Not an Age of Reason; Rather, an Age of Credulity

Ed Driscoll mentioned this on his blog yesterday, and I couldn't help but share it.

Quoting Umberto Eco:

It is the role of religion to provide that justification. Religions are systems of belief that enable human beings to justify their existence and which reconcile us to death. We in Europe have faced a fading of organised religion in recent years. Faith in the Christian churches has been declining.

The ideologies such as communism that promised to supplant religion have failed in spectacular and very public fashion. So we're all still looking for something that will reconcile each of us to the inevitability of our own death.

G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

And Now, A Word From Mongol 482

I recently discovered - thanks to, among others, a reference by Jonah Goldberg - a 1958 essay by Leonard E. Reed, "I, Pencil."

The essay details the wonderous cooperative effort that is required to make something so simple as a pencil - and then notes how remarkable it is that all this happens without a single mastermind running the show:

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The essay then turns, not to a defense of, but rather a testimony of, free market economics:

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

Please, read the whole thing. It is well worth your time.

Surrender & Self-Loathing

Bill Whittle is a must-see.

UPDATE 8/20/2010
Here's the video:

"Those Voices Don't Speak For The Rest Of Us"

This needs to be shown everywhere it can be, not just in the next two-and-a-half months but over the next two-and-a-half years.

The Ant Farm Analogy

Choosing to Keep Quiet

Andrew Klavan had an interesting piece in City Journal recently.

In it, he describes how the French publisher of his most recent novel has decided to forego publishing, despite having already purchased the rights.

Last Tuesday, I received word that the French release of my thriller novel Empire of Lies had been canceled by publisher Seuil Policiers. The editor who originally bought the book had left the French company, and the new editor, my agent says, feels that “she can not publish . . . because of the political and religious aspects of the story.” This, even though it’s in breach of a contract for which I’ve been paid in full.

What is so objectionable? Sex, violence?

Empire of Lies features a politically conservative Christian protagonist, Jason Harrow, who believes he has uncovered an Islamist terrorist plot being obscured by the leftist mainstream media.

Ah.

Sometimes, the problem is what we don't say.

Mr. Klavan expands on this theme, applying it to the media at large; well worth the read. Especially in a time where what the media reports and what the news is seem to be very different sets of facts.

I Think You Missed Something

Two bumperstickers, seen on a car on my drive into work this morning.

The first:

SNOWBOARDERS
Proudly Annoying SKIERS
Since 1984

Then below that, the second:

"COEXIST"

I think his latent passive-aggressive tendencies might be clouding his judgement.

The Ant Farm Analogy

Thanks to Kathryn Lopez at The Corner.

Paul Harvey... Good Day!

Paul Harvey passed away this past weekend.

Lots of words have been written, but I liked what James Lileks had to say:

Ninety years! It’s hard to feel sad. Sometimes you hear of the death of a famous person, or formerly famous person, and you deflate a little, partly because it’s a pity, him being dead and all, and mostly because it moves something from your own experience from the ALIVE into the GONE column, and makes you wonder if you’re replenishing your own store of cultural icons, or just dusting the ones you’ve had for years. For some reason when I heard Paul Harvey was dead (once again, via Twitter) I thought: damn. And then I wanted to applaud. Some lives are like that. Curtain down, the house is dark - and everyone decides, on their own, to clap. I don’t know what Paul Harvey was like, and I don’t care: that career was a performance. Sure, I’ll clap. And stand.

Where Have the Hollywood Heroes Gone?

Orson Bean, writing at the new website Big Hollywood:

Where are the cinema heroes today, the characters who refuse to surrender, who just won’t give up? Not in Hollywood pictures.

You think audiences aren’t hungry for heroes? There’s a little movie out there called Slumdog Millionaire, which almost didn’t get released and is now being touted for best picture. It takes place in India and tells the story of a young man who overcomes impossible odds to succeed. People are lining up to see it. Why aren’t the many genuinely talented folks in Hollywood making pictures like that? You’d think that simple greed would tempt them to do so. Cecil B. DeMille worshipped the almighty buck.

The truth is they’ve forgotten how. They went to college and were taught that their country is wrong, that the system stinks, that to be a hero is to be a sucker fighting for a lie. Like Louis B. Meyer and Sam Warner before them, they want to make picures that have meaning. But their “meaning” is very different from that of the movie makers of my boyhood. When they churn out what’s in their hearts (the depressing view of life as they actually see it), no-one buys a ticket. Then, because they have to make a living, they revert to meaningless special effect extravaganzas and tell themselves there’s no market for “serious” pictures.

Check out the site.