JUST A RETURN TO HUME:

What Is Postmodernity? (Zygmunt Bauman, October 10, 2024, Church Life Journal)

When Toynbee first announced spotting a gray postmodern era that stretched at the other end of the Modern Age, what he meant was simply indeterminacy. What this way of coining the name (particularly the use of the prefix “post” as the only differentiating/signifying unit) conveyed, in the first place, was the absence (or ignorance) of any positive distinctive features which, in addition to setting the hazy prospect apart from the preceding period, could also give it a degree of internal unity and an identity of its own.

The Anglosphere avoided the catastrophe of Modernity because our philosophers always recognized that Reason was incapable of internal unity and thus could have no distinct identity. It was a faith all along.

THE FOUNDING DID NOT BEGIN IN THE 1700s:

The Lasting Importance of the Case of Proclamations (John Kennerly Davis, Oct 26, 2024, federalist Society)

In the fall of 1610, representatives of Parliament officially requested Sir Edward Coke and three other noted jurists to provide Parliament with a formal legal opinion as to whether and to what extent the King could rule by proclamation in contradiction of the limits set by the laws enacted by Parliament. Specifically, Parliament asked the jurists for their opinion on the legality of two proclamations that had been recently issued by the King, one to prohibit the construction of additional new buildings in London and one to outlaw the making of wheat starch used to stiffen the dress collars widely worn at the time.

After taking the matter under advisement for several weeks, the jurists issued their opinion in the Case of Proclamations. The opinion found that the King could not, by proclamation, create new offenses or arbitrarily extend his administrative reach into areas not sanctioned by the laws enacted by Parliament.

As Coke notes in the opinion, “the King cannot change any part of the common law, nor create any offense, by his proclamation, which was not an offense before, without parliament.” This is so because, “The King has no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him.”

James resisted the judgment and continued to argue that his proclamations had the force of statutes enacted by parliament. Nevertheless, the opinion was issued and the case decided. The vitally important principles of law, limited government, and separation of powers were strongly affirmed. These principles would inspire the English Bill of Rights in 1689 and our own Constitution in 1787.

They should continue to inspire us today as we labor to preserve our constitutional order against the relentless onslaught of those who work tirelessly to extend by regulatory proclamations the arbitrary reach of the administrative state into areas not sanctioned by the laws enacted by our Congress.

WE HAVEN’T FACED AN EXTERNAL THREAT SINCE BEFRIENDING BRITAIN:

Are We Too Worried About International Threats?: We should chill out and let the threats to America self-destruct—even China (John Mueller, Oct 31, 2024, Discourse)

Because of its size and economic growth, China is now in second place globally in total GDP (though 78th in per capita GDP), a position it has occupied for most of the past two millennia. Partly impelled by that development, it wants to be seen as a “great power.” As part of this, China is seeking to gain “influence” and “to assert dominance in East Asia and project influence globally” by lending money through its Belt and Road Initiative to a vast array of other countries and by engaging from time to time in “wolf warrior diplomacy” using economic and military muscle to badger and to bully.

However, these efforts have been remarkably futile and counterproductive. Rather than generating admiration or obedience from countries that once wished it well, resentment at its “wolf warrior” antics has soared not only in the West but also in important neighbors like Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Australia and, most significantly, Taiwan, pushing some of them further into the embrace of the United States.

The Belt and Road Initiative is awash in unpaid debt, and loan outlays were cut from $75 billion in 2016 to $4 billion in 2019. As former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has recently observed, “The BRI is often depicted as helping China win hearts and minds, but in reality it is not winning anything” as recipients grow “frustrated with the corruption, poor safety and labor standards, and fiscal unsustainability associated with its projects.”

China’s Taiwan Weakness
The report sees China’s potential future invasion of Taiwan as its first salvo in its drive to “dominate” East Asia. To supply his military with some guidance, Xi has given it the goal of being able to successfully invade Taiwan by 2027, a mission that the report and many others in the West consider ominous. However, Timothy Heath of RAND points out that in setting that timeline, Xi was seeking primarily “to keep the military focused on its goal of becoming more professional and resist tendencies of slipping into corruption and lethargy,” and that there appears to be no evidence of an intent, in anything like the immediate or not-so-immediate future, to actually invade. Xi himself is reported to be exasperated at the West’s claim and insists that plans to invade in 2027 (or, for that matter, in 2035) simply do not exist.

