Jerry Pounelle is my favorite author of military-ish science fiction. All the others are just shadows, IMO.
He hits on and rambles about the following idea: governments and societies don't just change for the better, they de-evolve and de-civilize.
http://jerrypournelle.com/view/2009/Q1/view553.html#MondayCommenting on my observations on Atlas Shrugged:
Ayn Rand was not an anarchist, or someone who believed in no government at all.
Her views on government can be found here:
http://www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/lss/2nature_of_govt.pdf
The discussion on business regulations should not be an all-or-nothing proposition. To state that a 600-lb. deep ocean diving suit is inappropriate garb for a successful ballet dancer is not the same thing as saying that she should dance naked. At present, the regulatory load on American businesses is a lot closer to the former than the latter.
Tom BroszI suspect I know more about the views held by Miss Rand than most. I even met her once. What she never could explain is the basis for law. No one else can, really, either; as Burnham points out in The Machiavellians, a book well worth the time to seek out and read,
there is no more compelling reason to assume that a government selected by 50% plus one of the male, or male and female, population is legitimate than to assume legitimacy for a monarchy ("Your fathers swore to my father, and you to me") or a social class (rule of the best).
Aristotle noted many forms of government, some good, some bad, and nearly all changing one to another, republics becoming democracies which quickly degenerated into the many plundering the productive leading to anarchy leading to some form of tyranny, which if they were lucky would become monarchy, which would --- but you get the notion. John Stewart Mill said that "Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or a Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one."
He did not contemplate a state -- such as the England he lived in -- preferring "diversity" to liberty, and abandoning liberty when they had achieved the maturity necessary for a liberal republic. It never seems to have occurred to him that nations could, in H Beam Piper's phrase, from Space Vikings, decivilize. I suspect that if he lived today he would reexamine his assumptions.
A stable and reasonably rational government is a gift from God or from the gods, and fortunate are the people who have such a gift. Of course they will one day spurn it. One Greek republic (a city state) required anyone proposing a change to the constitution to do so with a noose around his neck; if the proposal was rejected, the winning faction pulled hard on the rope. Whether this ever happened isn't known, but the people of the city assured Aristotle's graduate students (who were investigating the constitutions of all the known city states) that the provision of their law was true, and they thanked the gods for it.
We are busily destroying the basis for our consensus of right and wrong in favor of some kind of pluralism and diversity. Not in favor of rational discussion; indeed, that is suppressed in the name of preventing hate speech.
Of course the federal structure of the nation was intended to accomplish something like diversity while preserving the union: by leaving as much as possible to the states, the largest possible numbers would live under governments they had assented to. In addition, by leaving most economic matters to the states, there would be competition: competition to have lower death taxes thus luring the wealthy to move there before they died. Competition to have lower sales and business taxes to lure the enterprising to come live in the state. (California seems to be going in the opposite direction, trying hard to see how many of the productive it can drive out of the state, and it's doing very well at it.) Alas the temptation to meddle in other people's affairs has never abated.
There was a time when states had residency requirements. You had to live in California for a year to be eligible for any kind of state welfare. New York, which gave welfare support to anyone who had been in the state for an hour, sued, and Lo! the Supreme Court held that residency requirements were unconstitutional. There followed == well, it's pretty obvious what followed. The courts did what Congress could not do.
Now courts and Congress work together to destroy the Judeo-Christian basis of society in favor of The Drama of Atheist Humanism. (There's a very good book by that name, and it's worth finding, as is The Pursuit of the Millennium; read together they give an interesting picture.)
Of course once you admit that the Federal Government has power over some area of human endeavor, sooner or later it will create a bureaucracy to assert that power, and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy will take over, assuring that the area of endeavor will be choked by rules, all well meant. Congress Shall Make No Law becomes something less than an absolute restriction, and Congress hands out doles and earmarked funds but only if the states adopt whatever it is Congress thinks will be best for everyone, and meanwhile the courts hold that window washers are engaged in interstate commerce because they might be washing windows for an office suite that has someone working in it who is importing goods from another state, and suddenly federal minimum wage laws, are valid, and soon Congress will be able to say that a union goon can intimidate you into signing a card so they don't have to have a secret ballot election to make you join the union to keep your job. Welcome to freedom tempered by good intentions.
But make no mistake about it. To secure real rights, governments are necessary. We can agree on that without deciding how to choose a government. Both Heaven and Hell are rumored to be absolute monarchies with a hierarchy of officials...
If men were angels, would government be needed? Apparently even then: Lucifer didn't demand that everyone worship him, only that their obeisance to God be directed through him.
The Framers wisely left matters of religion to the states. We moderns in our infinite wisdom have seen fit to change that. Precisely what we will replace it with as a means of securing the loyalties of the citizens has yet to be seen: I haven't seen many willing to fight and die for diversity, but perhaps it will be so in future.Enough. It's late, I have to get to bed so I can get up in the morning. We pack up and leave before Noon lest we be trapped in traffic coming home. Forgive my late night rambles. I too understand the temptations of that small party who clustered around John Galt. I also understand Miss Rand's joy in creating a world in which the Earth's most powerful and competent men rush to her aid when she is in need, despite large incentives for them not to do that. And I never did understand the moral and ethical position of Ragnar the Pirate. He seems to have been acting benevolently because he wanted to, but what he was doing wasn't charity, and he hated Robin Hood; why would he want to act benevolently, and where did he get his notions of benevolence in the first place?
Ragnar was a great righter of wrongs as he saw them, but why one would do that while believing in Rand's philosophy isn't clear, and why his crew would remain fanatically loyal to him as he risked their lives so that he could right wrongs is even less so;
but then personal relationships, particularly between unequals, is always a problem for Rand. She understood -- or at least admired -- leaders a lot more than she understood followers, for whom she always had a certain disdain.If I seem hostile to Miss Rand, I am not. My mother was very much an individualist and encouraged me to be such. Rand was a prodigiously intelligent and complex woman, with many views worth study and respect.
That she could never reconcile the gap between knowing what is and knowing what ought to be (and how to prove you know what ought to be) is not astonishing : no one else has ever done so without resorting to some form of revelation. Her admiration for St. Thomas Aquinas was real and her reasons for that admiration are worth knowing.
I didn't much like her the time I met her, but perhaps we were both having a bad day. We parted on friendly enough terms. I never met her husband (they were married for some fifty years), who must have been a remarkable man in his own right. I will say that I doubt anyone who ever met her, no matter how briefly, ever forgot the experience.
There was one really galling paragraph in Atlas Shrugged: the judge who has retreated to Galt's hideaway at one point says that he has written a book on law that would save the Earth, but he isn't going to publish it. I will leave it as an exercise for the readers to discern why this so upset me when I read it that it pretty well spoiled the rest of the novel. Miss Rand did not want to comment on that paragraph, which she remembered as soon as I brought it up; I have often wondered if it bothered her as much as it disturbed me. I confess I did not dare ask her why Ragnar the pirate would be so eager to rush to her rescue; but then having met her, I didn't need to ask.
And enough. It really is time for bed.
