Tom’s Big Picture

Another great effort by Sailer to address the histrionics and moral grandstanding associated with this issue:

www.vdare.com/sailer/071203_iq.htm

Why it’s important to allow open debate.

Everyone agrees that we have a higher loyalty to our families than to perfect strangers, much less people across the world.  In this article, using the family of Charles Darwin as an example, Steve Sailer demonstrates the concept of “pedigree collapse”, where the sheer number of ancestors a few generations back in one’s family tree pretty much mandates some degree of cousin marriage in history.  This is why national-level loyalties (in the traditional “nation” sense of sharing common birth, not merely people with whom we happen to share citizenship in the federal empire) are as equally rational as family loyalties.

Al Mohler recently got himself attacked from both the dogmatic left and right by posting the following piece talking about the possible biological origins of homosexuality:

www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=891

For my part, I find it hard to believe that it could truly be genetic, especially occurring as often as claimed in the sheep studies. Microevolution would deal with that defect quite handily it would seem. However, the fetal development of male mammals would imply some level of vulnerability. While genetically male, every male starts out as female, and as I have heard it explained, there are three relatively discrete exposures to testosterone that occur during fetal development that develop the three essential traits of the male organism:

1. The most robust feature, the development of male anatomy. Though, there are rare women out there who are women in every way but who have an XY genotype but never experienced any of the testosterone exposure, even this first one.

2. The second feature, and second most robust, that of sexual attraction to females. The “female” fetus with an XY genetic code must have its brain reprogrammed by testosterone to hard-wire attraction to females, and,

3. The third feature, and least robust, is male behavior patterns and male ways of thinking. This tends to produce male traits like logical thinking, male ego, reduced emotional response, etc, i.e. male personality traits.

We can see how these three discrete testosterone exposures can function like dip switches to produce the variety of phenotypes (i.e. the physical manifestation of a genotype) of the same genotype, XY. We have homosexual-inclined males, who obviously received burst 1, but not bursts 2 and 3. We have heterosexual males with feminine personality traits, which would reflect bursts 1 and 2 without burst 3. And of course, there would likely be a normal distribution and continuum surrounding these “discrete” bursts, as everything is variable to some degree.

The interesting thing about this is that it is all incredibly Calvinistic, which I think accounts for the evangelical criticism of Mohler’s comments. If one must believe in free will, as most evangelicals do, then we must all have “equal opportunity” for sin, or else our conception of justice is misinformed. Cognitive dissonance ensues, causing the usual reaction of shooting the messenger of uncomfortable news.

Phenomena like this explain my own reluctant embrace of Calvinism. My main reasons for finally resolving myself to the concept of predestination are A) it is the only internally consistent and logical explanation for our understanding of God and B) it accounts for observed phenomena like the possible predestination of some people for sinful, destructive behavior.

My objections to Calvinism reflected my own offended sense of justice. One of the darkest Biblical verses from a Calvinist view is from Romans 9:

9:21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? 9:22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: 9:23 And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.

The thing that always bothered me about this vessels of wrath concept was offense at the idea that I myself might have the unlucky role to play as a vessel of wrath. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the concept of total depravity implies that anyone worried about being a vessel of wrath probably isn’t, but has been gifted by God with conviction of his sin and thus is well on his way to being a vessel of mercy.

Throughout college, I resisted Calvinism, often arguing against it with my roommates- the problem with arguing about it is that free will requires a lot more faith, since I would estimate that the Bible is 70%/30% biased in favor of a Calvinistic view. I had to fall back on essentially existential arguments about justice, making “fairness” the arbiter over Scripture and logic.

The final fall was logic itself. In college physics and chemistry, one learns about the concepts of relativity and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. These are complicated mathematical expressions of observed reality that make no sense to the human brain. Yet, observed data confirms their essential truth. If the hard data of science could show that human senses are more unreliable than abstract, impossible-to-really-understand mathematical expressions, then it would also be possible for the human sense of justice to be limited in its perspective as well.

What seals the deal for me logically is chaos theory- this is the idea that things only appear random because we lack information on the hyper-sensitive initial conditions of a chaotic function. A roll of the dice or weather are examples of such functions- they are not truly random, but are hyper-sensitive to small, unknowable changes to human senses that make them appear random.

Similarly, unless we completely reject our Western heritage and the idea, first derived independently by Aristotle, of a completely omniscient and omnipotent God (an example end-run around this is what’s known as “Kingdom Theology”, which holds that God does not know the future and exists within time), then we must assume that God knows every function and every initial condition, including the chemical reactions in our very brains that determine what we do and who we are. And that when He laid the foundation of the Universe, and at every subsequent “edit” with Creation and Man, He knew exactly what changes in initial conditions would be wrought and thus the exact outcomes of His actions. Thus, predestination happens by default, which means it happened on purpose since God had the means to modify the initial conditions as He saw fit.