Moreover, the problems accompanying such an effort are likely to be sobering to military planners. The report does note that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be economically devastating, but it fails to note the difficulty, emphasized by many in the U.S. military, of a massive amphibious landing: Stormy seas and weather rule out landings for the vast majority of the year, and potential landing beaches are small in number and well-fortified. In addition, resistance in the form of guerrilla and urban warfare in the mountainous interior by some of the 20 million intensely hostile Taiwanese residents could prove to be extensive.

Moreover, in the contingency considered by some analysts to be “most likely,” a military conquest of Taiwan would require China to outdo Pearl Harbor by raining thousands of missiles not only on Taiwan but on American military bases and ships in Japan and Guam. The judgment of the CIA, according to its director William Burns last year, is that “President Xi and his military leaders have doubts today about whether they could accomplish that invasion,” and that “if they look at Putin’s experience in Ukraine, that’s probably reinforced some of those doubts.”

Impelled by such considerations, longtime diplomat and China-watcher Ambassador Winston Lord has concluded that the chances of an invasion of Taiwan in the next decade or two are “somewhere between one and two percent.”

The Potential for Chinese Decline or Stagnation
A more plausible occurrence is that rather than rising to anything that could be conceived as “dominance,” China could decline into substantial economic stagnation.

AS maga CALLS IT, bIDENOMICS:

The Dow jumps 150 points as strong earnings and GDP growth boost stocks (Vinamrata Chaturvedi, October 30, 2024, AP)

The Dow and other major indices jumped Wednesday morning, fueled by a stronger-than-expected earnings report from Alphabet (GOOGL) Google’s parent company, and new GDP data signaling a stable U.S. economy. Released just days before the U.S. election, the third-quarter Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report showed an annualized growth rate of 2.8%.

PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE THEY FEEL THREATENED BY MORALITY:

Quebec’s Secularism Laws Are About Control, Not Freedom: My teaching career ended because I chose to keep my hijab (Fatemeh Anvari, 10/28/24, MacLean’s)

I spent my childhood in Tehran and moved to Ottawa when I was 10 years old. After some years, we returned to Iran to be closer to family. There, I earned an English literature degree and taught English to students of all ages; working with young children brought me the most joy. In 2017, when I was 23, I moved back to Canada and pursued a master’s in education at the University of Ottawa. I’d spent most of my life in Iran, where the ruling regime took away many of our basic freedoms and controlled women’s bodies by enforcing the hijab. Canada felt like a place where I could be myself, where diversity and freedom of expression were celebrated. Or so I thought.

I first heard about Quebec’s proposed Bill 21 in the second year of grad school, during a discussion with one of my university professors. The bill was part of Premier François Legault’s push for laïcité, a secular principle that emphasizes the separation of religion and state. Specifically, the bill would ban public servants in positions of authority—including teachers, police officers, doctors and judges—from wearing religious symbols. This meant no Christian crosses, no Muslim hijabs, no Sikh dastars and no Jewish kippahs. I was shocked. How could this be happening in Canada, a country that celebrates diversity? My professor reassured me that it wouldn’t happen. “Not in Canada,” she said. However, in June of the following year, it passed into law.

A few months later, I moved to Gatineau, Quebec, where I planned to work as a supply teacher in English-language public schools. I applied to jobs and eventually got a call from a school asking me to come in to teach. I wondered what would happen when I showed up and they saw that I wore a hijab. I was nervous they’d turn me away. But that wasn’t the case; I got the job without any issues. The English Montreal School Board, or EMSB, the largest English-language public school board in Quebec, even argued to the Superior Court of Quebec that Bill 21 shouldn’t apply to English schools, citing the need to protect minority language rights. Although the Superior Court upheld most of Bill 21 in April of 2021, they agreed with the EMSB and made an exemption for English schools. The Quebec government wasted no time appealing that decision.

In October of that year, I was hired at an English elementary school in Chelsea, near Gatineau, teaching third-grade English Language Arts and serving as a homeroom teacher. At the time, the English school exemption was still in the appeal process, and I was optimistic that it would stand. However, less than two weeks after my contract started, the Quebec Court of Appeal rejected a request to temporarily exempt English schools from Bill 21 while the appeal was ongoing. This means that I was not allowed to wear my hijab at the school anymore.

