SANE Email Update Vol. 5. No. 2

Sane Email Update Vol. 5. No. 2 Sept. 15, 2009

Dear SANE Subscriber, Member, or Friend:

Welcome!

A Reminder: at our SANE Works for US web site, we have now completed our conversion from an “open source” journal on public policy (stage one), to an open source web log (stage two), and now to a members-only policy web log and knowledge base (stage three). Our data archives are loaded with mineral-rich and protein-packed essays and white papers. Many readers, numbering in the hundreds, have requested membership information. Consider this email a response if you haven’t received a direct email response to date.

For basic membership privileges to access the web log, one should pledge $150 per month or make a one-time annual donation of $1200. For access also to the archived knowledge base, $250 per month or $2500 annually. SANE of course is a 501c(3) tax-exempt organization and these donations are tax deductible. (These are suggested donation amounts and are subject to change.)
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As we promised last week, this edition focuses on “Progressivism” in the context of the
diagnostic analysis of the great political-social malady of our day—the destruction of the West through the dismantling of national existence. The dismantling of national existence in favor of what has been termed transnationalism is the intentional and unintentional destruction of peoplehood or national sovereignty. The ultimate fate of this malady is the One World State where every man and woman is an equal citizen of the global village. The indicia of this progressive march is found everywhere, both on the left and right of the political spectrum, albeit in varying degrees:

the ubiquitous reliance on universal human rights to protect the downtrodden on foreign soil;
the growing call for international courts of justice, transnational jurisdiction, and an international jurisprudence;

the internationalization of war and national security with the empowerment of the U.N. and its Security Council;

the developing legitimacy of the internationalization of currency;

the signing and ratification of international treaties obligating countries to give asylum to illegal immigrants on “humanitarian” grounds; and
the ubiquitous teaching plan in every public school and university that America, and the West more generally, embrace a multiculturalism where pluralism, diversity, moral relativism, and tolerance of hostile and even dangerous cultures and messages are absolute values.
For example, our demand for tolerance as an absolute value extends so far that in 1969 the Supreme Court determined that our very freedom demanded that we re-write the First Amendment and its 182 years of jurisprudence. Nine men in black robes decided that from that day forward we must tolerate our sworn enemies’ public call for our violent destruction as long as the threat is not “imminent”.

Thus, if a Shariah scholar and authority stands up in the public square, even one with an army of jihad-hungry young men listening to his every word, and declares that Shariah obligates Muslims to fight the infidel to the death, law enforcement must stand down because without proof that this is a call to act “imminently”, even though the threat is real and has proven actionable in the past, it is protected by the First Amendment. The theory being that tolerance of all views, even intolerant deadly ones, is an absolute value that surpasses all threats to life and liberty except “imminent” ones.

When asked to explain why a less than imminent threat to thousands if not millions of lives ought to be tolerated for even one minute, the advocates of absolute tolerance respond by repeating the trope that protecting such intolerant and deadly messages allows them to be overcome in the public square by counter voices of yet more tolerance.

Just repeating the theory out loud shows it to be preposterous.

This preposterousness is tolerated, we are told, out of the fear that once you foreclose the violent message, you’ll do the same for the message of non-violent destruction (like the Muslim Brotherhoods’ plan to use civil rights and litigation to “destroy[] Western civilization from within” as a “kind of grand jihad”, spearheaded by such organizations as CAIR and ISNA). And, finally, once you’ve forbidden the non-violent, destructive message, you’ll restrict even the peaceful but merely unpopular voice.

In other words, somehow we are incapable of distinguishing as a matter of law between a non-violent political view and a violent one unless there is something imminent about the danger posed. But when asked to describe “imminence” with some specificity and to explain how in the world it brings a legal clarity that the call for violence does not, the progressive offers at best a garbled response and returns to the theme that the “idea” of freedom embodied in such absolute tolerance is superior to even a viable threat to life and limb unless the threat is “imminent”. What imminence means of course is anyone’s guess. As noted above, it took the Court exactly 182 years of re-reading and rewriting the Free Speech Clause before ‘imminence’ finally made its appearance. And, no one objected. Now, that’s progress!
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Just recently, Norman Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine fame and the great voice of a new kind of political conservatism by non-observant Jews (sometimes broadly yet erroneously labeled neo-conservatism), wrote a book entitled, Why are Jews Liberals? This has spawned a small cottage industry in its wake with Commentary running a symposium on the subject and the Wall Street Journal publishing an oped by Podhoretz on the same subject.

