John C. Wright's Journal

First, let us establish definitions and common notions, so that we do not confuse ourselves with ambiguities.

1. It is the common experience of all men that they make decisions, evaluations, and judgments: men think.
   1. This thinking process in some few cases is automatic or effortless: the solution to the math puzzle leaps out at you, and is intuitively clear. Artists speak of inspirations, by which they mean: full-blown ideas simply leap into their awareness from who-knows-where. The obvious thing about thoughts and decisions of this kind is that they are effortless. It is as if something behind the stage machinery in your mind is helping you solve the problem and make the decision for you.
   2. All men also have experience with difficult decisions, where they are called upon to make a judgment on incomplete information. A judge in his chambers must weigh and balance the niceties of the law, and the jury must ponder imponderables, and decide how much weight to give the testimony of the various witnesses and physical evidence. A lad must decide whether to enlist in the military, and follow the drum, or stay and work the family farm, and follow the plough. The obvious thing about thoughts and decisions of this kind is that they are difficult, and require much thought and effort to achieve.
   3. All men (except for the young, or perhaps the Elect) have experience with temptation. Eve recoils before she tastes the fatal apple, urged on by the serpent’s guile; Hamlet hesitates before the awesome sin of slaying a king and a kinsman; Lancelot repents his love for Guinevere, which is both faithlessness to his best friend, and treason to his king. The drunkard, hating himself, buys one more drink he knows he should not; the gambler puts his rent money in the kitty; the wrathful man heeds the dark urge that tells him hate is pleasing; the slothful man hears the whisper that tells him to stay abed. The obvious thing about thoughts and decisions of this kind is that they are opposed: we know what is what is right, and we do what is wrong.
   4. There are cases where the passions are right and the reason is misled, and a man would be better advised to follow his heart and ignore his head. A man who forswears his one true love because she comes from an ignoble family with no dowry makes a decision that would cause Cupid to weep. The mere presence of one or two cases like this makes all the other cases more difficult, and suspect. We are not angels or even computers: our reasoning powers themselves are unreliable, warped by passion, limited by ignorance, prone to error. There is more latitude in the human condition for arbitrary decisions or fanciful decisions than if we were a perfectly logical race, Vulcans or Houyhnhnms.

2. All men have experience with reactions that are animalistic or thoughtless: tears come to the eyes at a bee-sting. A vile smell induces vomiting; a savory one makes the mouth water. The sight of Catwoman in her skintight body-stocking provokes an erection (or maybe that is just me). The obvious thing about reactions of this kind is that they are reactions, not actions. At no point do I sit and reason with myself, “This is a vile smell. Weighing one thing against another, I think it wise, in the long run, to vomit.
3. There are vital processes in our bodies that seem perfectly mechanical or vegetative. When the physician strikes below your kneecap with a rubber hammer, willy-nilly, your leg jumps. This is not contested ground: even the strongest willed stoic cannot control this reflex. You cannot, by taking thought, add one cubit to your stature. A growing boy cannot, by taking thought, stop growing; you cannot, merely by willing it to stop, stop the action of your heart.

Let us adopt these terms: sphere #1 is the sphere of human action. Let us call this the “reason”. Sphere #2 is animal reaction, passions, urges, appetites, instincts. Let us call this the “passions.” Sphere #3 is vegetative or automatic processes. Let us call his “biology.”

The case of reasoning (sphere #1) breaks down into several cases: (a) inspired or intuitive reasoning (b) deliberation (c) temptation (d) sound instinct.

What confounds the matter is that pure examples of temptation and pure examples of deliberation are rarely found in nature. Usually the mental process of making a decision involves some mixture of (b) and (c). To make matters even more confusing, some people, perhaps all people, are “unreliable narrators” when it comes to reporting their mental processes: many a man who gives into temptation will invent from reasonable sounded excuse to justify his behavior, or not admit his true motives, even to himself.

Again, case (d) and (c) are difficult to untangle, and temptation will, as if guided by deliberate malice, present itself to us as if it were case (d). Even in hind sight, the one can be confused with the other.

The most obvious thing about the human condition, the thing that makes human nature human, is that conflicts that arise between the first and the second sphere, between the reason and the passions. The conflict is the source of our poetry, politics and philosophy. Sermons, speeches, and love letters alike speak of it.

The most interesting thing about the second sphere is that it is contested ground: a man by the pursuit of a virtuous habit can sometimes train himself, must as a horseman trains a horse, to react not as his animal nature would have it, but as his reason would have it. There are men who can train themselves not to flinch at pain. There are men who can resist temptation.

