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Talking about Jacob Bronowski with Ari Armstrong

My new book, The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski, starts shipping today from Amazon.com, so if you preordered it already, it'll be in your mailbox when you get home, and if you haven't, shame on you--but you can get it now!

I talked about Bronowski, and also a little about the task of writing a biography, with my friend Ari Armstrong on his podcast, "Self in Society," and you can listen here.

Entrepreneurs in space

This week at The Objective Standard I look beyond the anniversary of the moon landing to the efforts by today's private firms to explore space.

Upcoming appearances

July 22 - Phoenix, AZ - Spirit of the Senses - Jacob Bronowski 

August 8 - San Francisco, CA - ABA annual meeting - Latest Challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act and Potential Implications for Equal Protection, Family Law, and Indian Law 

August 10 - Park City, UT - TOS-Con - Leading an Enlightenment life in an anti-Enlightenment world

August 28 - Sacramento, CA - Federalist Society - Jacob Bronowski 

September 20 - Madison, WI - Thommy Thompson Center - Frederick Douglass 

September 25 - Washington, D.C. - Center for Urban Renewal and Education - Frederick Douglass (info TBA)  [cancelled]

October 16 - Malibu, CA Costa Mesa, CA- Pepperdine University - The Permission Society

 

Zora Neale Hurston put nothing above independence

This week, at The Objective Standard, I take a look at a new book on the incomparable Zora Neale Hurston.

Somehow you keep exploring in my dreams

I wrote this poem a few years ago in tribute to Neil Armstrong, on the occasion of his death.

You must be up there still,
Neil, sliding down
that flimsy ladder, bolted
to the lander’s spindly
legs—aluminum,
like a jungle gym—
and poised to mess your new,
white boots with billion-year-
old silver dust; scuff up
some sand on that tranquil shore;
waving too fast in your home-
movies, making faces
safely behind your mirrored
mask. Your laughter crackles
back to grown-ups in Houston.
Summer vacation will last
forever. Out of sight.
Tonight again, you’re splashing
at Buzz in the Mare Cognitum,
or bouncing after a ball
out of bounds. Man in the
Moon, gleaming like
an upturned smile. Hail
Columbia; Peter Pan;
Captain America; Nostalgia
Man. No, not man,
Mankind. Host of Daydreams,
you keep flying toward
that earthrise; fling yourself
at a horizon that falls away
as you approach, around
and around forever.

(from Medusa's Kitchen, Aug. 27, 2012).

My new book--available for preorder on Amazon (again)

There was a bit of a hiccup with regard to my new book, The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski, which was available for preorder on Amazon, and then was briefly removed. It's now back up for sale, I'm glad to say, and will ship July 31.

More about it here.

Recent developments in Indian Child Welfare Act litigation: moving toward equal protection?

My latest law review article, "Recent Developments in Indian Child Welfare Act Litigation: Moving Toward Equal Protection?" is now available in the Texas Review of Law & Politics.

The article examines some important recent ICWA cases, including the Utah Supreme Court's bizarre decision in In re. B.B., the Ohio Court of Appeals' excellent ruling in the recent case of In re. C.J. Jr., and of course the big one, the Texas federal district court's decision finding major portions of ICWA unconstitutional, in Brackeen v. Zinke (now on appeal).

George Will, me, and Andrew Hyman on the Declaration and the Constitution

I'm touched that George Will's July 4 column favorably cites my book, The Conscience of the Constitution in support of the argument that, to understand the Constitution, one must also grasp the philosophical foundation for the Constitution set forth in the Declaration of Indepenence.

This really shouldn't be a startling thesis at all, but many conservatives are hostile to it because they would prefer to see a more collectivist, "states rights" interpretation of the Constitution prevail, instead. Relying on historians of the "classical republicanism" school, who have tried to downplay the significance of classical liberalism in the American Revolution, these theorists contend that the war was really fought over the so-called "right" of "self-government," and that the natural rights the Declaration speaks of either don't exist at all or really referred only to the powers of the colonies to establish rules that controlled the decisions of their residents. As Harry Jaffa explained far beyond my poor power to add or detract, this is in fact precisely the opposite of the original intentions of the authors of the Constitution. It is, rather, the argument John Calhoun fashioned in the 1830s, in an effort to deny the truths of the Declaration and to transform the Constitution into the reverse of what it was actually designed to be: a bulwark for individual rights properly understood.

Among those who don't properly understand them are Andrew Hyman, who argues this "classical republicanism" thesis on The Originalism Blog. He begins (as is common, I'm afraid, of writers of this stripe) with a straw man, claiming that Will and I believe in "federal judicial supremacy," a position neither of us has ever endorsed. It is true, of course, that it is one job of the judiciary to identify and protect individual rights. The founders well understood this, and said so many, many times. But at no point have I or Will ever said that federal courts are "supreme" in any sense. Rather, this claim is based on the fallacious idea that the federal judiciary is undemocratic, when (as I explain in my book) they are certainly not.