I have hope that God did the best He could to optimize the equations, to maximize the number that would be predestined into the Kingdom without violating His holiness. But it would not be required on His part.

Which brings us back to Mohler’s points. Many Calvinists insist that those predestined were out of “God’s pleasure” and nothing worthy in those predestined. This is technically true, since all deserve eternal punishment. But I’m not sure that it’s very useful practically, as any practical application would imply a somewhat random distribution of the predestined, when what we see are clumps of the elect, running through families, nations, tribes, maybe even genes themselves. In fact, if God DID optimize the equation, then genetics would be one of the most robust (i.e. relatively insensitive to initial conditions) ways to maximize the elect.
Our genes are no credit to ourselves either, since we didn’t get to choose them- they are a gift, or a curse, as the case may be. And God obviously will save some in spite of predilections to the contrary, to increase His glory in individual cases, but this would not change the overall slant of evidence.

Twin studies have shown that genetics account for 44% of a person’s likelihood to be religious. Now Mohler reports that specific sins may have their own biological markers.

I used to agree with this statement by Luther regarding the utility of Calvinism as a practical concept:

A dispute about predestination should be avoided entirely… I forget everything about Christ and God when I come upon these thoughts and actually get to the point to imagining that God is a rogue. We must stay in the word, in which God is revealed to us and salvation is offered, if we believe him. But in thinking about predestination, we forget God . . However, in Christ are hid all the treasures (Col. 2:3); outside him all are locked up. Therefore, we should simply refuse to argue about election.Such a disputation is so very displeasing to God that he has instituted Baptism, the spoken Word, and the Lord’s Supper to counteract the temptation to engage in it. In these, let us persist and constantly say., I am baptized I believe in Jesus. I care nothing about the disputation concerning predestination.

For this you should know: All such suggestions and disputes about predestination are surely of the devil.

From his commentary on Romans:

In chapters 9, 10 and 11, St. Paul teaches us about the eternal providence of God. It is the original source which determines who would believe and who wouldn’t, who can be set free from sin and who cannot. Such matters have been taken out of our hands and are put into God’s hands so that we might become virtuous. It is absolutely necessary that it be so, for we are so weak and unsure of ourselves that, if it depended on us, no human being would be saved. The devil would overpower all of us. But God is steadfast; his providence will not fail, and no one can prevent its realization. Therefore we have hope against sin.

But here we must shut the mouths of those sacriligeous and arrogant spirits who, mere beginners that they are, bring their reason to bear on this matter and commence, from their exalted position, to probe the abyss of divine providence and uselessly trouble themselves about whether they are predestined or not. These people must surely plunge to their ruin, since they will either despair or abandon themselves to a life of chance.

Luther couldn’t have known at the time, but the concept may have more practical utility than we think, especially if the line of predestination manifests itself in physical form in our very genetic code.

The German strategist Von Clausewitz described war as “politics by other means.” I believe the inverse is true as well- politics is simply war by other means. This is why I am somewhat annoyed at people who object to “negativity” and “mud-slinging” in politics, as fighting with words and going home to sleep in peace is much preferable to a physical fight to the finish. And since negative ads are the only ones with any real content (as the public is generally not interested in dispassionate analysis of the issues), they’re the only chance to work out serious issues before things get to the physical fighting stage.

But most people don’t realize the nature of the war of ideas in the culture, especially conservatives, who are always trying to apologize for who they are in hopes of gaining approval from their sworn enemies. What they don’t realize is that the Left has a play-book for defense, an escalation strategy depending on how hard you hit them. These escalating strategies are summarized below:

1. The Religious Nut Attack

2. The Freudian Attack

3. The X-ist or X-ic attack, where X is a variable depending on the offense, whether that’s racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic or another choice liberal charge.

4. And finally, their biggest gun, The Nazi Attack.

All other things being equal, the Religious Nut Attack is their favorite, as the Left has contempt for traditional religion, and they simply dismiss you as an idiot. Most of the time this happens to hapless Christians who don’t understand the Lord’s admonition to not throw pearls before swine.

If instead of quoting the Bible, one focuses on Leftist behavior, they bring out the old standby, The Freudian Attack. This attack was conceptually underpinned by the great pseudoscientist Freud and perfected by the cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School (who were kicked out of Germany in the 1930’s for their culturally destructive theories, which explains their obsession with Nazism) in their famous studies on “The Authoritarian Personality” (now debunked due to their poor experimental methods). The TAP studies were essentially rigged “experiments” whose inevitable conclusions were that religious families with strong father figures are the building blocks of “fascism”. As I’ve explained before, this is why father figures (especially white male father figures) are hardly ever portrayed in a positive light by the liberal elites who run Hollywood and television- they literally think that such a portrayal will lead to “fascism” (which in their mind is just conservative government and society based on traditional families), which would be bad for people who make their living degrading the culture. It’s kind of a catch-22 for them mentally- they believe that they have to degrade the culture to prevent “fascism”, but it is their degrading of the culture that makes the “fascist” scenario so dangerous for people in their position.

