THE NEW ENLIGHTENMENT

From Some of Those Who "Got It"

"Nothing...is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Cartwright, 1824)

Reference: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Lipscomb and Bergh,
eds., 16:48.

"If ye love wealth better than liberty,
the tranquility of servitude
better than the animating contest of freedom,
go home from us in peace.
We ask not your counsels or your arms.
Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you.
May your chains set lightly upon you,
and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

-- Samuel Adams
(1722-1803), was known as the "Father of the American Revolution."
1776

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Samuel.Adams.Quote.428D

Do You Want Another Political Party?

Once upon a time, the Libertarian Party marketed itself as THE place to go for the "politically homeless." Then, after 11 September 2001, it alienated anyone who took national defense as necessary and went with those who thought the whole mess was caused by bad American policy over the decades. After we had been attacked, it mattered less to rational Americans just what our Middle East policy had been than the fact that we had had another "Pearl Harbor," and we had to defend ourselves instead of wring our hands in guilt over the past. Talk about dropping context, i.e., throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So, we are left with the Democrats, the Republicans, the vanishing Libertarians, and a jillion johnny-one-note political parties. Listen to people like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Medved, and almost any of the right wing talk show programs, and you will think that our only hope comes from keeping the two party system JUST AS IT IS. They call it something like, "working from the inside" to clean up the parties and to make change. They are also vicious against anyone advocating another political party, with all sorts of arguments ranging from you-are-wasting-your-vote to you-are-too-stupid-to-breathe-were-it-not-automatic.

Well, to all who poo-poo the idea of another political party, I quote the old Arab saying: May the fleas of a thousand camels reside in your crotches.

I say, if we want any semblance of representative government, and politicos who listen to us and share our profoundly pro-American principles, we MUST create a new political party. NOW! Time's a-wastin'. We are burning daylight.

Does anyone think that the Republicans or the Democrats can be reformed? In our lifetimes? At all? One party wants the communist version of socialism, and the other wants the fascist version of socialism. All the present third parties want to self-destruct. We are truly politically homeless.

Victor Hugo once said that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. If you do not want to live in an increasingly totalitarian state, or do not want that for your children and grandchildren, well, THE TIME HAS COME!

From Whence Came Those 1960s That Still Have Not Left Us? Part Three

Suppose you take a young fruit tree and cut off all but some 18 inches of its trunk. Then you graft poison tree stock onto the stump. Let us say that the new tree grows, drawing from the fine genetics and roots of the original tree. When this new tree makes fruit, you notice that the individual fruits look pretty much the same, but they differ enough from each other to notice the differences. All, however, come from the poison tree graft, and all are toxic. Some take longer to poison the consumer.

This metaphor really sets up the causes of the apparent de novo explosion of the late 1960s, and since. In fact, nothing about the late 1960s and subsequently was a surprise or an explosion. In this case, "apparent" describes those asleep at the switch as the changes were fermenting.

Pragmatism was one component of the fermentation, but it had and has a partner. Enter Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Enter communism.

Marx took his philosophical marching orders from Hegel who got his from Kant. Marx arrived with his pot of bad idea seeds to ground readied by the Franco-German intellectuals taking Rousseau and Kant as far downstream as each could go. Regardless of which limb of the tree the fruit came from in the 19th century, it was all poisoning. In the 20th century, the post-Marxians, ne' Hegelians, ne' Kantians, and so on, produced so real lulus: fascism, Nazism, communism, and a host of so-called "democratic socialisms."

Marx jumped the Atlantic to America in the German philosophy importation.

Intellectuals were ready. Marx gave them the total state, the destruction of and hatred for capitalism, groupism for morality, subjectivism for truth, and he carried forth the split between reality and reason which Kant gave Europe, and then all the West.

Enter the Progressive Movement in America and the collapse of classic liberalism. The war against capitalism was joined, and partnering with the Pragmatists and other strains of Franco-German philosophy which had lept the Atlantic posed no problem whatsoever. They all mixed and matched like cream and sugar in coffee. Marxism gave all of them a political focus. From the universities into the secondary schools became a step, not a leap.

Meanwhile, philosophy in Europe, somewhat ahead of America, simply disintegrated into little more than babbling in the 20th century. Philosophers became obsessed with trival pursuits, thereby turning off generation after generation to the power of philosophy. Philosophy no longer tried to solve problems; it tried to replace dealing with the big concerns of life with issues such as the meaning of the sentence, "The cat is on the mat."

