The Artlessness of War

Twenty-five hundred years ago, a book was written by Sun Tzu, a Chinese man—The Art of War. In his book, the author stressed that in order to win a war or a battle, it is absolutely necessary to attack with direction and surprise. Without that, victory is very likely elusive.

Now, American armed forces are being directed by a president who has absolutely disavowed that basic principle of warfare. He has clearly notified our Syrian enemy of his strategy and his tactics, including targets he plans to hit and targets he intends to avoid. He has stated that he is not trying to unseat the government of Syria. And…he has said that he may attack tomorrow, next week, or next month! Apparently, there is plenty of time for an attack; and for the first time in wartime history, there is no urgency in making a military move. All this delay is only giving the enemy plenty of time to move all military targets out of harm’s way, so it can be employed later to kill more civilians and children.

 
This attitude is absolutely unbelievable for a military commander. These stupid moves are being backed up, apparently, by our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey. General Dempsey seems to me just a mouthpiece for a president committed to a pointless and undirected symbolic move which is probably only going to be effective in promoting the president as one who decisively moves at a point of emergency—at least, that’s the way the president wants the whole situation to appear to the uninformed voter.

Pragmatism in America

I have recently finished reading a biography of William James, a philosophy professor at Harvard in the late 19^th Century. James was a molder of thought in our country; and his influence can be counted alongside of Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, and Jonathan Edwards in his influence on our present day world. He and his colleagues at Harvard, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Josiah Royce developed the “philosophy” of pragmatism, which has pervaded American thinking as a dominant driving force for well over 100 years. For reasons I will later explain, I doubt that pragmatic philosophy can legitimately be called a complete philosophical system. But, nevertheless, the core of the pragmatic thought process has colored and embellished North American thought and made the accomplishments of our society outstrip those of other nations. For example, compare our pragmatically oriented culture to that of our southern neighbor, Mexico. Mexico’s dominant philosophy, positivism, has remained mired in the mud of pure reason and logic. Positivism is only another name for enlightenment reason—the idea that all of mankind’s problems, including his search for meaning/significance can be obtained through science and reason. Mexican positivists believe that all mankind needs to reach moral, ethical, and religious satisfaction is ever increasing doses of science, the experimental method, and reason. I do not think that any self-respecting philosophers outside the editorial pages of Scientific American buy into that defunct philosophical belief system. At its apex of influence, enlightenment thinking was shattered by World War I and II. Reason and the scientific method only seems to produce progressively sophisticated methods for men to kill one another.

It is interesting to note that William James as far back at the late 19^th Century had more or less downgraded his opinion of enlightenment thinking, also. James had come from a family background of Puritan/Calvinism. He strove all his life with two great conflicts: The 1^st was to reconcile his Christian beliefs with the sciences of his world—which was mainly Darwinian evolutionary theory. The other striving of James mind was the apparent conflict between freedom of the will and the deterministic teachings about God that he had imbibed as a young man.

Pragmatism is the applied belief that the only important things in life are “the things that work,” i.e. if a thing can be caused to function, no matter in what field of action, and if it will produce the desired effect—then, it is true and worthwhile.

For William James the tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions is that there is no thought so important or so strong as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. For him, only the consequences of thoughts were important; and this dictum subsequently pervaded American thought. This belief became in the American mind something far more important than a philosophy; it became a habit of mind, a quality of the general public consciousness. And, as such, it has molded American behavior and belief for well over one hundred years.

As a result of this pragmatic attitude, more and more Americans relinquished their faith in “absolutes” and became ready to judge ideas by their consequences rather than by some abstract formula. In getting rid of the absolutes of the Christian religion, the American mind became more ready to adopt the principles of pluralism and tolerance. In common parlance, Americans became more inclined “to live and let live;” this brought on an erosion of dogmatism and a decline in religious and racial prejudices. These ideas also often produced a bewildering absence of certitude, a sense of confusion and even abandonment. So…pragmatism became something like a religion if one were to allow that religion could be pluralistic or merely something that would improve situations.

A true philosophy is a form of thought that searches for wisdom and knowledge through theory or logical analysis of the principles underlying conduct, thought, and the nature of the universe. A true philosophical system cannot tolerate any internal contradictions.

Pragmatism does not always deal with the principles of a true philosophy; and it may, at times contain internal contradictions. For these reasons, I doubt that pragmatism can really be called a philosophical system. Neither can it be called a religion. A right religion must deal with questions of:

1.   Origin, i.e., where did I come from?
2.   Significance, i.e., why am I here?
3.   Morality, i.e. what is right and what is wrong?
4.   Loyalty, i.e., to whom I accountable?
5.   Behavior, i.e., how should I behave?
6.   Destiny, i.e., where am I going?

Only Christianity has those answers.

 

 

But, try as he may, James could not completely divorce himself from the fact that the Christian religion had produced some of the most beneficial effects on society. He tried, but never once in his adult life did he step inside a church. He wrote, “The problem I have set for myself is a hard one: first, to defend experience (of Christian faith) against philosophy as being the real backbone of the world’s religious life—I mean prayer, guidance, and all that sort of thing immediately and privately felt, as against high and noble general views of our destiny and the world’s meaning; and second, to make the hearer or reader believe…that, although all the special manifestations of religion may have been absurd, yet the life of it as a whole is mankind’s most important function.” So...this 19^th Century philosopher could not get away from the truths and manifestations of the true religion, which meant Christianity.

 

None of us should ever forget that the truth is not a set of man-made ideas. Truth is a person, i.e., the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Must Do Something About the Middle East!!

The time for watching and waiting about the wars in the Middle East is over. America absolutely must ACT!! President Obama’s policy of “leading from behind” must quit. His empty threats have made American statements about humanitarian actions a laughing stock of the world, thanks to the president’s unwillingness to do anything about mass killing and erupting violence in the Middle East. His repeated statements about “keeping all options on the table” simply mean that there are no options on the table. He intends to do absolutely nothing.

President Obama should look at the history of how another Democrat president acted in the First World War. At first, President Wilson did everything he could do to stay out of the war. The American populace was dead set against entry into the war; but as Germany was not willing to seriously negotiate and when on March 18, 1917, German U-boats sank three American merchant ships, Wilson changed his mind—he decided on war.

Congress declared war on April 7, 1917. Wilson used the presidential “bully pulpit” to mobilize American motivation to fight the Germans. He took charge of raising American fury against the German leadership, and he even set aside the Constitutional rights of American citizens to do it. (Abraham Lincoln had set that example during the Civil War when he set aside the right of habeas corpus.) President Wilson convinced Congress to pass the Sedition Act in 1917, which outlawed draft dodging and legitimized censoring printed material including the mail. In 1918, the Sedition Act prevented private citizens from speaking out against the federal government in the war effort. Wilson created the Committee on Public Information, which distributed propaganda against Germany. He saw to it that taxes were raised to the highest level in American history in order to raise money to fight the war—taxes on the rich rose to an astounding 77% of income.

President Obama could mobilize America to do something about the deteriorating world situation if he only had the will to do it. If he really wants a favorable legacy, as most pundits say he does, he must act militarily against tyranny. He must get on his feet and convince Americans that we can, again, gain control of an almost hopeless situation. We must act to prevent the slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians by the Syrian government using nerve gas!!

However, I am afraid that the legacy President Obama will leave will be a reputation as the President who presided over the greatest demise of American prestige and effectiveness in the history of the modern world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Fault Lines Through our Religion and Our Society!

Most of us sense that there are dangerous divisions developing in our America—even among our churches. Morals and ethics of the society are changing; and those changes are seeping into our religious lives and our basic beliefs. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever; but…ideas and mores of the society, as a whole are changing.

Our attention has been drawn to these changes by a recent book by Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America. R. R. Reno has also pointed out the same thing in an opening article in First Things for August/September 2013, which he titled War on the Weak.

These writers and others are pointing out to us that there is a developing division among our people between the educated, socially prominent, administratively powerful, and (resultantly) wealthy on the one hand. And…on the other hand are the uneducated, the working class disenfranchised, the socially weak and administratively impotent. The first group is becoming richer while being able to avoid the pitfalls of social deterioration. The second group is falling victim to high-school dropout, single-parent homes, drugs, smoking, crime, and poverty. The first group lives in gated communities; the second group lives in inner-city ghettos and run down housing projects. The first group includes the politicians, university professors, and the media programmers. The second group can hardly find any kind of work.

The second class of people, whom I will call the underclass, used to be able to keep their life in order because of fixed social norms that told them how to behave. Examples: Boys play with toy guns; girls play with dolls. Clean up your plate. Don’t spend more money than you have in the bank. Always tell the truth. Working hard will get you ahead in life. Boys open doors for girls—etc., etc. Those simple rules have given way to relativeness, inclusiveness, diversity, affirmative action, and other varieties of political correctness.

The more fortunate, whom I will call the upper-class, have been able to keep these norms intact for the most part in their social lives; but they have come to espouse liberalized, “progressive,” allowances that disavow the old-fashioned admonitions. Now, so they say, “anything goes;” but…they still teach their own children to avoid these destructive ways of thinking and living. Out-of-wedlock pregnancies are rare in the upper-class; drug use is slight; and dropping out of high school is anathema.

