Simplification

Fifty years ago, a guy named Walter M. Miller Jr. penned a provocative and terrifying tale.

It was the only book he ever published, but it was a doozy*.

A Canticle for Leibowitz tells the story of a small abbey of monks living in a post apocalyptic world devastated not just by a terrible war, but by deliberate and willful ignorance.

Like much of the fiction of the 1960’s, Canticle was shaped by the Cold War. In the story, six hundred years before the events of the novel, civilization was destroyed by a nuclear exchange between East and West. The survivors could have rebuilt their world, could have remade civilization, wiser perhaps, more cautious, they could have put aside their differences and learned to cooperate.  Instead, they descended into savagery.  They killed the surviving scientists and the engineers, blaming science and technology for the devastation instead of the fear and hatred and politics that had led them to disaster, and then they deliberately discarded the hard won knowledge of their ancestors.  As the world disintegrated into a new dark age that would last for the next eight hundred years, they hunted down and burned the last books, along with those who could still read and write.

As ignorance and superstition fell across the continent, the survivors proudly began to call themselves “Simpletons.”

Miller’s description of the Age of Simplification was mere scene setting for Canticle, a prelude told in bits and pieces scattered across a tale that spanned the twelve hundred year story of a small order of Catholic monks, the Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz, dedicated to the preservation of knowledge in the blasted ruins of what used to be New Mexico. We learn early on that the titular character, the order’s founder, a former Jewish electrical engineer converted to Roman Catholicism named Isaac Leibowitz, was caught by a mob of Simpletons while attempting to save one final load of books from the flames, he was then hung by the neck and burned alive for the crime of literacy and “booklegging.”

Re-reading A Canticle for Leibowitz today, what strikes me is Miller’s portrayal of religion as safeguarding and preserving scientific knowledge instead of denying and suppressing it –  a bit of irony obviously not lost on the author, as the superstitious monks of the story revered a handwritten grocery list as sacred text right next to a book of electrical engineering.

But it was always Miller’s description of the Simpletons that fascinated and repelled me.

There are days that I wonder if Miller didn’t get it backwards.

Simplification first, then the fall of the civilization – and the rise of savage empires.

Unlike the 1960’s we no longer expect the world to end in nuclear war. 

Now when I imagine the end of the republic, it’s not the cataclysmic thunderclap of The Bomb I hear.

It’s not the martial drumbeat of goose-stepping fascists, nor the clanking rumble of poorly made communist tanks in the streets of America.

The soundtrack of our demise won’t be the crash of falling buildings and exploding ordnance and the stutter of machinegun fire.

It’ll be to the sound of the raging mob.

 

See, the problem with a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is, well, the people.

 

You’ve heard me say it over and over, our republic depends for its very existence on educated, informed, and reasonable citizens. 

Our country, our civilization, was not designed to be run by a bunch of simpletons.

This isn’t my idea, our nation was founded on this very concept.

Prior to the the United States, countries were ruled by those who had been born and bred and (supposedly) educated to run them.  

A government of the people was a whole new model of government which directly implied that anybody of sound mind could be as educated and informed and as reasonable as any king or noble – something we Americans, and subsequently most of the modern world, now take for granted.

However, for this concept of a government by the people to work, there turn out to be certain consequences.

If you’re going to have a government of the people, if any random Joe Shit The Ragman can rise to power at the whim of the electorate, it clearly follows that everybody must be educated and intelligent and reasonable enough to actually run the the place.

In a republic such as ours, willful ignorance and deliberate stupidity are not virtues.

This assumption was explicit in the founding of America. It’s why originally only landed white males could vote, because they were assumed to be exactly those people, educated, intelligent, and reasonable. When education and freedom were extended to all citizens, those explicit assumptions were extended as well – or vice versa, depending on your viewpoint.

Certain things directly follow from this basic idea:

• A government of the people implies that if the population is on average cooperative, educated, informed, and reasonable so too will be the resulting government.
• Likewise, in a representative democracy, an unreasoning and uncooperative population tends to produce a government of obstinate braying jackasses who are incapable of running the country. And typically, once this state exists, collapse or transition (by whatever means) to a more effective form of government (of whatever type) usually follows.

That’s the Achilles Heel of a democratic republic.

Republics are resilient. A republic can survive many things, conflict, pestilence, civil unrest, widespread dissent, recession, depression, radical changes in fortune and society, and even civil war – but a population of ignorant simpletons?

A democratic republic can survive an unhappy restive population, but not a willfully ignorant and uncooperative one.

A growing proportion of our population appears to have discarded reason, intellect, and cooperation for fanaticism, for ignorance, for fear and hysteria, for unreasoning simplification.

A significant fraction of our population is now firmly convinced that violent revolution and civil war are the only ways to “save” the United States – the apparent logic being that in order to avoid supposed FEMA Reeducation Death Camps of Death, they must preemptively overthrow the government and herd all us unsavory types into … um, well, American Reeducation Camps of Christian Capitalist Patriotism, those of us that they don’t just shoot outright anyway.

Another fraction is firmly convinced that America, indeed civilization, isn’t worth the effort, they’d like to burn it all down and live in the ruins – because for them peering suspiciously out the gun ports of their bunker while eating salted rat under the flickering yellow light of kerosene lanterns is preferable to flush toilets and paying taxes.

Repudiation of education, abandonment of reason and intellect, and disdain for the spirit of cooperation – the very things our republic was founded on – are apparent at every turn of this bankrupt worldview and strongly apparent in those that we choose to represent us, i.e. the herd of braying jackasses we currently call the US Congress.

Increasingly, these simpletons want to erase the hard won advances of our predecessors, of science and technology, of society and civil rights, of advance and change and reason and cooperation, and retreat to what they think must have been a better time.

Now, of course, the United States has always had a stubborn core of religiously fueled uncompromising anti-intellectualism – ironic, given that the men who created America were as a group the most educated, intellectual, reasoned, and cooperative outfit to found any nation in recorded history.  But since the early 80’s the strident repudiation of intellect by a religion increasingly hostile to reason and obsessed with apocalypse and Dominion has grown exponentially and it shows in everything from creationism to climate-change denial to those that would gleefully let the world burn in order to realize some ridiculous muddleheaded mumbo-jumbo of biblical “prophecy.”

It’s not just that these people are predicting a new dark age, they’re actually looking forward to it.

The thing is, they might indeed lose their republic; but they’re not likely to get what they’re wishing for either.

Last week, John Stossel penned an opinion piece for Fox News where he randomly cherry picked the opinions of one Dr. Carl Richard, professor of history at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, to make some kind of half-assed doomsday comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and the United States.

Stossel’s OpEd is subtly entitled:  OMG! OMG! Will America soon fall, just as Rome did?!!!!!

Okay, I might have added the OMGs and the exclamation points, but I think the omission was obviously an oversight on Stossel’s part.

And OMG! is most certainly implicit in the text.

Stossel went to Princeton, and he’s supposed to be an experienced columnist, but frankly his essay looks like something that would garner a D- in any high school freshman English class. It’s chock-a-block with non sequiturs, fallacies of false comparison, outright historical falsehoods, odd little unattached paragraphs, and unattributed quotes.  Hell, even the title of the piece begs the question in a fallacy of circular logic.  Stossel can’t decide if the United States is a republic or an empire, which is probably why he keeps confusing the Roman Republic with the Roman Empire while doggedly trying to compare the two to the United States.

The article begins thus:

A group of libertarians gathered in Las Vegas recently for an event called “FreedomFest.” We debated whether America will soon fall, as Rome did.

Historian Carl Richard said that today’s America resembles Rome.

The Roman Republic had a constitution, but Roman leaders often ignored it. “Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year.”

Sounds like New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg.

“We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I’m not going to enforce certain laws because I don’t like them. ... That open flouting of the law is dangerous because law ceases to have meaning. ... I see that today. ... Congress passes huge laws they haven’t even read (as well as) overspending, overtaxing and devaluing the currency.”

The Romans were worse. I object to President Obama’s $100 million dollar trip, but Nero traveled with 1,000 carriages.

Tiberius established an “office of imperial pleasures,” which gathered “beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world” so, as Tacitus put it, the emperor “could defile them.”

Emperor Commodus held a show in the Colosseum [sic] at which he personally killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe.

To pay for their excesses, emperors devalued the currency. (Doesn’t our Fed do that by buying $2 trillion of government debt?)

Nero reduced the silver content of coins to 95 percent. Then Trajan reduced it to 85 percent and so on. By the year 300, wheat that once cost eight Roman dollars cost 120,000 Roman dollars.

Nowhere in this muddleheaded libertarian twaddle does Stossel attempt to actually address the ominous warning of the title with anything other than innuendo and hand waving.

We debated…

Debated?