If you have raised children, you know the main point of educating the young is to build character, that is, to train them in a habit of virtue such that their reason can overcome their passions.

Indeed, the most obvious thing about a baby is that he cries and cannot be reasoned into ceasing to cry; a child can be threatened with punishments or bribed with obvious pleasures (like candy) into ceasing to cry, depending on his degree of learned self-control, or in other words, on his character; a man of low character can be talked into a course of action by an appeal to his self-interest; but you must reason with him, because a spanking or a lollypop has insufficient power to overthrow his reason; a man of high character (something quite rare these days, I am sad to say) who is too courageous to be threatened, and too temperate to heed bribes, can only be reasoned into or out of a course of action. You must appeal to his sense of justice or not at all.

The faculty by which the reason overcomes contrary passions has several names, but for now, let us call it “the will”. When the will has power to overcome the passions, we call this “willpower.” Another word for this power or efficacy is “virtue.”

1. When the reason overcomes contrary emotions of fear, the virtue involved is called “Courage.”
2. When the reason overcomes the appetites that are excessive or lead to excess, we call this virtue “Moderation.”
3. When the reason overcomes the animal appetites for food or sexual pleasure or the learned appetite for intoxication, we call this “Temperance.”
4. When the reason overcomes self-interest and all selfish vices (anger, pride, sloth, greed, envy) so that one’s reason is untouched by partisanship or self-centeredness, so that in turn a sense of fairplay dominates, so that in turn one is objective in making judgments, we call this “Justice.”

The point of raising the young is to instill virtue and build character. We all it “virtue” when a single example of the willpower allows the reason to overcome contrary passions. We say a man has “good character” when repeated examples of virtue show that the virtue is habitual with him.

Now the issue becomes muddled. In normal speaking, we do not distinguish between the contest between the reason and the passions and the outcome of the contest There are two distinct and perhaps opposite meanings of the word that must be distinguished.

1. When the “will” is whatever we finally decide (even if the decision is a weak-willed one) we say we willed it: Hobbes, indeed, defines the “will” as merely the final outcome of the contests or operations in the thinking, no matter what they are. For Hobbes, and man who resists temptation and a man who surrenders to temptation both alike are said to have “willed” the outcome of their deliberations.
2. When the reason is fighting the appetites we say we “will” only what reason commends. When apologizing for giving in to temptation, we speak, perhaps metaphorically, or perhaps literally, of the passions as if they were an outside force that invades and overbears the reason. We speak of the reason as the “self” and speak as if something outside the self conquered us. When we say “I could not help it; I tried to resist, but I could not” the “I” in that sentence refers to the reason.

In the first way of speaking, there is no such thing as temptation, and any conflict between the reason and the appetites is called deliberation. Indeed, in the first way of speaking, there is nothing but a war between appetites as the contest between cannibal snakes in a snake pit, and whichever snake is strongest and overcomes and eats the others remains, and commands: and the last appetite to survive the contest is said to be the “will”.

This is contrary to common experience: Hobbes speaks this way dishonestly, merely to make his point, not because his terminology clarifies a matter in dispute. Indeed, it is a way of silencing dispute. It is an easy and shameful trick: you merely define your terms so that you can ignore the reality your opposition wants to talk about. If you want to know why Hobbes is not a philosopher who strongly influenced later thinkers, or convinced many men of his political program, it is because of this: his logic flew in the face of common experience.

And yet the second way of speaking contains an element of dishonesty as well: when a guilty child or prisoner in the dock excuses his misbehavior by saying “I could not help it; I tried to resist, but I could not”, we recognize this as a mere excuse.

A man is responsible for his own behavior in the same way a horseman is responsible for his horse. If a rider cannot control his mount, and his mount is startled and tramples Aunt Begonia’s prize Petunias, or even Aunt Begonia herself, the law would hold that man to be negligent.

Even had the rider no control of his horse, he should have trained the horse, and should have kept control, lest he pose a danger to his neighbors.

In a like fashion, a child who could not resist the lure of an unwatched cookie jar, or a murderer who could not resist slaying his wife and her lover after dwelling for many days on the image of her in his arms, is responsible for controlling his impulses, even if, in this case, the impulse proved to be cyclopean in strength.

To extend this metaphor slightly, the Hobbesian way of speaking of the will is to speak of the horse and rider as a centaur, as if there is no division or distinction between the higher and lower nature in man.

Each way of talking contains an element, let us call it, a temptation, to be dishonest: and yet we cannot reject either.