Where was the opposition to Pragmatism and Marxism? Who stood up for reality, reason, individualism, rights, and capitalism? After the social darwinists got egg on their faces and shut up, no one stood up. Franco-German philosophy marched into American culture through the intellectuals without opposition.

These offspring went to law schools, then to the courts, to the legislatures, to journalistic media, and, of course, to a wholesale takeover of the liberal arts, i.e., "humanities," in our colleges and universities. From there they flooded the public schools predominantly, even fashioning powerful educational unions which completely took over America's public schools and squeezed out opposition.

Many intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s visited Lenin's Soviet Union to witness full bore communism, and they returned making comments like their having seen the future, and it was glorious. They got themselves their own President of the United States and an endless stream of indoctrinated professors streaming to a rapidly expanding federal government to make pro-socialism policies.

The tree metaphor is no approximation. The social-political-economic fruits that it bore in the 20th century differed slightly from each other, but these fruits came from the same stock. That stock can be called socialism, and the fruits are its variants regardless of whatever names are given to differing fruits.

TV's Season Past

We published early-in-the season thoughts about the 2005-6 television season on Sixth Column in the fall of last year. Now it is time to look back at the season, now that it has just concluded, to tell what we thought of the programming. (OK, Closer is out of sync with the networks).

First, there were many programs not worthy of any mention whatsoever, so they won't be mentioned.

Programs which self-blighted:

o Commander-in-Chief (turned boringly Left) o E Ring (poisoned by its own dhimminess) o Invasion (glacial and unsuspenseful) o Threshold (even worse than Invasion) o Alias (weirded itself into the unseeable even before its final hurrahs)

Programs being killed by the writers and producers:

o Cold Case (Turning heroine into a neurotic with poor judgment about men) o Desperate Housewives (Becoming just another soap opera) o NCIS (Characters' unnecessary sillinesses displaying plot and story line) o Lost (Too glacial and indefinite, with too much "who cares") o Monk (Slapstick)

Programs with wasted high potential:

o House

Top 10:

1. Closer 2. CSI (all three are good) 3. + CSI (all three are good) 4. + CSI (all three are good) 5. Numbers 6. House, M.D. 7. The Unit 8. Close to Home 9. Without a Trace 10. Surface

We really liked the top ten, although some on the list really need improvement. E.g., House wastes opportunity after opportunity to provide real glimpses for audiences into how great medical diagnosticians really work. House himself does not share enough of his thinking, and his three medical amigos operate like medical students. These three "shotgun" (i.e., fling names at the blackboard seemingly thoughtlessly) differential diagnoses and seem uncommonly able to do every high-tech procedure known to man, except for complex surgeries. They should be thinking more and leaving procedures to those highly specialized technicians who really do them. House's three amigos subtract significantly from the program because they more nearly act like The Three (Medical) Stooges.

The Unit started slowly and almost faltered. In the last of the season, better cast chemistry and more relaxed acting began producing that well-oiled-machine presentation. Too much time goes to wives who have "ditzy spells," and the tawdry adultery really subtracts as well. The soldiers make you swell with pride at watching highly competent Americans taking on severe dangers and winning.

Surprisingly good stories and acting came from the science fiction drama, Surface. It turned out to be engaging from the first episode to the last.

Without a doubt, however, the Closer is the Secretariat of the bunch. The new season starts in June 2006 on TNT, and we cannot over-recommend this program. TNT repeated the entire first season during 2006. We saw every episode again, and each was as good again as it was the first time through. "Nuf said here; we might write more as the second season gets underway in June.

What made the top ten so good? With the exception of House's neuroses, all involved normal people who live by high knowledge, skills, and principles, seeking the truth, and acting morally according to what the truth tells them. They made errors of knowledge, and even some errors of morality, but they never rested until they learned what they needed and corrected bad actions. All relied on their minds, including the minds of others as colleagues and those nameless and faceless folk who invent fabulous tools and equipment (products of their minds). None was bothered with the liberal-leftist pap of subjective truth and moral behavior, and the blurring of the obvious to let feelings dominate their thinking.

When we think about it, this is the second season of people operating in the manner of the foregoing paragraph. We must note that art reflects the deepest values of the artists who create and the consumers. In a world falling apart, in a West committing suicide, and in an America racing to see whether socialism or fascism replaces the constitutional republic, we are seeing on television profound values. These are human values, not soap-opera-like gummy "relationships."