In other words, a bunch of angry miserable libertarians (that’s redundant, isn’t it?) sat around in a big circle-jerk crying into their beer about how the country is going to hell and how everything is going to fall apart at any second, so get your guns and grab your womenfolk, time to head for the bunkers and don’t forget to pick up a brochure on how to make gunpowder from your own piss on the way out.

Debate means something else.

…whether America will soon fall, as Rome did.

Rome? Which Rome?

Rome didn’t just fall.

It wasn’t like one day there was a Rome and the next there was the Dark Ages and people were looking around with a confused expression on their faces, “what the hell happened to Rome?” “I dunno, did you look behind the couch?” “Of course I looked behind the couch, it’s not there!” “Well, where’s the last place you saw it?” “I dunno, Turkey maybe?

Rome evolved over a long, long period of time.  It grew and shrank and fought against itself and was sacked and burned and rebuilt. And which Rome are these libertarians talking about? The Village? The City State? The Kingdom which eventually evolved into the Republic? Which became The Empire? Which split into two empires which went their own separate ways, one of which just sort of faded away and one of which became a religious theocracy? All over a period of more than twelve hundred years?

If you’re going to compare the Current United States to Rome, you have to be a lot more specific.

The Roman Republic had a constitution…

Oh for crying out loud, for most of its history the Roman constitution was an informal hodge-podge of various guidelines and governmental principles passed down through the generations mostly by word of mouth or in collections of writings from various politicians. And the Roman Constitution continuously evolved over the years, and there were radically different versions depending on which period of “Rome” you’re talking about. The late Republic’s version resembled what we today would very loosely call common law. 

“Marius was elected consul six years in a row, even though under the constitution (he) was term-limited to one year.”
Sounds like New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg.

Sounds like New York City’s Mayor… ?

The Bloomberg Bogymen again? The hell?

I call Shenanigans.

Gaius Marius was Consul of the Roman Republic – the most powerful man in the known world at the time. History informally calls him “the third founder of Rome.” He was a general of the Roman Army, a soldier of Rome, a commander of Legions, a statesman in the original meaning of the word. Marius was a hard-eyed ruthless ambitious son of a bitch, he’s one of the guys responsible for changing Rome from a republic into an empire, along the way he conquered about half of Europe, provoked a rebellion that nearly turned into a civil war, and killed untold hundreds of thousands of people.

Michael Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City, which is one city of hundreds of cities within the United States and not even the country’s capital, hell it’s not even the state capital. Think about what that means. New york might be a big damned city, but it’s not a nation, Bloomberg is a mayor, not an emperor.  Bloomberg doesn’t command armies and far from conquering the Germanic tribes of Europe, or even their distant German descendants in his own state, Bloomberg is the guy who banned supersized Slurpees because he wanted people to live longer and be healthier and to save money that the government spends in order to care for the health problems caused by too much soda.  Liberals like to promote his name for governor of New York and for president of the United States, so far he’s declined to run for either. He was term limited out of office after his second hitch as mayor, but after New York City changed its election laws, Bloomberg was reelected for a third time.

Bloomberg’s reelection was perfectly legal, no violations of the US Constitution, the New York State Constitution, or even the Roman Constitution occurred.

Marius’ reelection was likewise legal.

While there’s some question as to which laws were actually in effect when Marius was reelected, those laws turn out to be moot since there was an invasion going on and, with Cimbrian barbarians at the gate, Rome wanted Marius the General in charge, so the laws against reelection were voided by the Roman Senate.

Also, Roman law and US law are wildly different animals, ditto the Roman Republic and the US one. They’re not comparable except in the broadest of outlines.

You want to direct Stossel to the fallacy of false  equivalency or should I?

“We have presidents of both parties legislating by executive order, saying I’m not going to enforce certain laws because I don’t like them. ... That open flouting of the law is dangerous because law ceases to have meaning ... ”

Who is Stossel quoting here? 

Is it just some random libertarian? Is it one of Stossel’s drinking buddies? Is it himself, does he quote himself the way Rush Limbaugh does? Is it that aforementioned historian? Who? Where did the quotes come from? What context were they uttered in? Where’s the source reference and associated link? The entire article is peppered with these unattached quotes. Hell, Stossel could be quoting Michael Bloomberg for all you can determine.

And what is it with these people and executive orders?

The president, whatever his party, isn’t legislating anything. That’s congress’s job – though they’re not doing much legislating either.

The president is the head of the Executive Branch of the US Government. That’s his job. The Executive Branch is the largest and most complex portion of the government, there are fifteen enormous departments under the Executive, and hundreds of agencies, bureaus, boards, offices, government owned corporations, inspectors general, charter organizations, commissions, and enterprises – and one of those departments includes the entire US military. How, exactly, do you think the president directs all of those people?

What? What’s that? You call it a what? And order from the executive?

Yeah.

Executive Orders apply only to agencies that fall under the Executive.

Executive orders must comply with the law, with the Constitution. They can be challenged by congress. They can be contested in court. The President cannot, repeat cannot, give you an order – unless you work for him.  He can’t give Congress or the Court an order. He can’t give business or industry an order – and in fact one of the few times an Executive Order was struck down by the court was when Harry Truman tried to give the steel industry orders.  Executive orders apply only to the executive branch of the government, that’s how the president – i.e. the Executive – manages his constitutional area of responsibility. Executive Orders have the force of law, but only for the Executive Branch of the government, and they are issued to clarify US federal law as legislated by congress as it applies to various executive agencies.

For example: if Congress passes a bill that makes unrestricted domestic spying on American citizens by NSA once again illegal (i.e. congress repeals certain articles of the Patriot and Protect America Acts and the president signs that into law), the intel spooks don’t just magically turn off the monitors. These are massive complicated programs, there are active funding lines (and that money has to be accounted for, it can’t just be spent elsewhere, it was specifically allocated for these programs by the NDAA and other bills. I.e. it’s the law), there are billions of dollars of assets in play, there are legal contracts with commercial companies that must be honored, there are thousands of people involved, there’s all that data. The office of the president has to issue an executive order to the Department of Defense (which is the authority NSA falls under) to bring the US intelligence community into compliance with the new law and describe the exact parameters under which the department will operate going forward, this is the president’s legal responsibility. The Secretary of Defense then issues more specific orders to DIRNSA (the director of the National Security Agency), who then issues his own orders via directive that address the very specific technical, procedural, and administrative actions to be taken.

This isn’t a secret. This is how the government works.

Do they not teach this stuff at Princeton any more?

And the president never said “I’m not going to enforce the law.” Never. Didn’t happen, never happened.

The president directed the Justice Department not to defend certain laws against legal challenge before the Supreme Court, that’s a whole different thing from not enforcing the law. 

There is no, repeat no, “open flouting of the law.” That’s just made up political horse puckey.

For example: If the president chooses not to defend the idiotic Defense of Marriage Act in court then that’s his decision as president. That’s why we elected him, twice. But until Section 3 of DOMA was struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 2013, the federal government under the president enforced the law as it stood. This isn’t open for argument, it’s plain provable fact.

Of course, this “Obama is not enforcing the law” bullshit isn’t really about defense of traditional marriage, is it?

It’s about illegal immigration.

Libertarians are ambivalent about same-sex marriage, but their panties are twisted into a hard tight little knot over the mere thought of illegal immigrants getting away with something.

That’s a hallmark of the libertarian philosophy, they’re all about flouting laws they themselves don’t agree with, especially when it comes to guns (in the name of liberty, of course) but angrily insist that everybody else toe the line.

The accusation of not enforcing immigration laws holds about as much water as the beef over DOMA – but you couldn’t prove that to fanatics and there’s not much point in trying.

The Romans were worse. I object to President Obama’s $100 million dollar trip, but Nero traveled with 1,000 carriages.

Tiberius established an “office of imperial pleasures,” which gathered “beautiful boys and girls from all corners of the world” so, as Tacitus put it, the emperor “could defile them.”

Emperor Commodus held a show in the Colosseum [sic] at which he personally killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe.

Jesus Haploid Christ, talk about the mother of all non sequiturs.

What the hell is Stossel trying to say here?  We’re like Rome but not really and besides the Romans were worse so I object to the cost of a presidential tour of multiple countries across Europe and Africa but 2000 years ago Roman emperors engaged in debauchery and slaughtered animals in a stadium that I’m too upset to even spell correctly [** Edit: See the footnote] which is so totally like meeting with heads of state to improve trade and relations with the US. Bleet bleet. Ook ook. Also, Nazis.

Dread Cthulhu, folks, an Ivy League educated journalist? Really? 

I don’t know about you, but at this point I’m starting to wonder who he had to blow to get the job.

To pay for their excesses, emperors devalued the currency. (Doesn’t our Fed do that by buying $2 trillion of government debt?) Nero reduced the silver content of coins to 95 percent. Then Trajan reduced it to 85 percent and so on. By the year 300, wheat that once cost eight Roman dollars cost 120,000 Roman dollars.