We need the first way of speaking if our laws and moral judgments are to have any meaning at all. If one man is not responsible for his actions, he is insane: if no man is responsible for his actions, we are all insane, and law and order is impossible. A criminal is merely a machine whose input labeled “appetite” has a greater kinetic energy, or more mass, than the contrary impulse labeled “conscience or fear of consequences” has less impulse or less mass. When the two masses collided, by a Newtonian law, the greater overcomes the lesser, and the resulting vector pushes the criminal toward his crime. In this way of thinking, criminals are not responsible for their murders any more than a sack of grain falling from a loft is responsible if it hits Zeke the farm hand and kills him.

We need the second way of speaking if we are to make any allowance for weakness of Fallen Man. Without an understanding of the bifurcate nature of man, the moral instruction both from parents with children and courts of law with prisoners would be pitiless and inhuman.

Hobbes reasons quite logically from his false premise: if all deliberations of man are merely deliberations, and if there is no such thing as a virtuous or vicious deliberation, no such thing as willpower or weakness of the will, then it becomes a non-issue, a matter of no import, to overbear the courage of the weak by threats. Hobbes deduced that the threat of violent death at the hands of others was a sufficient warrant for the surrender of all natural rights and liberties to the sovereign power. Without going through all his steps, let us merely take for granted that this axiom leads logically to consent to a tyranny, no matter how oppressive, where the subjects have no valid basis for resistance, rebellion, or complaint.

To sum up: if we accept only the first way of speaking (“will” means whatever the end result of mental deliberations or conflict with temptation might be), then we reject all law and moral law, and man becomes merely a clockwork, his thoughts merely wheels and gears. If we accept the only second way of speaking (“will” means the reason, which sometimes prevails over contrary passions, and sometimes fails; and the will is called strong and virtuous if it has the habit of prevailing) we are tempted to excuse men from all responsibility for their own acts.

Here we can no longer be philosophers, but must be poets. Which of the two slightly or grossly inaccurate metaphors we use, depends on the circumstances in which we use them. We must rely on the good will and honesty of our audience to understand the circumstances and not to misunderstand the words.

The common experience of mankind leaves us with a mystery. In some ways, human consciousness is a unity: “my’ reason struggles with “my” passions and the result of the struggle is what “my decision” is. In some ways, human consciousness is a duality: “my” reason wars with the passions of the flesh, and it is as if I stand by helplessly watching myself choose the base and wicked path. Both are the truth: neither is the whole truth.

How can the human consciousness (or, indeed, anything at all) be at once a unity and a duality? Why does man war in his own spirit against himself? How can a man know what is right and will what is wrong? Here we come to a central mystery of human nature. We know that these things must be this way, because common observation confirms it, and out speech would soon turn to nonsense if we spoke about the issue in any other way: but we cannot (or, at least, I cannot) penetrate the mystery of how and why it is this way.

It is like the sunlight. No one can stare at the sun, lest he be dazzled; but by means of the sunlight, we see the daily objects around us. Likewise, the paradox of human consciousness and the war of our higher and lower natures is a dazzling paradox: but by means of this paradox, the ordinary objects of thought and moral reasoning we encounter every day are illumed. We would be in the dark if we ignored either aspect of the question.

Let us therefore recoil (at least for now) from these philosophical puzzles and return to common sense observations.

Now, once we grant the common sense observation that unlike animals, men do, in fact, make decisions, and deliberate (sometimes taking great pains and care in their deliberations) and that, unlike animals or children below the age of reason, they can be seen to overcome their animal natures and follow their reason against their normal inclinations, it becomes merely nonsense, the blabbing of meaningless words, to conjure away this observation by some sort of verbal formula that equates a successful contest of the willpower against the passions with an unsuccessful one.

I say again (the point bears repeating) that no matter what properties the mental act “do not resist temptation” has in common with the act “resist temptation”, the moral and practical quality of the two acts is the opposite. To equate the acts merely devalues and dishonors the act of resisting temptations. (And this is Hobbes’ rhetorical purpose).

To muddle matters further, we use the same terms and metaphors for referring to internal temptation as to external coercion. Indeed, the central metaphor we all use to describe temptation is that it is an externally applied force, as if the Devil is overpowering us, or as if our glands and hormones are physically interfering with our thoughts.

Nevertheless, we must distinguish between a powerful and internal temptation (such as my allure for Catwoman, or, to pick a less personal example, Lancelot’s allure for Guinevere) and an externally applied threat (such as Catwoman’s henchman telling a bank guard to open the vault, or be gunned down). In the eyes of the law, the guard’s trespass and breach of faith is excused on the grounds that his will was not free: he did not freely choose to open the vault, because there was a gun to his head. A court of law would excuse his crime due to the mitigating circumstances. In the legal sense of the term, his will was not free.

