SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
February 2002
Volume 9, No. 2
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Moving Picture
-> Keeping Slaves Happy
-> Ourselves and Someone Else's Posterity
Letters to the Editor
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Moving Picture
(page 1)
Have you noticed, as I have lately, how many Arabs
name their sons after basketball players?
* * *
And the inevitable follow-up question: If Islam is a
"religion of peace," how come there are so many brawls in
the NBA?
* * *
The untimely death of Buddy, Bill Clinton's Labrador
retriever, has raised eyebrows from sea to shining sea.
Buddy is only one of myriad Clinton acquaintances who
have met their Maker ahead of schedule. Sure, it *looked*
like an accident. They always do. But if ever there was a
dog that knew too much for his own good, it had to be
Buddy. Paradoxically, he was also the last sentient being
who trusted Bill.
* * *
TIME magazine really wimped out by naming Rudy
Giuliani as its "Person of the Year." When old Henry Luce
ran the mag, he never shrank from picking Hitler or
Stalin -- the obvious newsmakers of certain other years.
It was always explained that the choice was an
acknowledgment of fact, not an honor. Since September 11,
only one man has dominated the covers of all the
newsmags, including TIME -- and it wasn't Rudy.
* * *
I figured that if al-Qaeda had another trick up its
sleeve, it would play it during the holiday season. But
apparently all it could come up with was a guy trying to
give himself a hotfoot on a plane. How brilliant! On the
other hand, we can't be sure that the War on Terrorism
has made us any safer; it can hardly have made America
better loved. Time will tell.
* * *
Do American conservatives have any agenda besides
killing? George Will has written a column recommending,
as a model of how to make war, General William Sherman's
proposal to exterminate the entire ruling class of the
Confederacy. (Sherman eventually distinguished himself by
slaughtering Indians indiscriminately; it is to him that
we owe the apercu: "The only good Indian is a dead
Indian.") That is, Will would have had Robert E. Lee
shot. Classy guy. Will reminds you of what Burke meant
when he lamented the age of chivalry had passed. No
wonder liberals can plausibly equate conservatism with
"hate." You might suppose that a conservative was someone
who, like Burke, wants to conserve things he loves.
* * *
Jewish organizations are calling for a boycott of
all French products. Why? Because France won't recall its
ambassador to Britain, Daniel Bernard, who made bluntly
critical remarks about Israel at a private dinner party
in London. Among other things, he asked why one little
country should put the whole globe at risk of another
world war. Good question, but Israel couldn't do it
alone. American support and assistance is also necessary.
So far Bernard and the French government have refused to
back down, which gives hope that others in high places
are thinking (if not yet talking openly) along the same
lines.
Keeping Slaves Happy
(pages 2-4)
I used to be skeptical when champions of the
Confederacy insisted that most slaves in the Old South
were content with their lot. But since the 9/11 attacks,
I find it easy to believe.
No slave system can work if the slave population is
perpetually restive and chafing for liberty. It's now
fashionable to portray Southern slavery as a constant
ordeal for the slaves, with shackles, chains, and whips
their daily lot. In fact this lurid picture has been
drawn ever since the Civil War, when Union propaganda
made slavery sound like unremitting torture; Lincoln
spoke darkly of "every drop of blood drawn with the
lash."
But it would hardly pay to have slaves if the master
had to spend every waking hour subduing them. Much easier
to keep them contented, with the assurance that the
master is their protector. They may yearn for ultimate
liberty, as the old Negro spirituals attest, but
meanwhile their lives may be bearable enough -- as
Lincoln, despite his public rhetoric, privately admitted.
Aristotle, ever the realist, remarked that most men
are "slaves by nature." I don't know exactly what he
meant, or how you test such a proposition; "most" may be
an overstatement. But human nature includes both the
desire for liberty and a dread of responsibility, and we
see how often men are eager to follow a leader and submit
to his will, or how implicitly they trust the supposed
expertise of a ruling elite. David Hume likewise marveled
at how easily the many are ruled by the few.