We said it last year, and it seems worth repeating. Though the art of the dramas on television, we might be seeing the nidus of America's recovery. The top ten programs reflect totally opposite principles and values of those dominating and degrading our culture. Time will tell.

Stand By for Incoming

"The American feels too rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free;he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them."

Erik H. Erikson(1902-1994)

Source: Childhood and Society, 1950http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Erik.Erikson.Quote.18F7

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Ayn Rand(1905-1982) AuthorSource: Atlas Shrugged, Francisco's "Money Speech"http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Ayn.Rand.Quote.4138

"A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom."

Milton Friedman(1912-) Nobel Prize-winning economist, economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan, "ultimate guru of the free-market system"http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Milton.Friedman.Quote.DEA4

From D. C. Watson's Forthcoming Book: TRUTH IS NOT BIGOTRY: Sometimes it just hurts

{Also published on Sixth Column today.}

Our friend and colleague-in-arms, D. C. Watson, has given us the opportunity to read his forthcoming book. Here is a delicious excerpt following our brief review:

[6thCAJ] Editor's Review of D. C. Watson's Forthcoming Book

If anyone who follows the anti-jihad movement on the websites and blogs does not know D. C. Watson by now, we assume they are really, really new to all of this. We began to notice D.C. a good while back from his comments on Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch/Dhimmi Watch. His comments had a growl to them, "pithy" some would say. But they were always "right on." Soon others commenting on D.C.'s comments on Jihad Watch were saying things like "D.C. for president," "D.C. for secretary of state," and "D.C. for secretary of defense." Then this American original began publishing articles on Jihad Watch and a few other places. We were very fortunate to publish some on this site and on our blogsite, Sixth Column. No one really knows when D.C. will surface next with a pithy article about the Islam problem or the Borders Security and Immigration problem. D.C. keeps his own schedule, and it is close to the vest.

A while back, D.C. let us know that he is dangerously close to publishing his first book. Even better, we had a chance to read it before publication. What follows is a chapter from that book, one that has not been published previously. It is very typical of the contents of this book in that it has something important to say and says it very well.

The book is entitled TRUTH IS NOT BIGOTRY: Sometimes it just hurts. You can read it in two sittings, and it will keep your attention.

It begins telling about this very typical American young man and how he was living his life. He loved wrestling and thrived doing it on the circuit. Life for him moved from one event to another, and he was living chronically in a comfort zone.

Then came the events in America of 11 September 2001. D.C. had an epiphany. Life in the comfortable lane, as he had been living it, ended abruptly. His book takes you through that change from relatively halcyon days to 11 September 2001. In fact, it is hard to proceed right away after reading his chapter for that day. It is hard because it summons up the emotional memories and images of the day. I felt the profound sadness and the profound rage all over again.

The rest of the book is about the education of D.C. to Islam and his efforts to educate others out of their comfort zones. It makes good reading.

At the end are extensive references.