Now, Hobbes and all the modern nihilists who follow him, wish to have tyrants hold guns to people’s heads, and wish to rob those people of the character and virtue needed to resist coercion in the face of a death threat: and so they use terminology and metaphors to downplay or abolish the distinction between the guard unable to resist the gun, and, Lancelot unable to resist the romantic allure of Guinevere. The fact of the matter is that Guinevere did not in fact hold a gun to Lancelot’s head and force him into adultery with her. His will, in the legal sense of the term, was free.

If we follow the Hobbesian terminology, however, Lancelot merely decided to commit adultery, and the bank guard decided to help the crooks rob the vault, and both are legally and morally obligated to act in consistency with those decisions. Hobbes holds that contracts made under duress are valid, as if a man who cracked under a death-threat has some sense of honor, moral obligation, or pragmatic reason, to continue, once the threat is removed, to honor the word he gave his captors.

Having said this, let me now address your points:

Q: How can the will be free? Experience shows that we always take the course of action that seems best at the time. Decision-making seems to be kind of like a moral algebra.

A: I can only report that this is not my experience. Only deliberation (see 1b, above) seems to fit into this category. Temptation (see 1c, above) does not seem to fit into this category. Since I never encountered an irresistible temptation, one that I fought and lost, until I was in my late thirties, it is also my experience that many young people, and all pagans, never encounter the strength of temptation, and so they mistake it for deliberation. It is not until you fight these self-destructive or self-demeaning impulses that you see how “external” they appear. To use a metaphor, you might think you were a centaur, until the day you tried to rein in the horse, and it threw you from its back.

Q: Why couldn’t this [free will] be modeled in a, for lack of a better term, “mechanical” sense?

A: Because the model would be grossly inaccurate. An engineer need not take into account the curve of the earth, because his calculations only deal with a small part of the earth’s surface: but it would be nonsense for the pilot of a ship sailing to another hemisphere to use a flat-earth model. Likewise, the mental actions involved in deliberation that can be described in a Newtonian metaphor (impulse A was weightier than impulse B) involve a metaphor that becomes nonsense when speaking of human action in a legal or moral sense.

Hobbes speaks of mental actions as a clockwork, and the final passion once the machine has run as the “will”: but my own testimony of the deliberations I myself has seen in my own mind rarely lend themselves to this mechanistic metaphor.

The rare exception must be mentioned. The only time in my life my mental process seems mechanistic is when I am faced with an utterly arbitrary and appetitive decision, e.g., deciding what to eat in a restaurant, when there is no reason to prefer one to the other. I envision one food or the next, and passively wait to see which appetite is stronger, and go with that. That is like measuring two masses and going with the weightier. If there is a reason for the reason to intervene, such as if thrift or concern for diet urges something other than what the appetites urge, something more than a merely mechanical process is involved: I put my mental thumb on the scale, so to speak. I deliberately interfere with my own deliberations and attempt to talk or force myself into a particular outcome.

Q: But it seems that if making choices is just an automatic thing, you couldn’t really hold others accountable for their actions. I mean, it’s not like they could’ve done otherwise. But this is absurd!

A: Correct. The absurdity here is that if no one is responsible for their actions, then my mental act of holding someone responsible is allowed. If someone tells me it is irresponsible for me to think a false thing, I will answer that no one is responsible for the content of his thoughts: my robot brain has been programmed to reject determinism. I have no choice but to believe in free will.

Of course it is even absurd to talk of the matter at all. If all decision making (including speech) were an automatic action, we would not speak of it. It would merely happen, and we, assuming we existed at all, would merely be passive spectators. All deliberation would be a vegetative or automatic action, like the jump of a leg when the physician hammers your knee, and we could no more influence the outcome of our actions than we could, by willpower, add a cubit to our stature or quell the heart from beating.

Q: What is free will?

A: Every word exists to distinguish itself from other things that are alike it.

The legal meaning of “free will” refers to actions or contracts made when not under coercion: signing a contract when a literal gun is pointed at your head, as opposed to signing a contract of your own free will. The philosophical meaning of “free will” refers to deliberate action as opposed to animal reactions.

The clearest definition I ever heard on the matter come, of all places, from a treatise on economics. This is from Ludwig von Mises’ magisterial HUMAN ACTION:

Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego’s meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person’s conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. Such paraphrases may clarify the definition given and prevent possible misinterpretations. But the definition itself is adequate and does not need complement of commentary.