The sum and substance of this discussion is why non-observant (viz., non-Orthodox) Jews in America have so consistently opted for the politics of the Liberal Elite even when it is against their own financial, social, and filial (as in love of their brethren in Israel) interests? (In contrast, Orthodox Jews, to the extent they are politically engaged, are almost wholly conservative in their voting patterns.)

While this question may interest you, it is not the real question. The more important inquiry is why are most Americans (Democrats, Republicans, and Independents) progressives?
Parenthetically, you will note that President Obama, in his speech last week to the Joint Session of Congress on the universal health care plan, purposefully turned to his “progressive friends” to make a particular point about the government-run option aka the public option. The reality is, however, that most of the president’s adversaries from across the isle are also staunch believers in progress—scientific, political, and social—the difference being one of degree.

In this effort to explain Jewish liberalism, Podhoretz and his friends at Commentary offer essentially historical and sociological explanations. Neither theory sufficiently explains the self-destructive nature of Jewish liberalism as a unique species of Leftist beast and a fortiori both are incapable of explaining why essentially all of Western political thought and action have embraced progressivism in what can properly be described as a fatal attraction.

We will provide, we hope, a cogent and coherent analysis of why contemporary Western political thought and action are aligned with the very progressivism that invariably leads to big government, statism, and tyranny—that is, its own destruction. Given the number of Americans (and even Europeans) who claim allegiance to conservative political principles, this appears, at the very least, counter-intuitive. We hope to show it is not.

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But first, we wish to highlight an article published by SANE’s Col. Thomas Snodgrass in the American Thinker. Entited, “Can We Find Clarity in the Afghan Strategy Debate?”, this article cuts to the chase on the problem with our current military strategy in Afghanistan in particular and more generally in the war on Islamic terror, or what the Obama administration calls “overseas contingencies”. It is an important clarification to the war punditry and we recommend it to all. (For members, the article is posted here at SANE.)

For those of you who don’t know, Col. Snodgrass, USAF (retired), serves on SANE’s executive board as Director of Military Affairs and has a relevant and rich military career which includes combat service during the Vietnam War, INTEL officer in Pakistan and Turkey, War College instructor, and now adjunct professor of history at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. SANE’s premium archives contain many essays and white papers incorporating Col. Snodgrass’ penetrating analysis of why modern war theory has a built-in defeat mechanism.
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We return to the question at hand: Why are most Americans (including most Jews) progressives?

To answer this query, let’s begin with the basic premises of contemporary life and thought.

[1] (a) Science is the symbolic (i.e., mathematical) representation of reality (i.e., existence) subjected to empirical verification through the experimental method.

(b) Science leads to certain knowledge.

Thus, if Einstein proves mathematically that E=MC2 and other scientists validate the consequences of this symbolic representation of reality under controlled conditions, this knowledge is now a certainty. It is beyond debate. (It goes without saying, we hope, that scientific theories not fully verified by the experimental method, like global warming, or those theories which are simply attempts to explain why some formula like E=MC2 works [as in explanations of quantum physics], are just that—theories, which even scientists concede, given further mathematical insights and more precise empirical measurements, are neither certain nor irrefutable.)

[2] Science, as certainty, precludes any cause that is not of the material or natural world. Thus, that which cannot be represented symbolically or measured empirically cannot be part of scientific reality. (Again, we hope it goes without saying, that measurement tools are always improving so that science’s exclusionary condition of reality is not that it is not measurable today, but that the thing itself, or its effect on other things, is inherently not subject to prediction, testing, and measurement.) Thus, something that acts on nature from outside of nature—as the divine—does not, per science, exist.

[3] Science is the exclusive domain of certainty. Thus, every part of our existence that is not scientific and subject to science’s certainty is belief. Belief or opinion is unalterably uncertain because by definition it can never be subjected to science. (Yet again, we hope it goes without saying that certain beliefs might be tested as with any scientific hypothesis; if scientifically validated, it is no longer a belief or opinion but a scientific certainty.) Thus, moral assertions are untestable and mere belief, opinion, or preference. Divine intervention through prayer or other miraculous event is similarly untestable and simply a belief held by a religious adherent.

[4] Those beliefs not subject to science (as in morals and faith) are so unalterably uncertain that they are in fact certain. That is, there is certainty that no such belief has any objective reality or validity.

If you’re still with us at this point, then you now understand the transformative nature of the Enlightenment, beginning effectively with Descartes in the 17th century. You also recognize the truth of existence all around you. This is how we in the West live. These premises are beyond discussion.

This is what Robert J. Loewenberg of the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies has termed the Reciprocal: Science = Certainty; All Else = Uncertainty. The Uncertainty of All Else as Belief is the reciprocal of the Certainty of Science. As such, its Uncertainty is a certainty.
Political thinkers like Hobbes, lesser minds like Locke, and many other well known names in the pantheon of modern political thought, grasped immediately the implications of the Reciprocal. First and foremost, it finally eliminated the divine and morality as part of serious discourse. Such talk was not science, which relegated these subjects to the “liberal arts” where belief and even educated opinion belonged. Once the liberal arts figured out that they too could participate as a science, albeit a neo-science through the social science disciplines, the divine and morality were further exiled to the outermost margins of political and social discourse.

Second, the political minds of the Enlightenment also understood that the premises inherent in the Reciprocal had an impressive implication for political life. If nothing a man said outside of science and its realm of certainty had any objective value for political society, how could you order political and social life? How could society prohibit the venal and permit the virtuous now that we understood that venality and virtue were mere figments of our individual and collective imaginations?

The answer was tyranny. Tyranny in its active phase is simply that: brute force. The Ubermensch. One man or clique of men decide for all. And, given that everyone accepts the fact their their beliefs and imaginations are no more true or objectively valid than the next man’s (B1 = B2; B2 = B3; B1= B3 = Bn), one man’s belief (B1) could quite reasonably be replaced by any other’s (Bx). Political and military might it would seem would be the deciding factor, leading to the well-known “might makes right.”

The problem with the Ubermensch approach to political order is that while everyone involved might agree that their respective beliefs and preferences have no greater claim to truth than their neighbor’s, they most assuredly don’t like the idea of being denied their own pleasures.

While truth and value have been eliminated from the public square, preference, predilection, and zealous sincerity have not; indeed, these substitutes for value and virtue had been elevated to high, if not ultimate, rank. Not surprisingly, when one man rules, there is presumptively a growing army of malcontents. This leads to the ever increasing level of might that must be brought to bear to impose political and social order.

The other approach considered was tyranny in its passive phase. Rather than one man arbitrarily demanding to apply his Bx as the law, why not grant each man a vote? Since all B1, 2, 3 . . . n are equal relative to their claims for truth and value, on any given issue count the votes and whichever side is victorious on that day claims the mantle of the mightier. The Ubermensch had been replaced by the mob.

Democracy is no less arbitrary relative to the truth than the Ubermensch—precisely because there can be no truth or intrinsic value in any Bx as un-scientific—but it does solve the thorny problem of the Ubermensch imposing law and order on an unruly and growing majority. In democracy, the ruling mob reduces the unruly mob to a minority status—literally and figuratively. (We witness this effort by the majority, be it Republican or Democrat, to label the minority as an unruly mob in all of contemporary politics.)

But herein lies the rub. And, it is a rub so abrasive that once tyranny, in either its active or passive phase, touches down it leaves little, save some residue, of what constituted Western political order prior to the hegemonic dominance enjoyed by the Reciprocal. The Founders understood this threat and purposefully rejected democracy opting instead to craft a unique and complex constitutional republic with a separation of powers between the newly organized national government and the states and between the three branches of this new federal power.

The French did not and were soon to experience how tyranny in its passive phase quite naturally morphs into a Reign of Terror. (The question we leave unanswered today is whether the Founders sufficiently protected us from the Ubermensch or the mob. We would suggest that the answer to this important query is the proof in today’s pudding.)

If you have not fully thought through the Reciprocal, its premises, and what it means for man and his political life, you might still be struggling with our assertion that the Reciprocal, operating as the truth of existence for political and social life in the contemporary West, necessarily leads to the destruction of man qua Man and his political order. And, you might not yet fully grasp that the Reciprocal’s political expression in active or passive tyranny is necessarily a progressive march toward the universal stage and the One World Order. While the answer, we suggest, is demonstrable in the understanding of political order proper and the collapse of the Terms of Existence represented by the less than visible action of the Reciprocal, this is not the forum to attempt to demonstrate this.

