“Progress Debunked” is Six Weeks from Publication, and Other Updates

If you don’t know the story behind Progress Debunked, you can read this post. I’ve spent the last few weeks finalizing the interior of the book for both print and ebook versions. I am nearly done. In about two weeks I’ll be sending out review copies. If you’d like a free copy so you can be one of the first to review on Amazon, let me know. (You can use the contact form on the lower right if you don’t have my email address.)

Publishing has been taking up most of my spare time, but I have made some conceptual progress on a few of my other projects, primarily on The First King of Montana and my fantasy computer game, tentatively retitled Sagas of Orthadel.

Last week I took my family on a road trip through Montana. We all had a great time. It was the kids’ first real road trip out of state, and my wife’s first time that far north. And it gave me, as a novelist, the chance to get a feel for the place, the people, the landscape, and its ecology. The experience has given me some fantastic notes and images to work with. For example, I knew Montana was big, but just looking at maps and photos and satellite images doesn’t really give you a good feeling for how big. And we traversed it in our van. Riding across it on horseback would be an entirely different story. It also gave me a better feeling for the towns, cities, and ranches. Even the largest cities there feel pretty isolated. Their post-apocalyptic versions would be even more so. Let alone the ranches way out in those central-Montana valleys, where a single saloon will draw in regulars from 50 miles around. We saw cattle grazing in wetlands by little creeks you could jump across, surrounded by hills and mountains of parched desert and fragile, desertified pine forest as far as you could see.

And there’s a lot of local pride in Montana. People up there love where they are, and in parts they’ve done an incredible job of preserving the primal forests. Much of the state is natural or man-made (overgrazed) desert, but there’s also true wilderness there. Up north they connect with the endless untamed Canadian wilds. Wolves and grizzlies, and tall, thick forests to the horizon, black within. To meditate on them is to fill your spirit with a beautiful and holy kind of terror.

I realized for the first time on that roadtrip that to write a novel about Montana, let alone the first king of Montana, is to promise something awfully huge. I’m not sure how else to put it. It’s a big task. The place has a big spirit. I will have to put everything I have into my novel if I am going to even come close to doing it justice.

Sagas of Orthadel, the Tolkienesque fantasy computer game I’m working on, is also shaping up to be a big task, if doable. It will be a real-time strategy with some role-playing elements, based on my board game Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player guides a handful of characters possessing both hereditary powers and learned skills. Players can either cooperate against outside foes or vie for political dominance. Characters can marry, have children, teach each other skills, die, create artifacts, and exploit or heal the natural (simulated) ecosystems around them. Most of the basic rules have been playtested in board-game form, but it will likely take several years to finish the computer version.

The basic reason for this is fundamentally the same as with my novel: the subject matter is huge. In this case, though, it’s not a real place. Rather, I’m trying to capture an ideal, an ideal that goes beyond what any philosophical essay or novel, or even series of novels, could really capture.

Modern novels have lost the ability to investigate consequences. Of course, novels have never been interactive. But before the modern era this was not important. Life was interactive enough. Novels were used to express lived experience, and thus carried experiential knowledge. But you can’t trust novels to do this anymore—novel-writing has become a craft that is more dependent on style than on content to satisfy a reader. It’s all illusion, it’s all surface now.

Today, books don’t teach you anything. They have no message.

Modern authors are even proud to have no message.

And the most “literary” novels today are the worst. Magical realism? Post modernism? You can’t trust them not to frivolously negate their own reason for being, if that makes any sense to anyone without a graduate degree in the humanities.

The modern novel (and movie, too) has given us—has indoctrinated us with—a false version of reality. It is false because it can be false. It is anchored to nothing but popular opinion. And popular opinion has run away with itself.

What I am saying is probably still far from clear. So let’s take a specific example. Female heroes in modern storytelling. What’s the first image that pops into your mind? Is it:

(a) a warrior

    or

(b) a mother

Yeah, okay, you say, it was (a), but so what? Can’t women be warriors too?