Conscious or purposeful behavior is in sharp contrast to unconscious behavior, i.e., the reflexes and the involuntary responses of the body’s cells and nerves to stimuli. People are sometimes prepared to believe that the boundaries between conscious behavior and the involuntary reaction of the forces operating within man’s body are more or less indefinite. This is correct only as far as it is sometimes not easy to establish whether concrete behavior is to be considered voluntary or involuntary. But the distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness is nonetheless sharp and can be clearly determined.

The unconscious behavior of the bodily organs and cells is for the acting ego no less a datum than any other fact of the external world. Acting man must take into account all that goes on within his own body as well as other data, e.g., the weather or the attitudes of his neighbors. There is, of course, a margin within which purposeful behavior has the power to neutralize the working of bodily factors. It is feasible within certain limits to get the body under control. Man can sometimes succeed through the power of his will in overcoming sickness, in compensating for the innate or acquired insufficiency of his physical constitution, or in suppressing reflexes. As far as this is possible, the field of purposeful action is extended. If a man abstains from controlling the involuntary reaction of cells and nerve centers, although he would be in a position to do so, his behavior is from our point of view purposeful.

[… ] Action is not simply giving preference. Man also shows preference in situations in which things and events are unavoidable or are believed to be so. Thus a man may prefer sunshine to rain and may wish that the sun would dispel the clouds. He who only wishes and hopes does not interfere actively with the course of events and with the shaping of his own destiny. But acting man chooses, determines, and tries to reach an end. Of two things both of which he cannot have together he selects one and gives up the other. Action therefore always involves both taking and renunciation.

To express wishes and hopes and to announce planned action may be forms of action in so far as they aim in themselves at the realization of a certain purpose. But they must not be confused with the actions to which they refer. They are not identical with the actions they announce, recommend, or reject. Action is a real thing.

I have nothing to add to this aside from the definitional comment that, when I speak of free will, I mean human action as opposed to animal reaction.

Q: How, and in what way, is the will free? What do we mean by the word “free?”

A: Animal reactions are determined by non-deliberate causes. The bell rings; Pavlov’s dog salivates. The bull sees a red flag; he charges. The dog and the bull do not weigh several courses of action and select the best. They are conditioned by their past. Human action is influenced by the future, that is, by anticipations, dreams, conclusions, expectations, extrapolations. Our acts seek ends. The dog and the bull are not free to do other than they are inclined by nature or trained by man to do. We are.

A man can be talked into vegetarianism. A dog must eat meat, because that is his nature. A man in heat can take a vow of abstinence. A dog in heat must mate, because that is his nature. When we speak of free will, we are speaking of an ordinary and common sense observation: men are not dogs.

If a dog or a bull kills a man, it may be killed as a dangerous beast, but it cannot be executed, because it cannot be blamed. It acted only as its nature or training dictated. We humans need not follow the dictates of our nature. We can be educated, but cannot be trained, not in the real sense of that word. We can be tried and executed if we kill a man, but it would be an insult to the human dignity of a murderer to put him down like a dog merely because he was dangerous.

We treat children and madmen with less dignity than we treat adults exactly because their wills are not free: they are not responsible for their actions. A child can be ordered not to do something an adult can do, merely because it is dangerous, or a madman locked up because of the danger he poses, but we do not blame children or madmen for acts they cannot help. When you see yourself doing an act you honestly cannot help, you are not free to choose otherwise.

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.
I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

I trod the earth and know it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

The role immortalized by Michael Rene will now be played by … Keanu Reeves! We will get Jennifer Connelly (not the yummy young Jennifer we recall from LABYRINTH but the thin bony Jennifer we recall from Ang Lee’s HULK) instead of Patricia Neal. Instead of a warning tale against the folly of nuclear world war, this movie will probably be a Green Screed calculated to appeal to environmentally-minded Marxists.

Alas, alas. Those Hollywood types will not even be able to match the music.

Will they even be able to match the rock and roll version?

[Star Keanu] Reeves told us that Klaatu’s message to Earth was very different from the one in the original, that he was bringing with him a warning to stop destroying the environment. … 

“It’s … even more,” Derrickson explained. “I think that this film in some ways is an attempt to address a number of issues that are amongst the most pressing issues for the human race. The original being a Cold War film was addressing what was clearly the greatest threat for the human race at that time, mutual nuclear destruction, and that’s not the most pressing threat that we face now. It’s also man vs. man. We are destroying each other as well. Our country’s at war right now. There is certainly the issue being addressed in the movie of our treatment of one another on the planet. I think it’s a movie about human nature as much as anything else and how human nature is acting itself out in the world right now.”

