The Middle is Always Evil

You may have read my last post and– in the event that you are a Libertarian– gotten the idea that Sharia courts in the UK are acceptable because in any dispute settled by such courts, both parties are consenting to give it the power to arbitrate their case. From the Times Online article:

“The rulings of arbitration tribunals are binding in law, provided that both parties in the dispute agree to give it the power to rule on their case.”

So what if it is consensual?

I could make the argument that there is a strong possibility that men will force their wives to “consent” to a court more lenient to, say… Domestic violence. I could make the argument that if a man is beating his wife for failing to wear a scarf, it would not be very much of a stretch for him to force her to attend a particular court with him. I could make these arguments, but I will not. The proper question to ask about the Sharia court– or about anything, for that matter– is not: is it consented to or not, but rather: is it moral or immoral?

Yes, in order for a British Sharia court to hold any weight, it must be consented to by the parties in question, but this is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not they are moral institutions. As governmental bodies, do Sharia courts faithfully uphold man’s right to life, liberty and property? Are you muttering that it does not matter if man’s rights are protected, so long as everyone involved consents to their chains? If so, you are simultaneously holding the following two positions:

• That you believe the moral premises of the Sharia courts to be evil and in opposition to the fundamental rights of man, and:
• That the British government, an institution whose sole purpose is the protection of individual liberty, should enforce said evil.

You are giving your moral sanction to that which you know to be evil.

It does not matter that the slaves consent to their chains; what matters is that you believe that they should be chained by the very institution set up to protect them.

The fundamental error here is the belief that any action is permissible, so long as all parties involved consent to it. This is a position commonly held by Libertarians. While it is true that consent is a necessary requirement for morality, it is not the only requirement; it is not a proper standard by which to judge the morality of an action.

When a man chooses to abuse drugs or alcohol, he makes a conscious choice to do so, a choice that he felt was (out of all of his options) the best one for him at the time, given the context of his knowledge. It was an action that he consented to, that he wanted for himself, otherwise he would not have taken it. All of this is necessarily true about this man, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was the wrong choice. Just because he consented to it does not mean he was making the right decision about his life.

Consent as a moral standard is a necessary result of Libertarianism because it espouses no moral philosophy at all; it is simply the belief that man may do as he pleases, so long as he does not initiate the use of force against others. While this is fine as a political philosophy, it is morally non-prescriptive; it gives no answer to the question: How should I behave? The inevitable result of Libertarianism’s non-answer to this crucial question is an anything-goes mentality toward life, which is so destructive because in life, anything does not go. As Ayn Rand wrote,

Just as man is free to attempt to survive by any random means, as a parasite, a moocher or a looter, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment—so he is free to seek his happiness in any irrational fraud, any whim, any delusion, any mindless escape from reality, but not free to succeed at it beyond the range of the moment nor to escape the consequences. (Italics mine)

There was once a time when I thought I’d never understand why Ayn Rand once said that she would rather be a Marxist than a Libertarian; I now understand her completely.

The British government has officially adopted sharia law. Special “Sharia courts” have been set up that have the authority to arbitrate among Muslims according to Muslim law and tradition; the rulings of these courts carry the full weight of British law, and are enforced by the British government. The courts can rule on any range of civil issues, from financial disputes to divorce and domestic violence; I find this to be laughably absurd.

In order for a government to work properly and efficiently, it must govern according to an objective, impartial standard to which all people must adhere with equal consideration; such a standard is commonly referred to as the law. When two governmental bodies operate under different standards, there is a problem of competing governments, which inevitably results in mobbery and thugs with guns ruling hand over fist. What muddles this particular issue so much is that in this case, the conflicting parties are courts sanctioned by the same government. How can one government faithfully execute the laws according to two different standards, two different value-systems? It cannot. To put it simply: “No man can serve two masters.” Mark my words: this flawed system will prove to be a problem for the organs of the British government in the near future; worries over a “parallel legal system” seem small when the potential damage of this move is fully considered.

