be a pleasant coexistence of the two.

The further Kirk delves into this essay, he states a blatant lie. He alleges that “the typical libertarian of our day delights in eccentricity – including, often, sexual eccentricity” (347). Doubtless, some libertarians exhibit sexual eccentricity, but the typical libertarian? Would Kirk, if he were alive today, dare to make this generalization of all, or even most, of the 1.2 million people who voted for Ron Paul in 2008 – a reasonable estimate of the number of libertarians in the United States? My observation has been quite different: most libertarians are more sexually modest than the general public in the United States. The reason for this may have less to do with libertarianism as a doctrine, but rather with the fact that libertarianism is an intellectual doctrine and requires a great deal of mental sophistication to grasp. More intellectual people are also typically more sexually modest – so libertarians, having a greater proportion of intellectuals among them than the general public, are typically more sexually modest. It can also be said that conservative and left-liberal intellectuals tend to be more sexually modest than the general public, although conservative and left-liberal politicians are far from being so. But Kirk does not say one word in criticism of the sexual eccentricities of conservative politicians…

Kirk also establishes an intellectual strawman. He writes, “The final emancipation from religion, convention, custom, and order is annihilation…” (347). But few, if any libertarians advocate complete emancipation from any of these; they simply want the freedom to choose how, when, and if to adhere to them. Some libertarians are religious, and some are not – but no libertarian wants to eliminate religion, especially through coercion. The same goes for adherence to non-coercive customs and conventions. After all, many libertarians celebrate traditional holidays and hold doors for people! Likewise, most libertarians subscribe to Friedrich Hayek’s understanding of a spontaneous order in society – an order that is not centrally or consciously planned but nonetheless emerges out of the interactions of millions of human beings. It is impossible to eliminate every kind of spontaneous order, although these orders do evolve and replace one another over time. But no libertarian wants to jettison all order. It is Kirk’s primitive equation of order with top-down planning – what Hayek calls taxis – and more particularly, with central planning at a society-wide level – that lies at the basis of his accusation.

Kirk, and G. K. Chesterton, to whose story “The Yellow Bird” Kirk refers (347-348), misconstrue the meaning of liberty as the freedom from all limitations. They argue, instead, that limitations are quite necessary even to the very survival of the human organism. This is not controversial, but it is beside the point. The question is, rather, should somebody else be able to dictate to an individual what his limitations ought to be and to punish that individual for having a different understanding and/or acting on it? Most of us – the ones who are still alive, at least – want some limitations in our lives, which we structure according to definite patterns that we do not like to see infringed on. The alternative we face is whether we get to plan our lives, or whether somebody else gets to do it for us. It may well be that some amount of government action is necessary to give every individual the maximum possible sphere in which he gets to make his own decisions. I certainly do not reject all government, and I am even a state employee, because I think that certain kinds of protections afforded by government can maximize individual liberty. Some libertarians, the anarcho-capitalists, will disagree with me here – but virtually all libertarians will agree that the purpose of political institutions, whether they be governmental or decentralized, competing, and private, is to protect every individual’s ability to choose the limits to which he will be subject, with the exception of the inviolable limitations of not harming others and not infringing on their ability to have a similar level of choice.

Moreover, there are always the limitations posed by the laws of nature – laws that cannot be violated, although they can be used creatively to achieve our purposes. To get anything of substance done in this world, one needs to have a thorough understanding of natural laws – the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, economics, ethics, and even to a certain extent esthetics. In the words of Francis Bacon, “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” It does not work to simply wish away the limitations posed by the laws and phenomena of nature. Rather, we ought to work within those limitations to make a better existence for us all. Libertarianism does not see itself as opposed to the limitations of natural law. Quite the contrary, libertarians – even some of the utilitarians among them – consider their ideas derived from the laws of nature, with their inherent limitations. After all, if libertarians truly did not believe in limitations, they would say that socialism could work if people wanted it to work – since socialism not working despite people’s best intentions is surely a limitation to what is possible!