However, what can be demonstrated straightforwardly is the incoherence of political and social life within what Loewenberg characterizes as the visible action of the Reciprocal and why those who embrace its premises even tentatively will seek ever more statism, larger government, and tyranny. In this world, a universal political order is both progress simply and a product of the universal truth of existence which comes hand-in-glove with the enlightenment of science.

To demonstrate this incoherence, which afflicts not only political discourse but envelops almost all of our social intercourse in its gelatinous womb, we turn to science. We begin with science-speech.

The language of science is manifestly incoherent. In and of itself, it consists of mathematical symbols representing some count. Nothing in science qua science is more than a quantification of something. Symbols (i.e., mathematical physics) subject to empirical testing and measurement can be nothing else.


For example, science measures the distinction between inorganic matter and organic matter. One reproduces the other does not. We will assume science can also measure the distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings. One perceives sensation and the other not. Per science, it is a certainty that all of these things are just that—things. Material things all derived from different quantities of different things developed in wholly physical environments all subject to quantification. Nothing else exists other than beliefs (Bx) about those things. The Reciprocal.

Science-speech, therefore, communicates nothing about the value of anything in the world. A scientist speaking science-speech has no way to communicate the difference in value or moral worth between a man and a rock. For science, there is no qualitative ordering. Even those engrossed in the understanding of the evolutionary struggle to reproduce and survive cannot speak of survival as better or more valuable than extinction. Both are merely empirical facts to be counted.

This being the case, the question must be asked: how does man survive? How is society possible in a world dependent on science? How can we create political and social order out of the morass of quantifiable facts? What is better or worse? What is good or bad? What should be lawful and what should be criminalized? Per science, all things are matter and qualitatively indistinguishable. As such, science does not recognize or even countenance distinctions or discrimination not wholly quantifiable.

Thus, science recognizes no distinction among nations or peoples. Moreover, it is not that science is neutral on the question of such distinctions. Science strictly speaking rejects any such distinctions as a social construct and as such a belief as any other unscientific belief. The idea that Americans would consider themselves distinguishable from Mexicans is anathema. In science, the very idea of national borders and legal infirmities based upon citizenship is wholly unfounded and invalid.

Indeed, if one were to propose a political order agreeable to science it would be a world order in which there was no value or moral worth given to any group of people over another. Each global citizen would be treated no better or worse than any other. At the end of the day, each person is just another organism subject to some count. A global order in which all non-scientific decisions are made by counting the beliefs (B1, 2, 3 . . . n) and granting political and legal consequence to the greatest number of votes might very well be countenanced by science. It is at the very least a quantification of something. But national existence and the discrimination between those born on one side of an imaginary line and those born on the other has absolutely no scientific justification.

But if science provides no sanctuary for national existence, and indeed is hostile to it, the only other refuge would be in the All Else other than science—that is, beliefs. The All Else =
Uncertainty of the Reciprocal. Might we find a justification for national existence in this realm?

The answer is obviously that we do not. And, this answer is what we are witnessing in real time. The reason we know this is so is embedded in what we already know are the only political orders possible within a world of only science and beliefs. If you cannot claim some objective worth in a discreet people, separate and distinct from another people, national existence is simply not possible. Multi-culturalism as an absolute value because “all values are equal” in that all values or beliefs are equally uncertain dooms any effort to create political order to failure.

Tyranny, either active or passive, ruled by tyrant or mob, which denies all truths save that there is no truth, is a priori a denial of man as nothing more than beast or matter simply. It is a denial of peoplehood and any political order grounded in transcendent truth. Man without transcendent truth is nothing but matter.

This point is clarified when we examine the speech that must accompany All Else = Uncertainty. It is no less incoherent than science-speech and therefore incapable of ordering man’s world. When any moral assertion is unalterably uncertain because B1 equals any Bx, society and political life either abandon morality and the good altogether with disastrous consequences, or pretend that the quantification of the votes of B1, 2, 3 . . . n is a good substitute for the truth and the good. But it is obvious that the sum of even an infinite number of non-true or valueless Bn does not make it true or give it value, beyond the satisfaction of the predilections of the greatest number of those casting a vote.