Another straw-man argument Hyman employs (again typical of the classical republican view) is to imply that there is a necessary collision between "representative democracy" and individual liberty. In fact, such a contradiction exists only in the minds of those who fail to appreciate the classical liberal view articulated in the Declaration. The Declaration does not, however, deny the validity of representative democracy, but on the contrary, explains and justifies it. It states that we begin as free individuals, and then agree to come together to create a government, which we then vest with the power to protect our antecedent individual rights. That government is valid only insofar as it respects those rights, but if it becomes destructive to those ends, it can be altered or abolished. In other words, rights come first; government second--and it is those rights that give legitimacy to "representative democracy." Hyman gets this backwards when he suggests that these two principles are somehow in conflict or that "representative democracy" creates our rights or is responsible for our enjoyment of them. That is a proposition the founders not only did not endorse, but that they expressly rejected.

Among the string of fallacious arguments Hyman offers against the founders' views is that "both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments provide mechanisms for taking liberty away, no matter how broad it is, subject to the exceptions elsewhere in the Constitution." This is, of course, not an argument at all, because it begs the question of what "liberty" really means. Liberty means (in Jefferson's words) "unobstructed action according to our will, within the limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’; because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual." Since one has no rightful liberty to harm another, the govenrment is not violating our rights when it bars us from harming one another. Hyman, however, fails to respect the difference between liberty rightly understood (freedom to act while respecting the rights of others) and totally unlimited action irrespective of the rights of others. This is, again, an error no founding father would have made, as they knew Locke's statement that "freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man's humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own."

Hyman's argument, such as it is, is based on disregarding this fundamental distinction, and viewing liberty as merely the ability to act, full stop. His next step is to claim that the way we distinguish what actions are permitted and which are not is to turn to the voters and ask them to tell us what freedoms we can and cannot have, because otherwise we'd have anarchy. Whatever one might say about that argument, it is not one the founders endorsed; rather, it is one they rejected in both the Declaration and its Constitution. "An elective despotism was not the government we fought for," said Jefferson, "but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced,,,as that no one could transcend their legal limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the others." By essentially arguing for a passive judiciary, Hyman is seeking to tear down that system of checks and balances, and along with it the "free principles" which in Hyman's view aren't really principles at all, if the majority doesn't approve of them.

Hyman concludes that "The Declaration of Independence was not meant to defend only individual liberty, but also collective and political liberty. It speaks of 'a free people' organized into 'free and independent states.' Those aspirations are reflected in the democratic architecture of the Constitution, which could all be irretrievably destroyed by rashly transferring power over every fundamental political question to a largely unaccountable federal judiciary which was never meant to play such a role." This is, as I've said, wholly a straw man argument, since neither Will nor I have ever suggested transferring power (rashly or otherwise) over "every fundamental political question" to federal courts. It is also false, in that the federal judiciary is not unaccountable, or that the courts were "never meant" to play the role of deciding essential questions about defining individual rights; in fact that is amont the most important jobs the founders entrusted them with, and is and has always been, among the basic tasks of the judiciary in the Anglo-American common law tradition.

But more important than all these fallacies is the idea that the "collective liberty" Hyman refers to is somehow in collision with the principles of individual liberty it details. The opposite is true: the Declaration gives us a hierarchically structured argument familiar to anyone who's read Locke, Sidney, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, etc.: the "collective liberty" enjoyed by states is given to them by free individuals who have more fundamental individual rights, and those states are deputies of the people, not their masters. 

"Was, then, the American Revolution effected," wrote Madison when he was confronted by arguments virtually identical to those Hyman advances,

was the precious blood of thousands spilt, and the hard-earned substance of millions lavished, not that the people of America should enjoy peace, liberty, and safety, but that the government of the individual States...might enjoy a certain extent of power, and be arrayed with certain dignities and attributes of sovereignty...? [This is] the impious doctrine...that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people....  [T]he public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object....  [A]s far as the sovereignty of the States cannot be reconciled to the happiness of the people, the voice of every good citizen must be, Let the former be sacrificed to the latter.

That Hyman ignores this basic element of originalism is still not as bad as the moral relativism inherent in his unspoken premise that "fundamental political questions" are to be decided by the "collective" he refers to. That is the very opposite of what the founders intended. The most basic premise of the entire American experiment is that truly fundamental matters are not subject to the dictate of either a single king or a majority, but are rather dictated by "the laws of nature and of nature's god." That is to say, our rights are inherent in us because of our humanity, and are to be discovered by and respected by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches--not decided by them. That is the principle to which the founders pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, and for which "the precious blood of thousands was spilt." Fortunately for us, it appears today, that we have only straw men left to fight.

Robert Hayden, American poet

I wrote this piece for The Objective Standard this week, but they would not publish it, so I thought I’d share it with you here:

 

Robert Hayden didn’t like being called a black poet. It placed him, he said, “in a kind of literary ghetto where the standards applied to other writers are not likely to be applied.” He preferred to be thought of simply as an American poet.

He certainly was that. Indeed, few authors have produced more insightful and lovingly crafted poetry about American history and culture than he. Hayden—who served as poet laureate in the bicentennial year of 1976—belongs on every July 4 reading list.

Born in a Detroit slum in 1913, he discovered poetry as a child. A social worker who saw him reading Countee Cullen’s anthology Color while standing in a welfare line took it upon herself to get him a scholarship to Detroit City College, where he met important writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Later, studying at the University of Michigan, he met W. H. Auden, who become his most important literary influence.

Auden wrote highly intellectual poetry that emphasized precision and insight more than emotional confession. More importantly, he shunned the ideological obsessions of many of his contemporaries. While many mid-20th-century poets viewed themselves as spokesmen for political causes, especially Marxism, Auden thought they should aim at broader themes, and although he wrote political poetry, he never wrote propaganda. Hayden, too, came to shun narrow, political poetry, which he saw as having “negligible literary value . . . because it [is] more rhetorical and programmatic than imaginative.”

It cost Hayden much to take that position; black radicals of the 1960s labeled him an “Uncle Tom” for refusing to devote his writing exclusively to racial protest. Yet Hayden did write about race, and did so indignantly, understandingly, movingly, and even magnanimously. In “Middle Passage,” for instance, he articulates the experience of slaves chained in the bellies of dark ships. In “On Lookout Mountain,” he reflects on the eerie sense of history he feels at a picnic spot that was once a bloody Civil War battlefield:

A world away, yet nearer than our hope
or our belief, the scions of that fighting climb endless hills of war. . . .
Have done, have done.

And he wrote elegies for Malcom X, John Brown, and Frederick Douglass—this last being one of his finest works. In it, Hayden celebrates the legacy of liberty that the abolitionist strove to realize: “this man / shall be remembered . . . / with the lives grown out of his life, the lives / fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.”

Hayden also did write protest poetry, but instead of the off-putting confessional style in vogue in the Vietnam era, he focused primarily on producing good art. Among the “dubious assumptions” held by mid-20th-century writers, said Hayden, was “that the ability to ‘express oneself’ is more important than craftsmanship.” Writers of this persuasion were “hailed in some quarters as the ‘voices of revolution.’ But the truly revolutionary poets are those who are committed to some integrative vision of art and life.”

Hayden’s integrative vision was rooted both in love for America and an objectivity about its history and culture. In “Witch Doctor,” for example, he’s skeptical about the inner-city preacher resplendent in what we would today call “bling,” who lectures worshippers with “wildering vocables / hypnotic no-words planned (and never failing) / to enmesh his flock,” and who secretly considers himself God. On the other hand, he could celebrate even the meagre joys of his impoverished childhood, as in “‘Summertime and the Living,’” or in his most famous and most moving poem, “Those Winter Sundays.”

Exceptionally disciplined, Hayden obsessed over the sound and weight of his words—one reason his complete poems comprise fewer than two hundred pages—and strove to express meaningful and timeless truths. Calling himself a “romantic realist,” he insisted that “art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos,” and the order he found in American life lay in its striving—often violently or reluctantly—to realize the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

This becomes clear in “[American Journal],” published not long before his 1980 death, which imagines a space alien reporting back to the “Counselors” on his home planet about the Americans he’s secretly observed. The Counselors think Americans “a decadent people,” but “i / do not find them decadent.” There is “some thing essence / quiddity” about them that makes them special:

we are an ancient race and have outgrown illusions cherished here  item   their vaunted
liberty  no body pushes me around i have heard
Them say   land of the free they sing

Though the alien is too cynical to “exist among [Americans] for long,” he finds himself drawn to “their variousness their ingenuity / their elan vital.” America, he concludes, is “as much a problem in metaphysics as / it is a nation.” In poetry delicately and eloquently worded, Robert Hayden expressed the solution to that problem, by giving voice to the enduring spirit of independence at the heart of the American Dream.

Pasiphaë on the Simple Life

I have a contribution to The American Scholar’s “Next Line Please” blog—a pseudo-sonnenizio I call “Pasiphaë on the Simple Life”: 

Come live with me and be my love,” he said.
I didn’t know by “live” he meant abide.
Survive. Exist. For surely it’s not living
to be denied what makes you feel alive—
Aea with its lively salons, art,
music, lights. Here there’s only olive
trees and goats and work the live-long day,
and maids who drive you livid with their tales
of insipid romances of lives
past. I’ve told Minos the Simple I’ve
got to have more, but he lives—
despite his gold and silver and liveried
slaves—an unenlivened life. Dull.
Undelivered. Dead-alive. Unfull.