It must be noted, however, that currently, the Sharia courts are not mandatory for anyone; Muslims who wish to live under normal, British Common Law are free to do so. The choice is theirs. But what is to say that a Muslim man will not force his wife to attend Sharia court, where the beatings he gave her are sanctioned, or are at least met with a much less severe penalty than that of the normal courts of England? In divorce cases, like all others, Sharia law favors men, who are usually permitted retain all of their assets, in addition to some of their wife’s. The British government’s sanction of this kind of tribunal is disturbing, and it sets a dangerous precedent.

What has really happened here is the British have ceded Her Majesty’s Government to Islamic Totalitarians, people (men, mostly) who feel that it is their duty to Allah to convert the entire world to Islam, by force if necessary. But there are two kinds of Islamic Totalitarians; there are those that we see (the gentlemen in masks on television, who fire AK47’s into the air on the streets of Pakistan), and there are those who choose to remain largely unseen. These men do not wear masks or carry AK47’s, they wear suits, and they carry briefcases. They talk about Muslim discrimination, and demand special treatment and rights because of their religion; they talk about benefiting British society as a whole, “through the promotion of Islam and Islamic values,” a quote I pulled off of The Islamic Society of Britain’s website. Think long and hard about what is meant by “Islamic values,” and you will realize that it is men such as this that we should be paying attention to, with equal if not greater intensity than the men with the guns.

We have already seen Muslims attempt to use the force of government to restrict the freedom of speech of individuals in the West. Now the situation has become more severe; a dangerous precedent has been set by the British government, one that cannot go unchallenged here in the United States.

My father has done quite well for himself in his life, the majority of which he has spent working. He started his own plumbing company, which is now one of the most successful on the northshore of Chicago; he did all of this himself. I have a lot of admiration for him.

Today, I had a rare conversation with my father. We often talk about politics, since he is the more conservative of my parents, and therefore has more in common with me; but our talk is usually filled with levity– it never takes on a serious tone. Today was different.

I asked my father how much money he makes a year. I thought I had a pretty good idea, but I wanted to be sure. The number that he gave me seemed very low– much lower than I thought, considering my family’s lifestyle. I asked my him if he was sure about the figure he gave me, and he started to talk to me about tax deductions; thats when I realized why the number seemed so low to me– he wasn’t talking about how much money he made each year, he was talking about how much he made after taxes. I asked him how much he really made each year.

“Why does that matter?” He asked.

It was at that moment, looking into my father’s tired eyes, that I realized that when the government takes money from him, it takes so much more than just monetary wealth– it takes a piece of my father’s pride; it robs him of the joy that comes from the achievement of a value. It takes a piece of my father’s spirit.

Just to come to the understanding that my father doesn’t look at how much money he earns each year in terms of how much wealth he was able to create, but rather– of what tax bracket he belongs in, to really understand the full implication of that fact– it truly saddens me.

And to come home and to talk to these people on the internet who are my age, who think they know everything, who talk about how much they are inspired by Barack Obama’s plan for “social justice,” who talk about how they find socialism “interesting,” who speak voluminously about their love for humanity…

I just think about looking into my father’s eyes in that moment.

Dear Exxon Mobil Executives,

Yesterday, you made public your quarterly earnings, setting a record for the biggest profit in the history of the United States: 11.68 billion billion dollars. Over the next few weeks (and quite possibly over the next few years), you should expect to get a lot of flak from Washington, as well as the American public, about how you have made an “unfair profit;” they’ll tell you that the money that you’ve made rightfully belongs to somebody else. Just today, Barack Obama has said that he thinks your profits should be divided up and given to the American public– but did they earn those profits? No!

This is the United States of America, the greatest country in the history of civilized men. Here, each man is entitled to the sweat of his own brow, to the products of his labor. I am proud to live in a country where a corporation has earned as much as yours has; I consider it a great honor. Gentlemen, when the entire country comes to you demanding a share of your wealth, do not capitulate. Do not give in to their threats, or their corrupt moral code that demands that you do. Do not accept guilt for living on this earth, or the way that you have chosen to do so. Do not listen to them.