More than halfway through the essay, Kirk comes to his senses and acknowledges that there are some respectable libertarians out there “who through misapprehension put up the cash for the fantastics” (348). Kirk believes that these people are really “conservative[s] with imperfect understanding of the general terms of politics” (348). I would give these individuals, whom Kirk does seem to respect, a bit more credit than to think that they are simply duped by the more objectionable elements of the libertarian movement. If these gentlemen are so smart, they must know what they are doing and must have good reasons for doing so. Perhaps the other libertarians whom they support are not as bad as Kirk supposes, or perhaps the gentlemen do not as readily support the caricatured doctrinaire libertarians as Kirk asserts. Either case, or a combination of both, is entirely plausible. In every movement of any decent size, there will be fanatical, irrational, and dangerous people; I have met some of those among libertarians as well, and I do not support them or their agendas. On the other hand, there are many people whom Kirk considers “eccentrics” (this is a negative term for Kirk) who I believe are delightful, reasonable, and sane individuals. It is true that many libertarians spend too much time developing their abstract theory and not enough time attempting to implement it in the real world – but some libertarians have recognized this and are beginning to work – often quietly and indirectly – toward more tangible objectives than an ideal minarchist state or pure and functional market anarchy. But the lack of practicality among some libertarians should not be a condemnation of libertarianism itself; it may simply be a natural outcome of the politically marginalized status that most libertarians consider themselves to have. If they can only effectively think and write at this stage, then this is what they will devote their attentions to.

Following his disclaimer, Kirk makes his case for why an intellectual alliance between libertarians and conservatives is undesirable. He believes that libertarians are “mad” and exhibit “lunacy” and besides are so small a minority that they will have no impact on American politics, but one should not want to be associated with them and their “lunacy” (349). He also accuses libertarians of splitting into ever-smaller sects and rarely coalescing again. Libertarian sectarianism is, alas, all too prevalent a phenomenon for my liking – and Kirk’s criticism here has some justice as applied to contemporary libertarianism. However, libertarians are no longer a minority so insignificant as to be dismissed and have no impact. With such highly influential and wealthy libertarians as Richard Branson, Peter Thiel, T. J. Rodgers, and Charles Koch – multi-billionaires, all – on the international business scene, libertarianism can no longer be dismissed as a fringe movement. (An impressive list of libertarian celebrities has been published by Advocates for Self-Government.) The number of libertarians is growing – especially among the intellectual and economic elite – while the number of conservatives is constant or declining. I say this to refute Kirk’s allegation that libertarianism will always be insignificant and ineffectual. Moreover, the more successful libertarians – the people who have accomplishments outside the realm of developing libertarian theory – also tend to be less sectarian, so it is possible that a natural selection process will lead those libertarians to assume increasingly more influential positions in the movement.

As for the accusation of the madness of libertarians, it is an ad hominem attack and is simply unfair. I could easily say the same about Kirk’s belief that cars are “mechanical Jacobins” and his complete rejection of television and computers. I will not say that this belief is madness – just a difference of opinion. I say this because, while Kirk’s ideology seems thoroughly irrational and false to me, I do not believe that anyone can say, from his vantage point, that the vantage point of another constitutes madness. This aids neither intellectual progress nor mutual good will among people. Every person – irrespective of the content of his thoughts, has reasons for thinking the way he does. Rather than dismissing him as mad, it is more constructive to try to understand his position – for we must, after all, coexist in the same world, preferably without exerting brutal violence upon one another. This is the purpose of civil discussion – to establish a level plane of respect and consideration for all the participants and to evaluate ideas based on their content, not on name-calling. Ad hominem attacks, such as the accusation of madness, destroy the level plane of discussion in an attempt to relegate one of the participants to an automatically less respectable position. This leads to intellectual bullying and bravado by the party that performs the diminution, but it does not establish any truth, nor contribute to any mutual improvement.

Now I will refute, point by point, Kirk’s more specific arguments for why an alliance between libertarians and the more sensible conservatives is not possible.

1. Kirk writes, “The great line of division in modem politics – as Eric Voegelin reminds us – is not between totalitarians on the one hand and liberals (or libertarians) on the other; rather, it lies between all those who believe in some sort of transcendent moral order, on one side, and on the other side all those who take this ephemeral existence of ours for the be-all and end-all-to be devoted chiefly to producing and consuming” (349). I will not here address the controversy between the believers in the transcendent and those who consider this world to be sole and primary. However, I will note that politics concerns this world and the manner in which people interact in it. Thus, in the political sphere, any considerations of whether anything besides this world exists could and should be irrelevant. The purpose of politics is to establish an order here that fulfills certain desired characteristics. I fail to see why people of different metaphysical beliefs would necessarily never agree on what the desired state of affairs in this world ought to be. We all believe in this world, after all, and – despite the disingenuous protestations of some on the Religious Right – we all consider this world important.

2. Kirk writes, “In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that ‘liberty inheres in some sensible object,’ are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable ‘liberty’ at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise” (349). Kirk believes that order has primacy over liberty – but any order? What about the order of the Aztec empire, with its hundreds of brutal human sacrifices per day. What about the caste system – the traditional order of India – accompanied by ritual widow burning, violence against families that paid insufficient dowries for their daughters, and inhuman treatment of “untouchables”? What about the order of some eras of traditional China, characterized by female foot binding and aversion to foreign contact? What about the order of a totalitarian dictatorship? Surely, not all kinds of order are desirable – and some are even less desirable than that big unattainable bugaboo of complete chaos. If Kirk is willing to admit (and he probably would be) that not every order is a good order, then it follows that an order is only good if it is good for something.

Then the question must be asked as to why we want order in societies in the first place. We need societal interaction in order for us to rise above the level of bare subsistence we could attain under autarky. By engaging in societal cooperation, we each want something that the others have. Thus, we require mechanisms by which we can engage in only interactions that benefit all of us and avoid, as much as possible, those interactions that harm some of us. Most of these mechanisms are private, consensual, and even informal. But some human interactions – the violent ones – are so powerful at overriding all the others that they must not be tolerated. Indeed, the society in which nobody uses violence against anybody else is the most desirable society. If we have a government, its legitimate purpose is precisely to make sure that as little violence as possible occurs by establishing a method of promptly detecting and punishing initiations thereof. Historically, most governments have fallen miserably short of this goal and have indeed initiated much active harm – but some governments fulfill the role of protector from violence better than others. And we can always hope for and work toward future improvements. Order is undoubtedly important, but it is vital to have the right kind of order for fulfilling the primary goal of a society, which is the mutual benefit of everybody in it. But who defines the mutual benefit of everybody? Each person who fits under the umbrella description of “everybody” defines his benefit for himself, to the best of his reasoning ability. But in order to be able to pursue his definition of his benefit, every individual must have liberty. Therefore, the purpose of a political order is to preserve for each individual this liberty, so that – by partaking in the larger societal order – the individual can gain other values as well. Order and liberty are not mutually contrary, but order without liberty is not worth having; it is the enslavement of some to others.

3. Kirk writes: “What binds society together? The libertarians reply that the cement of society (sofar as they will endure any binding at all) is self-interest, closely joined to the nexus of cash payment. But the conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor” (349). Kirk is being far too simplistic here. Why cannot both friendship and self-interest be necessary and important components for a society to work? What makes these two concepts in any manner opposed or mutually exclusive? Why can one not look out for one’s own well-being but also care about the well-being of others whom one considers friends? Virtually everybody does this, and I do not know of a single libertarian or conservative who believes that there is either no friendship or no self-interest in any actual or desirable society. Moreover, I do not know of any libertarian who believes that no dead person is important. After all, many illustrious libertarian thinkers have lived many generations ago! Moreover, I do not know of any libertarian who espouses complete apathy for the yet unborn. Self-interest, as well as friendship and consideration for the past and future, are universal human attributes; they are not peculiar to conservatives or libertarians.

4. Kirk writes: “Libertarians (like anarchists and Marxists) generally believe that human nature is good, though damaged by certain social institutions” (350). This is far from the truth. Perhaps only Jean-Jacques Rousseau – clearly not a libertarian – and his intellectual disciples held this view of human nature. Most libertarians do not believe that any universal normative judgment can be applied to the natures of all humans. Humans are neither universally good nor universally bad; rather, they have certain fairly common motivations and are channeled by internal and external incentives toward good or bad acts. As for my own more particular view, I believe that the term “human nature” is tautological and not particularly helpful, as I explain in this article.

5. Kirk writes: “The libertarian takes the state for the great oppressor. But the conservative finds that the state is ordained of God” (350). Kirk is wrong again about the libertarian view. Libertarianism per se does not condemn the state, although anarcho-capitalism does. Most libertarians are minarchists – advocates of a government limited to protecting individuals against the initiation of force. The state, so long as it confines itself to this role, is not an oppressor. When, however, it initiates force or fraud, libertarians begin to have issues with it. The “conservative” view that the state is ordained of God is rather alarming; it is in no manner distinguishable from the divine right philosophy that justified 17th-century absolutist monarchies in Europe. Surely, sensible conservatives will shy away from this view, if only for its glaring potential to be used by tyrants as a blank check to do anything they please – since they were ordained by God, after all. The sensible conservative will believe that the state is a manmade institution, subject to the possibility that it will be imperfect, unjust, or even on balance harmful. The sensible religious conservative will believe that, if God really is that great, he would not operate through the imperfections of human government – and, moreover, that his faith is most secure by being distanced as far from the state as possible.