This upper-class of citizens is the one that determines the mores of the society via their control of the media, the universities, and the judiciary. This class has developed an “enhanced morality” that can promulgate a free-living life style for anyone who wants it while, at the same time, preserving a chaste and self-controlled mystique for themselves. This class is the “strong,” as named by Reno.

The underclass, i.e., the “weak,” in the words of Reno, needs social and moral structure in order to avoid chaos in their personal and social lives. But…that structure is missing from our politically correct society. Our dominant culture refuses to meet this need. Indeed, it rejects it root-and-branch, consistently treating clear moral strictures with suspicion, seeing them as dangerous regressions back into Middle Ages morality.

I believe we will never get out of this conundrum until we get back to Christian principles as a society. Only Christ has the answer. Other religions fail to produce the goods that Christ can offer. Islam produces violence. Eastern religions fail the give personal significance, which is the source of human dignity. Atheism and western-style philosophy only lead to nihilism and its complete lack of human fulfillment. Christ is the answer.

Our way out of this morass of cultural relativeness is not better politicians, academics, economists, and other people planners. Our only hope is that our people (and especially our young people) will not retreat into a materialistic, self-seeking, behavior pattern, that idolizes sex and selfishness. We need real cultural and religious leaders who put Christ at the forefront of their life efforts. These kinds of people will never come out of our present “progressive” culture that only sees quick fixes to our social and cultural problems. We must get at the root causes of our social deterioration before any lasting correction can be obtained. The cure can only be found in Christ.

It must be noted that there is a subset of young people in America who come from the upper-class, but who have co-opted the morals and values of the under-class. You can read about these young people in an article in Imprimis about Sex at Harvard and in a book by Christian Smith, Souls in Transition. I wrote a review of this book on 4/10/2012; and if you are interested in this subject, you can access that review in the list of my blog posts.

Tax-Payers Now Subsidizing Liars!!

According to the Affordable Care Act, in order for a person to qualify for a taxpayer subsidized health insurance policy, he needs two things: The first is an affidavit stating that his employer does not supply adequate health insurance. The second is that he must show that he has a sufficiently low income that he cannot afford to buy health insurance on his own.

The Obama Administration has set aside the first requirement for one year, because it says that it is too onerous to enforce. Now, it is setting aside the second —because it is too difficult to verify at the present time. WOW! Of course, government health insurance is slated to take place on 1 October, right on schedule. The way that is going to happen is that the government is just going to accept the word of the buyer of insurance that his income is low—no verification needed, apparently. The government will dispense the insurance through the national health insurance exchanges.

IRS experience tells that 21%-25% of earned income tax credits go to people who are not eligible for those credits.  If that level of fraud is predictive of the amount of fraud anticipated by asking people to designate their financial qualifications for ObamaCare health insurance through the exchanges, then tax-payers will be picking up $250 billion in fraudulent insurance payments over the next 10 years.

This waiving of verification procedures seems like a transparent attempt to get many people to sign up for insurance through the exchanges; there by showing that government health insurance is the preferred vehicle for coverage. Of course, this will be done at the expense of the taxpayers. As usual, President Obama expects taxpayers to cough up the money.  

As you might expect, this arrangement is in violation of the Affordable Care Act’s specifications. President Obama just does not seem worried about enforcing the features of his own legislative measures.

(This blog post was redacted from the Wall Street Journal of 8 July 2013 page A16.)

The Cause of Homosexuality

There is often a question in the minds of Americans about the causes of homosexuality. In this blog post, I will attempt to give two theories about this abnormal sexual orientation. I am particularly interested in this matter because of the recent change of policy in the Boy Scouts of America. That organization previously would not admit homosexuals into the organization as members or as leaders. Lately, the BSA has decided to allow openly homosexual boys to become members.

I believe that homosexuality is a moral mistake. Of course, homosexuals have long strived to establish their life style as a normal variant, caused by a genetic difference between them and heterosexual individuals. Intense study of the human genome has failed to find any correlation between homosexuality and any particular pattern of human genes or chromosomes. In other words, there has been found no genetic correlate for homosexuality. That leaves only environmental and social causes as viable explanations for homosexuality.

So…what does cause homosexuality? This is a question that probably has several answers in different cases. But whatever the causes may be, you can be pretty sure that they are complex. Sigmund Freud in the late 19^th Century pointed out that establishing sexual identity is a major and sometimes difficult task for the human being. He thought the task of sexual identification in males is more difficult than that of females. Of course, I think that Freud was a bit too ready to ascribe every psychiatric malady to something sexual—but nevertheless, his observation has some credence.

It is my opinion and that of many others that homosexuality has two common origins. The first is that in very early childhood, certainly before the age of 5, a conflictual relationship develops between the child and the parent of the same sex. We will discuss the pathway to homosexuality in boys because homosexuality is more common in the male; but the principle can be reflexly applied to girls, also. Both little boys and little girls are very attached to their mothers during infancy.  As a boy grows up, however, he becomes more and more interested in his father. He sees his father as a model for his life; and he seeks to identify with the father. He notices that his father is sexually attracted to females, and he, thus, identifies that as a model for his life, too. He then normally becomes a heterosexual person, attracted to the female.

However, when a conflictual relationship becomes obvious to a little boy, he becomes afraid of his father. Or…he may disengage emotionally from his father who is authoritarian, hostile, distant, or otherwise offensive. This conflict drives the little boy to develop a pathological (abnormal) relationship with his mother. The boy notices that the mother is sexually attracted to males; and the boy, then develops an attraction to males. Thus…you have a homosexual male as he grows up. This early conflict with the father causes very early onset homosexual affinities; and I have heard these early age homosexuals tell me on several occasions that their earliest memories are of their attraction to males as sexual goals. This early attraction to males is the thing that makes homosexuals believe that there is something genetic about their homosexuality; they cannot imagine how their sexual affinity can come from any other source.

The second kind of sexual development into homosexuality occurs in teen-age years; and this is what I think is particularly hazardous in the Boy Scouts. There is a well-known tendency for teenagers to rebel against their parents and other authorities in their lives—they are trying to find their own identities. The teenager seeks venues in which he can rebel. In the course of this rebellion, some of them decide to “walk on the wild side,” so to speak, and find the most blatant issue against which he can rebel. He soon sees that one of the most powerful recommendations that is put upon him is that he become heterosexual. This provides the teenager with the opportunity to rebel in grand fashion. He may decide to experiment with the gay lifestyle. Sometimes this results in a lifetime commitment to homosexuality. Sometimes, however, it is only a temporary situation that is nothing more than a brief experimentation in an otherwise normal developmental model. There are many teenagers who have had brief encounters with homosexuality; and their subsequent development does not seem to be harmed.

 My concern with the Boy Scout matter centers on this second developmental pathway. I worry that exposing developing boys to homosexual influences may tempt them to adopt that lifestyle for themselves as a result of their normal rebellious tendencies. For that reason, I do not think the Boy Scouts is a proper venue for homosexual boys. I think that normal boys might possibly become homosexuals as a result of interaction with homosexuals during teenage years.

Homosexuality is a harmful lifestyle practiced by about 5% of human populations. The more it is tolerated and accepted as normal, the more prevalent it will become. It brings no happiness into the life of a boy and as time goes on his focus is on how attractive he can be to other males; he does not move on in life as a happily married  man. I do not believe that our government and our social institutions are doing anybody any favors by aiding and abetting this aberration of behavior.

 

An ObamaCare Board Answerable to No One

(This blog post was partly redacted from the Wall Street Journal 6/20/13 page A21.)

A huge objection to The Affordable Care Act has been raised by those who view that law’s inclusion of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the IPAB. That board has been called the “death panel.” (That name is not warranted, in my opinion.)

Nevertheless, I think there is great danger in the function of the IPAB, as it is specified in the ACA (ObamaCare). As described in the Act, the IPAB will be a separate governmental organization with extreme power to specify where huge sums of money are to be spent. The Board will also  prescribe monstrous changes to our health care system. The ObamaCare law stipulates that there “shall be no administrative or judicial review” of the board’s decisions. Its members will be nearly untouchable, too. They will be presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed, but after that, they can only be fired for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” The crafters of the ACA designed the IPAB so that it would be immune to political pressure; but that effort is a futile one. The original appointees would be put there by an elected (and, therefore, political) president. It is impossible for the Board to be independent of politics.

Once the board acts, its decisions can be overruled only by Congress and only through unprecedented and constitutionally dubious legislative procedures—featuring restricted debate, short deadlines for actions by congressional committees and other steps of the process and supermajoritarian voting requirements. The law allows Congress to kill the otherwise inextirpable board only by a three-fifths supermajority, and only by a vote that takes place in 2017 between January 1 and August 15 If the board fails to implement cuts in expenses, all of its powers are to be exercised by the HHS Secretary Sebelius or her successor.

This new board is an invention of government that seeks to replace the system of checks and balances inherent in our form of government. It is dangerous; and Congress should act immediately to change the specifics of the board’s creation so that it will respond, at least to some degree, to the will of the people through our elected representatives.