In the twentieth century the claims and powers of
the state increased so vastly that it may be said that
state slavery has replaced private (chattel) slavery.
Under Communism the state's authority was nakedly
absolute; in "free" societies it was, and is, qualified,
chiefly by a traditional morality and by personal legal
protections. Neither this morality nor these protections,
we should note, are a fruit of democracy; on the
contrary, they predated it and it has weakened them. If
the democracies are still relatively free, as compared
with the Communist states, this is more in spite of
democracy than because of it.
Through the taxing power the democratic state now
confiscates large portions of private property without
due process of law. The process of confiscation has been
streamlined through such devices as withholding taxes, so
that most people hardly notice what is being taken from
them and can retain the happy belief that they are living
in a free society. One of the marks of "democracy," after
all, is a vigorously promulgated optimism.
In periods of calm men prefer liberty and bridle at
state control. But in times of panic they loyally obey a
dictator. After the 9/11 attacks, most Americans seemed
to forget that the United States Government is
theoretically their servant and were willing to cede it
all sorts of arbitrary power in the hope and faith that
it would protect them. Submission to the new power --
servility to the state -- became a patriotic duty.
This is nothing new. During earlier wars the same
thing happened: the servant became the master. The
personal will of the Leader became law. Normally gradual
encroachments of the state accelerated. Civil liberties
were violated, constitutional restraints forgotten.
Resistance to the state was quickly interpreted as
treason.
At such moments the servile side of human nature
emerges, and we are seeing it today. Large majorities of
Americans support the Bush administration's new
constraints on constitutional liberties. That is, "We the
People," having laid down the rules for our government in
the U.S. Constitution, now consent to allow the
government to violate that Constitution. We recognize the
government's superiority to the Constitution that was
supposed to bind it. What, then, is the point of having a
constitution?
Over two centuries, the U.S. Constitution has proved
unenforceable, because the government it supposedly
controls has arrogated to itself the authority to
interpret the document as it pleases; always, of course,
to its own advantage. The plan of a federalized system
has been adroitly converted into a mandate for
centralized power, the original division of power only
superficially retained.
But all the clever schemes of tyranny could never
have worked if free men had merely fixed their eyes on
the essential question: What is the original source of
the state's authority? Why is obedience to the state a
duty?
Obviously society requires law, or commonly accepted
rules of conduct. But as Michael Oakeshott has reminded
us, laws are, properly speaking, observed rather than
obeyed. They bind everyone alike. They are impersonal.
*Commands* are obeyed, and a command is the expression of
a particular personal will. Commands may of course be
disguised under the forms of law, but the "laws" of the
modern state are still in essence commands.
St. Thomas Aquinas said that all positive law, in
order to be valid, must conform to immutable natural law.
A human law at variance with natural law is void --
unconstitutional, as it were. A ruler who commands his
subjects to commit, or submit to, immoral acts is a
tyrant.
Genuine laws are by nature finite, because the
natural law is fixed. In a healthy community laws are few
and are seldom changed, and a man can be law-abiding by
keeping the Ten Commandments. But commands are limitless,
because they proceed from the human will, which is
inexhaustible. That is the real source of "big
government."
Yet today it is everywhere assumed that man has a
moral duty to obey the state, no matter what it commands.
Why? How can submission to an arbitrary will be a moral
obligation? It's absurd to suppose that every petty new
Federal regulation proceeds from, or is harmonious with,
the natural law.
The modern state was explained around the time of
its origin by Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 classic
LEVIATHAN. Rejecting the Christian conception of natural
law, Hobbes came up with a materialist version. According
to Hobbes, the first law of nature is self-preservation.
But in the state of nature, every man is at war with
every other man; in this war of all against all, every
man's self-preservation is perpetually at risk, and men's
lives are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
The Leviathan state emerges when a single sovereign
acquires the power to "keep them all in awe." Fear of the
ruler displaces mutual fear and chaos. It simplifies
things.
That is, the state is defined by its power to kill.
Men have no choice but to obey it, if they want to live.