My considered and thoughtful reaction upon contemplating the theatrical merit of remaking a beloved science fiction classic into a politically eco-sensitive environmental warning movie:

AAAAARGGGHHH! MY EYES! MY EYES! MAKE IT STOP! PLEASE, MAKE IT STOP!

It seems someone has a print, a full print. The missing scenes are no longer missing.

Editors butchered the scenes in this silent masterpiece of Science Fiction, ripping out whole plotlines, and making certain remaining scenes simply senseless. (In the original, the mad scientist Rotwang hates Joh Freder, the master of the city, and seeks to destroy him: in the cut version, Rotwang is helping Freder, and the robot is allegedly meant to replace the workingmen, rather than replace the dead wife both men loved, and the betrayal of Freder is left unexplained.)

By the beard of Saint James Matamoros, I’d love to see an uncut, restored, complete version.

Let us not mince words: Cat is a Marxist. The Marxist sees the world as divided into the evil oppressors and the virtuous victims.

The world view is remarkably one-sided and simplistic: criticism of the victims, even when they commit the same crimes as the oppressors, is never voiced.

The world view is collective: the crime of belonging to the group “White” is a crime because the Whites oppressed and enslaved, for example, the Black Africans. Never mind that individual blacks also enslaved and sold blacks, and that individual White Guys from Lincoln to Wilberforce to Lord Mansfield also freed the blacks, after discovering and propagating the Greco-Roman Judo-Christian notion — found nowhere else in history — that all men were created in the image of God, created equal, and deserved by nature to be free.

In the collective world view, the only motive admitted in any discussion is self-interest, i.e. a prudent form of selfishness. Note particularly what Cat says:  Sometimes writing that perpetuates the dominant culture is written by the people who most benefit from it. Sometimes it is written by people who do not benefit from it, but who have internalized it too well.

What is absent from this world-view is unselfishness. The idea that a poor man (as I once was) might prefer to live, for example, in a nation with a robust free market (as I do), is alien to this world view. The poor man is designated as a member of a victim group, whether he is actually the victim of any real harm or not. The idea that a poor man in a capitalist democracy is better off (both because he is free and because his opportunities are limitless) than a rich man under the heel of a dictatorship, or webbed by the strangling safety net of the Nanny State, is alien to this world view.

What is absent from this world-view is basic fairness. No one can be objective, in this world view: no one can look at the larger picture, and no one can say “Stepping away from my own personal interests, I judge that this system of laws and customs is more just than the other real options. My judgment is the same, whether I personally get money and power from this system or not.”

What is absent from this world-view is humility. Everyone can either be accused of being self-serving (those who benefit from perpetuating the dominant culture) and therefore insincere, or perhaps a hypocrite; or can be pitied as self-deluded, or, perhaps, accused of class-treason (those who do not benefit, but have internalized it too well). In both cases, the conclusions of those who celebrate their home culture can be dismissed condescendingly, because all who defend the culture are automatically hypocrites and traitors.

What is absent from this world-view is love. No one in the Marxist world view loves his country, his nation, his culture, his tribe, his family. The only culture you can love is a stranger’s, and it must be a blind love, blind to the flaws and barbarisms that surround the non-Christian world. The only nation you can love is the United Nations, I guess.

There is group-identity politics, but please notice that, as a matter of fact, the groups selected by the Progressives are always artificial categories with no real-world meaning. According to feminists, my wife has more interests in common with Madame Mao than she has with me, even though she and I are one family, and Madame Mao is a Red enemy. Likewise, according to collectivist theory, the hand in the Ford plant has more interests in common with a hand in the Volkswagen plant than he does with Henry Ford, even if the USA and Germany are at war at the time. Likewise, I, John C. Wright, white male from Virginia, am supposed to have nothing in common with Ayn Rand because she is not a man, so I should prefer the books and the company of my fellow white male Bill Clinton. He and I (according to collectivist theory) are supposed to gang up on her. Maybe Bill can send in federal agents to stamp her cat to death.

On the other hand, the Pope is a Pole, so I am not sure why he is a member of my collective “White Race” as opposed to, say , a Islamic mulatto from Fairfax County, who, if genetics means anything, has more genes in common with me that I have with Cardinal Ratzinger. Is race simply skin color? If there is a biological base, then my “race” and hence my alleged unity of collectivist self-interest, is shared with all the children and grandchildren of mixed marriages, or of Sally Hemmings type affairs. Am I supposed to be a member of the collective “Rightwing Christian Conservative Nutjob”? But the Catholics were scorned and beaten and oppressed when they came to these shores— few folk, from the Pilgrims onward, came to these shores without suffering some evils at the hands of their fellow men—but no Marxist and no Progressive would ever admit that the Catholic Church was a legitimate collective identity-group.