The Frankfurt School, through the debunked TAP studies, essentially described conservatism and traditional family life as a mental illness. In the Freudian mythology, when conservatives get angry with Leftist behavior, it’s because they’re sexually repressed. Seriously, that’s the essence of the Freudian attack- circular reasoning that says liberalism is correct, any objection to liberalism is mental illness, and (in the Freudian mythology) mental illness is caused by sexual repression, the details of which could only be dreamed up in Freud’s sick mind and are not suitable for a family site.

Now, if instead of being angry, a conservative actually points out facts that are uncomfortable to the Left, they bring out the X-ist and X-ic attacks. As Rush Limbaugh once defined the term, a bigot is someone winning an argument with a liberal. This attack is also based on circular reasoning, the Marxist mythology of absolute human equality. When this postulate of the Left disagrees with reality, as it often does, they are forced to bring out various conspiracy theories like “racism” and “sexism” to explain the diversity of outcomes for various groups. Since many issues are linked to the essential nature of man (or the different varieties of man, there being no abstract universal “man”), and the nature of each man or woman is tied intimately to genetics and gender, conservatives who make arguments based on reality will brush up against the Equality Mythology quite often in a way that makes the Left uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, most conservatives are double-minded about this issue, and try to make reality-based arguments while still mouthing the Equality Faith, at least publicly. However, reality and non-equality are so intimately linked that liberals will make the connection for them, and then proceed to call them a nasty name of the X-ist and X-ic variety. Conservatives, always wanting to please liberals, quickly repent of their sin against the Equality Cult and say stupid things that undermine their other arguments, all to please the liberal and avoid the dreaded X-ist and X-ic label.

What happens to conservatives who don’t repent? What happens to those who have the courage to make reality-based arguments and resist X-ist and X-ic attacks? Liberals call these people Nazis. You see, anyone who refuses to confess the Equality Creed is figuratively burned at the stake as a heretic, and in our degraded culture the only real sin is intolerance, and so heretics get smeared with the worse curse word little liberal minds can dream of in their rather limited moral system: Nazi. Never mind that Hitler was small-time compared to the hundreds of millions murdered in the name of the liberal Equality Creed through Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot and Roe. In their moral system, Nazism is it, the polar axis of evil to which all others must be compared.

So what does this have to do with Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary? Well, Mohler said some interesting things about biology and homosexuality last week that offended the Left- most notably, a call for medical intervention to prevent homosexuality if were determined to be biologically-based. And for that sin, the idea that not all sexual “orientations” are equal, and that this disease ought to be wiped out like polio, he is called Josef Mengele, the Left’s arch-demon of their Nazi-obsessed mythology.

The article below summarizes the controversy:

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17615602/from/ET/

Mohler’s original piece here:

www.albertmohler.com/blog_read.php?id=891

My thoughts on the specifics of Mohler’s article in part two…

I recently helped my wife transition our family’s digital photos and movies from ad-hoc directories spread across several computers into a unified library on her Mac’s excellent iPhoto software. While I still find the Apple operating system a bit awkward (it’s prettier, more stable, easier-to-use and more secure than Windows for the average user, but it doesn’t offer any really breakthrough additional functionality and taxes me with my Windows-optimized computer instincts), the real treat of owning a Mac is Apple’s software. It’s well-designed and it works. Particularly interesting was the scrolling function when looking at the entire library. As you scroll down chronologically, the software superimposes the month and year over your screen. I was a bit taken aback as I started scrolling down- we have so many photos over only six short years of time as a couple. At last count, I think there are 12.8 gigabytes worth of photo and video (we take short video snapshots with our digital camera that I edit into an annual DVD as an alternative to the awkward omnipresence of a video camera, whose footage is never watched).

I think it works out to about 3000 total photos. They are stored digitally, will never degrade, and will look as good 500 years from now as they do today.

If I did my best, I might be able to find 50-100 photos total of any of my grandparents (3 of whom are passed away). The tiny bit of video is on 20-year-old degrading VHS tapes that badly need to be archived. In essence, I have a few pictures, a bit of video, fading memories. That’s it.

For every child born today, it will be far different. When my second child is a great-grandmother, maybe 50 years after I have passed away, she will have a perfect digital copy of video taken moments after her birth- and perfect archives of her father and mother. How they talked. What they looked like. Their mannerisms and the silly things said to them when they were a child.

But the implications are far more significant than just emotional connections to dead relatives that can be recalled upon command. Perhaps a bit of historical context on this subject:

In medieval England, one of the goals of the aristocracy was to preserve the unity of family wealth over time. Many of them left wills that essentially said “my oldest son inherits all of my wealth; he may do anything he wishes with the income generated from it, but may not deplete one penny of principal or sell one acre of land.” Over time, land and money became tied up in a few hands as the “dead hand” of the past restricted the living from doing what they wished with their estates. The law eventually recognized this problem and created a legal principle called the “rule against perpetuities”. The rule essentially states that for a contract or will to be valid it must be provable that it will terminate within 21 years after the death of someone alive at the time of its origination. So for example, an older British patriarch could only tie up property for the maximum of the lifetime of any one person alive at the time of his death plus twenty one years. Still a lot of time, but it freed up a lot of land and removed the oppressive regulations of long-dead ancestors.