And when you are called before Congress to testify for your crimes against the American public, this is what you tell them:

I work for nothing but my own profit – which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs; I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to me; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutual advantage – and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with – voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able to do it better than most people – the fact that my work is of greater value than the work of my neighbours and that more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologise for my ability – I refuse to apologise for my success – I refuse to apologise for my money. If this is evil, make the most of it. If this is what the public finds harmful to its interests, let the public destroy me. This is my code – and I will accept no other. I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow men than you can ever hope to accomplish – but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognise the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work – my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good – that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices – that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the right of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation – as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own – I would refuse. I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!”

I am proud of what you Gentlemen have achieved, not because of the “public service” that you have provided, but because of the virtue that it requires to achieve it. You are heroes; do not give in.

Since starting this blog, I’ve blogged about environmentalism a little more than I’d like to.

There are other issues out there; issues that are more pressing, that affect our country and our world much more directly– like Iran’s nuclear program, or the fact that they’ve been launching test missiles capable of striking Israel. But so often I choose to write about the Environmentalist Movement over other things for a very specific reason, which is:

The choice to accept environmentalism or not is the choice between industry and inactivity, civilization and primitivism, comfortability and suffering; it is the choice between life and death. Many may disagree with this claim, citing the good intentions of the environmentalists: taking care of the earth couldn’t be bad, could it? After all, not all environmentalists are nut jobs like Eric Pianka, a noted ecologist who wants to kill off 90% of human life; most are in fact quite moderate, and simply believe that humans have a responsibility to look after the earth.

Such people are not evil, but they are misguided. They accept the two basic premises of environmentalism: that the environment is good because it is the environment, and that the smallest human interference in the natural ecological structure is a desirable goal. The logical conclusion of these premises, of course, is that human activity must be restricted as much as possible in order to prevent such interference. If you accept these premises, chances are good that you would not be in favor of a mass culling of the human population. The danger is that men like Pianka also accept them, and they desire to see their logical ends carried out. Since you’ve already accepted their premises, they can use the power of guilt to get you to accept a gradually more oppressive environmental policy. Case in point:

Yesterday, the leaders at the G8 Summit agreed to cut their countries’ carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, a radically anti-industrial move that will dismember the economy and stunt the standard of living for the global population. No one can claim that such an act was motivated by anything other than a hatred for mankind. Last week, a measure was put up for conideration in the British Parliament that would institute a personal cap-and-trade policy for every resident of England. Was this act considered because its proponents love the earth, or because they hate humanity? You be the judge.

With the basic premises of environmentalism so common today, it won’t be long before such cap-and-trade proposals are made in the United States. Do you really believe that such a measure would be beyond the scope of a Barack Obama environmental policy? Maybe not now, but what about four years from now? This is why the environmentalism issue is so important to me.

But there is another reason I frequently choose environmentalism over other topics. Throughout history, the war against man’s productive faculty has been waged under the banner of countless different names and movements; tribalism, monarchism, feudalism– more recently communism, socialism, and fascism– and of course, there’s always been the monstrosity that is organized religion. All of these have been a part of an overarching war on Individualism and a hatred of humanity; environmentalism is no exception here– it is merely the newest leader in the same war, the latest manifestation of the same hatred. However, environmentalism is different from its ideological ancestors in one, very important way.

In the past, movements that sought to destroy humanity (the modern ones anyway) have disguised their hatred for man’s virtues, proclaiming them to be the immoral while holding up their own standards as the moral alternative. With the broad base of society accepting altruism, their unpracticeable moral code, they guilted people into embracing their own self-destruction in the name of the love of mankind. Environmentalism is different because it makes no attempt to disguise its contempt for humanity.

Now, I won’t run through my whole spiel on environmentalism again because I’ve already blogged on it and have stated my opposition to it in as clear terms as I can, both here and in other places. But I will say this: