The Borrowers
Commentary by Aslan, 3.20.2007
Complexity conceals truth.
An old woman is found dead, curled up in the corner of a dwelling. Twenty thousand years ago, the story of this woman’s death is simple and straightforward. Her fellow cave dwellers, fully aware of her condition and her relationship to every person in the cave, would know exactly what had happened. If blame for her demise was in question – not in this example; she was old and weak and froze to death – the tribal leader could take the necessary action without being haunted by uncertainty or confusion about the nature of her death.
An old woman is found dead, curled up in the corner of a dwelling…in New York City, last week. She was old and weak and froze to death because…why? Was the heat on or off? Was it cut off? Did the landlord cut it off? Was the apartment up to code? Did she know about utility assistance in New York? Where was her family, if any, and why was Grandma living alone? Did she have an illness that required medication she couldn’t afford? Was the illness related to poor work conditions in her youth? Was she white, black, oriental? An illegal immigrant? Did she have enough food? What was her income? Was there a pension, a husband’s pension? Was the pension managed well? Poorly? Was social security all she had? Did she have transportation to get food and medicine? Back to the heat: did a rise in energy prices make it impossible for her to pay her gas bill? Why are those energy prices high? The War on Terror? Environmentalists? Hurricanes? Did she smoke? Drugs or alcohol? Was her pitiable state a result of trauma in her life, in her youth? What kind of trauma and who was responsible?
And so on.
An old, infirm illegal immigrant named Juanita Suarez who was abandoned by her crack addict grandson in an unheated apartment building in New York City during a cold snap, and a wealthy old woman named Dorothy O’Leary, an insulin dependent diabetic with heart failure, who forgot to take her medication and slipped into a diabetic coma the very night her new furnace failed due to a faulty part are both "old, weak women who froze to death." Why did these women freeze to death? The answer to this question – the truth – is obscured by the complexity of modern life.
Within this complexity, bad ideas – like rats in a tenement – find shelter and thrive.
When insanity dominates the headlines, sane people wonder why indisputably absurd ideas are given serious consideration. Complexity is the answer.
A judge in Nebraska sentenced a convicted child molester to probation instead of prison, saying she believed the man's short stature would cause him harm in prison.
Cheyenne County Court District Judge Kristine Cecava on Tuesday sentenced Richard Thompson to 10 years probation instead of the 10-year prison term she said his crimes deserved...Cecava said she believed the 5-foot-1 Thompson would not survive in a state prison because he was too small (here).
Only intricate layers of complexity – the man’s stature, how molesters are treated in the correctional system, the man’s upbringing, full prisons, political correctness, the judge’s attitudes and biases – conceal the simpler truth that a child molester does not, under any circumstances, deserve special consideration for his or her well being.
On the heels of a child molester going free, we find the idea of parents being jailed for spanking:
Ms. Lieber's bill, which will be introduced this week, would make California the first state to prohibit parents from spanking their own young children. If caught, parents would face penalties…punishable by up to one year in jail (here).
A naïve analysis would insist that sexually abusing a five year old is worse than spanking that same five year old, but this ignores the complexity that is mother’s milk to bad ideas. It is possible, in the complex world of the cultural sophisticate, to see the molester as a victim and the spanking parent as an aggressor, and from this nuanced view of life emerge new priorities and new punishments.
Such headlines are symptoms of a deeper problem: the survival of untenable ideas in the public square that, under cover of modern complexity, persist by borrowing from successful ideas.
Every major leftist idea is unworkable on its own. Only by borrowing from a proven, generally pragmatic idea can modern liberals make an argument that leftist thinking is viable. In simpler times, good and bad ideas – usually opponents – did battle, and good ideas prevailed. Oh, a bad idea, enjoying the protection of a powerful patron, technical ignorance or ingrained superstition, might win a skirmish or three, but in the end it died precisely because it was a bad idea; very much like a crippled animal, it lacked the ability to survive once the healthy animal appeared and began to compete. Survival of the fittest ideas has been the backbone of progress over the ages, replacing gathering with farming, filth with hygiene, leeches with penicillin, and monarchies with representative republics. It is the scientific method incarnate.
Clarity, however, must be present for this beneficial evolution of ideas to continue – particularly abstract, cultural ideas – and modern complexity thwarts clarity. If you can’t figure out which idea is bad, you can’t kill it off. The bad idea becomes a parasite – like the rat – able to survive and perhaps even prosper as long as it can feed off of stolen success.
What emerges is a curious pattern in modern society: bad cultural ideas cannot begin until there is something to feed upon, until the fruit of its opposite idea has ripened. Once the good idea has built a foundation, the bad idea takes the field and lays claim to the results. From then on, the life of bad cultural concepts depends on surreptitiously borrowing from its opposite idea to survive.
Consider the idea called "pacifism." Here is a bad idea that survives because it borrows from strength – real, tangible, martial strength that has defeated past assaults on sovereignty long enough to permit a cohesive society to emerge. Then, under the protection of this secure republic, a band of citizens come forth who assert that all application of physical force, even in defense, is morally wrong and counterproductive to the cause of peace. This concept called pacifism may have appeared during cave man days, but that proto-philosopher was quickly clubbed to death. So, too, pacifists found life rough on the Mongol steppes, across from Rome’s legions, in Hitler’s camps and on the plains of Darfur.
Pacifism is an idea that requires a mature society established through strength to take on the appearance of viability. Pacifism argues that aggression is only directed towards other threats (other aggressors) and that passive behavior deters aggression by removing threat. Yet history is rife with the lessons of the bully: that aggressors are drawn towards weakness like ants to sugar. Mel Gibson’s Apacalypto succinctly captures the fate of pacific villagers who lack a strong benefactor.
Communism is another idea that requires the fruits of its antithesis – capitalism (private property rights, creativity, industry, passion) – to first take root. Once man’s entrepreneurial spirit has generated sufficient wealth to raise him high above the animals, the communist steps in to assert that the collective ownership of this wealth will better promote prosperity and justice.
The core value of communism – the Marxist mantra "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" – is a microcosm of the intellectual thievery that drives the Borrowers.
Atheism is the most aggressive Borrower of all. Here are people that claim morality is a social construct, which is to say that the prevailing morality in evolving society defines right and wrong, not "God" or religion. What is this morality that prevails? Why, the morality of the strongest or most influential faction at the time, of course. This is Social Atheism 101 and from that perspective it makes perfect sense. You can’t have every individual running around proclaiming some personal knowledge or intellectual revelation should form the basis of an ethical system – who would distinguish between Charles Manson, James Dobson, Peter Singer, William Bennett, Bill Clinton or Jack Kevorkian? Naturally, some form of consensus within the whole social group must inform morality.
Yet no creature is quicker to shout “Foul!” than the easily-affronted atheist, who must borrow from the absolute morality of the Creator to assert that he – the holder of one of these minority viewpoints – has inviolate individual rights that include a right not to be subjected to the morality of the majority – in this case, Christians. Such bizarre waffling between the morality of the individual and morality of the majority is a surefire formula for anarchy, if borrowed absolutes weren’t there to bail the atheist out.
But that is the tip of the iceberg for the atheist, who must borrow again and again and again from absolute morality – which can only be defined by a Creator – to instinctively hold such strong opinions against slavery, Nazism, infanticide, euthanasia or religion. There is no intrinsic right or wrong to any of these things; since morality emerges from society, any other thing that emerges from society is on its surface viable, never repugnant. For such things to be immoral, society must make a judgment about utility and value. On what basis can any atheist claim that prevailing social mores – for example, the subordinance of women under Sharia Law – are wrong? They cannot. They must borrow to do so.
Liberal tax policy – a bad economic idea that promotes class envy and ignores the Laffer Curve – owes its very existence to borrowed prosperity. Just as a blood drive borrows from the healthy, so too high tax rates borrow from the extraordinary health and resilience of the American economy. Then advocates of higher tax rates point to the survival of the blood donor as proof that he can still give more. They borrow the blood and then they borrow from the resilient individualism that perseveres to overcome the loss, never asking if the patient might have been better off avoiding the Bloodmobile altogether.
From the New Deal to the Great Society, from public schools to judicial activism, leftist ideas thrive because they borrow success. These Borrowers run a shell game and the complexity of modern life is the shell moving back and forth, back and forth. The Founders had a sense of the importance of clarity and good information, and, in a representative republic, the job of helping the rube keep track of the pea was the purview of the Fourth Estate.
Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people. - John Adams
Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government. - Thomas Jefferson
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. - James Madison
The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. - Thomas Jefferson
With the Fourth Estate expected to be the purveyor of information and clarity in our republic, is it any wonder why bad ideas are thriving as never before?
Copyright © 2007 Dan Hallagan. All Rights Reserved.