Kirk further writes: “Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individual, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can be done only by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In short, a primary function of government is restraint; and that is anathema to libertarians, though an article of faith to conservatives” (350). This passage is a further example of Kirk’s fascistic leanings – the desire to subject not just people’s actions ­– but their will and passions. Thoughtcrime, anyone? The moment that the state goes beyond restraining what people do and instead endeavors to control what goes on inside their minds, it becomes not merely authoritarian but outright Orwellian. An old-fashioned autocrat is preferable to a government that thwarts men’s inclinations, controls their will, and brings their passions into subjection – which leaves men as nothing more than chunks of meat with no direction of their own, controlled entirely by the great puppetmasters to whom Kirk ascribes the enormous ability of so managing other human beings!

6. For me, the most unwarranted of Kirk’s objections to libertarianism is the following: “The libertarian thinks that this world is chiefly a stage for the swaggering ego; the conservative finds himself instead a pilgrim in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required-and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding. The conservative regards the libertarian as impious, in the sense of the old Roman pietas: that is, the libertarian does not venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or his country, or the immortal spark in his fellow men. The cosmos of the libertarian is an arid loveless realm, a ’round prison.’ ‘I am, and none else beside me,’ says the libertarian. ‘We are made for cooperation, like the hands, like the feet,”‘ replies the conservative, in the phrases of Marcus Aurelius” (350).

I do not know whether it takes a “swaggering ego” to make presumptions that another person’s experience of the world is that of an “arid loveless realm” – but these certainly are swaggering presumptions on Dr. Kirk’s part! One can appreciate the numerous wonders, beauties, and possibilities of this world without unquestioningly adhering to custom and tradition, being willing to lose one’s life for millions of people whom one does not know but who happen to be in the geographical entity rather arbitrarily defined as one’s “country,” or believing in a supernatural personified entity who made us, knows everything, and can do anything. It is sheer ignorance to say that libertarians do not venerate the natural world; many of them base their whole worldview on the idea of natural law – and a substantial portion of them like trees and animals and sunsets, too. As for “the immortal spark in one’s fellow men,” which Kirk certainly means in a religious sense, some libertarians agree with Kirk, while others prefer to pursue a more reliable physical immortality in this world. Still others believe that we do not need immortality in order for what finite lifespans we have to still be the highest values can that exist. There are substantial differences of opinion among libertarians on this issue – but clearly, the reality does not justify Kirk’s characterization of all libertarians as ignoring everything that makes the world worth appreciating. As for cooperation, no libertarian advocates autarky and many, including John Locke, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard, placed an explicit emphasis on the importance of societal cooperation to human flourishing. But this cooperation is among autonomous, independently conscious individuals – not “hands and feet” of a larger “body.”

Kirk further states, quite alarmingly, that an alliance with socialists is more preferable to conservatives like him than an alliance with libertarians: “The socialists at least declare the existence of some sort of moral order; the libertarians are quite bottomless” (351). The allegation that libertarians do not believe in a moral order is quite false and misleading. Most libertarians adhere to some explicit understanding of what is right and wrong for them and others to do – and all of then have an implicit understanding of this. One moral belief that is shared by all libertarians is that the initiation of force or fraud is wrong and should not be tolerated. Another common moral belief is that the life of each individual is a major – if not the major – moral value for its own sake, and not as the means to any other end. Another virtually ubiquitous libertarian moral value is that of honesty in one’s personal dealings – for no free-market economic system can thrive when people continually lie to and defraud one another. A wide variety of other moral values can be derived from the above in a myriad of ways.

Kirk continues to make false blanket characterizations of libertarians: “It was recently a plank in the platform of the Libertarian Party that expectant mothers should enjoy a right to abortion on demand; while to the reflecting conservative, the slaughter of innocents is the most despicable of evils” (351). While some libertarians do indeed support abortion rights, many others do not – myself included. Whether libertarians support the legality of abortion depends primarily on whether they consider the fetus to be a human person; if the fetus is a human person, then it has a natural right to life. If it is not a person, then it has no such right. Many libertarians are as strongly opposed to abortion as many conservatives, the Libertarian Party’s platform notwithstanding.

In the years since 1981, we have seen where the American conservative movement has gotten by refusing, in Kirk’s words, “to lie down, lamblike, with the libertarian hyenas” (351). (By the way, it seems rather strange for Kirk to first dismiss the libertarians as politically insignificant, but then to compare them to dangerous hyenas that would devour the conservative “lambs”!) By refusing to consider libertarian ideas, the American conservative movement has actively caused one of the greatest increases in illegitimate government activity in American history – including rampant deficit spending, the expansion of dangerous social programs, a disastrously-managed foreign war, torture, a surveillance state, restrictions on civil liberties, the precursors of hyperinflation, and enormous corporate bailouts. Russell Kirk’s intellectual influence may be felt in these developments by the discerning observer. If he were alive today, Kirk might protest that the depredations of the Bush administration were not what he wanted – but they are the logical outcome of the insular, intolerant, fascistic, and illiberal form of conservatism that Kirk promoted with considerable success. Conservatives have indeed had far more political power than libertarians in recent decades – and look where this brought us. Perhaps it is time to try something different.

Click here to read more articles in Issue CXCVIII of The Rational Argumentator.

Fearless, Provocative, and Inescapably Thought-Provoking: Review of Kyrel Zantonavitch’s “Pure Liberal Fire” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Fearless, Provocative, and Inescapably Thought-Provoking: Review of Kyrel Zantonavitch’s “Pure Liberal Fire” – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
May 16, 2014
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Pure Liberal Fire by Kyrel Zantonavitch is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle formats.
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There is perhaps not a single thinker in the world more fearless than Kyrel Zantonavitch. Pure Liberal Fire is the direct, provocative distillation of his thoughts on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, economics, culture, religion, and the history of philosophy – including Objectivism and Classical Liberalism. Zantonavitch seeks to evoke a pure, true liberalism, and he shows no mercy for ideologies and attitudes that constitute its antithesis. He certainly leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind about where he stands on the issues addressed – and each article within the book employs an abundance of superlative expressions – be they positive or negative. When Zantonavitch praises, he really praises – and the same goes for when he condemns.
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I give this book a rating of five stars because it invariably makes people think – no matter who they are or what their starting persuasions and assumptions might be. There are many areas in which I strongly agree with Zantonavitch – and quite a few where I strongly disagree as well. He articulates many valid points about the fundamentals of philosophy, the importance of liberty in political theory, atheism, the damage perpetrated by various political movements and policies, and the unfortunate tendencies among historical and current Objectivists toward dogmatism and conformism instead of independent thought and the honest pursuit of truth. Some of our areas of disagreement include war, areas of foreign policy, and, perhaps more generally, the desired mechanisms for achieving societal change.

Zantonavitch’s approach and style would entail achieving a fiery, dramatic, immediate deposition of everything (every person, every policy, every idea) he considers evil, dangerous, or damaging. My view of reform is more surgical, focused on getting the sequence of steps right so as to minimize the damage inflicted during the transition while ridding the world of the disease of bad policies (and, in a more long-term fashion, through persuasion and free-market education, also ridding it of bad thinking of the sort that motivates bad policies).

Zantonavitch combines his no-holds-barred treatment of his subject matters with a unique dialectical technique. There are several places in a book where he characterizes a particular set of ideas (or people) in a strongly negative way – but then later (or earlier) also portrays them as either highly praiseworthy, or at the very least understandable and characterized by redeeming attributes. Two examples that come to mind are (1) his discussions of Objectivism as a brainwashing cult in some places and as the most advanced, best-developed philosophy to date in others, and (2) his characterizations in some places of religious believers as not particularly bad as long as they do not take their belief too seriously – and in other places of anyone who believes in a god or teaches his/her children such beliefs as being guilty of evil and/or abuse. The reader can glimpse in this a deliberate juxtaposition of these opposing characterizations in a dialectical fashion – in an attempt to examine both the positive and the negative aspects of the ideas and behaviors Zantonavitch is writing about. (With regard to Objectivism, there is definitely merit in pointing out both the great strengths and the failures, as I have myself done, for instance.) This also creates a second layer of meaning in Zantonavitch’s work, as his uses of positive and negative superlatives with regard to the same subject are seldom immediately close to one another. While the rest of his writing endeavors to be extremely direct (indeed, provocative) with regard to its meaning, he seems to expect his readers to make their own connections in this respect without him deliberately pointing them out. As a result, with regard to Objectivism especially, Zantonavitch’s readers have the opportunity to acquire a more balanced, nuanced view after having been exposed to both his glorious praise and his scathing condemnation of the philosophy.

The Humility of Futurism – Article by Adam Alonzi

The Humility of Futurism – Article by Adam Alonzi

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The New Renaissance Hat
Adam Alonzi
April 20, 2014
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Civilization operates as if its troubles and their solutions will be as relevant tomorrow as they are today. Likely they were obsolete yesterday. How preposterous do the worries and aspirations of yesteryear seem now? What has not been refined since its conception? Our means of subsistence, entertainment, expression and enlightenment continue to change, although, at least unconsciously, they are accepted as stable. Change, once gradual, now quickens exponentially. Countless professions have been created and destroyed by advances; old orders have been destroyed, new ones have arisen; our world outlooks have been revolutionized by new discoveries over and over, although a sizable portion of the world is unwilling or unable to understand a man like Aubrey de Grey and an equally sizable portion of the population is still struggling with Copernicus. A Futurist accepts himself and his ideas as incomplete, therefore he actively works to improve upon them. Futurism is the first ideology that explicitly accepts the necessity and desirability of change.

It is a mistake to think we have reached the final stage of our journey. Plateaus are mirages conjured by the shortsighted; human evolution is a mountain without a peak. If a man has eyes, let him see all we have done and all we have yet to do. Let him gain the humility religion and liberalism have failed to inculcate into him and so many others. Each generation repeats this mistake. There is no evidence to suggest we are complete or are doomed now only to regress. Naysayers seem motivated to dismiss the triumphs of others out of fear they themselves will appear even less significant. Historically the distant future has received little attention compared to such pressing questions as the number of angels on the head of a pin or the labor theory of value. This may be thanks to a fondness for the apocalyptic, a fascination which certainly has not faded with time, but it is also attributable to the egotistical need to stand out. All epochs are transitions. The advances of this decade have failed to restore popular faith in progress, yet the very word is misleading. Faith does rest not upon an empirical foundation. There are scores of popular beliefs founded upon little or no evidence. Yet the proof of progress is all around us. Death wishes and earth-annihilating misanthropy aside, we can trace the modern disdain for the march forward to the fashionable nonsense of academia.


 Speculations and prophecies, even conservative estimates based on careful analysis, are treated with derision by the public. To say one has faith in technology is misleading. To compare the singularity to the rapture is like comparing planetary motion to Santa Claus. One is rooted in scripture, the other in observation. The doomsayers, secular and religious alike, enjoy forecasting our demise. The essential corruption critics charge Western civilization with is common to all; it is called human nature. It is meant to be transcended, not through critiques of immaterial “cultural entities,” but by improving our bodies and our minds through bioengineering. No belief is needed here. We do not rely upon a outworn holy book or the absurd dialectic of the Marxists. We change and adapt because we must. This is a point of pride, not one of shame. We do not worship the past; we have shrugged it off. Compared to the ridiculous claims circulating in the cesspool collectively referred to as “the humanities” this is a sane position, yet it is treated with nothing by scorn by those who, wishing so ardently to distance themselves from Western civilization, bite the hands that feed them, clothes them, and shelters them. While they navigate by GPS, post their inane tangents on social media sites, and try with all their might to discredit the culture to which they owe their lives and livelihoods, others push forward. Self-proclaimed critics of Western civilization should consider trading their general practitioner for an Angolan witch doctor. It is hard to respect those who do not practice what they preach.

