The Battle of Midway has been extensively studied, analyzed, and written about, but all of the studies have missed the point that the Japanese Navy would have defeated the U.S. Navy if not for an inexcusable blunder of Admiral Yamamota. Without Yamamota's folly, history would have recorded the destruction of the America's Pacific Fleet and Admiral Nimitz would possibly have been relieved of duty in disgrace.
Even with its code-breaking intelligence and its position at Point Luck, the U.S. Navy would have had the remainder of its Pacific Fleet destroyed in the battle had Yamamota not suffered from "winner's disease" and tried to repeat what worked so well at Pearl Harbor.
Much has been made of the dilemma that Admiral Nagumo had upon hearing that there were enemy ships within battle range. Nagumo had bombers returning from the attack on Midway that desperately needed to be landed and refueled and he had bombers loaded with land-based ordinance, requiring reloading with armor piercing (anti-ship) ordinance upon being informed of the American fleet. His need to make difficult decisions, his need to land incoming planes, and his need to change ordinance, all cost valuable time before he could get his planes in the air. He had a real dilemma but it was a dilemma that was totally unnecessary -- all of his bombers should have been armed and fueled and waiting for the American carriers. Their sole mission should have been to attack American carriers. All of his pilots should have been well rested and ready for battle at a moment's notice.
The attack on Midway, assumed necessary to draw out the American ships into harm's way, should have been made by Yamamota's battleships. The battleships were capable of putting an order of magnitude more ordinance upon the small islands than the carrier planes of Nagumo's. They would need the air support of Yamamota's carriers, but that air support, made up entirely of the defensive Zero fighters of only one carrier, would have been more than sufficient to destroy the Midway air force.
Nagumo's force to attack the American fleet would have included four carriers (the one flat-top sent to Alaska was a waste). Nagumo would have had nearly 300 planes, dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and Zero escort fighters to attack the American fleet. And, more importantly, they would have been prepared to attack upon first realizing the presence of American ships. Nagumo's planes were superior to the outdated American planes and his pilots were more experienced and, at that time, better trained. Attacking the American carriers would have been like “shooting fish in a barrel.”
Above all, the point should be made, that, by all accounts, the real target was the American carriers, and not Midway, a small atoll of no strategic value to the Japanese. Since the attack on Midway was just the bait, battleships would have sufficed, and Nagumo's real target would have been easy prey for his deadly planes.
Yamamota's great success at Pearl Harbor was an air attack, and, suffering from "repeat your success" intoxication, he wasted his planes doing what his battleships could have done much better.
Sunday, November 27, 2022
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Liberty and the Federal Reserve
Since the days of our founding fathers, the American ideal of individual liberty has been constantly besieged by the appetite of politicians for more power. Secretly, those politicians have gained much of their growing strength through a central bank that has allowed them to manipulate the individual through his pocketbook.
The nineteen century, even more than in our present time, was a time in which libertarians stood against the oppressive forces of an advancing central government. However, in those days, unlike our own time, it was the Democratic Party that defended the individual from the state. The Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson was the true libertarian party of that time, while it was the pro-bank Republicans of Hamilton and Lincoln that consistently undermined our Constitution in an attempt to increase the “implied powers” of the government to intrude ever more upon our freedoms.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the roles of the two parties began changing. First, the Democratic Party gave up its losing cause for liberty. They joined the Republicans in the quest for a forceful government with a central bank, the only difference between them being the division of spoils among the party of political victory; the Republicans protecting incumbent business interests while the Democrats promising entitlements to the “little guy.”
Libertarianism in America finally began to regain a voice in American politics with the modern conservative movement under Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Although the Republicans have yet to prove themselves as the party of small government, libertarians can only hope that their cause is making it full circle from the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson to the “government is the problem” Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.
The mystery of how the statist (big government) cause went from the pro-business party to the pro-labor party can be easily explained if we follow the history of the dispute over our national banking cartel (presently called the Federal Reserve). From the beginning of the federal government’s growth as an institution to the current economic crisis, American political history has been secretly dominated by the quest for a national banking system that would have absolute control over the people’s monetary wealth. The so called “implied powers” that provides the government with potentially limitless authority was invented by Alexander Hamilton in his “Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bank.” And, once that national bank system was created, banks and their political partners had the power to increase their power over the American people through fraud and deception and even cause depressions and credit meltdowns through their own incompetence.