The efforts of these aristocrats to control the future dealings of their heirs illustrate the natural desire of any father or mother to influence what comes after them. Many of them wrote long, detailed letters concerning life to their children, for example the very popular (in the 1800’s) writings of Lord Chesterton to his son or Robert E. Lee’s affectionate letters to his children, first published in the early 1900’s.

I believe our opportunity for such influence is many times that of our ancestors. Thanks to digital technology, our photos and videos will survive indefinitely, and our descendents can have the opportunity to feel like they really know us. Feeling like they know us as people, they are more apt to take our ideas seriously, even those passed down in written form.

Recently I listened to Vision Forum’s Entrepreneurial Bootcamp CD’s (as an aside, they were excellent, with more practical business content than the typical secular “think positive” business cow pattie seminar; I don’t think I ever understood the whole venture capital build-it-to-sell-it process until I heard one of the guys speak, as I’m more naturally interested in building cash cows to have and to hold than capturing market share as bait for a potential buyout). One of the more, shall we say, “intense” speakers shared that he had a 200-year plan for his family- actually written out! Now that may sound really strange, but he remarked that in his lifetime since he wrote the plan, 20% of 200 years will have passed.

To our hyper-individualistic culture this sounds insane- the typical parent is just looking to get the kid out of the house and self-supporting. But to most people in healthy cultures (including our own before not too long ago), long-range planning is a desirable goal. One of the reasons the Japanese outperform us in many areas is their extreme long-term perspective- Sony and Toyota are reported to have business plans looking up to 500 years into the future! Meanwhile, GM is studying how to save $1 on a piece of plastic to boost earnings next quarter.

So we shouldn’t be shocked or ridicule someone with a long-range plan, but rather consider how such a plan, enabled by the priceless technological gifts of our time, fits into OUR vision for OUR family. I also think we have to start thinking tribally, in terms of our extended future kinship network, not only our immediate nuclear family.

These thoughts are very much in-process, but I will briefly summarize some of the opportunities available:

1. A longer lifespan will enable more long-term-oriented thinking for our families, and more impact on grandchildren. One of the challenges affecting any successful parent is a statistical demographic reality called regression to the mean. Even if a husband and wife are both above-average in ability, the children of such a union will tend to regress back towards the population mean (or IQ=100 for European peoples); the parental IQ is the best indicator of the highly heritable trait of general intelligence (i.e. smarter parents have smarter kids), but like height or any other inherited trait, extreme values tend to get smoothed back down to the average. If you’re smarter than average for your population group, your children will tend to, on average, regress down to the mean (this is a statistically probabilistic statement- it is certainly possible to have all children be smarter, in fact, if you have enough children, it becomes likely that at least one will be smarter). Likewise, those below the average will have children who regress back up to it. Thankfully, IQ is not nearly as important as moral and spiritual development (though, as The Bell Curve demonstrates, they do correlate together in a rather Calvinistic way), but if we want to have an extended kinship network with a visible leader (as committees are the worst way to govern anything), especially when we’re talking about running a continuing family business, we want this person to be at least as talented as the previous generation. The Italians have a word for this concept, called virtu’, that combines the traits of high intelligence, high moral standards and an action-oriented mindset. We want a leader for our extended family or business who is smart (practically smart, not primarily a self-absorbed geeky intelligence), highly moral (as fairness is the only way to ensure the long-term unity and stability of the extended family unit) and a man of action. In other words, someone with the essential virtu’. The only solution to finding this leader is to cast a wide net by having lots of children and grandchildren. The long lifespans afforded by current medicine (which is worlds better than it was even twenty years ago at helping us maintain a higher quality of life) can enable us to not only have more a of multigenerational impact on our grandchildren, but also to see the track record of performance of our children and grandchildren over a longer period of time, which can give greater peace of mind when the time comes to pass the baton to a new leader of the extended family.

2. We are entering a new era of fathers taking responsibility for leadership of their families; could this be formalized? I’ve considered the idea of a “Family Constitution”, some sort of internal document delineating reasonable objective standards of behavior that define who we are, to minimize the “drift” of future generations. Of course it would be unenforceable, but so are Biblical standards of behavior in our times- but no one would say the Bible has no impact.

3. On issues that we care about (say a certain perspective on history, or a theological opinion not compatible with the spirit of our age), we could make simple videos explaining our position to our children and grandchildren. Imagine how difficult it would be for the Supreme Court to twist the opinions of the Founding Fathers if there had been C-SPAN at the Constitutional Convention! In the same way, a video can provide concrete evidence of your opinion, not watered down or compromised in any way. This can help your descendants resist any future liberalizing influences.