Obedience is rational, therefore (in the only terms
Hobbes recognizes) moral. The essence of the state is a
monopoly of terror.
Few have espoused this grim view, yet it has a
plausibility that makes it perpetually fascinating. Like
Machiavelli, Hobbes speaks for many who would never agree
with him openly. He offers a philosophy they can live by
even if they don't profess it.
In fact, we obey the state not because conscience
requires it, but because we fear what it may do to us.
When the chips are down, it may kill us; short of that,
it can make life miserable in myriad ways. Its powers now
far exceed those available to rulers when Hobbes wrote.
Ordinarily it chooses harassment rather than murder, but
the threat to kill if necessary is always implicit.
In democratic theory, a vague theory at best, we
have a moral duty to obey the state because "we" are the
state, and every member of the community has a duty to
assent to the justice of the collective will as embodied
in a freely elected government. We may "disagree" but not
disobey.
But in fact only a few officials are elected, the
individual vote is meaningless, and nobody can possibly
keep track of all the doings of state officials. Nobody
can even name all the agencies of the state. It would be
worth nobody's time to try to keep track of them, since
little can be done about them. They rule by force and the
threat of force, however oblique. It comes down to that.
Making allowance for changing times and
circumstances, Hobbes more or less had it right. In plain
terms, the modern state is based on human timidity and
confusion (which are mutually reinforcing). Maybe this is
what Aristotle had in mind.
Modern man is more submissive to the state -- by
far! -- than medieval man was to the Church. Yet the
illusion persists that modern man is free. True, he is
nobody's personal property, but he is a serf to an
amorphous power he can't define. He learns the slogans of
democracy but is baffled by the labyrinthine realities of
the bureaucratic state, which bears no relation to those
slogans.
He obeys he knows not why. The state threatens him,
yet he feels that it also protects him from things even
worse than itself. He can see that the politicians he has
"elected" are fools and knaves, yet he trusts that "the
government" as a whole is a repository of wisdom and
expertise. He trusts this undefined thing more than he
trusts his own mind. So he never asks the most basic and
obvious questions, the ones Hobbes at least tried to
answer.
Still, Hobbes was wrong. Because force has no moral
authority, there can be no specific moral duty to obey
the state, no matter how much popular support it enjoys.
One man has no right to compel another; neither do a
million to compel one. Nor may one man "consent" to be
compelled. That is moral nonsense. "Consent" can
legitimize neither slavery nor the state, but only
cooperation. Yet the state spares no effort to convince
us that we are compelled with our consent! When we obey
it, we are only obeying ourselves. So who is this thug at
my door who says he'll put me in jail and take my money?
It must be ... but of course! ... myself!
True obligations are moral obligations. No man can
create an obligation for another by a sheer assertion or
act of will: "You must obey me." His demand for obedience
acquires no moral authority if he supports it with a
threat: on the contrary, "Obey me or I will hurt you" is,
morally, far worse than a mere "Obey me." Yet most people
accept this ugly threat -- the essence of the state -- as
an expression of authority! This is all the more
remarkable considering that the state no longer claims to
be of divine origin and has, in fact, become nakedly
amoral.
If the state confined itself to enforcing our
natural obligations (as, not to kill or steal), the
question would still remain why any particular man or
body of men should monopolize the power of enforcement.
All of us have a natural and unalienable right to protect
ourselves and, if we choose, others. But the state claims
much more than this. It claims to monopolize the right --
the *right,* mind you -- to create obligations
arbitrarily.
And where does it get this right? "*I* don't know,"
we say to each other. "I thought *you* knew." Actually,
nobody knows. But that doesn't stop us from obeying.
Ourselves and Someone Else's Posterity
(pages 5-6)
{{ Material dropped or changed solely for reasons of
space appears in double curly brackets. }}
A friend inscribed his new book to me the other day.
His inscription provided the only cheering words in the
entire volume. To my mind the book is more disturbing
than the 9/11 attacks.
The book is THE DEATH OF THE WEST: HOW DYING
POPULATIONS AND IMMIGRANT INVASIONS IMPERIL OUR COUNTRY
AND CIVILIZATION (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's
Press); the author, my friend, is Patrick Buchanan. The
title gets right to the point.
