R3volution: Never Let Down Our Will to Protect It

This weekend, in between having my first real Shabbat in 10 weeks and meetings to discuss aspects of the R3volution, I have been impatiently thumbing through Naomi Wolf's Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries and I watched Revolution with Al Pacino, the new DVD version of the 1985 movie.

I bought the book out of sheer depression on Election Day 2008. Although I was certain of the outcome, what depressed me was that the election was the epitome of a game, a show put on for the American people; a show whose outcome did not really matter, because either of the major party candidates were going to be taking us to same dismal place. I remember reading the introduction and then life, and university papers, took over, and the book remained on my shelf until one of our Shabbat guests casually mentioned it when we were discussing our own R3volution over tea and cherry pie.

The book is a disappointment because despite Wolf's promising premise that the people of the United States have the obligation to be rebels, ". . . to take the most serious possible steps and undergo the most serious kinds of personal risk in defense of this freedom that is your natural right", she does not wrestle very deeply with the ideas; where those rights come from and what they mean. Thus, she dismisses the Founders as dead white males (what could they possibly know of tyranny, she seems to ask), and she continually mistakes the Republic they founded as "democracy" where one's rights can be voted away by the tyranny of the majority. Nevertheless, her idea that every generation of us who have inherited the idea of liberty is obligated to rebel against the new tyranny of an out of control executive branch that had imposed upon us the Patriot Act with all the depredations of our rights in it, and an unconstitutional war in Iraq and Afganistan. (She clearly hated Bush II, but I wonder what she would think of the current administration, the one that has instructed its loyal minions to report on their "fishy" neighbors who oppose its plans? Does she see the continued destruction of our liberties, or is she partisan to her party, right or wrong? I hope that she is an equal-opportunity critic of tyranny whether it comes in Democrat or Republican form.)

The movie was far more satisfying. I had seen the VCR version some years ago, but this new version, with added narration, made what had been a beautiful film with a botched ending into a more comprehesible portrait of an illiterate fur trader who is caught up in the American Revolution. At the beginning of the movie, as he and his son bring their boat into New York, Tom Dobb (Al Pacino) muses:

"Revolution: A word spoke everywhere. It’s about the bringing down of a king and the noisy shouting, celebrating on the day my Ned and me come into New York. My boy asks what it ‘tis. I don’t know."

The boy Ned enlists in the fight, and his father goes, somewhat against his will, to protect the boy. However, he makes his son cut and run with him after the battle of Brooklyn Heights, determined to protect their lives, saying:

"I, being born of another place, sold and sent [into indentured servitude: EHL] to this land makes me only some little bit American. For I would as leaf be back in the natural land of my birth than caught in this butchery for a cause not mine. I’ll take freedom for Ned and me from this bloodshed now and here."

But gradually, through a series of events, we are shown the rigid class structure of the Brits, and the ways in which the colonists are seen as "Friday's Children", those who must work for a living, the fruits of their labor and their very persons confiscated for the folly of the landed gentry, and the momentary pleasure of the nobility. Coming back to New York to find work he notes:

"New York is not as we left it. It’s now a place of complete England with its ceremony and soldiers. Oh, but the throne itself fills every street and alley. They that were called the Continental Army, broken as a dry twig. . . "

There being no foxes for the pleasure of the British officers before battle, he and fellow worker from the rope factory are made to run before the hounds, tied to an effigy of George Washington.

"So strange and cruel a thing to die a hunter of animals for means to live and now the animal hunted. All for the foolish sport of kings. I am made prideless, crawling to survive for my Ned’s life. "

But the turning point comes after his son is impressed into the Redcoat Army to be a drummer boy, and refusing the advances of a lord who fancies little boys, is badly injured by a beating to his feet. Dobbs, a frontiersman, tracks and saves the boy, and when Huron scouts find them, they treat Ned's feet. As he is holding and rocking his son through the painful cauterization of his wounds, Tom Dobbs comforts him, saying:

"I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. We’re gonna find us a place where there ain’t no one to bow down to. Where there ain’t no lord or lady better than you. Where you can say what you like and climb as high as you want. And there ain’t nobody gonna treat no one like a dog in the dirt. I look around me, Ned, and I see all kinds of people. Men, women. And they got families like mine. And we all stand together like brothers and sisters. And we make a place for ourselves. We’ll make a place where our babies can sleep safe through the night.”