Although our state-run schools have not included it in their curriculum, the most important theme in American history is the story of how the greedy forces from both the left and right have used the growing power of a central banking system to deprive the individual of his promised liberty. As further posts here will show, the libertarians’ fight for individual freedom must be largely directed at its natural enemy – the Federal Reserve banking cartel.
The nineteen century, even more than in our present time, was a time in which libertarians stood against the oppressive forces of an advancing central government. However, in those days, unlike our own time, it was the Democratic Party that defended the individual from the state. The Democratic Party of Jefferson and Jackson was the true libertarian party of that time, while it was the pro-bank Republicans of Hamilton and Lincoln that consistently undermined our Constitution in an attempt to increase the “implied powers” of the government to intrude ever more upon our freedoms.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the roles of the two parties began changing. First, the Democratic Party gave up its losing cause for liberty. They joined the Republicans in the quest for a forceful government with a central bank, the only difference between them being the division of spoils among the party of political victory; the Republicans protecting incumbent business interests while the Democrats promising entitlements to the “little guy.”
Libertarianism in America finally began to regain a voice in American politics with the modern conservative movement under Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. Although the Republicans have yet to prove themselves as the party of small government, libertarians can only hope that their cause is making it full circle from the Democratic Party of Thomas Jefferson to the “government is the problem” Republican Party of Ronald Reagan.
The mystery of how the statist (big government) cause went from the pro-business party to the pro-labor party can be easily explained if we follow the history of the dispute over our national banking cartel (presently called the Federal Reserve). From the beginning of the federal government’s growth as an institution to the current economic crisis, American political history has been secretly dominated by the quest for a national banking system that would have absolute control over the people’s monetary wealth. The so called “implied powers” that provides the government with potentially limitless authority was invented by Alexander Hamilton in his “Opinion on the Constitutionality of the Bank.” And, once that national bank system was created, banks and their political partners had the power to increase their power over the American people through fraud and deception and even cause depressions and credit meltdowns through their own incompetence.
Although our state-run schools have not included it in their curriculum, the most important theme in American history is the story of how the greedy forces from both the left and right have used the growing power of a central banking system to deprive the individual of his promised liberty. As further posts here will show, the libertarians’ fight for individual freedom must be largely directed at its natural enemy – the Federal Reserve banking cartel.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Brief History of the World
The intent of this blog entry is to tell complete history of man’s civilization accurately in one short single-page summary. Of course, for the sake of brevity, a lot of details need to be left out, but all of the major parts of the story are included without abridgement. So, to full this ambitious intention, I offer the following as the complete history of man’s adventure here on earth.
Man, since the beginning of time, has applied value to the things of his world. He has valued some things more than other things and has conducted his life according to these judgments of value. His values have been an individual experience and have never been shared directly with his fellowman. He has communicate reasons and feelings to his fellowman, and by doing such, he has influence their values, but each member of his race has always had a private experience when he has placed value upon the things of the world. Value has always been, and will always be, a very individual subjective experience.
The individuality of the valuing experience can account for most of what we call our history, including its most constructive and destructive chapters. The differences in valuation between men have led to two very different types of activities that we have recorded as history. The first type of activity is voluntary, entered into by men peacefully cooperating with each other to take joint advantage of their differences in values; the second type is involuntary, where a stronger man applies force and coercion to a weaker man to make the weaker support the values of the stronger.
Throughout history, the first type of activity, the voluntary one, has taken advantage of the differences in the values of its participants to enrich them, creating civilizations, cultures, and ideas as its byproduct. This type of activity is called trading and it typically occurs when a man values the things possessed by another but puts aside his envy and other violent instincts in order to peacefully achieve the things he values most.
The second type of activity, the use of force by more powerful men against the less powerful, goes by many terms but is perhaps best summarized as “the state.” It typically occurs when an individual or a group of allied individuals value the things possessed by others and use violence or the threat of violence to tax, confiscate, or otherwise take what they so covet.
Mankind’s biography has been one dominated by the countering effects of these two types of activities: the mostly constructive effects of individuals trading their advantages for the advantages of others, and the mostly destructive effects of other individuals who take those advantages by force.
Man, since the beginning of time, has applied value to the things of his world. He has valued some things more than other things and has conducted his life according to these judgments of value. His values have been an individual experience and have never been shared directly with his fellowman. He has communicate reasons and feelings to his fellowman, and by doing such, he has influence their values, but each member of his race has always had a private experience when he has placed value upon the things of the world. Value has always been, and will always be, a very individual subjective experience.
The individuality of the valuing experience can account for most of what we call our history, including its most constructive and destructive chapters. The differences in valuation between men have led to two very different types of activities that we have recorded as history. The first type of activity is voluntary, entered into by men peacefully cooperating with each other to take joint advantage of their differences in values; the second type is involuntary, where a stronger man applies force and coercion to a weaker man to make the weaker support the values of the stronger.
Throughout history, the first type of activity, the voluntary one, has taken advantage of the differences in the values of its participants to enrich them, creating civilizations, cultures, and ideas as its byproduct. This type of activity is called trading and it typically occurs when a man values the things possessed by another but puts aside his envy and other violent instincts in order to peacefully achieve the things he values most.
The second type of activity, the use of force by more powerful men against the less powerful, goes by many terms but is perhaps best summarized as “the state.” It typically occurs when an individual or a group of allied individuals value the things possessed by others and use violence or the threat of violence to tax, confiscate, or otherwise take what they so covet.
Mankind’s biography has been one dominated by the countering effects of these two types of activities: the mostly constructive effects of individuals trading their advantages for the advantages of others, and the mostly destructive effects of other individuals who take those advantages by force.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
The Injustice of the Marketplace
It is not fair that Wilt Chamberlain became the greatest basketball player of his generation and I didn’t. He made millions having fun and dated a different woman after every game. On my student's budget, I couldn’t afford watching him from behind the home team’s basket. I could have practiced as hard as Wilt, but all of the effort in the world would not have compensated for the advantages of his seven foot stature and the disadvantages of my flat feet.
Robert Nozick, the libertarian philosopher, found justice in a marketplace that allowed Wilt to charge people to watch him play basketball. Nozick claims that the market is fair simply because every paying spectator purchased his ticket voluntarily. For Nozick, the giving of limited choices to otherwise disadvantaged people creates justice. For Nozick, the voluntary nature of choosing among limited choices makes wretchedness just.
How can Wilt’s market be just? He made it to the hall of fame and I never even got a good seat at courtside. The market might give people the liberty to pursue the best options available to them, but different people have available different options and the richness of their options is never based upon justice. It is not justice that a poor man has the liberty to choose between eating bread and oatmeal while a rich man has the liberty to choose between filet mignon and caviar. It is not justice that a man without basketball talent must enjoy the game from the bleachers rather than the free-throw line. The marketplace is not a place of justice; its liberty has never given people fairness or any other form of entitlement.
Nozick is wrong, the marketplace with all of its individual liberties may have rules but they are not the rules of fairness or justice. The market is run by the rules of consistency and predictability; it offers no entitlement of justice to the untalented. Among its consistencies is its consistent evasion of justice; the advantaged are consistently advantaged and the disadvantaged are consistently disadvantaged.
People like Wilt have monopolies of their unique talent and for that monopoly they can demand whatever the market will bear; they do not have to be bound by anyone’s idea of fairness. Once promised, Wilt must keep his promise, a contract is a contract and a contract stands on its consistency and predictability. Wilt has to follow the rules, but those rules do not deny the injustice of a gifted person’s selling for money what he received freely by an accident of birth.
The best the marketplace can offer is the opportunity for each person to minimize the injustices that his birth, his family, and his society have arbitrarily bestowed upon him. The liberty of the marketplace gives us the chance to enrich our lives, regardless of whether we are entitled to that enrichment or not. When Wilt offered his talents for money, not only did he grow richer, but each person that purchased a ticket became enriched by the talents that he offered. The fact that the participants had acted freely may not have created a presumption of fairness as Nozick claimed but it did create a reasonable presumption that all participants were enriched by receiving more than they had sacrificed.
Everyone gets richer in Wilt’s market. Wilt’s pocketbook swells while the fans experience the drama and grace of a demanding sport. It may not be fair, but, if we are talking about human welfare, the economy of Wilt’s market is good for everyone. To a small degree, even the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the larger economy is increased by talented people like Wilt and his fans all pursuing their greatest happiness at the least sacrifice to themselves. Wilt’s game is productive even if it is not just.
Justice is not about enriching people’s lives; it is about the use of force to make all men comply with the imaginations of others. Justice is an unverifiable superstition that is paid for by constraining the talented and denying their talents to the ordinary. The fairness of a graduated income tax is just an incentive for the best and brightest to limit their contributions to the quality of our lives. Fairness is standing in line on a freezing Muscovite street waiting for your fair turn to receive a roll of toilet paper. Justice is an Englishman waiting seven years for his fair turn to have his burned face reconstructed. It is a demagogue promising to make Germany Judenfrei or a Mayan priest making a blood sacrifice.
Justice makes wars between those who return from Plato’s ideal forms with different visions. I would prefer the avarice of the marketplace to the coercion and violence of justice. The only place Voltaire found Jews, Muslims, and Christians all working together and meeting their minds was in the London Stock Exchange. He found peace there even though he perhaps found justice wanting.
Free markets, like that of Wilt and his fans, work where justice fails because they allow the less talented to take advantage of the talented. The marketplace gives us ordinary folk the opportunity to experience Beethoven’s music, Michelangelo’s ceilings, and Spielberg’s imagination. In a fair market, as opposed to a free market, I would be both a basketball star and a cinema director but my audiences would impoverished by my skills.
The economists use the term “comparative advantage” to describe this exploitation of the skilled by the unskilled. For example, try making a lead pencil by hand to experience the “comparative disadvantages” of self reliance. If you have good manual skills you will fit the wood, mine and process the graphite, and create the necessary paint, metals, and rubber in the course of a year. You can accomplish the same thing by offering a half-dollar to someone who has real pencil-making skills, however unjustly he may have come by those skills. This “Wilt” of pencils, in turn, will rely on woodworking Wilts or graphite mining Wilts. A great chain of unfairness lies behind our world of cars, colleges, and Ipods.
Comparative advantage renders real culture to us of limited skills and it creates civilizations where people would otherwise create fire by rubbing two sticks together. The economists might call it comparative advantage, but I like to think of it as “cooperating with each other to make the best of an inherently unjust world.”
Robert Nozick, the libertarian philosopher, found justice in a marketplace that allowed Wilt to charge people to watch him play basketball. Nozick claims that the market is fair simply because every paying spectator purchased his ticket voluntarily. For Nozick, the giving of limited choices to otherwise disadvantaged people creates justice. For Nozick, the voluntary nature of choosing among limited choices makes wretchedness just.
How can Wilt’s market be just? He made it to the hall of fame and I never even got a good seat at courtside. The market might give people the liberty to pursue the best options available to them, but different people have available different options and the richness of their options is never based upon justice. It is not justice that a poor man has the liberty to choose between eating bread and oatmeal while a rich man has the liberty to choose between filet mignon and caviar. It is not justice that a man without basketball talent must enjoy the game from the bleachers rather than the free-throw line. The marketplace is not a place of justice; its liberty has never given people fairness or any other form of entitlement.
Nozick is wrong, the marketplace with all of its individual liberties may have rules but they are not the rules of fairness or justice. The market is run by the rules of consistency and predictability; it offers no entitlement of justice to the untalented. Among its consistencies is its consistent evasion of justice; the advantaged are consistently advantaged and the disadvantaged are consistently disadvantaged.
People like Wilt have monopolies of their unique talent and for that monopoly they can demand whatever the market will bear; they do not have to be bound by anyone’s idea of fairness. Once promised, Wilt must keep his promise, a contract is a contract and a contract stands on its consistency and predictability. Wilt has to follow the rules, but those rules do not deny the injustice of a gifted person’s selling for money what he received freely by an accident of birth.
The best the marketplace can offer is the opportunity for each person to minimize the injustices that his birth, his family, and his society have arbitrarily bestowed upon him. The liberty of the marketplace gives us the chance to enrich our lives, regardless of whether we are entitled to that enrichment or not. When Wilt offered his talents for money, not only did he grow richer, but each person that purchased a ticket became enriched by the talents that he offered. The fact that the participants had acted freely may not have created a presumption of fairness as Nozick claimed but it did create a reasonable presumption that all participants were enriched by receiving more than they had sacrificed.
Everyone gets richer in Wilt’s market. Wilt’s pocketbook swells while the fans experience the drama and grace of a demanding sport. It may not be fair, but, if we are talking about human welfare, the economy of Wilt’s market is good for everyone. To a small degree, even the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the larger economy is increased by talented people like Wilt and his fans all pursuing their greatest happiness at the least sacrifice to themselves. Wilt’s game is productive even if it is not just.
Justice is not about enriching people’s lives; it is about the use of force to make all men comply with the imaginations of others. Justice is an unverifiable superstition that is paid for by constraining the talented and denying their talents to the ordinary. The fairness of a graduated income tax is just an incentive for the best and brightest to limit their contributions to the quality of our lives. Fairness is standing in line on a freezing Muscovite street waiting for your fair turn to receive a roll of toilet paper. Justice is an Englishman waiting seven years for his fair turn to have his burned face reconstructed. It is a demagogue promising to make Germany Judenfrei or a Mayan priest making a blood sacrifice.
Justice makes wars between those who return from Plato’s ideal forms with different visions. I would prefer the avarice of the marketplace to the coercion and violence of justice. The only place Voltaire found Jews, Muslims, and Christians all working together and meeting their minds was in the London Stock Exchange. He found peace there even though he perhaps found justice wanting.
Free markets, like that of Wilt and his fans, work where justice fails because they allow the less talented to take advantage of the talented. The marketplace gives us ordinary folk the opportunity to experience Beethoven’s music, Michelangelo’s ceilings, and Spielberg’s imagination. In a fair market, as opposed to a free market, I would be both a basketball star and a cinema director but my audiences would impoverished by my skills.
The economists use the term “comparative advantage” to describe this exploitation of the skilled by the unskilled. For example, try making a lead pencil by hand to experience the “comparative disadvantages” of self reliance. If you have good manual skills you will fit the wood, mine and process the graphite, and create the necessary paint, metals, and rubber in the course of a year. You can accomplish the same thing by offering a half-dollar to someone who has real pencil-making skills, however unjustly he may have come by those skills. This “Wilt” of pencils, in turn, will rely on woodworking Wilts or graphite mining Wilts. A great chain of unfairness lies behind our world of cars, colleges, and Ipods.
Comparative advantage renders real culture to us of limited skills and it creates civilizations where people would otherwise create fire by rubbing two sticks together. The economists might call it comparative advantage, but I like to think of it as “cooperating with each other to make the best of an inherently unjust world.”
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Reagan, both a Lion and a Fox
“..he [a ruler] should take as his models among the animals both the fox and lion, for the lion does not know how to avoid traps, and the fox is easily overpowered by wolves.”
Machiavelli, The Prince
Politics is where the visionary world of dreams, beliefs, and the love of humanity meet the realistic world of deals, calculated appearances, and brute military force. A true political leader needs to provide his people with a vision that can only come from a set of core beliefs and convictions, but, in order to make that vision a reality, he also needs to be skilled in expressing his vision to the world. Politics is no place for the pure idealist; a successful leader must use the weapons of political reality to turn his vision into true accomplishment.
The inspiring vision of human liberty stood atop the world by the end of the Reagan administration, even to the point where credible writers were speaking about its being the so-called “end of history,” that utopian point in time when the goal of man’s dialectic of political conflict would resolve itself into a final peaceful solution. Even Bill Clinton said that the time of big government was over. From those heady days of victory in the cold war, economic juggernauts at home, and socialist humiliation worldwide, history has turned Reagan’s party out of the White House and into an overwhelmed minority in congress. The American people have spoken and they have said that they want an avowed socialist for President and a legislature sympathetic to his ideology. History’s failure to end is now a reality as big government appears to be our immediate future.