Postmodernism and cultural relativism, though they have pretensions of completeness and delusions of permanence, are but passing fads. Something devoid of usefulness or, for that matter, a coherent hypothesis, cannot last long when technology is generating so much benefit to so many people. A meme will continue to propagate itself long after it has served its purpose, to the detriment of competitors and to society at large. It is the duty of Futurists and Transhumanists to demolish the acceptability of rubbish in academia and in the media. The Luddites are more dangerous than the Creationists. Hubris is barely acceptable in the hard sciences, but in an absolutely unempirical discipline like philosophy, it is deplorable. Our first priority should not be political or religious; it should be scientific. To whom do we owe our prosperity, and to whom do we owe our future? To whom do we owe our lives and the lives of our children? How many of us would not be here today were it not for the men and women of modern medicine? This is not the end. Forget the weary and the overwhelmed; they are weak. Forget the ones who have no desire to climb higher; they are unfit. Cast aside the ones who pray fervently for the undoing of their own species; they are the most vile of all. This is not the end. This is our beginning.
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Adam Alonzi is the author of Praying for Death and A Plank in Reason. He is also a futurist, inventor, DIY enthusiast, biotechnologist, programmer, molecular gastronomist, consummate dilletante and columnist at The Indian Economist. Read his blog Cool Flickers.
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Help the next generation embrace a progress-filled vision of the future by supporting the illustrated children’s book Death is Wrong (free in Kindle format until April 22, 2014), and the campaign to distribute 1000 paperback copies to children, free of cost to them. The Indiegogo fundraising period ends on April 23, so please consider making a contribution today.
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A Brief History of Western Liberalism – Article by Kyrel Zantonavitch

A Brief History of Western Liberalism – Article by Kyrel Zantonavitch

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The New Renaissance Hat
Kyrel Zantonavitch
June 1, 2013
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This is a brief history of the philosophy and culture of liberalism. It describes a life-style and civilization which lifts human beings far above that of animals, chimpanzees, hominids, and even tribalist hunter-gatherers. Liberalism features man at his best. Liberals are clear-thinking and rational men: natural, sound, healthy, happy, uplifted, and heroic.

Liberalism is a fundamental category of philosophy and life-style – something broad and general. It constitutes a definitive concept – beyond which one cannot venture or improve – like life, happiness, greatness, transcendence, virtue, beauty, pleasure, thought, reality, existence, and the universe. Liberalism’s subsidiary concepts are also ultimate and final: rationality, egoism, and liberty.

In the story of mankind, first come bonobos, then semi-human Homo habilis, then primitive man Homo erectus, then highly advanced Neanderthals, then truly intelligent and impressive Cro-Magnons – who used their 100 IQs to exterminate their brutish competitors, invent sophisticated arrow technology, and make art such as those Venus statues and cave paintings.

By 9000 BC the last Ice Age ended, and humans immediately converted from hunter-gatherers to rancher-farmers. After domesticating multitudinous plants and animals, by 3300 BC human beings further cultivated them with irrigation on their new private property, backed by their revolutionary social institution called government. By 1700 BC men had well-established written laws, well-developed literature and art, easy personal transportation using horses, and elaborate international trade using sophisticated great ships.

All of this constituted impressive advances in humans’ quality of life; but none of it constituted philosophical or cultural liberalism.

Finally, by about 600 BC, the ancient Greeks created the indescribably magnificent phenomenon of Western liberalism. They invented rationality or “Greek reason” or syllogistic logic – or pure thought or epistemology. This is usually described as “the discovery of science and philosophy.”

But along with the stunning and wondrous epistemology of reason – naturally and inevitably and inherently – came the ethics of individualism, and the politics of freedom.

All of this can be fairly, accurately, and usefully denominated as the thought-system and life-style of Western liberalism – of liberal philosophy and culture, especially as exemplified by Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno the Stoic. These three theorists, ironically, were labelled by their intellectual opponents as “dogmatic.” This was not because these scientifically minded open debaters claimed to know everything based on faith, but because they claimed to know anything at all based on evidence and analysis.

By the 100s BC in Greece, the general ideology of liberalism was well-established in the middle and upper classes. Then the Romans conquered the Greeks and within a century made liberalism their own. They even advanced the noble ideas and ideals a bit, with such thinkers as Cicero, Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, and Aurelius.

But skepticism of reason ascended rapidly by the 200s AD, and with it came the decline of the greatest country in human history. The new phenomenon of monotheism began to dominate in the 300s AD, especially Christianity or “Plato for the masses.” By the middle of the 400s, the philosophy and culture of liberalism were dead, and so was Rome. A long, terrible Dark Age ensued.

This irrational, illiberal nightmare of Western civilization lasted for a millennium. The wretched and depraved philosophy of Jesus ruined everything.

But a bit of reason and hope came back into the world in the 1100s of northwest Europe with the mini-Renaissance. High-quality Greek thinkers were gradually reintroduced. Then came the 1300s and the Italian Renaissance.