The native populations of Europe, and the white
population of the United States, are dying off. They
aren't reproducing themselves. Their birthrates are
below, in most cases far below, replacement level. The
average Spanish woman, for example, bears 1.07 children.
In all Europe, only Muslim Albania has a high birth rate.
Meanwhile, Third World immigrants are flooding into
the West. Many of them are illegal, but the laws are not
enforced because young workers are needed to support the
aging natives and because governments are afraid to
enforce the laws against the alien populations.
Two outstanding factors have produced this
situation: the welfare state, which is pledged to support
the elderly; and contraception (with abortion as a backup
guarantee), which has allowed Western women to put jobs
ahead of family.
There are other factors too, including politics and
ideology. Bill Clinton has famously exulted that within a
few decades whites will be a minority in the United
States. He and the Democratic Party have opened the gates
to aliens, hoping to enlarge their political base as they
lose the loyalty of white voters. And of course liberal
ideology (shared by many nominal conservatives) forbids
whites to practice the self-serving politics which
nonwhites are permitted and even encouraged to indulge
in. Mexicans speak openly of "la raza" -- the race -- and
of a "reconquista" of the Southwestern states.
The advocates of feminism, abortion, and Zero
Population Growth have taught young Western women that
traditional women's roles are not only optional but
undesirable. The mythology of the "population bomb" took
root decades ago and has yet to wear off, despite ample
refutation, and to most Americans small families have
become both a convenience and a sort of civic duty.
Christian morality is in decline; even the Catholic
clergy and hierarchy have pretty much given up opposing
artificial birth control and blessing large families.
High taxes in the "advanced" countries also discourage
childbearing.
Margaret Sanger's vision of eugenic contraception,
to quell the growth of nonwhite populations, has
backfired; only whites and the Japanese are eliminating
themselves.
In 1960, people of European stock were a quarter of
the earth's population; by 2000 they were reduced to a
sixth; by 2050 they will be only a tenth, and their
average age will be 50.
In Russia, where there are already four or five
abortions per live birth, this grim future has already
arrived. While the population is aging, life expectancy
for men is only 59 years. China's exploding population
will soon move into, and conquer, the largely vacant
Eastern Siberia, while Muslims will do likewise in
Central Siberia.
Reading Buchanan, one is struck by the way
government policies, especially those driven by
liberalism, have helped create this {{ situation at every
turn. }} Secularism, the welfare state, taxation,
contraception, abortion, sexual license, civil rights,
feminism, immigration -- virtually every measure that was
supposed to better the human condition has conspired to
construct a gigantic trap for the West. And now there may
be no way out.
The whole process has been so systematically
perverse that you can't help suspecting it was
deliberate; then again, short-sighted social planners
lack the cunning for such a grand design. What is certain
is that the United States has been ruled and guided by
people who are deeply alienated from and hostile to the
West and its traditions, especially its Christian
religion.
One of the books that inspired Buchanan, James
Burnham's SUICIDE OF THE WEST (1964), described
liberalism as "the ideology of Western suicide." Burnham
didn't mean that liberalism caused the decline of the
West, which he thought was due to deeper factors (perhaps
just the exhaustion that eventually comes to all
civilizations), but that it provided a comforting
rationalization for a decline that was already in
progress. For Burnham liberalism was a sort of
intellectual anesthetic, a euthanasia for a moribund
patient. It offered the comforting interpretation of
every Western defeat as a forward step for "progress."
Buchanan is much more inclined to blame liberalism
and its related ideologies. He particularly stresses that
"progressives" have consciously sought to destroy
Christianity, and he cites abundant evidence from their
own books, manifestoes, and other documents. Accordingly,
he tends to think the damage is reversible, if only the
heresy is renounced.
Here I must say that his pessimism is much more
convincing than his optimism. His evidence for Western
decline and doom is weighty; his argument for Western
recovery sounds relatively facile, even desperate. In the
court of reason he may win his arguments with liberals;
but in the real world, liberal arguments, however
fallacious, have become established institutions, against
which refutation is unavailing.