HATING GREENS WON’T STOP THE LAWS OF ECONOMICS:

The Expedia of solar panels confirms new rooftop panels are more powerful than ever — and it’s leading to enormous savings: It has fueled the adoption of solar energy on an unprecedented scale. (Elijah McKee, October 28, 2024, The Cool Down)

[T]he technology is more powerful than ever, with a single cell capable of producing over 400 watts. And get this: 97% of them do exactly that — another huge step up from just four years ago, when most panels performed below that mark, according to a marketplace report by EnergySage.

This colossal evolution of solar power is not just a cool fact. It has also fueled the adoption of solar energy on an unprecedented scale and had real impacts on the financial benefits of switching residential and commercial fuse boxes over to solar.

For example, the lifetime energy savings after installing rooftop panels can now be as high as $33,000, Forbes reported.

WHY CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS:

J.B. Mauney conquered the toughest bulls in the world. As he prepares to enter the Bull Riding Hall of Fame, he reflects on the injury that made him hang it up (Ryan Osborne, May 7, 2024, WFA)

He arrived in Lewiston as beat up as ever — breaks in his left leg and foot and right ankle — and he drew an old bull named Arctic Assassin.

He lowered into the chute for his first go-around.

Arctic Assassin spun and kicked out of the gate, and Mauney “sat down on my ass.” That mistake, as subtle as it was, knocked his timing out of sync. He started to fall, and then one last kick launched him into a backflip.

“I just round-assed off the thing,” Mauney says now, describing a predicament that makes more sense seen than heard.

He landed on the side of his head and rolled onto his knees. When he pushed down to stand up, he felt it: His neck had broken.

“Felt like somebody stuck a hot knife right in the back of my neck,” Mauney says. “I’d broke my back before, so I knew. I was like, ‘Son of a b—-, I just broke my neck.”

Mauney continues explaining the rest of it: the trip to the hospital, the surgery, the doctor’s orders — no more bull riding, at the risk of paralysis or death — and, finally, his decision a week later to retire from bull riding for good.

Then he walks across the front pasture at the XV Ranch, and calls out to an old black bull.

“C’mon, biggun!” Mauney shouts as he kicks over a bucket of feed.

After one more call, Arctic Assassin lumbers over.

DEMOCRACY IS A FUNCTION OF THE LONGBOW:

Who was the real St Crispin, and what did he have to do with the Battle of Agincourt? (Ian Morton, October 25, 2024, Country Life)

Critical to the outcome of the Battle of Agincourt were the English archers, some 7,000 forming the bulk of Henry’s army, pouring a torrent of arrows into the ranks of the French, who were jammed together and bogged down on a muddy field between two woods. Archers were the artillery of the age, the word coming from Middle French, meaning the provision of weapons, including projectiles. Chaucer mentioned the term in The Canterbury Tales of 1405. The bow and the arrow were artillery before cannon, powder and shot. Royal Artillery gunners with the surname Archer, Bowman, Bowyer or Fletcher may inherit closer links with history than they might suppose.

UNIVERSAL LAWS DRAFTED IN PARTICIPATORY FASHION:

A Principled Revolution: a review of Public Philosophy and Patriotism by Paul Seaton (Richard M. Reinsch, Law & Liberty)

Seaton also looks to identity politics’ binary of oppressed vs. oppressor and its replacement of individual rights with group rights. How does the Declaration’s articulation of individual rights, and its inherent appeal to the rule of law, deliberation, limited government, representation, and a people united under God for its support of liberty against oppression stand against the binary of identity politics, with its insistence that limitless government is needed to serve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or what is the same: racial and gender socialism? Identity politics brings tremendous passion in the service of justice but does so in the complete dismissal of every institution in American life that it confronts, promising the transvaluation of every cardinal and civic virtue to achieve group justice for the oppressed. It promises to unleash tremendous injustice on individuals in the service of its future promises.