Even a college freshman understands the logical dilemma and incoherence of such an absolute moral relativism, typically coined in the phrase: “There are no absolutes, absolutely.” Only the rare man actually lives his life abandoning all moral truths. This cognizance that some moral truths are so foundational as to be irrefutable is the residue from Western civilization prior to the Reciprocal taking hold of all of existence we noted earlier. It is the Christian (aka Judeo-Christian) foundation upon which this country, and others in the West, were founded. It served for much of the history of the West as the transcendent and moral grounding for our norms, laws, and customs.

Today, it is but residue. An example can be drawn from the contemporary wellspring of beliefs that is our constitutional jurisprudence. In Lawrence v. Taylor (2002), the Supreme Court overturned this country’s adherence to morals legislation (by outlawing anti-sodomy statutes) and declared that when it comes to sex, no moral justification by the state to forbid some perceived perversity survives constitutional scrutiny. Only if the state can document some empirical harm flowing from the sexual conduct (presumably some “harm” that itself can be described without recourse to moral reckonings) is the state free to restrict the behavior.

Yet, just a year earlier and confirmed subsequently, the Court and its army of lower federal courts were comfortably declaring that sexual conduct between an adult and a child is “an act repugnant to the moral instincts of a decent people.” The problem with such declarations in light of Lawrence is obvious. The Court is vainly seeking coherence as it abandons any semblance of it. Even the fall-back claim that sex with children is “abusive” and produces a quantifiable harm (thereby satisfying Lawrence’s willingness to accept social science, not moral, reports of harm) is only true because our Judeo-Christian residue does not permit us to treat sex like brushing our teeth. Yet, without our Judeo-Christian taboos on sex outside of marriage between one man and one woman, who is to say that sex, including adult-child sex, would be treated as anything more than a biological fact?

It goes without saying that many societies, including Shariah-adherent Muslim ones, find nothing wrong with pedophilia. Mohammed himself enjoyed this “repugnant” indulgence. Not surprisingly, we already have social scientists empirically documenting that “consensual” adult-child sex does not in fact lead to quantifiable harms.

What this example points to is the consequence to a people and nation which embraces science as certainty and must as a consequence accept that All Else = Uncertainty. It is the abandonment of man’s being, and thus his political order, as fixed by the divine. It is, in the parlance of our Founders, the denial of any endowment to man by the Creator.

Thus, given the Reciprocal as our truth of existence, one might ask, What possible justification is there to grant what we now call American citizens the benefits we don’t grant to those we call non-citizens? How does democracy justify discriminating against huge populations based upon the drawing of some arbitrary yet absolute line at geographical borders? If democracy is an absolute good, precisely because it denies any Bx the status of objective value or truth, why do we elevate the social constructs of borders and nations (Bx) to some absolute value and truth they cannot claim? Democracy necessarily demands that all men and women be allowed to vote on all political and social issues without regard to national borders. This is the One World State.

And, to test this, the board of trustees of SANE have authorized us to announce here a new essay contest. The first contestant that can make a coherent and persuasive argument for national existence based upon science or democracy will be awarded $1,000. The condition is that the argument must not stray from the Reciprocal. That is, one must accept the truth of existence now permeating Western civilization.

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With this, we conclude. We apologize for the length of this discussion but our experience informs us that many conservative Americans will find the Reciprocal jarring even as they understand the meaning of one aspect of the Reciprocal—moral relativism. What causes many of us to reject a confrontation with the Reciprocal’s implications is our unwillingness to confront what it is. And what it ‘is’ is the truth of our existence today and this ‘is’ suggests that the way back from the World State and tyranny will neither be easy nor a given. So, to be frank, we write to a select few who are prepared to persevere and to ask, what makes a people? Do the American people exist today as a people? If not, is there a residue that can be reconstructed into a discreet people and nation?

These questions have been raised of late by many serious and contemplative observers. We are not the first. But, what we have offered here today that you will find nowhere else is an explanation of what went wrong in the great experiment which gave birth to America and what that might suggest the next time around.

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As always, those of us at the Society of Americans for National Existence continue our focus:
To strengthen America’s national existence by probing a new and deeper discussion of the issues others fear or just avoid. We are convinced that with integrity of purpose and thought, graced with civility, the SANE message will pierce the fog that lies heavy on the ground.

All the best,
SANE Staff
Society of Americans for National Existence (SANE)(sm)

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