What happened? The forces of liberty had lost a great leader, Reagan, and had cast their fates in with men who, while perhaps well-meaning and strong of heart, were unskilled in the art of political expression. While Reagan demonstrated the heart of a lion and the guile of a fox, both Bush Presidents were lions only. All three Presidents had the lion-like qualities that defeated foreign foes, but Reagan also had the ability to communicate to the American people the importance of remaining independent and self-determining citizens.
The press hated Reagan because, unlike them, he did not find wisdom in the enslaving policies of Stalin, Zedong, and Che Guevara, but Reagan’s skill at communicating the truth kept him popular throughout their propagandizing attacks. They hated the Bush family for the same reason (socialism is, after all, just the “institutionalizing of envy”), but the Bush family did not have the communication skills that Reagan had. The attacks on the Bush family stuck like Velcro where they had slid off Reagan like Teflon. Only the fox outwits the ensnaring traps of the predator.
The primary factor that liberty has going for it is that it is the truth. Socialism fails wherever it is tried. In the final analysis, the only systems that work are the ones that give their people the liberty to find their own happiness. But if liberty is to prevail, it will need a leader who not only has the heart of a lion, but the clever fox’s ability to expose the traps of deceit.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Honor, Power, and Falstaff
Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.The Renaissance was a time of great change, among the most famous being the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the Americas, and the fragmentation of the church. Less famously but equaling in its significance, the Renaissance was a time when the very definition of political sovereignty changed. Renaissance man found himself liberated from fealty to other men only to be enslaved to a new master, the nation-state.
Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1, Act V, Scene 1
Before the Renaissance, medieval monarchies ruled by claiming a supreme justice from above while exercising brute force from below. From above, they claimed the righteousness of their rule as an appointment from God. Below them was a warrior class that owed them their allegiance and exercised their military powers in the name of the monarch and his appointing God. As in any political system, the brute force of the physical world was masked and manipulated by the righteousness that was claimed from the nonphysical.
The monarch’s feudal system consisted of a hierarchy of vassals below him that were held together through an honor code known as chivalry. Chivalry demanded that a knight live a life of honor where he owed his warrior skills to the knight above him in the hierarchy, with the king and his appointing god sitting at the top of this pyramid of honor and allegiance. Real world arms were structured into political power by the obligation of the lesser of God’s agents to those of greater appointment. Chivalric honor was the fidelity a warrior held to this obligation.
Medieval feudalism provided a certain level of stability to the European continent for several centuries before finally succumbing to the nation-state and its advancing weaponry in the Renaissance. The vast majority of the population worked as simple farmers who, because of the protection provided by the king and his honor-bound knights, were able to sow, cultivate, and harvest crops from land titled to another. The system may have been unfair and stagnating, but it did provide a stability that was necessary to support the continent’s significant population. The honor of the king and his knights provided the law and order that was necessary to support cultivation and the investment in land and labor that cultivation demanded.
But the changes of the Renaissance would demand a new form of armed protection and this new form of armed protection would require a new form of honor. The rural villages of the medieval periods were growing into towns where trade supported a greater division of labor and the greater division of labor created a new class of wealthy people. Merchants grew rich and powerful without having the honor that held the knights of incumbent wealth together.
Regardless of their growing wealth, the citizens of the cities were not vassals of any knight in the feudal system and therefore owed their honor and allegiance to no member of the warrior class. If they were to be obligated subjects of the monarch it would have to be through a new system of honor. If the king was to maintain his power over the region of land that was his sovereignty, he would have to exact the fidelity of the townspeople who owned no one their fealty and to whom chivalry was nothing more than a romantic notion in the tales of old.
During the Renaissance, as cities grew in size, monarchs held onto political power by claiming that the every resident of the kingdom, regardless of class, was a citizen of the king’s newly discovered nation-state and owed his honor thereto. While the nation-state’s knights might remain believers in the honor of chivalry, their more populous countrymen would owe their allegiance directly to the king through the new form of honor called patriotism. Chivalry’s hold grew weaker and the number of the chivalrous grew relatively smaller as patriotism and allegiance to the nation-state grew stronger and eventually replaced an older romantic notion with a newer one. Europe became, during the Renaissance, a whole continent of people willing to become warriors because of the enslaving burden of a new form of honor.