By the 1500s a whole Europe-wide Renaissance began with France’s conquest of northern Italy. The French brought their reborn art and philosophy to everyone in the West. The beautiful general philosophy of liberalism ascended still higher while the ghastly evils of fundamentalist skepticism, Platonism, monotheism, and Christianity declined. The classical liberal era was brought about by radical and heroic innovators like Francis Bacon, John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson.

The late 1700s Enlightenment and Age of Reason in Britain, France, Holland, and America featured liberalism at its height. But it was gradually and massively undermined by the irrational, nonsensical philosophers Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Hegel.

During and after the 1790s the French Revolution went astray and embraced ideological dogmatism, and self-sacrifice to the cause. It also converted itself into an early version of modern communism; as well as the false, evil, and illiberal ideologies of right-wing conservatism and left-wing progressivism. In the art world this was manifested by the slightly but definitely irrational Romantic movement of 1800-1850. Paintings started to turn ugly again.

Socialism and communism fairly quickly went into high gear after Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848. Religion also somewhat revived in the late 1800s. These two monstrous ideologies backed the moral ideal of self-destruction, or the “Judeo-Christian ethic,” or, even better, the “religio-socialist ethic.” The fin de siècle of the 1890s was the giddy, despairing, hopeless, lost end of a noble era in the West – a dynamic, heroic, rational, liberal era.

A practical, real-world, irrational, illiberal dystopia was achieved in the mid-1900s with Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Later in the 1900s there were Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini, and countless other despots. Illiberalism reached a hellish trough around 1985.

Then came Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Mikhail Gorbachev in Russia, and Deng Xiaoping in China. These four political semi-revolutionaries, in four leading nations, used their governments to change world culture in a liberal direction.

These liberal leaders emerged on the world scene because theory always precedes practice, and the theory of liberalism began to rise again – at least intellectually, and in certain recherché circles – around the early 1900s. It began anew with Austrian economic thinkers like Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and Friedrich Hayek. In addition to the dry, mechanical realm of economics, these three addressed the fields of politics and sociology – and even ethics and epistemology. They filled in many of the gaps, and corrected many of the weaknesses and failures, of Locke, Smith, and company.

The Austrians also attacked the communism, socialism, and progressivism of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, among others. And they taught the fiery intellectual novelist Ayn Rand.

Rand converted from fiction to philosophy from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. She was by far the most liberal thinker in the history of man. She created the philosophy of Objectivism. Ayn Rand advanced human knowledge about as much as Bacon, Locke, Voltaire, Smith, and Jefferson combined.

Sadly, however, Rand undercut her liberal ideology with a heavy atmosphere and subtext of cultism and religiosity in her propaganda movement. This was understandable, considering how revolutionary and hated her philosophy was, but hardly rational or legitimate.

However, Rand died in 1982, and a highly rational and non-religious organization, organized around her discoveries, emerged in 1989. This brought the world Objectivism as a thought-system, not a belief-system; and Objectivism as a rational, benevolent, effective philosophy – not an irrational, malicious, weird cult.

There are currently three separate but related avant-garde liberal ideological movements: Austrian economics, libertarian politics, and Objectivist philosophy. All three are tiny but, based on historical intellectual standards, seemingly growing solidly.

Pure liberalism – a pure, clean, complete comprehension that reason was 100% right in epistemology, individualism was 100% right in ethics, and freedom was 100% right in politics – began in the early 21st century. Randroid illiberalism began to die out. A New Enlightenment is about to begin.

Kyrel Zantonavitch is the founder of The Liberal Institute  (http://www.liberalinstitute.com/) and a writer for Rebirth of Reason (http://www.rebirthofreason.com). He can be contacted at zantonavitch@gmail.com.

Thoughts on Zoltan Istvan’s “The Transhumanist Wager” – A Review – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Thoughts on Zoltan Istvan’s “The Transhumanist Wager” – A Review – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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Zoltan Istvan’s new novel The Transhumanist Wager has been compared to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But to what extent are the books alike, and in what respects? In this review, Mr. Stolyarov compares and contrasts the two novels and explores the question of how best to achieve radical life extension and general technological progress for the improvement of the human condition.

References

– The Transhumanist Wager Official Page
– “Thoughts on Zoltan Istvan’s ‘The Transhumanist Wager’: A Review” – Article by G. Stolyarov II
– Guilio Prisco’s Review of The Transhumanist Wager
– “Larry Page wants to ‘set aside a part of the world’ for unregulated experimentation” – Nathan Ingraham – The Verge – May 15, 2013
– Zoltan Istvan’s Reddit AMA