“Are we there, Pa?”

“We’re almost there, son. You come through, Ned.”

Then, holding his son, he reflects:

"I spake words to Ned I did not know were in me. And now with them said, I am new. And there’s new purpose in this bloody and uneven fight. I can now see what parted Ned from me these many a month. He knew deep in him this land of his birth was home."

And thus Tom Dobbs joins himself to the cause of Liberty. He sees that it is his fight.

As I watched the transformation of this man, who at the end of the movie tells his son to tell his own children and his children's children "how we fought. And you tell them, Ned, how far we come," he says. I also thought about the idea that we, the children's children's children's children, have the obligation to continually join ourselves to that same cause of Liberty. To stand up anew against those in Congress who have forgotten that they are not our masters, but our servants. Those who mean to impose upon us a system of socialized medicine, one that they, who fancy themselves better than we, do not mean to impose upon themselves. And I think about our president, who continues to lie to us with impunity even as the last one did, twisting the truth* of what he previously said, in order to better ride the tide of politics, to win his own way, even if that win means bringing down the economy of the United States.

*First it was healthcare reform, now it's health insurance reform. First he said no middle class taxpayers making under $250,000 would pay a dime in new taxes, now he says that he doesn't mean that they should pay the whole burden. Etc. etc.

"So ends the American dream," says one of the foppish and bewigged foxhunters in the movie, as he lops the head off the effigy of George Washington. He wasn't counting on the endurance of patriots at Valley Forge. He wasn't counting on the British surrender at Yorktown, when the world was turned upside down.

Sons and Daughters of Liberty, flawed as her book might be, Naomi Wolf is right in this:

" . . . the Declaration's specific call to liberation from George III's tyranny is also a timeless contract that implicates each one of us, forever . . ." (p. 20).

So dies the American dream? By G-d, not while we live and breath, the fire of Liberty, ignited by those first American Revolutionaries, burning within us.

We see the Pols running scared from us. We know this by the plummeting approval rating for Congress and the Executive. We know this by the viciousness with which their press whores attack an ordinary housewife who dares stand up to a twice-turncoat politician from Pennsylvania for her termerity when she said:

"I don't believe that this is just about healthcare. It's not about TARP, it's not about left and right; this is about the systematic dismantling of this country . . ."

Now that we know this truth, we must stand together as brothers and sisters in Liberty, arm in arm, and say to these would-be lords and ladies, "You shall not pass these bills that put in place the structure of tyranny over us for your own momentary power and profit. It shall not stand."

For as the character Tom Dobbs watches the celebration in Philadelphia after the victory at Yorktown and the winning of a new country, the likes of which the world have never seen, he seems to speak directly across the generations to us, who claim its inheritance:

"My lost family comes back to me in all these I see before me. I feel Kaitlyn in the young ones on high released from all they suffered here. I see also in these shining faces the bright-eyed, tender and gentle face of Daisy McConnahay. Many from different lands be they exiled or fled from want of respect and free thought, now share a home where as one or all, they will have a voice that can be heard. No more to be divided into the lowly and privileged; but equal in chance and opportunity. And all the children of all the children to come will know this of this word: Revolution. And what it meant and never let down their will to protect it."

A fictional character comes back to admonish us that the dreams of those whose fought and died to secure Liberty to themselves and to us that we should never let down our will to protect it. In the words of the founders:

"[W]hen a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security." (Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence, 1776).

Never let down your will to protect precious Liberty.

A Gray Champion and Other Patriots

His voice is not one that should either be raised in prayer or in command of the battlefield, and yet the judgement he delivers against that snake, Arlen Specter, made even that corrupt politician blanch.


Here is the real voice of America.




It is time for those who work for us to listen to us.
Our nonrepresenting representatives have awakened a sleeping giant.
When they truly fear what we have to say, there will be Liberty.

Libertarian Ethics: Natural Law and Natural Rights

"If it is said that moral conduct is rational conduct,

what is meant is that it is conduct in accordance

with right reason, reason apprehending the objective good

for man and dictating the means to its attainment."

--F.C. Copleston, SJ: Aquinas (1955)

The principle of individual liberty was established during the Enlightenment by philsophers and was based on the concept of natural law. This concept of liberty is not commonly taught in government schools in a way that elucidates its philosophical origin and the importance thereof; rather liberty and the rights of man are taught as an interesting but somewhat quaint idea produced wholesale by those white men in whigs, the founders of the Republic. This is so because the educational philosophy of government schools is based on unreason; specifically upon the post-modern positivist idea that reality cannot be measured and that values are determined subjectively by each individual based on emotion rather than reason*.

*This is the philosophical legacy of David Hume.

Natural law, however, is based on the idea that a human being, like any other thing in the universe, has an identity that is differentiated from any other thing; that is that humans have a definible nature that differentiates them from anything else, and that human nature is measurable. Thus, for human beings, natural law is used to determine what ends are compatible with the facts of human existence and values are therefore objective. Or as William Blackstone described the natural law as:

" . . . demonstrating that this or that action tends to man's real happiness, and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature; or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destruction [sic] of man's real happiness, and therefore that the law of nature forbids it." Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. I, as cited in Brendan F. Brown (ed.), The Natural Law Reader, p. 106.

Although the Scholastics who developed the concept of natural law believed in a supernatural being, they nevertheless established the natural law upon human reason alone. Currently, therefore, the concept of natural law is opposed by many conservatives who argue that the origin of ethics must come from supernatural revelation (which takes them beyond human reach*); it is also opposed by skeptics who argue that ethics can only be ascertained by human beings subjectively, from emotion (which makes them relative).

*As a Jew, I am opposed to this view. the Rabbinic view is that the law "is not in heaven" based on the Torah portion Nitzavim, which says: "It is not in heaven that you should say who will go after it and bring it to us . . . nay, it is very near to you that you may do it." Thus the Rabbis set up a system whereby they could argue that precepts must be based on human nature and norms.

Because natural law can be determined by reason, it provides an objective standard by which traditional norms can be held accountable and found wanting should they violate basic human nature, thus making it possible for people to find their current legislation wanting. It thus provides a basis for the Rule of Law and the establishment of justice. (This ability to reject the status quo on the basis of natural law differentiates libertarian thinkers from many conservatives, who tend to argue that tradition is good because it is old. A tradition may be good or bad; if it is good, it is not because it is old, but because it is the fulfillment of what is good according to the essential nature of man).

During the Enlightenment, natural law was wedded to the concept of individualism by the English enlightenment philosophers, the greatest of whom was John Locke. From this individualist tradition, Locke developed the idea of the natural rights of man, and this idea was founding philosophy of the American Revolution. Locke based his idea of individual rights upon the foundation of human self-ownership. He wrote that:

"Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then, that he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property."

John Locke, An Essay Concerning the True Origin, Extent and End of Civil Government, as cited in Murray N. Rothbard (1980) The Ethics of Liberty.

Essentially, if a person owns his own self, then no one else may own him, and thus he has a right to Liberty. To remove his life from him would be an ultimate theft of his own self, and thus he has a right to Life. Finally, as Locke stated, if he mixes his labour with things in nature, he has the right to keep and control them, the right to Property. These rights are endowed to human beings by virtue of their very nature and are therefore natural law. They are, as Jefferson wrote, "inalienable." They are not given by government, and government cannot take them away. Neither do they accrue to a collection of human beings as a group; rather they belong to each individual as an individual. Thus no group may lawfully (in the sense of the Rule of Law) or morally do anything that the individual does not have the right to do. No group may violate the rights of the individual simply because it is a group. (That is the essence of democracy, mob rule by the will of the majority, legislating away the natural rights of the individual).

These are the individual rights of each person, which are protected by the United States Constitution (currently being honored only in the breach). They are the rights to Life, Liberty and Property. Libertarian ethics begin with the acknowledgement of the natural rights of individual human beings.

Fiery Libertarian Speech in Ohio

I am working on another installment on libertarian ethics, but it is not ready for prime-time just yet. Today I was working on some other things as well having to do with the Continental Congress, and also with the Constitution Class that I am organizing. It is a good, introductory course about the background concepts underlying the Constitution as well as the a good look at the Constitution itself.

Then there was some UNM business I had to transact, and tonight the Boychick has a Patrol Leader Meeting (very important) for his BSA troop.

But you are in luck, a master libertarian thinker and speaker gave a fiery speech at the Ohio Tea Party on 1 August. I bring you Judge Andrew Napolitano, courtesy of You Tube. Enjoy!

E-Mail to Snitch.gov

Here is my letter to the White House Snitch.gov, which can be reached at this address: flag@whitehouse.gov.

Long Live Lady Liberty!

To the Ministry of Truth:

Ever eager to help you in your great work of rooting out misinformation, I have been on the lookout for those radicals who by e-mail or on blogs or in casual conversation malign the One's Healthcare plan. Here is something from the print media, and although rather old, still of great concern.

"Amendment IX: The ennumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage other rights retained by the People.

"Amendment X: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the People.

"Amendment XIII: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jursidiction."

Since the Constitution clearly states that people retained unennumerated powers, and the power of the federal government is limited to ennumerated powers (all listed in the body of the Constitution), none of which include government sponsored health care; and since the people would be forced to work for the government for a substantial portion of their lives to pay for said healthcare initiative, the Constitution must be a subversive document of disinformation. This has been borne out by the fact that the federal government recently (in the MIAC Report) stated that people who discuss the Constitution are extremists. Since you have clearly not read the Constitution recently, I thought I would helpfully point this out for you, so that you can send the goons from SEIU and Acorn out to round up the heirs to Mr. Madison and Co.

Unfortunately, your thugs will have quite a job ahead of them as they will have to put every high school history book down the memory hole, along with all those pesky pocket Constitutions passed out by the Heritage Foundation (who have also spoken out against healthcare).

Oh, and I included a quote by Thomas Jefferson that ought to be supressed as well. After all, those tea party activists and town-hall protesters seem to have certain government officials running scared!

Your Obedient Slave,

Elisheva Levin

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

-Thomas Jefferson

R3VOLUTION: Gray Champions Burn Their AARP Cards

When they were in college they burned bras and draft cards.
Now Boomers, this saeculum's Prophets, are buring their AARP cards.

From The Fourth Turning:

"One afternoon in April 1689 as the American colonies boiled with rumors that King James II was about to strip them of their liberties, the king's hand-picked govenor of New England, Sir Edmund Andros, marched his troops menacingly through Boston. His purpose was to crush any thought of colonial self-rule . . .

"Just at that moment, seemingly from nowhere, there appeared on the streets "the figure of an ancient man" with "the eye, the face, the attitude of command." His manner "combining the leader and the saint," the old man planted himself directly in the path of the approaching British soldiers and demanded that they stop. "The solemn yet warlike peal of that voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in prayer, were irresistible. At the old man's word and outstretched arm, the roll of the drum was hushed at once, and the advancing line stood still."

"Inspired by this single act of defiance, the people of Boston roused their courage and acted. Within the day Andros was deposed and jailed, the liberty of Boston saved, and the corner turned on the colonial Glorious Revolution." (Strauss, W. & Howe, N.(1997). The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. Broadway Books, New York. p. 139; Internal quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales).




"Who was this Gray Champion?" . . . No one knew except that he had once been among the fire-hearted young Puritans who first settled New England a half-century earlier. Later that evening, just before the old priest-warrior disappeared, the townspeople saw him embracing the eighty-five year old Simon Bradstreet, a kindred spirit and one of the few original Puritans still alive.

"Would the Gray Champion ever return? "I have heard," added Hawthorne, "That whenever the descendents of the Puritans are to show the spirit of their sires, the old man appears again." (ibid.)

It looks like the Gray Champion is getting ready to ride again.

Libertarian Ethics: Life is the Standard

I at no time believed that value-free analysis or economics

or utilitarianism . . . can ever suffice to establish the case

for liberty. Economics can supply much of the data for a

libertarian position, but it cannot establish that political

philosophy itself. Political judgments are necessarily value

judgments, political philosophy is therefore necessarily

ethical, and hence a positive ethical system must be

set forth to establish the case for individual liberty.

--Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (1980)

As I have mentioned before, I am second-generation Libertarian, although in my early adulthood I had a long hiatus from any political activity, and then I made some detours in my thinking. However, the apple does not, so they say, fall far from the tree, and so here I am politically involved in libertarian causes, and in the cause of Liberty.



Recently, on the recommendation of a Libertarian friend, I read L. Neil Smith's book, The Probability Broach. It was not only an enjoyable swashbuckling alternative history sci-fi book, but it also poked gentle fun at some of the early libertarian heroes of my childhood. I am guessing that because I am second generation libertarian, I experienced a certain meta-enjoyment of the book that can only be had by second-generation libertarians. Imagine Rand and Ross-Bird (Rothbard) living in a anarcho-capitalist libertarian society, rather than fighting for liberty in a corporatist-fascistic statist society. But there amidst the adventure and the humor, the heart of Smith's book is a description of a society based on the ethics of individual liberty.



There are those who disparage Liberty as a luxury at best, and as a profoundly immoral system at worst. And those who would defend the cause of Liberty often cut themselves off at the knees by conceding the ethical and moral argument for Liberty by agreeing with the collectivist ethics that are destroying the freest and most productive society in history. Liberty is not a luxury; no, it is an absolute necessity for human productivity and happiness, and this is what makes it good as well.

At a basic level, libertarian ethics rest on the idea that human life on earth is good, and that human beings are rational animals that use their minds to survive on earth. That is, that man's ecological niche is the use of technology to alter the environment in order to survive and thrive.

From an ecological standpoint, human beings, like all other animals, must get the energy required for metabolic processes from the primary producers that convert energy from the sun into chemical energy useful to living things. That is, human beings are consumers. (See The Energy Web). Like all animals, human beings must work for a living by finding primary producers and consumers lower on the food web to consume. But because man is endowed with the rational faculty, humans make and use tools, plan ahead and develop natural resources, increasing the efficiency (in time and energy) of that work. In economics we call that production. And the rule of nature is that production must precede consumption. You cannot consume what has not been produced. This is so by definition.

In the ecological sense this means that plants must live where they can access sunlight, and if they cannot access enough sunlight to produce the amount of glucose (energy stored in carbon bonds) needed to carry out their metabolic processes, they die. Animals must go where the primary producers are in order to consume them, and those consumers lower on the food web. If an animal cannot consume enough energy, it dies. And energy is lost at every step of the way. Natural selection therefore "favors"* those organisms that find ways to produce (in the economic sense) enough to consume so that they can not only live, but reproduce themselves successfully more often than others that share the same niche. And it must be emphasized that natural selection acts upon individuals, not groups. (This does not contradict the fact that it is indeed species that evolve, not individuals. See G.C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, and R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene). These are the facts of life on earth.

*Of course, being a force of nature, natural selection does not actually favor anything or select anything, it is a blind force operating on the basis of the facts of life on earth. Anthropomorphic language is useful here for conveying meaning, but should not be taken literally. There is no consciousness, and therefore no choice involved, and therefore no morality or ethics implied.

Thus, individual members of a population develop a whole host of different strategies in order to make sure that their offspring (and thus their genes) survive into the next generation. Various forms of aggression against other members of that same population make up some of these strategies. (In evolutionary ecology, the definition of aggression is limited to acts against others in the same population or species; predation is an entirely different activity). Among these is "cheating"--that is gaining advantage by deception or theft upon the productive capacities of other individuals.

There is a maxim in evolutionary ecology that so long as the number of cheaters remains at a minumum in a population, cheaters always win. What this means is that there are costs to the cheaters in a population, but so long as the number of cheaters remains pretty low, the cost of cheating to the cheater is worth paying, and the cost to the "honest" producer for stopping the cheater is not worth paying. In the EEA (evolutionary environment of adaptation), the number of cheaters in a population is kept in stable equilibrium by selective forces. (For a thorough explanation of this dynamic see Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 5: Agression: Stability and the selfish machine.) However, hypothetically, if the number of cheaters were able to rise above a certain stable minumum, members of the population would not be sustained into the future, and it would crash*.

*This is why the engineers of the current world economic crisis--and it is being engineered by cheaters--may get more than they bargained for. The plan (whether conscious or not) is to develop a world population of serfs over whom they can exert power, and thus establish a system in which the cheaters themselves do not have to exert much individual energy on production. But there are likely too many of them, and their capacity for self-deception is too great, and thus they could end up crashing the civilization, thus destroying the goose that laid the golden egg as it were. If this happens, it is because the honest producers who have been agressed upon were immoral and did not defend against the agressive cheaters.

But human beings are uniquely endowed by their nature to choose between good (life and the fullness thereof) and evil (death and destruction). Human beings are capable of conscious self-deception in ways that the other animals are not. This ability (and requirement) by his very nature, makes the human being a moral animal. As long as she lives, a human being must constantly consciously choose life (good) over death (evil). This requirement devolves on the individual and is independent of social considerations, that is, even Robinson Crusoe had to make moral choices, alone on his island, even before meeting Friday.

Thus the basis of human ethics is that life is the standard by which we measure what is good and what is evil.