Who does identity politics speak for, Seaton asks? While identity politics claims to rectify past injustices it revels in present injustice by subsuming the human person into racial and gender characteristics, removing man from his highest feature: reason. Those drafting and approving the Declaration were sent by rebellious public authorities to promulgate a verdict of separation on behalf of the colonies, a judgment accepted by the people. They spoke comprehensively on behalf of the persons in the colonies who were being denied the protections of the law, preventing them from flourishing as individuals in community with others. It was precisely because individuals as moral creatures, made to pursue happiness freely, were being denied this right by arbitrary government, that the colonists rebelled. Contrast this with the understanding of power and speech displayed by identity politics leaders, who state that only the designated victim groups should speak on behalf of their justice. Thus, they are permitted to cast impossible demands for justice on those whose word is officially devalued because of their group trait as historical oppressors. Nothing could be further from the deliberation and argumentation in the Declaration.

Where equality of opportunity requires removing interference with liberty, equality of outcome requires imposing interference.

THE TEXT AND EVERYTHING AFTER:

First Moon Colony: A star physicist teaches us how to read the Torah, book by book. First up: Genesis. (Jeremy England, October 21, 2024, The Tablet)

Editor’s note: This is the first of five columns by Jeremy England. England is an American-born physicist noted for his argument that the spontaneous emergence of life may be explained by the extra energy absorbed and dissipated during the formation of exceptionally organized arrangements of molecules. He is also a rabbi. In this series, he will teach modern readers how to understand the Torah, one book at a time. First up is Genesis, a book that, according to England, establishes a specific truth—one that many of us, under the sway of the Enlightenment’s caricature of biblical thinking, misunderstand: “God is not a claim about the facts of the world to be proved or disproved, but rather is the focus for a method we are meant to use to interpret the events of our lives and the world.” —The Editors

Here are a few tips for how to read Genesis. Assume the book’s account of God is absolutely correct, which means He wrote it, as well as all other books and your genome. Assume God knows everything you know, everything you could know, and more. Assume God is the unfettered author of your life, world history, and the universe. Infer, therefore, that the Hebrew Bible—“Tanakh”—is unique not because its existence expresses the Creator’s will (since that’s true of everything there is) but rather because its content serves as the Creator’s official autobiography and a job description for His willing servants. Given all this, note that trying to prove its statements to be factually true or false is about as confused as trying to reach someone on the phone by dialing the license plate number on his car.

You don’t have to be an Albert Einstein or a Richard Feynman to know that plants need sun to grow. So when plants make their first appearance in Genesis “before” the sun does, even the most skeptical student of the text might conclude that he is not, in fact, perusing a simple chronology. If he manages, just for a moment, to forget how our post-biblical culture expects us to read biblical text, he might even notice that a basic message of the seven days of creation is that true statements about God are guaranteed to sound enigmatic in some way.

While this is an evident enough point to discuss with an interested 7-year-old Jewish day school student, it was lost on a great many Jewish atheist theoretical physicists during the last hundred years. Never has so much intelligence done so little to justify arrogance as when Feynman or Steve Weinberg mouthed off about theology. For all their genius, these Wicked Sons were never taught to read, and so, sadly, when it came to the subject of Eden or Abraham they applied their intellects to bludgeoning straw men and sniping at a heritage they did not even try to understand.

I too was once a Jewish atheist theoretical physicist, who, like many others, grew up worshipfully reading Feynman’s memoirs, hoping to understand “the universe” as profoundly as he and Weinberg and a dozen other Torah-rein 20th-century yidden had. However, through a series of providentially happy accidents, I managed eventually to get a glimpse past the smokescreen. Imagine my shock to discover that the most profound and free-ranging intellectual pursuit I had ever experienced—Torah study—had been distorted or even deliberately obscured from view by the pontifications of my childhood heroes. Weinberg once said, “[Scientific education] is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing, too!” Today I can retort that quantum field theory may be fun and useful, but it only ever amounts to playing around in one little sandbox according to a stultifyingly narrow set of mathematical rules. Maybe one day I will forgive Weinberg and Feynman for the way they stunted my understanding of the world and mankind’s condition in it, but I’ll have to avenge myself on them first.

The best revenge I can think of is to turn the eye of a physicist to righting the false trail laid out by Weinberg and others. Proper scientific education is favorable to proper religious belief, and vice versa, and it’s a good thing, too.

So let’s begin.