At this point, for example, it is hard to imagine
American women choosing to have more babies for the sake
of the West's future. Oh, you can *imagine* it, in the
way you can *imagine* France converting to Buddhism, but
it seems more like a fantasy than a serious possibility.
Self-absorption, alias "self-fulfillment," has become a
profound cultural habit. "Sex," as we have learned to
call it, is now a matter less of procreation than of
recreation. It sounds like a platitude to say that both
sexes have an equal right to orgasm without the burden of
children; who could deny it?
In 1968 Pope Paul VI promulgated the most
controversial papal encyclical of the twentieth century,
HUMANAE VITAE, condemning artificial contraception.
"Controversial" is hardly the word for a document that
found very few defenders, even among Catholics, though it
merely repeated what previous popes had taught, what
nearly all Christians recently believed, and what many
Muslims and pagans still regard as morally obvious.
(Multiculturalists, take note!)
The real core of the sexual revolution is not to be
sought in calls for "gay rights" and legal abortion, but
in the normalization of contraception *between married
couples.* We are now beginning to see the consequences.
True, Paul VI spoke more of the intrinsic immorality of
corrupting the marital act than of the demographic
results of doing so; but after all, a pope can speak
authoritatively only of the nature of sin, not of its
earthly penalty for the sinner. In this world, the sinner
may sin with impunity, even with profit.
In 1968, all the bright people agreed that
contraception was a purely "personal" question. In
pragmatic terms, it was reproduction, not birth control,
that seemed irresponsible. What if every act of coition
produced a child? Horrors! Paul VI was on the side of the
Population Bomb, of overcrowding and starvation and
unmitigated global misery!
"Dissent" from HUMANAE VITAE immediately became the
orthodoxy of the progressives. And a peculiarly smug
orthodoxy it was, admitting no room for a second opinion.
You were shamed into silence if you held a sneaking
suspicion that the Pope had a point. And once
contraception had gained acceptance by seemingly orthodox
Catholics {{ -- including such conservatives as William
Buckley -- }} the sexual revolution had won a victory
Hugh Hefner could never have achieved.
Few (George Gilder, {{ author of SEXUAL SUICIDE, }}
was the great exception) perceived the far-reaching
nature of that revolution. Its rhetoric implied that it
was confined to private areas of no public concern --
"the bedroom." That is rather like saying that
cannibalism concerns only the kitchen.
Buchanan has made what should have been obvious
impossible to deny or evade. Reading his book is like
having your doctor tell you you have cancer, probably
incurable.
In blunt terms, the white races are endangered.
Their children may soon be powerless, disinherited, and
very few; even their languages may disappear from Europe
and America; their cultures may be forgotten. In a few
generations Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and P.G. Wodehouse may
be more remote and obscure than Homer is now. The new
denizens of America and Europe will discuss their affairs
in other tongues and think in entirely different terms
than those we take for granted. Any surviving whites,
having only faint memories of their ancestors, may play
no role in the fate of the new societies that displace
the old ones. Christianity may be reduced to a tiny sect,
with no influence over a miscellaneous culture, part
Muslim, part pagan, which will absorb traces of the West
but not its spirit.
Even darker outcomes are imaginable. If the new
society, losing the genius of Western science and
technology, sinks into poverty and disease, the white
remnant may be either enslaved or reduced to a minority
of persecuted pariahs, blamed for the misery of the
majority. Liberalism's slogans and favored history
lessons will have no authority -- Hitler will have ceased
to horrify (if Mao, why not Hitler?) -- and racial
extermination would no longer be unthinkable.
I can only say: Read this book if you dare.
Letter to the Editor
(page 4)
Mr. Sobran -- There is another Catholic priest on trial
in Boston for molesting a boy. This has been going on for
centuries, demonstrating just how corrupt the Catholic
Church is. Sure, the Catholic Church used to sweep all of
this under the rug, protecting the pedophile priests
instead of the boys. I admire Andrew Greeley for coming
down hard on the Catholic Church on these matters. What
if a priest molested your boy, Joe. Would you still
remain in the Catholic Church?