This change in the honor system that kept monarchy alive (although perhaps becoming less absolute) is aptly dramatized in Shakespeare’s historical plays. In Henry IV Part I, the king of England is haunted by his own violation of God’s selection process by his betrayal of his predecessor, Richard II. Henry’s divine right only existed because of a not-so-divine succession. The very plot of the play is based upon the growing disloyalty of the king’s vassals as they question the king’s divine right of rule and demand their own desserts as once-loyal Englishmen. Prince Harry earns his right of succession through his maturing competence and heroism rather than as a result of birth alone. This play, taking place in the early years of the Renaissance, shows a weakening dependence of the king and his vassals upon the assigned justice from above or the promised chivalry from below. England was becoming a nation-state.
In Henry V, the once Prince Harry calls upon a new form of honor to inspire men into armed conflict. The new king of England rallies his men into battle at Agincourt by appealing, not to their chivalry, but to their membership in a class of men known as Englishmen. On the eve of his greatest battle he appeals to patriotism rather than the medieval sense of honor.
However, throughout this period of changing senses of honor, Shakespeare gives us a man who, to the subject of honor, is certainly an outside observer. Falstaff, the consummate rogue, lives a life that is anything but honorable, but he does serve as an observer of the honor of his more noble friends and enemies. To Falstaff, both the lion’s honor of the fallen Hotspur and the fox’s honor of the clever Prince Harry are nothing but words and do not provide the practical skill of a surgeon nor the wine of a good innkeeper. Hostpur’s warrior honor was proved folly on the fields of Shrewsbury, just as the nation-states’ patriotic honor would later prove to be folly in the courts of Nuremburg.
So was Falstaff right in finding folly in honor? The honor of a chivalric knight is perhaps folly; the honor of Nuremburg is perhaps also folly; but honor itself can be wise. The honor that guides men into fruitful cooperation rather than the brutish application of force over one another is not folly.
Within the walled towns of Renaissance Europe, another code of honor was growing that would someday elevate man beyond the bounds of the Renaissance, produce an industrial revolution, and justify a new form of government’s ideal of the pursuit of individual happiness. The medieval merchant’s honor requires no weapons, draws no blood, and only demands that each man be given the liberty to trade and communicate with anyone who can be trusted to provide him with the greatest comparative advantage. The honor needed to make trades and thereby voluntarily cooperate with other men is the honor that only one who, like Falstaff, “takes purses by the moon and the seven stars” can find folly with.
Friday, August 8, 2008
2. Human Experience
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington, Of the Origin and Design of Government
All human experience is individual experience. The world is seen by our individual set of eyes, felt by our individual nervous system, and experienced by our individual lives. Regardless of what authorities tell us, the truth of the world is our own individual truth.
We may speak of nations having a “national experience,” but that is pure metaphor, generalizing about the individual experience of many of a nation’s individuals. Nations, societies, teams, and families can be referenced as units, but, essentially, these units are really just combinations of individuals who share a common interest. No nation really has eyes; no society has a set of ears; and no race of mankind has a conscience that makes it feel guilty. Only individuals actually experience an experience.
The individuality of our experience does not require that we justify our place in society with bottomless issues such as economic justice, good and bad, or some inherent right granted to us by nature. Stripping ourselves of all our fantasies of memberships that bestow upon us rights, obligations, and duties, we are left with the nakedness of our individual experience. As individuals we experience and as individuals we act. We need no justification or set of inherent rights to conduct ourselves as individuals – it is just something that we do as individuals.
The individual does not have to be a selfish one. Just as we experience sensual pleasures as individuals, we also experience love for our spouses and children and compassion for other people and animals. Both the sociopath and the saint are essentially individuals acting as individuals regardless of the direction their individualism direct them. Whether we experience our world as people serving ourselves or others, that experience is only experienced as individuals.
Man’s ability to experience and act as an individual is limited by the coercion of neighborhood bullies, governments, and other parties that use force against him. Liberty is the lack of these coercive forces. The more liberty man has from these coercive forces, the more he can act, for good or worse, as an experiencing individual – as a human being.
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