We don't want to give more away than we have in the foregoing, short review. We will let the following chapter speak for D.C.

~~~~~

From TRUTH IS NOT BIGOTRY: Sometimes it just hurts

Muslim immigration in the West: When opposites don't attract

Qur'an 48:29: "Muhammad is God's apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another."

I'd much rather be spending my time worrying about how much I can 'max' out on the bench press, who the Steelers are trading for who, if the Pistons are gonna make it back to the finals this year, and whether or not my beer is getting warm. However, since the West has been infiltrated by century impaired antagonists, that's going to have to wait. This may sting those who have a tendency to riot, start fires, make death threats over nothing, and offer up million dollar bounties for the deaths of cartoonists, but that's too bad. As citizens of the United States, you, and our cousins in all Western nations deserve to know the truth. While integration problems certainly exist with mass Muslim immigration alone, these problems are compounded by their often self appointed Islamic 'leadership'. Islamic 'civil rights and advocacy' groups, Imams, and clerics have stirred up unacceptable amounts of trouble and disharmony.

Out of one side of their mouths come the calls for pluralism and tolerance. Out of the other, we hear the exact opposite, as they play a phony race card, call for jihad, and express their desires for the implementation of Islamic law in the West. While these people are supposed to be leading, and assisting Muslims with assimilating into Western culture, they are instead spewing hate speech and inciting violence. They don't need to be standing on street corners, rocking from side to side, gobbling down sandwiches as they recruit gullible Mohammedan sheep for future homicide bombings. They don't need to be standing in mosques preaching hate for Westerners. And, they don't need to be running to the press screaming 'Islamophobia' or 'racism' because a local financial institution happens to be giving away free 'piggy banks' to their customers. They need to be rounded up and removed. Jailing them only forces the public to spend tax money in order to house, feed and clothe them. So, wouldn't the more economical alternative be to deport every last one of them and permanently bar them from re-entry?

The chances are good that many Muslims now live in the West because they don’t have an interest in this “Islam must rule the world” mentality that their co-religionists possess. There's also a good chance that they just want a quiet life without having to live under Islamic law. However, an over abundance of Muslim spokespersons and their followers have migrated to Western nations for the purpose of undermining democracies in order to inject their Islamist ideology. They are a constant irritation, and they need to go.

Behind some of their Islamic representatives, many Muslim migrants to Western nations have brought with them a bothersome, and complex cultural problem. If we actually examine this situation, instead of trying to not fracture a massive collection of fragile, seventh century egos, the realization may come to pass that we are in a culture clash with a certain percentage of immigrants who believe in entitlement. Entitlement to ignore the laws of the land to where they have migrated, and entitlement to behave the way their culture has allowed them to behave in their homeland, all while hiding behind a curtain of 'religion'. Who ends up paying for this? The citizens of their host nations.

The current trend, now on display primarily throughout Europe, demonstrates that the larger the Muslim population becomes, the more angered and “offended” it becomes with the non-Islamic culture that it has infiltrated. Certainly at first, when their population figures are relatively small, they are less vocal, and less violent. However, as we have seen in European nations, which have allowed the seemingly endless immigration of Muslims, problems are on the rise.

You won't see too many of the following stories being run in the mainstream Western press, which collectively is too afraid of these people to publish stories about their ridiculous behavior. Seeing or hearing about one or two incidents only every so often tends to allow them to be viewed as something forgettable. So, a compiling of events has been put together with the intent to demonstrate that this issue is widespread, consistent, and needs to be formally addressed. If Muslim organizations wonder why so many millions have no use for them or their constant squawking, the following should provide them with a clue:

[Read the rest on 6th Column Against Jihad.]

From Whence Came Those 1960s That Still Have Not Left Us? Part Two

Far too many people just do not give the power of ideas their just due. Victor Hugo said that nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Without giving so much as a tip of the hat to the power of ideas, most people today go for the action. They want to be practical ("pragmatic," many say). To them, practical people just go out there and "git 'r' done." They act first, then see what happened. That means that the realm of ideas is impractical if not useless to them. Little do these same people realize, but they are literally spouting ideas coming from a powerful, but toxic philosophy.

The pen is truly mightier than the sword. We live today under the powerful sway of the three great philosophical system builders: Plato, Aristotle, and Kant.

Kant, because he built a complete philosophical system, went on to influence every philosopher and thinker from his own time (he died in 1804), right down to this very day. He cleaved reason from reality--that was his "achievement." He sold, and everybody thereafter bought. His ideas drove all the of the rest of Franco-Germanic philosophy for the entire 19th and 20th centuries, and we won't dwell on Kant more here.

We need to go to America. That new country had no system of philosophy--that was the biggest flaw in the Enlightenment. In addition, the new America had few universities. Europhiles in America looked down their noses at American education for the most part. To them, young people must go to Europe for "finishing." With German philosophy all the rage in the 19th century, very many went to German universities.

They returned "finished," all right.

They returned crammed full of Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kant, and later Marx, Nietszche, and lessers. They brought home these dour, pessimistic, anti-reason, emotion-dominated, and pro-collectivist ideas. A number went into the new universities in the east and what is now the midwest of the United States where their continental ideas took root and were passed into the youth of the day.