Their groups are race, sex, and economic category (note: investor and wage-earner are descriptions of actions men take in an economy, not a description of a class or race of men) and sometimes sexual orientation. No real group that actually acts in unity and seeks unity, a Church, a family, a culture, or a nation, is a legit group as far as they are concerned: for Progressivism is make-believe, and so only make-believe groups mean anything to them. (I assure you I have more in common, self-interest-wise, with an Oriental lesbian libertarian Catholic American than I do with a white male hetero pinko Jihad-crazed Islamist from Iran. Just so you know. If they both wrote books of equal educational and entertainment value reflecting their world views, I would not complain of a gender imbalance or race imbalance, or whatever imbalance if the thoughts in that book reflected, not my skin hue, but my religion, my ideals, my patriotism, my politics, my tastes. By the wounds of Christ, I have more in common, self-interest wise, with any honest man of any race or class or nation than I do with any scoundrel of any race or class or nation. All honest men have a mutual enemy in the dishonest.)

If you are a member of the victim group, you cannot say, “Better a poor but honest black man in America than a wealthy King in Arabia, or a Commissar in China” because this is not in your self-interest. You get no money and no power from loving your country.

If you want more from life than money and power, if, indeed, you are not a materialist, then the rigid Marxist philosophy has no pigeonhole for you. It crashes their mental computer.

Ergo, by Marxist logic, if you love your country and get no money in return, well, you must have “internalized” the evil values of the evil “dominant culture.” You are not looking out for your own self-interest, and so ergo you must be deceived, a person with a false class consciousness, and perhaps a traitor to your class, race, sex, or other collective that demands your total loyalty.

As a member of the herd, of course, you are morally obligated to be a nonconformist. Anything else is “unethical”. Good grief.

The other thing absent from the Marxist world is a healthy dose of skepticism.

A skeptic would ask, “Gee, gosh, Cat! If Western Democracy build on Judo-Christian Greco-Roman Capitalist Individualist Christianity is the “dominant culture”, how did it get to be dominant? Who, exactly, did the early apostles “dominate” when Christianity spread through the Empire, and how did the Empire’s religion, after the fall of Rome, come to be spread among the Norse peoples? How many divisions of tanks did the Pope use to spread Christianity among the Communists of Poland, and how many Christian paratroopers reintroduce Russian Orthodoxy to Russia? When double-entry bookkeeping and private ownership of property became the main modes of the production of the wealth of nations in the West, the system its enemies call “Capitalism”, why did people flock to the factories? Why did their lifespans increase and infant mortality decrease? Why do immigrants flock to America, so many that all the immigration to all the other European nations COMBINED cannot match it? Are all these people masochists? Each and every one?”

To the skeptic, it is those who swallow the manifold, ever-changing, and ever-increasing absurdities of the Marxist view of history who seem gullible. So very many people are masochists, and they rush to the factories and fields of wealthy nations to raise families? It somehow exploits or harms them to pay them a wage, rather than (as under Communism, or Feudalism, or more barbaric methods of land-use and manufacturing) using serfs or slaves?

I would be so bold as to say that if the dominant culture in a Democracy became dominant because everyone voted for it, or, by immigration, “voted with their feet” and came here, it becomes pointless, nay, it becomes unethical, to complain about those who love the West from celebrating its virtues in song and story. We who love it also criticize it, because love— parental love— sometimes punishes and corrects.

We do not tell stories merely because it is in our self-interest; nor because we operate against our self-interest but have ‘internalized’ the values and customs of our oppressors. What total bunk. What total foolishness.

We tell stories because we love stories. We tell stories about the things we love because we love them. Do you expect people to stop telling myths about their own culture? Do you expect to stop admiring their own heroes? It would be neglect, it would be negligence, for a generation not to teach to its young the values and virtues inherited from its forefathers. Every cub is taught to hunt by its sire: shall we novelists be less than the beasts?    

Do you honestly believe some of the bitterest and most biting criticism of the “dominant culture” does not come from Science Fiction? No? What about NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR by George Orwell, BRAVE NEW WORLD by Huxley, A HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood, FEMALE MAN by Joanna Rush or ANTHEM by Ayn Rand or FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury , or for that matter, what about CALIPHATE by Tom Kratman?

Are these not science fiction? I get the impression that they are criticizing someone.

Was THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH by C.S. Lewis completely uncritical of modernism, science-worship, modern education, feminism? Was THE AMBER SPYGLASS by Phillip Pullman completely uncritical of the Roman Catholic Church?

STARSHIP TROOPERS is hated by those who hate it and loved by those who love it because it bitterly criticized pacifism, so beloved of the Left; STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND is hated and loved because it bitterly criticized monogamy and monotheism, so beloved of the Right.

If you are alert enough to spot it, note the criticism of the “dominant culture” in WAR OF THE WORLDS or THE TIME MACHINE or ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU or WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES or FIRST MEN IN THE MOON. Good heavens, even TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA stars the fiercely anti-Imperialist Captain Nemo.

Was there no criticism of the “dominant culture” in STAR TREK? I seem to recall a few episodes that made a counter-cultural point or two.

Which one of these books, all of them classics of the genre, should we not publish, not review, not “acknowledge” because they are too celebratory of the ‘dominant culture’? What? Is it only criticism from the Left that is valid? Is it only the Progressives that are saints, and everyone else is damned? Only H.G. Wells writes valid Science Fiction, and not Jules Verne?

All these science fiction books, all of them, rightwing and leftwing both, are based on values that spring from the West. Marxism is Western, because economics (of which Marxism is a lunatic distortion) is a Western science; Progressivism is Western, because progress (of which Progressivism is an idolatry) springs from Western science; Feminism is Western, because equality (of which Feminism is a heresy) is a Western political ideal, unknown to the Emperors of China and to the Brahmin of India.

Let us save the best for last: what about WE by Yevgeny Zamyatin? Oh, wait a minute. I seem to recall that Mr. Zamyatin’s book was repeatedly banned in Russia, and that the author was forced to flee from Soviet Russia, that bastion and exemplar of tolerant Marxist values, because he dared to criticize what was the ‘dominant culture’ there. 

I wonder if it is ethical or unethical to celebrate the ‘dominant culture’ if the culture is based on no evils, like the Worker’s Paradises that so grandly went broke in recent decades, after uselessly killing countless tens and hundreds of millions of people.

And what a stupid standard it is not to celebrate what is praiseworthy in a man, or in a nation, or in an ideal, because we find our idol has feet of clay. If there is a culture with no evils in its past, no wars, no invasions, no oppressions, then it is the culture in the Garden of Eden. According to the poet Dante that lasted from nine in the morning until noontide. Every society after that has a certain number of corpses to explain away, except for the revolutionary societies of the modern bent, Marxist and Fascists, who have astronomical numbers of corpses to explain away. This standard is no standard at all, but a trifle of moral preening, of vanity, of narcissism. Let us not be so quick to shatter our idol whose feet are clay if the idol we have to erect in his place lacks a head of gold.

One final note: outside of the narrow and dark walls of the madhouse of Marxist thinking, some of us tell stories just to tell stories, as entertainment, and as art, because of inspirations even we cannot understand: and not as propaganda and not as indoctrination. So, the Marxist world view is not only materialist, selfish, and loveless, it is lacking in art, beauty, and poetry.

I also should like to discover the name and lady of the fellow who wrote this letter to Mrs. Rusch. I should like to drub him for addressing a lady in such a varlet’s fashion.

You see, being a masculinist (I am the male version of a feminist, and so we must coin a dumb name for it) I firmly believe the sexes are different and merit being treated differently; but the cost of joining so unpopular a stance is that, once you say that men should act manly, you are obligated to act like a Man.

I do not mean a Turkish or Arabic or Chinese ideal of manhood, mind you, nor do I mean a pagan ideal. I am talking about chivalry. I mean a man acts like a gentleman, or better yet like a prince, and should never print such an unprintable letter to a lady. If you are not willing, gentlemen, to treat the distaff sex better, then you have no business being a chauvinist for masculinity: far better for you to be a sexless egalitarian than to be a punk.

Note the paradox. If male chauvinists like me really want to be male chauvinists, we have to be male chivilrists as well, in which case we cannot treat womanhood with other than courtesy and fearful reverence. The creature who wrote Mrs. Rausch might have a penis, but he is not what I would call a man.

Now, there are those of you who might say that merely by calling Mrs. Rausch “Missus.” instead of “Miz”, I overstep the bounds of chivalry. I cannot answer you, for my scorn is too great: we are done with allowing a sense of courtesy to be perverted into a sense of political correctness. (We know courtesy has nothing to do with the Progressives, and the Progressives have nothing to do with courtesy.)