What the hell is a Roman “dollar?”

And how did we get from Commodus killing hippos to inflation? There isn’t even a connecting sentence. Seriously, what the fuck?

Again, what does this paragraph even mean?

Note: also, not exactly a great supporting argument for return to precious metal standards as libertarians demand, is it?

The rest of the article is of similar cut. Poorly reasoned, poorly structured, filled with fearful ominous gibberish that only serves to summarize the fevered undefined shadowy night-sweats of conservative terror.

But then again, the frightened angry people who read this silly nonsense aren’t doing so with red pen in hand and they aren’t actually demanding anything other than confirmation of their own hysterical undefined fears.  So I suppose it follows that Stossel has given up even pretending to be an actual journalist.  Stossel knows his audience, and his employer, and he gets paid the same for hysterical tripe and he does for actual journalism –  which is probably why he’s just phoning it in. 

This kind of dreck, journalists like Stossel and the declining standards of mainstream media, aren’t the cause of this disease, they’re a symptom of the larger cancer.

Articles like Stossel’s, and there are many, are indicators of a marked decline in intellectual rigor, in national integrity, in civil discourse, in reasoned dialog, and most especially in an informed, educated, and reasonable population.

Not only does a major, supposedly professional, news organization employ a “journalist” who would actually write such amateurish copy, editors who would accept it without correction, an owner and managing board that would allow such juvenile doomsaying to post unchecked under their imprimatur, but it also indicates that a significant fraction of the population accepts this nonsense with an unquestioning nod of their fearful ignorant heads.

A republic, especially one like ours, depends for its very existence on an educated, informed, and reasonable population that is willing to cooperate for the benefit of all.

A republic, most especially one like ours, cannot suffer fearful ignorant simpletons gladly.

Not for long anyway.

And not in the majority.

Stossel and his simpleton friends draw the wrong lesson from Rome.

The Roman Republic didn’t fall.

The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire.

Democracy gave way to dictatorship eight hundred years before the actual fall of Rome.

When the Roman Senate, i.e. the Roman legislative branch, fell to infighting and inaction, to ignorance and unreason and obstruction, when the legislature became incapable of cooperation and thus action, those with the will and the ambition seized power and declared themselves Emperor.

That’s the true danger of this ongoing deliberate simplification.

In a democratic republic, when the population is no longer capable of cooperation, when they eschew education and reason for ignorant superstition, then they are no longer capable of running the country and by default they give up their right and authority to do so.

And that, right there, is how republics die.

When the end comes to the American Republic it won’t be to the apocalyptic thunder of nuclear war.

It won’t be to the martial drumbeat of goose-stepping fascists, nor the clanking rumble of poorly made communist tanks.

The soundtrack of our demise won’t be the crash of falling buildings and exploding ordnance and the stutter of machinegun fire.

It’ll be to the simpleton cackle of that moronic laugh from the Beevis and Butthead cartoons, eh heh heh heh heh heh...

 

 

 

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* Walter M. Miller was a prolific writer of short fiction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was a “fix-up,” i.e. three of Miller’s previously published short stories were combined with additional material and rewrites to create a single novel. The book was supposedly inspired by Miller’s experience both as an engineer and as a tail gunner in the US Army Air Corps during WWII where he flew more than 50 missions over Italy and was present at the bombing of the Abbey at Monte Cassino. Miller was a hell of a short story writer and he penned some of the best short science fiction ever written, winning a Hugo Award for it. But he suffered terrible post traumatic stress disorder from his war experience and from horrible writer’s block when it came to novels – and especially with the pressure of crafting a suitable sequel to the fantastically successful Canticle (which won Miller another Hugo for best novel in 1960). He struggled with his demons and that sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, languished for years until he died under tragic circumstances with it unfinished. Science Fiction writer Terry Bisson completed the book from Miller’s outline and the novel was published under Miller’s name posthumously.

 

** (Update) From The Grammarist: Coliseum and colosseum are both common spellings of the word referring to (1) the famous Roman amphitheater built in the first century A.D., and (2) any large amphitheater used for sports or other public events. Neither spelling is considered wrong in either use, but while the forms are often used interchangeably, the famous structure in Rome is now usually spelled Colosseum, and coliseum is generally reserved for other uses. Exceptions are easily found, however, and there is no consensus evident in popular usage.

I stand corrected, Stossel’s spelling was acceptable. My apologies to Princeton University.