The flood to European universities and back really became a flood after our Civil War, when the nation was becoming super-prosperous comparatively because of capitalism and our industrial revolution. The flood returning to America came prepared to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism.

From the mid-19th century on, a philosophy called Pragmatism, unique to America, developed. Although it has not been a significant force in American universities for many decades, it is THE dominant philosophy of almost every politician and bureaucrat. One of its cardinal features is that it tells people that reason is impotent; one cannot know the truth of something until one acts and looks back. If it worked, it was true. The same kind of thinking applied to morality.

Two supremely bad things came from Pragmatism. The first was John Dewey, one of the triumvirate of Pragmatist philosophers and one of the most influential. The second was the Progressive Movement at the end of the 19th century.

Dewey wanted to socialize children, not educate them. He was a Kantian-Hegelian. Almost single-handedly, he created the "progressive education" movement in America. Schools of "education" created wave after wave of "teachers" who went out not to make children competent to use their reason and be successful in reality, but to do whatever they feel like, whenever they wanted, and to become socialized and subservient to "the group," whichever group. By the 1920s, this necrotizing form of education was widespread.

And, progressive education and its influences were training pre-World War II era leaders, then the kids of those people, and their kids. Public education declined precipitously in the 1940s and has not stopped declining. The 1960s act-up generation began living out the ideas of the progressives, who got their ideas from the Pragmatists, who got their ideas from Marx, Hegel, and Kant, who got his ideas from Christianity and Plato.

No one is forced to believe that ideas are powerful, but no one can escape their influence.

More later.

Our Yearning to Be Free

"A government can be compared to our lungs. Our lungs are best when we don't realize they are helping us breathe. It is when we are constantly aware of our lungs that we know they have come down with an illness."-- Lao-Tzu [Li Erh] (570-490 BC) 'Old Sage', Father of Taoism http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Lao-Tzu.Quote.3FC1

"Liberty is to the collective body,
what health is to every individual body.
Without health no pleasure can be tasted by man;
without liberty, no happiness can be enjoyed by society."-- Thomas Jefferson
(1743-1826), US Founding Father, drafted the Declaration of Independence, 3rd US President
http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Thomas.Jefferson.Quote.9DF0

From Whence Came Those 1960s That Still Have Not Left Us? Part One

Recently, I finished a book which I plan to review on this site in the near future. The author of that book properly sees the great danger to America from toxic ideas infecting our culture, and he attributes these to their arising in the latter 1960s. I have read a number of books with much the same to say about the latter 1960s and their very toxic legacy.

The trouble is, things do not happen that way culturally speaking.

The toxicity of the 1960s and subsequently did not spring de novo. It did not come from Baby Boomers over-indulging their children, although this contributed. It did not come about because Americans abandoned religion, nor did it come about for almost any of the usual reasons cited.

Ask yourself why a country having the Greatest Generation became post-war pabulum, then began falling apart some 25 - 30 years after the great achievements of the Greatest Generation. Where did all the problems come from?

It started over two hundred years ago, as a reaction-formation to the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment of the latter 17th and 18th centuries that took the cardinal element of the Renaissance, reason, and gave it its full importance. While men in Scotland and England were taking reason to its fullest, the continentals were gathering the counter-attack. No, the continentals were Europeans, not Americans. Americans took the cardinal elements of the Enlightenment and fashioned a new country based on natural rights, one which fully embraced the capitalism that the Scots and Brits developed. The continentals of France and Germany went entirely the other way.

They had local help.

From the first, the religious began a ceaseless war on the Enlightenment, one that continues today in essentially the same language and style. The religious were not very effective because the Renaissance and the Enlightenment took all the steam out religion, and people tended to mock religion instead of admiring it.

Effective resistance to the Enlightenment started in France and came to full fruition in Germany. Jean Jacques Rousseau in France hated rights, freedom, capitalism, and self-reliance, and he managed to inject emotionality into anti-reason arguments as though emotions were proper elements of thinking. His crowning achievement was his becoming the intellectual father of the French Revolution--all of it.

In Germany, philosopher Immanuel Kant set out to destroy reason, and, in the limited understanding of many, he succeeded. He bragged that he had to destroy reason to make room for faith. He created a highly elaborate system of philosophy, one which made him only the third philosopher in all of human history to create a full system. Plato and Aristotle were the other two. Kant harnessed the emotionality of Rousseau with the brain-destroying micro-ideas of David Hume who worked tirelessly to invalidate the senses. Kant, to many, invalidated reason.

Kant began a trend in German philosophy which produced increasingly irrational philosophers throughout the 19th century.

Was there no opposition from people like John Locke and others on the pro-reason and pro-freedom side? Yes, they opposed, but not effectively. They lacked a systematic body of ideas to draw from, and they tended to use religion to support their arguments. That, of course, conceded the argument to Kant.

(More later).

Even Plato Knew

"The penalty good men pay
for indifference to public affairs,
is to be ruled by evil men."
-- Plato
(429-347 BC)

http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Plato.Quote.411C