Sure they can. But is it healthy for a culture to focus on teaching women to be warriors when in reality they will more often be mothers? How many popular movies or novels can you think of where the hero was a mother and her heroism consisted of doing really well as a mother?

And if you think I’m just making a point about “gender issues” here, let’s talk about men. How often are male heroes heroic as warriors rather than fathers? Even here we see an unhealthy tendency toward pure fantasy in our modern entertainment. Fathers are much more common that warriors. In fact they should be just as common as mothers.

Which, again, isn’t to say that there are no differences between men and women and their respective duties in a culture. The very idea that there are or should be no differences between men and women is another example of the veil modern storytelling has pulled over our eyes. Our fictions have come to sacrifice reality for the sake of popular political messages. But to champion a popular political message is to champion no message at all, but merely to flatter the prejudices of one’s own age. It’s to say, “Yeah, those [republicans/democrats] are crazy and you really need to vote [conservative/liberal] because they’ll fix things.” But this sort of binary message is utterly worthless. It’s pure propaganda. A vote is just a millionth of a decision. What about how people live their lives? The only respectable task for a novel, the only worthy task, is to teach people how to live better.

The same goes for a computer game. The example about fathers and mothers and warriors above is in fact right on point when it comes to the game I’m writing. Characters can be father, mothers, warriors, rulers, teachers, craftsmen, and farmers. Balancing these roles is a major part of the game. And the right balance isn’t some arbitrary percentage decided by how liberal or conservative I, the author, am. It’s determined by the ecology of the rules of the game. You can see what happens if you make all your females into warriors and none of your males care about teaching the next generation. Sound complicated? It’s not. At least not as a game. It will take a lot of work to code, as any game does, but the gameplay itself won’t be much more complicated than in most popular computer games. I am designing it not simply to be beautiful and fun but also—if all goes well—to mirror something important about reality. It will go against the modern tendency: it will be designed to teach future generations. 

Why Evil Exists: The Insights of Boethius

I've just posted my essay on the Problem of Evil on Twenty-Five Centuries.

Updates: Indie Publishing, Games, and a Screenplay

This month my plan was to post an essay on the Problem of Evil. But that essay is growing longer and more involved than I expected, and it looks like it won't be done until next month. So stay tuned.

Instead, here's a brief update on what I've been working on.

I've been spending most of my free time preparing Progress Debunked for publication: proof reading, formatting the Table of Contents and section headings, choosing fonts, and the like. It's starting to look more and more like a book. This is my first time publishing, so I'm still not sure quite how long it will take. I need to get permissions to publish quotes, find a graphic designer, get an ISBN, and several other odd things. It could be a month, or it could be autumn of this year. I'm committed to having digital, paperback, and hardback versions all available by the end of 2017.

The more I read about independent publishing, the more convinced I am that it is the way to go. It's faster, it gives you more control over the process, it earns you better royalties, and it is now more common for new authors to make a living by self-publishing than by "traditional" publishing. What's interesting, if you look at the history of publishing, is that self-publishing was actually the most common sort of publishing before about 50 years ago. It is the real tradition in publishing. It's only been in the recent era of mega-corporations and mass marketing that people have been convinced (mostly through advertisement) that you've got to publish through one of the handful of companies in New York that dominate the business. But a revolution is sweeping through; that era is ending.

I'm not so sure anymore that it will be impossible to make a living by writing. Tens of thousands of indie writers you've never heard of are supporting their families on book sales.  So we'll see. My first goal in writing is still to express relevant, important ideas as clearly as I can. Money is a secondary concern--and only pertinent because it might make it possible to write full time.

***

I've also made progress on a number of side projects. I'm re-writing the end of Part I of The First King of Montana. What's coming out this time around is more human, more emotional, has more grit, and feels more real.

Over the past several months I've merged several of my boardgames into an semi-cooperative, Tolkienesque, epic fantasy game: Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player is a different fantasy race, and you play over several generations. Characters can create magical artifacts and realms, marry, pass on magical abilities to their children, and teach one another ancient skills and crafts. The victory conditions are different for each player -- some players may have selfish motives -- and the game typically climaxes with a epic war between good and evil. It's fun, but it generally takes 5-6 hours. I've started coding a computer version of the game, which should speed it up.

My kids keep asking to play my fairy tale game, where you can choose to play a hero, princess, or monster. (Usually I play a dragon or giant, and they play the good guys.) As a hero or princess, you go around the map rescuing people. As a monster, you steal their treasure. Eventually, if the good guys make enough friends and find enough useful items, they can work together to defeat the monster, either by making it into a good monster or chasing it away. The game is set up so that it is almost impossible for the good guys to lose, though you can get into some sticky situations--for example, as last time when BOTH kids' characters were transformed into frogs. You might also get locked in a tower, wounded, or put to sleep by magic. For all the possibilities, the game goes quickly. It only takes about 15 minutes, but usually the kids will want to play again and again. Definitely worth it to try and publish, I think.

A couple months back I read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe for the first time and loved it. It's a story about feuding between Saxon and Norman knights in the era of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted. My wife and I watched the 1952 movie version and after listening to me rant about how the film had dropped all the most compelling aspects of the novel and everything I would put in a screenplay if I wrote it, she said, "Well why aren't you writing it?" So I wrote my own screenplay. It turns out that two of the main plotlines are romantic (one tragic and one happy), and as a fan of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, my wife has helped me enhance these. To do this I've had to deepen one of my antagonists -- Bois-Guilbert, a Norman and Templar knight -- and make him more sympathetic. The screenplay that has emerged (to flatter myself) is more tragic, more Shakespearean even, than what Scott originally wrote. We'll see. I've got to sit on this one for a while.

Against Heideggerian Philosophy

On my new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries, I discuss how Heidegger has led modern philosophy into a sophistical morass of timid "everydayness":

Heidegger's Philosophy as "Idle Talk": A Challenge

Twenty-Five Centuries

I've started a new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries. Here's the "About" blurb:

Since the birth of Greek philosophy twenty-five centuries ago, along with Cyrus the Great’s introduction of religious toleration in Persia and his rebuilding of Jerusalem, the Western world has been engaged in a vast dialogue, across both space and time. Some call this the Great Conversation, and when it touches on eternal themes, it is called Philosophy.

For anyone who has read and been personally touched by the classics, modern ignorance of this conversation is heart-breaking to behold.

I write this blog in the hope that I can contribute, in some small way, to the revival and continuance of this twenty-five-century-old conversation. 

Do not expect a dry survey of the history of philosophy here. I mean to do philosophy. I mean to carry on the conversation. I mean to challenge the way we think, the way we live. 

Modern Western civilization, far from being the peak of enlightenment it pretends to be, has declined into ideological barbarity. Scientism. Progressivism. Materialism. But also: Populism. Anti-intellectualism. Reactionism. 

We know this well. Satirists, cultural critics, and angry pedants abound, all attacking our failing culture. But unless we can do something positive to contribute to its health, even the truest, most relevant criticism is futile. 

The Great Conversation is Western culture. To forget it is to destroy our identity. So our first and most important task is: to remember. 

Each essay will attempt to reconstruct a portion of this Conversation stretching back to Socrates, and to bit-by-bit help us to remember who we are, and why.

My first post is about the civilizing effect of Homer on Greece: How HOMER'S EPICS Will Teach You Valor.

Littleton - A Parable

There was once a town called Littleton where no one lived much more than two or two-and-a-half months. The people of Littleton grew to adulthood in 21 days, and they even managed to learn to talk by this point, though theirs was a simple language. Most of them raised their families during weeks 4-6 of their lives, and declined into old age in the third month, seldom living past 80 days.

You might think that the people of Littleton were more reconciled to their own mortality the we longer-lived folk. That perhaps, with death so near, they would be forced to come to terms with it in a more profound way than the rest of us. And actually, for the first few decades of Littleton's existence, this was true. Though the people of Littleton had less time for study, this only made them study deeper, and they were apt to understand the deepest, simplest facts of life: death, love, taxes, and family. With these concepts firmly and concisely in grasp, theirs was a happy existence for a time, despite its unusual shortness.

They soon came to realize, however, that certain things were lacking from their lives. Because they had so little time, lawyers and doctors, for example, were very rare in Littleton. Though they were swift learners, two or three months is simply not enough time to learn all the facts necessary for a law degree or an MD. The most prestigious careers available were things like construction or auto mechanics. Littleton had access to a few instruction manuals in such things, and your most well-respected jobs involved meticulous following of directions written down by someone from another town or era.

Over the decades a new career began to emerge, their most prestigious yet: architect. What happened was this. Since all their most clever students went into construction, these exceptional intellects were able to find flaws in the classic manuals being used. So they began to add annotations. In some generations these manuals grew bloated with commentary, and in others they were cut back, summarized, and made more concise than ever. As a result Littleton began to develop a discipline of architecture that was superior even to that of the outside, longer-lived world.

Littleton had never had the skill or patience to build itself a town hall and truly put itself on the map where small cities go. But now it did. The skill had been built up--not in any one person's head--but in the collection of manuals being passed down and improved from generation to generation. Patience had been cultivated by this same process, by seeing how many generations had to pass away for the manuals to grow. And now it seemed that the year or two it would take to build a town hall wasn't as long a time as it might seem, though it would be something like twenty generations.

But of course, even just drawing up the plans for the town hall was a challenging process. No one architect, no matter how brilliant, had the time to learn both all the principles of architecture AND understand every detail of the new building. But by their deep and simple wisdom they knew that they needed SOME kind of overview of the building, if it was going to hang together and be a unified work of architecture.

The most visionary of their architects, then, were designated as "Eagles" -- those with wide, if incomplete, vision of the whole. They were not expected to understand how specific bricks were to be fitted together, nor even all the mathematical principles behind the Littleton theory of architecture. Rather, they were expected to know very basic, broad, ideas, such as (1) What is a Town Hall for? Why are we building it? (2) What sort of aesthetic qualities does it need? Should it appear massive and intimidating, or warm and welcoming? (3) Where should it be placed in the town? What buildings should it be next to? (4) What is the relationship among all the other specialties needed to build this building? For example there should be specialists in roofing, finish work, foundations, etc. What should be built first? How should this all be organized?

Such questions are more than enough for one Littleton lifetime, and bit by bit an Eagle Manual began to grow and establish itself as the basic guide to running the project. Other manuals grew as well, one for each specialty, as mentioned above.

After just a year the project began to take shape. It started to look like it was going to work. The Eagles, in particular, felt it was all very feasible, and might even be done within another year. Great trust was placed in their abilities, and rightly so--for a time.

In the meantime, Littleton had become famous for its small-scale architecture. The project of building a town hall had led to a flourishing of sorts. Extremely beautiful and quaint cottages had sprung up all over town, and people came from miles around to see these uniquely distinctive homes, built according to a theory that had developed entirely independently of the outside world. For outsiders, it was like seeing something from another continent.

Littleton became rich. And now its troubles began.

More specifically, it was the Eagle named Tommy McShort that began to derail the project. It wasn't that he didn't care enough about the town hall. It was that in his pride in his Eagleship -- the discipline that put Littleton on the map -- he believed he could discover the principles need to build the town hall bigger, more beautiful, and faster than they had previously imagined.

On the face it, his theory was perhaps only a little more daring than most. Usually, this wouldn't be a problem. Later generations would catch the mistakes and cross them out. But when an Eagle makes a mistake, it can create special problems. Previously, Eagles had understood the sacredness of their task, and knew that it was very easy to lose past insights if you didn't read the manuals carefully enough.

But this was the very chapter McShort had neglected to read over! The Eagle Manual had grown very long indeed, and McShort had been, as I've said, just a little less careful than most, and he'd missed the first chapters, thinking he would skip to the "good part". And now there was a problem. Because McShort was telling his apprentices to skip the first part of the book too, for he had done fine without it. (So he thought!) And thus each generation after McShort grew a little more flippant and ignorant of what had come before. They were losing their respect for the past. Meanwhile, they were growing rich on their fame as the Master Architects of Littleton, and so didn't spend much time worrying about it.

Within a few generations things were very bad, but only the Eagles even suspected that something was wrong. Each generation argumentation broke out among the apprentices about what was the best approach to learning Eagleship, and many questioned if reading the Manual was even that useful at all. After all it was very long and took several weeks to read over, and perhaps that time could be better spent on more practical questions. Master Eagles had a harder and harder time answering these questions because they hadn't bothered to read much of the first few chapters of the Manual, which was the part that explained the answers in most detail. More and more confused fluff was added to the end of the Manual -- and this was what most new apprentices now seemed to prefer to read.

Meanwhile, specialist architects, without the firm guidance of the Eagles, were also beginning to veer off track. Littleton Stonemasons, in particular, had begun to develop a pride to rival that of their masters.  While the Eagles quibbled over seemingly unanswerable questions like "What is a Town Hall for?" and "How big is too big for a Town Hall?" at least the Stonemasons had been discovering practical principles useful in constructing ever-more-quaint cottages and stone lodges for the tourists to gawk at. Stonemasons began to add comments to the front of their own manual saying, "Most important!" or "This is what it really means to 'hang together!'"

Though they had largely forgotten why, the Eagles were still skimming through other manuals, trying to get an idea of their contents. It was while doing this that Johnny Quickson decided that these pithy self-promotions of the Stonemasons were really much more profound than they seemed. He put forward a new fundamental principle of Eagleship: "The Mortar Principle." It said, basically, that as long as each tiny part of the Town Hall was mortared to its neighboring parts, everything would hang together even if no one could quite grasp the whole. Things like "aesthetic beauty" and "purpose" and so on were useless concepts that the craftsman who physically built the townhall wouldn't need anyway.

Now, these ideas might sound exceptionally stupid, especially coming from the inhabitant of a town whose fame was derived from the aesthetic beauty of its dwellings. You might think that the cottage-builders would come to the rescue and put these Eagle in their place. But it must be remembered that all the inhabitants of Littleton (except the Eagles, that is) still believed in paying respect to the old manuals. And all the old manuals said that the Eagles were the smartest and in charge.

So rather than putting the Eagles in their place, the cottage-builders themselves began to take on this new aesthetic-free, purpose-free style of architecture. And thus began the "Post-Quaint" era of Littleton, when the merit of a new cottage was measured merely in how many aesthetic rules it broke and old traditions it disrespected. Freedom to innovate began to trump all else. Unfortunately for Littleton, more tourists were pouring in than ever, providing them with even more money to be spent on still more extravagantly weird little dwellings.

And in this way, the Eagles' own disregard of the Manuals began to infect the rest of Littleton. Rare indeed was the individual who attempted to get any kind of overview of what a single Manual, let alone all the Manuals, had to say. Without the leadership of the Eagles, this had become all but impossible. The Town Hall project fell to ruin. And now, only a rare few in Littleton have the courage (or the time) to figure out what went wrong and how their Golden Age had come to end. But as long as a few inhabitants still read the old manuals for pleasure, especially the earliest chapters, perhaps some few of them will eventually come along with the know-how to start putting the pieces back together.

Introduction to “Thoughts of a Recovered Philosopher” for Liberals

1

This is an introduction for those who already understand that what humans are doing to the environment is a problem. That big corporations with big money unleashing big propaganda is a problem. That poverty is not just an inconvenience but a genuine and serious problem. That rationality and objective truth-seeking is a good thing and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is generally correct. That there are problems with traditional institutions and religions, specifically with organized religions, which have a tendency to decay. This is for those who understand, in short, that things are changing and some kind of adaptation is necessary.

Technically, my philosophy falls somewhat to the right on the political spectrum. Some of my views, in fact, are radically conservative. But I don't really believe in the "political spectrum." And here's why. You might think that on all of the issues I just mentioned--the environment, big corporations, Darwin's theory, and our need for change--I am going to argue that they are not all that important, that you should just compromise on them and be less liberal about them. But quite the opposite is true. Your typical liberal, in fact, should be far, far more radical about the environment, fighting poverty, and promoting reason and change. As I see it, the biggest problem with modern liberalism is that it is not liberal enough.

The same, incidentally, is true about modern conservatism on my view--it is not conservative enough.

Modern political thinking has become far, far too milquetoast.  It lacks vitality, vim, verve, vigor. It is too careful. We never take up arms anymore to defend our freedoms. Instead we whine on Facebook. As impossible as an anarchist utopia would be, better a bloody overthrow of the government and a return to primitive feudalism then all this aggrandized, infantilizing media drama. Yeah, Trump is Hitler. Sure he is. Next thing you'll tell me Obama is Moses and Mickey Mouse is the most profound idea since Buddhism.

2

Take the environment for example. You tell me global warming is THE issue of today. Millions will die, economies will collapse, and so on. Fine. Then why in the name of everything holy are you driving a car to work every day? "Oh, well you know I have to work and feed my--" Millions will die! Ride a bike!

Until you eliminate fossil fuels from your life it is hypocritical to utter the slightest complaint about global warming. Who are you complaining to? God? Are you asking the government to make your car illegal? Because short of that I don't see what the government can do about it. This is why I'm sick of the global warming "debate."

And what I really don't understand is why we stop with global warming. There's some disagreement over whether global warming is caused by fossil fuels or is all that serious, but it doesn't really matter because there's a dozen other unsustainable aspects of our civilization that will almost certainly cause its collapse:

-It would take five planet earths to supply the resources for everyone in the world to live with an American standard of living. This means that our extravagant lifestyle is literally blocking the rest of the world from development. In other words we are hypocrites, holding ourselves up as the most "equal" people on earth while in actuality constituting a sharply distinct and exploitative aristocratic class over everyone else. In essence, the scheme to lift everyone up to the Western standard of living is a pyramid scheme. All pyramid schemes (a.k.a. empires) collapse.

-We are in the midst of a huge extinction event, losing species faster than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

-The world's energy consumption is doubling roughly every 35 years, and this is primarily due to economic growth in China, India, and the West. Exponential growth cannot last forever--it always reaches a limit. In the news they talk about economic growth as a good thing. When we reach this limit we will be forced to face some harder realities.

-90% of our transportation is powered by petroleum, and 75% of our products contain petroleum products, mostly plastics. We have less than a century of oil and natural gas, even if our energy consumption stopped growing. But it is growing so we really only have a few decades at best. Coal may last a century at current growth rates, but mining it is not a pretty process and it burns dirty.

-Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Without them, it's been estimated that our agriculture could support only about one or two billion people.

-Renewable energy sources have limits too. It takes certain rare metals to make solar panels. And if wind power provided all our energy and our energy consumption keeps doubling, its wind-dampening effects would start to have climactic effects on par with global warming. (See K. Marvel, et al., “Geophysical Limits to Wind Power.”)

-There are over a dozen important minerals that won't be profitably minable after a few more decades. (See A.M. Diederen, “Metal Minerals Scarcity and the Elements of Hope,” NIDV, The Hague).

-We are destroying topsoil, forests, and fresh water resources faster than they can be replenished.

-Technological innovation is slowing (See Joseph Tainter, “Complexity and the Productivity of Innovation.”)

You may be thinking, okay, but maybe we are introducing enough new regulations and technologies to mitigate these trends. It may seem bad now but perhaps it's getting better. I'm sorry, but this is wishful thinking. It is essential to keep this fact firmly in mind: every trend I just described is only getting worse because overall consumption of every resource I mentioned is increasing exponentially. It doesn't matter how many new mines or oil fields are discovered, this only feeds the growth. And you just can't beat exponential growth. Not even with government regulation.

"Ah, but, you know, people have been freaking out about this stuff for decades and it really hasn't turned out to be a big deal." Maybe you've never heard the parable of the lily pond, or if you have you may need a refresher. Please Google it.

"All right, so then you're saying it's all hopeless?" Not at all. Resource limitations are a natural part of life. Here's the real kicker. Here's what most people these days have a difficult time understanding.

What's weird is not that resources are becoming scarce. What's weird is that we live in one of those extremely rare time periods when things aren't scarce. For millions of years, our main resources were things like wild deer and wild fruits and nuts. These things were generally hard to find and most people failed to survive and reproduce. If the population of humans grew, these things became even harder to find. If food resources grew, we'd consume them and they would return to normal.

Then we discovered farming. Now we just needed good land. The population exploded and before we knew it good land was scarce and we were back to equilibrium. Farming became hard again and not everyone made it. Natural selection quickly re-entered the picture.

Recently we discovered fossil fuels and now we have cars and tractors and trucks and fertilizer. It's made things easier for a time. All I'm saying is soon we will return to the hard way of things, where there aren't enough resources for everyone. European civilization persisted for 2000 years in such a state of equilibrium. It's a tough life but it's not fatal to society or learning.

My point is the last century or two has spoiled us.

And here we see, following ecological thinking out to its ultimate limit, why modern environmentalism is not nearly radical enough. Not even close. What we need to be doing is figuring out local sustainability, as we did in the "good" old days. I mean the "less-stupidly-easy" old days. Learn to farm sustainably. Or just raise a garden and a few chickens. Learn woodworking. Learn to build sheds and barns and homes. Be prepared. Take the basic idea of global warming, follow it out to its ultimate conclusion, and this is what you can begin to see.

3

Let's move on to wealth inequality. As a liberal you probably see it as a problem. And you should. But already, while discussing the environment, we've seen how popular thinking on this is way, way too milquetoast. We've got a pyramid scheme on a global scale. We're using resources so greedily we are making it literally impossible for other nations to catch up. We've got a form of hypocrisy as silly here as the whole global warming thing. You really want to help Africa? Stop driving your car and burning so much of the oil they need. Stop heating your home through the winter and using up all the natural gas they need. Stop buying cheap plastic goods made by the 12-year-old wage slaves we hired over there.

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, and more hypocrisy. The inequalities we see in America are virtually zero compared with the inequalities between nations. Don't tell me about the "hungry" in America. The only hungry we have are those who are too lazy to apply for welfare or even just stand on the street and stick out their hand. Take a little trip to Mexico and see what I mean.

Yeah, those 1% oppressing us all, sure. If you and I are making more than $34,000 a year we are the 1%.

We won't be on top forever. Learn traditional knowledge and skills. Get out of the city and learn agriculture. I know it's not the cool thing to do now, but in the future it will be so cool.

4

And now we come to my favorite topic of all, evolution. Many liberals enjoy the fact that religious types are in denial of the strong scientific support behind Darwin's theory. They also enjoy the fact that evolution tells us just how brutal things used to be before humans started to adapt using science instead of natural selection.

Actually, we should find neither of these facts enjoyable. There are plenty of people who believe in a personal God (myself included) that find nothing objectionable about evolution. We need to stop assuming that God and evolution are somehow incompatible. The more atheists use evolution as a weapon to challenge theism, the harder it becomes for theists to accept evolution as a fact of life, much less as a grand and beautiful part of God's design.

But this whole topic is basically moot, because you are a liberal and so you probably already accept evolution as fact. What is more interesting to me is the common view that evolution is something modern humans have "overcome."

The book I'm publishing this year, Progress Debunked, is essentially one long argument for why evolution applies just as strictly to human DNA and ideas as it does to all other organisms. And here we have an interesting place where radical "liberalism" may become radical conservatism. Because, historically speaking, those who believe that the principle of Survival of the Fittest can be applied to humans have been far-right reactionaries. This automatically makes it very un-PC, along with the idea that competition is a natural part of life, some are born with a higher IQ, and so on.

But these controversies are neither here nor there. The main reason I find it interesting and important to apply evolution to humans is that we can see, at a more fundamental level, why the whole idea of a modern world that has overcome natural selection is bunk. If you understand evolution deeply enough, you will see that it is essential to life itself. And you will see that liberal values like compassion and cooperation were actually shaped by natural selection (what some call "group selection"), which can in fact operate on entire ecosystems--even on the entire biosphere.

I'm saying that both liberals and conservatives have taken a far-too-shallow view of the significance of evolution. From the point of view of cultural evolution, the oldest religions and philosophies are the most profound, because they have survived and flourished through the natural selection of the harshest and most diverse ages and societies. I have heard Christianity called a "fossil species." As a matter of fact it is still one of the fastest growing belief systems. Atheism and secularism (which are in fact older ideas than Christianity) are shrinking because they tend to foster lower birthrates.

In the end, evolution and religion converge in what they are saying. This is true of all great ideas. To see this you must dive deeply into both. Why did God create evil? Evolution is one way to answer this question. What value system has the greatest evolutionary fitness? God is one way to describe the answer to this.

We could go much deeper, but this is only supposed to serve as an introduction to the sort of philosophical questions I think we most desperately need to face.

5

Liberals tend to have a problem with organized religion. And I would tend to agree that there is a problem here. This is a place where what I have to say to you is the same whether you are a conservative or a liberal or something else. As I wrote in my Introduction for Non-Liberals:

It isn’t just that people are forgetting religion and missing the point of it. It’s also that our religious institutions themselves are in a state of decay and corruption. Many people would rather not hear this. And in fact they have no reason to listen to me—-a humble philosopher, however recovered from his wayward ruminations-—on why their religion has a problem. In fact I am likely to be wrong in my diagnosis, being neither a profound theologian nor expert on the founding or leadership of spiritual institutions. I’d prefer to let someone infinitely wiser than me make the point:

“Do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”

None of this is to say we should go out and burn our Bibles. Quite to the contrary, we need to read them more diligently than ever, to make sure we lose nothing from this fittest of all books. We must pay at least this much respect to our ancestors, that we thoroughly understand what they believed before judging it. G.K. Chesterton called tradition the democracy of dead. I would take this two steps further. Tradition is not only the most powerful form of democracy, but the most powerful form of authority, period. It is the voice of natural selection, of God, thundering down to us from the depths of history. Those who ignore it, do so at their own peril.

For further thoughts on this, see my essay, Through Nihilism.

6

I hope this was a useful primer. Everything I've said here I've also said elsewhere, scattered about. You should be ready, at this point, to dip into my blog anywhere and more or less understand where I'm coming from.

I've criticized the hypocrisy of a number of modern notions here, and you may be wondering how I apply these ideas to my own life.

Now I don't claim to be perfect or live entirely free of contradiction. But I do humbly attempt to practice what I preach in four basic ways. (1) I study both ancient and modern classics diligently, and try to pay respect to the Great Conversation in what I write. (2) I strive to write philosophy, as Nietzsche asks, with blood. I don't split hairs but I do put logic above rhetoric. What I say comes from the heart and is meant to touch hearts and improve the way we live. (3) I devote even more time to my wife and children than I do to my writing, and I do everything I can to teach my children well. (4) I do garden as sustainably as I can. Though I don't know much farming I try to learn more every year and make progress toward establishing a homestead.