These are just a few fairly random thoughts at this point. But the possibilities are endless, for good and evil, with the technological revolution we are experiencing.

The problem with science and ideologies is that science every now and then drops a “data bomb” on man’s vain efforts to simplify God’s Creation. Both evolutionists and creationists have been guilty of this to some degree.

Evolutionists in the post-WWII era have maintained that, while evolution has great implications for the origin of life and for differences between and among a species, there are very little differences between the varieties of man, and all of these differences are at most superficial. These latter conclusions are politically convenient for globalist multicultural interests, and any scientist who deviates from the “party line” on this is punished professionally.

Some prominent Creationists, pathetically eager to score points with the liberal equalitarian zeitgeist of the contemporary world, proudly proclaim their belief in man’s literal equality (as opposed to the Biblically supported concept of mere legal equality before God). They hope to claim a politically correct moral high ground over early evolutionists’ beliefs concerning racial differences. In summary, these creationists promote their historically anomalous liberal interpretations of the Bible to produce various specious arguments that sum up to “Darwin=Hitler”. In reality, Darwin merely provided a theory of a naturalistic process to explain certain empirical observations. The observations themselves stand, but the new-age Creationists try to deny the very observations, rather than restricting themselves as they should to denying the atheistic tendencies of the theory of evolution. Any evil resulting from evolution is due to its denial of God. The observations it seeks to explain, the fact that man is a highly diverse creation, that we’re not all the same, are key to providing a rational argument against globalism.

By attacking dead scientists by association with what dead tyrants did with their theories, they do nothing but score cheap political points against their evolutionist opponents (who will simply deny the validity of the tyrants’ abuses), while surrendering the key ideological battles to the very real threat of equalitarian globalism. If we’re really all the same, then why not have one-world government?

Well, a new “data bomb” tends to show them both to be wrong. It turns out that there’s an entire additional “encryption layer” of information on top of the double helix of DNA, increasing the information density of God’s “organic hard drives” by an order of magnitude greater than we previously thought. This means that A) man is 400% less related to the chimpanzee genetically than we previously thought (94% versus 98.5%, whether you view this as evolution or just God reusing the same blueprints) and B) the varieties of man are 1000% less related to each other (99% versus 99.9%) than previously thought.

This is a huge discovery in genetics. That means there’s up to 1/6 the difference between men as there is between man and chimpanzee. And with this additional information density encoded into DNA, it certainly makes spontaneous evolution a much greater leap of logic.

It looks like God created us, and He created us with a wide variety of difference, not all necessarily superficial. And no amount of equalitarian ideological wishful thinking can change that, whether of the evolutionary atheist or new-age Creationist variety.

This series has discussed the legitimacy, primacy, biological reality and even Scriptural authority for a positive loyalty and preference for the ethnocultural group in which God in His Sovereignty has placed us. As Americans, our loyalty is not to a mere “American creed” or set of abstract principles theoretically extendable to all mankind, but rather to the actual, physical American people as they existed historically and their descendents today. Our heritage as Americans is not due to our Constitution (Liberia has an almost identical Constitution, but it’s not somewhere you would want to live) but rather due to our innate biocultural capabilities combined with a historical legacy as a colony of 17th century England and the attendant conservatism of a remote colony in preserving the virtues of that era, certainly not perfect but much superior in any moral or religious measure to our current age.

Yet many of us are hesitant to express this loyalty. Why? Because of an oppressive force generally known as “political correctness”. Hispanic groups can tell us to “go back to Europe” with no media backlash. Black Muslims like Louis Farrakhan claim European peoples are the invention of a black mad scientist sequestered on a remote island who created “blue-eyed devils” as the tools of Satan; and yet, it is only Farrakhan’s wacky theories about Jews that get media attention, while his anti-European views are tolerated. But let our people ask the government to merely enforce its own laws to prevent an alien invasion and their eventual displacement, and the media censors immediately begin the predictable cry of “racist, bigot, xenophobe”. Why the double standard?

Perhaps Moses said it best, in a speech Charlton Heston gave in 1997 to the Free Congress Foundation:

I have come to realize that a cultural war is raging across our land… storming our values, assaulting our freedoms, killing our self-confidence in who we are and what we believe, where we come from.

How many of you here own a gun? A show of hands?

How many own two or more guns?

Thank you. I wonder—how many of you in this room own guns but chose not to raise your hand?

How many of you considered revealing your conviction about a constitutional right, but then thought better of it?

Then you are a victim of the cultural war. You are a casualty of the cultural warfare being waged against traditional American freedom of beliefs and ideas. Now maybe you don’t care one way or the other about owning a gun. But I could’ve asked for a show of hands on Pentecostal Christians, or pro-lifers, or right-to-workers, or Promise Keepers, or school voucher-ers, and the result would be the same. What if the same question were asked at your PTA meeting? Would you raise your hand if Dan Rather were in the back of the room there with a film crew?

See? Good. Still, if you didn’t, you have been assaulted and robbed of the courage of your convictions. Your pride in who you are, and what you believe, has been ridiculed, ransacked, plundered. It may be a war without bullet or bloodshed, but with just as much liberty lost: You and your country are less free.

And you are not inconsequential people! You in this room, whom many would say are among the most powerful people on earth, you are shamed into silence! Because you embrace a view at odds with the cultural warlords. If that is the outcome of cultural war, and you are the victims, I can only ask the gravely obvious question: What’ll become of the right itself? Or other rights not deemed acceptable by the thought police? What other truth in your heart will you disavow with your hand?

I remember when European Jews feared to admit their faith. The Nazis forced them to wear six-pointed yellow stars sewn on their chests as identity badges. It worked. So—what color star will they pin on our coats? How will the self-styled elite tag us? There may not be a Gestapo officer on every street corner yet, but the influence on our culture is just as pervasive.

Now, I am not really here to talk about the Second Amendment or the NRA, but the gun issue clearly brings into focus the war that’s going on.

Rank-and-file Americans wake up every morning, increasingly bewildered and confused at why their views make them lesser citizens. After enough breakfast-table TV promos hyping tattooed sex-slaves on the next Rikki Lake show, enough gun-glutted movies and tabloid talk shows, enough revisionist history books and prime-time ridicule of religion, enough of the TV anchor who cocks her pretty head, clucks her tongue and sighs about guns causing crime and finally the message gets through: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant, or—even worse—Evangelical Christian, Midwest, or Southern, or—even worse—rural, apparently straight, or—even worse—admittedly heterosexual, gun-owning or—even worse—NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or—even worse—male working stiff, because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as delightfully green as you hand them over, but your voice requires a lower decibel level, your opinion is less enlightened, your media access is insignificant, and frankly mister, you need to wake up, wise up and learn a little something about your new America…in fact, why don’t you just sit down and shut up?

That’s why you don’t raise your hand. That’s how cultural war works. And you are losing.

…

Although my years are long, I was not on hand to help pen the Bill of Rights. And popular assumptions aside, the same goes for the Ten Commandments. Yet as an American and as a man who believes in God’s almighty power, I treasure both.

The Constitution was handed down to guide us by a bunch of those wise old dead white guys who invented this country. Now, some flinch when I say that. Why? It’s true…they were white guys. So were most of the guys who died in Lincoln’s name opposing slavery in the 1860s. So why should I be ashamed of white guys? Why is “Hispanic pride” or “black pride” a good thing, while “white pride” conjures up shaved heads and white hoods? Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated in the media as progress, while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule? I’ll tell you why: Cultural warfare.

…

Americans should not have to go to war every morning for their values. They already go to war for their families. They fight to hold down a job, raise responsible kids, make their payments, keep gas in the car, put food on the table and clothes on their backs, and still save a little for their final days in dignity. They prefer the America they built - where you could pray without feeling naive, love without being kinky, sing without profanity, be white without feeling guilty, own a gun without shame, and raise your hand without apology. They are the critical masses who find themselves under siege and are long for you to get some guts, stand on principle and lead them to victory in this cultural war.

Now all this sounds a little Mosaic, the punch-line of my sermon is as elementary as the Golden Rule. In a cultural war, triumph belongs to those who arm themselves with pride in who they are and then do the right thing. Not the most expedient thing, not the politically correct thing, not what’ll sell, but the right thing.

As an aside, I find it interesting that Heston brings up the Promise Keepers march on Washington. Indeed it was ridiculed by the media, in cruel ways, stereotyping a gathering of Christian men as just a bunch of dorky white guys wanting to beat their wives into submission. While I have my own reservations about Promise Keepers leadership that I won’t go into here, the instincts of the participants are commendable: men wanting to turn their hearts towards home. I remember watching the march on C-SPAN, and there was one particular part that turned my stomach: a bizarre ritual of “racial reconciliation” that involved a white guy on his knees, surrounded by representatives of other races (complete with an American Indian in full headdress, looking more like The Village People than any Indian you see in real life these days) who were standing around him, while the white guy prayed for God’s forgiveness for the sins of his race in America against Hispanics, Indians and African Americans. But it was the white guy and the white guy only who prayed for forgiveness- no prayer of forgiveness for Mexican slaughters of Anglos at Goliad and the Alamo, no prayer of forgiveness for the thousands of women and children mercilessly murdered by American Indians, and no prayer of forgiveness for African Americans’ disproportionate interracial crime rates. I will restrain myself from describing the myriad theological problems with the whole episode.

This incident is exactly the phenomenon Heston hit on- the cloud of oppression where we want to please the media and the cultural elites with apologies for who we are. And yet, what did this ritual buy the Promise Keepers leadership, who were obviously nervous about the fact that their openly multiracial group overwhelmingly consisted of white men? It only bought them contempt from the media. We must realize that our enemies can never be placated or pleased- but like a battered woman in a co-dependent relationship, Promise Keepers keeps on believing they can somehow justify themselves by trying to please the media.

In his speech, Moses was describing the cultural war, but specifically a psychological war, the dirtiest kind of war that deprives men and women of the sanctity of their own thoughts and opinions. And there we see the practical task before us: Like a Twelve-Step Program, we must admit and recognize that we are victims of this war, seek to rehabilitate ourselves from its effect, and most importantly, shield our children from it in their formative years and give them a cultural immune system that will enable them to fight off psychological pathogens once they enter the outside world on their own.

Once freed from the psychological disease of political correctness, the ethnocultural loyalties I advocate will occur naturally, or at least can be taught and internalized with little resistance as a logical extension of the family itself.

So, without further ado:

Tom’s Practical Suggestions for Recovering Victims of Political Correctness to Heal Psychological Wounds and Break the Cycle of Guilt and Oppression for Your Children

1. The media’s main distribution vehicle for mass-consumed politically correct propaganda is television. Turn off the TV. Cancel the cable. Your cable bill sends about 25 to 50 cents per month to every channel on the dial, whether you watch it or not. So you’re subsidizing the filth whether you want to or not. There’s not a whole lot of downside to getting rid of cable once you get over withdrawals: higher quality family time without the tube on all the time (I’ve noticed some people who mute the TV and leave it on all the time, like a security blanket or something), higher SAT scores for your kids since they’ll have to read for entertainment, and more sex. Seriously, studies have shown that TV’s in the bedroom reduce sex frequency between husbands and wives.

2. Ok, I realize most of you won’t implement #1. I’m a hypocrite as well on it, but I thought I’d throw it out there as an ideal. Here’s what we did: we cancelled our cable in 2005. We signed up with Dish Network; there’s even a “family friendly” package that is $20 a month (though not all of the channels, like Nickelodeon, are necessarily healthy). We also got a DVR, where we record shows like a TIVO. Second, and most importantly, we put the Dish Netword receiver on one and only one TV: the one right in front of our exercise equipment. In our house, you must at least be building your temple while you rot your mind.

3. Ok, so maybe #2 is not something you want to do either. At least do the following. Get a DVR, whether Dish or Tivo or whatever. I think a lot of our consumption of unhealthy propaganda is due to mindless viewing of whatever’s on. Now, most people don’t want to watch propaganda, but they will watch it if it’s the best thing on at any given time. A Tivo or digital video recorder allows you to record hours and hours of relatively harmless content (like my wife’s decorating shows, or my shows about “Modern Marvels”, exciting documentaries about concrete, plastic, metal and the like). My recorder has more shows of pretty harmless content than my wife or I could ever watch. In addition, you can skip commercials pretty easily, which will reduce your credit card bill by reducing your exposure to want-inducing messages of materialism (believe me, advertising works- I spend a lot of money on it, and not for my health). Now remember, I said the content is relatively harmless, but it’s not edifying either. So instead of consuming media toxins, you are now consuming the equivalent of table sugar, not healthy for sure, but not harmful in moderation. Even some of the “harmless” content will have trace levels of toxin- for example, a documentary about Texas had the obligatory politically correct hand-wringing about slavery. At least in that situation, with a DVR, you can hit the pause button, explain to your children the problem with what they just heard, and start again. If we talk back to our TV’s in our children’s prescence, the damage is mitigated; in fact, being a critical consumer of media content is an important skill to teach to our children.

4. Never, ever let your children watch content from television without your supervision. Even with a DVR, your children may be tempted to watch the commercials. And for goodness sake, don’t let them watch “children’s” programming. Media mogul Sumner Redstone, born Murray Rothstein, owns Viacom, which in turn owns Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and MTV. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network are designed to produce future consumers of MTV. Do not be so gullible as to trust an anti-Christian corporation to determine appropriate media content for your children. Your preferred medium for children’s content should be the DVD, where you are in absolute control of a closed circuit on the content. There’s no way they’re going to see a Spongebob commercial while watching Veggietales.

5. Build an extensive DVD collection of healthy content and share your content with others (I leave the means for the latter deliberately vague). I will soon start a project of building a list of appropriate DVD’s on this site.

6. Much of the “science” of psychology is actually pseudoscience. However, there is one psychological therapy technique that is almost universally useful: exposure therapy for curing phobias. If someone is afraid of snakes, they can be cured by handling snakes, almost guaranteed. Similarly, political correctness has made us afraid of our past as a people and culture. We need to dig around in the past, particularly in those areas deemed “forbidden” and “evil” by the media, to discover the truth. As a Southerner, this means, for example, I need to know everything I can about The War Between the States, Reconstruction and the Redemption (i.e. the overthrow of the Reconstruction governments) that I can, from original sources, or at least older sources. I need to know the past as it was, from the people who lived in it, and not from self-appointed censors in our current age.

7. We need a general exposure to our civilization’s heritage. Read good literature, listen to good classical music, and enjoy poetry from the past when poems were real art instead of self-indulgent raw feeds of randomness and obscenity from some idiot’s subconscious.

8. In regards to #6 and #7, it is apparent that we must read to accomplish these things. In music and reading, there is a somewhat painful process of stretching the mind that is required before finer things can be appreciated. It’s worth it. Once you begin to enjoy the “higher bandwidth” cultural offerings of our past, you’ll feel like something’s missing in mass-marketed media. But it does take some effort to read. I will also start media lists of music and books on this site. My own experience reading good books is fairly recent, so I can offer some suggestions.

9. In the blog format, one experiential thing I can do for my audience appropriate to the blogging medium to help with #6 and #7 is featuring poetry and prose excerpts from the past. The Internet is perfect for short-format poems- I will begin a weekly poem and prose feature soon, with poems and excerpts from important historical works that will help recovering victims of political correctness.

10. If you’re homeschooling your children, be careful with your curriculum. As anything you pick will be superior to most private and public schools, do not let that comfort blind you to the opportunity cost if a curriculum relies on a pre-digested textbook format to teach history, music, art and the like. I notice some of the large homeschool curriculum sources making overtures to multiculturalism, which is almost as destructive in a Christian context as a secular one. We should prefer a curriculum that is heavy on original sources instead of “interpretation” in a textbook written under the political pressure of our time. Older textbooks are preferable to newer ones. I believe our children have a lot of “heavy lifting” to do in restoring our civilization, and only a fully confident worldview in their culture, people, faith and family will give them the intestinal fortitude to do whatever is necessary in the face of our politically correct opposition.

I’m sure there are more suggestions than these, but I will stop at ten and discuss additional ideas in additional posts.

“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche

The atheist macroevolutionist Richard Dawkins* recently posted a link on his blog to an article on the “quiver full” movement among conservative Protestants. Most interesting to me is the response of his audience in the comments.

A heckler posts:

Oh, the irony: as you atheists/evolutionists realize that you’ll be victims of your own, very real, self inflicted form of natural selection (abortion, birth control).

An atheist responds:

Not if we can conquer aging and death through scientific means.

Delicious irony: it seems that belief in the worldview dictated by macroevolution is itself evolutionarily disadvantageous, as only deeply religious people (and really stupid people) reproduce themselves at an above-replacement pace.

By their own logic, religious belief in an imperative for high fertility is evolutionary advantageous. The logic of the eventual evolutionary triumph of faith is inarguable: all they can do is appeal to their faith that science will save them from death and the necessity of rearing children. In other words, they have replaced one faith with another that is empty and sterile.

Raising children is hard, arguably a form of voluntary slavery. Only faith in God can provide sufficient motivation to raise a large family. The future belongs to the fundamentalists.

Nietzsche may have been right when he remarked that “God is dead” as a real belief among the elites of late 19th century Europe; but as atheism and agnosticism run their course, God is coming back with a vengeance.

*Dawkins is a British scientist and a public personality who has a sort of anti-religious missionary zeal against all types of religion (and to his credit, he does not pull any politically correct punches when it comes to Islam), seeing them as the world’s prime source of conflict; we will be seeing more of him as a public enemy of the faith. Dawkins’ scientific ideas, however, when confined to their proper microevolutionary contexts (as opposed to the man’s macroevolutionary faith), are quite interesting. In particular, his work on memes (ideas that replicate themselves analogous to genes), stripped of his political agenda, is brilliant.

A friend of mine has a theory about the long-range effects of massive contraception and low fertility. Basically, he thinks that people who don’t naturally like children are going to have their genes eliminated from the future of humanity.

It makes sense- many psychological traits are genetic, and “degree of liking children” is likely at least partially genetic. Before contraception, the only thing required to procreate was to enjoy sex. Now, you have to enjoy children as well, since you can separate the former from the latter.

This seems to be the case- I was researching the Robinson curriculum recently for homeschooling, and I noticed that Robinson has some odd ways of caring for his kids. Notably, he never leaves them with anyone or a babysitter, presumably out of some sort of worry that someone else can’t take care of them even for a little while- he claims his children are always with him.

Now that’s someone who enjoys children, to the point of extremity- Robinson is a widower with six children. And his genes will be well-represented in the next generation.

I’ll add my own corollary to my friend’s hypothesis: the future will be composed of the descendants of those individuals who tend to like children OR tend to be too stupid, apathetic or incompetent to use birth control properly. Many Christians like to pretend otherwise, but on the other side of the bell curve there are a lot of people who can’t handle taking a pill everyday, whose procreation patterns more resemble cats than humans.

So we’ll have a child-obsessed homeschooling high-fertility overclass with a massive high-fertility low-IQ underclass. Should be interesting to see what happens when the two groups collide politically.