DJ
REPLY
If a priest (with the connivance of his bishop)
betrayed the Church and my son, would I still remain in
the Church? I hope so. The betrayal of Catholic truth no
more invalidates that truth than Judas's treachery
invalidates the Redemption.
One reason I believe in our Lord is that he is still
hated after 2000 years. The world has long since forgiven
Julius Caesar, who killed and tyrannized countless
people. He is no threat to anyone today; Christ is. In
the same way, the Catholic Church is still bitterly hated
by people who no longer care about Stalin or Mao. The
corrupt clergy "argument" is only applied to Catholics.
And I never hear Catholics trying to argue that the
Protestant clergy are all Elmer Gantrys; Protestantism
doesn't inspire envious insinuations. It's only
Catholicism that people want to tear down this way. And
these attacks only reinforce my faith.
There is a strange psychological need in some men to
destroy the great and glorious, just as some homosexuals
are always accusing others of being secretly homosexual.
If the Church weren't of divine origin, she wouldn't be
hated this way. People would let her die, without trying
to kill her.
Personally, I have never met one of these pedophile
priests we always hear about nowadays. This is one of the
world's fashionable slanders against the Church. Every
generation has a new version.
JS
NUGGETS
BLOAT IS GOOD: Gregg Easterbrook of THE NEW REPUBLIC
argues that we *need* military bloat. We never know where
we may have to fight next, and a stripped-down military
would be insufficiently ample and mobile to face
unpredictable challenges. Of course it depends whether
"we" means a constitutional republic, defending its own
borders, or a global empire. It's obvious which
Easterbrook means. An empire never knows who it may have
to bomb next. (page 4)
THE PAST AND ITS HEIRS: To me the late eighteenth century
means, above all, Mozart and Burke. Yet I know of no
reason to believe that they ever heard of each other.
What a pity, since each, in his way, exemplified a
civilization that seems to exist only in retrospect!
Maybe the eighteenth century I revere never existed until
it was already gone. In the twentieth century Mozart was
displaced by rap music, Burke by George Will. We can't
choose our successors. (page 4)
AS FOR ME: I was once called "a worthy successor to C.S.
Lewis." My first reaction: What an honor! My considered
reaction: Poor Lewis! (page 9)
SAVING THE QUEEN: The stylish and able historian Lady
Antonia Fraser has just published a sympathetic biography
of Marie Antoinette, showing that the poor queen remains
maligned and misunderstood to this day. She never said
"Let them eat cake," of course -- one of the many
slanders her revolutionary tormenters heaped on her (they
also induced her young son to accuse her of sexual abuse)
before and after they beheaded her. She was an ordinary
but decent woman caught in a tidal wave of fanaticism.
(page 10)
FOR FUTURE REFERENCE: The historian Stephen Ambrose has
been caught plagiarizing. Sort of. In a recent book he
borrowed a few dozen words from a book by another
historian; he cited the source in a footnote, but used
the words verbatim without quotation marks. (page 11)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
ACADEMIC FADS (CONT.): Is there such a thing as genius?
According to the NEW YORK TIMES, some progressive
academicians are saying the concept should be abandoned,
since individual "geniuses" are really just carriers of
class values. So the four-year-old Mozart, it seems, was
merely a passive vehicle of bourgeois interests! Which
proves that whether or not we need the concept of genius,
we certainly can't do without the concept of imbecility.
WINTER JUST FLASHES BY: No sooner had we recovered from
Kwanzaa than it was already Black History Month
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* The Myth of "Limited Goverment" (December 20, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011220.shtml
* Who's the Rat? (December 25, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011225.shtml
* The Curse of Beatlemania (December 27, 2001)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/011227.shtml
* The Greatest, Joyless (January 1, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020101.shtml
* What Do We Owe the State? (January 8, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020108.shtml
* The Powers That Be (January 10, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/020110.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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