Article from 2012.
Category Archives: Gary North
How 1936 Consolidated the Progressives’ Triumph in 1913
Article by Gary North.
Excerpts:
Until the myth of Keynes and the myth of Franklin Roosevelt, which are closely entwined, are refuted in a series of comprehensive, scholarly materials, and then translated into materials accessible to the general public, and rhetorically effective among bright high school students who are in homeschool programs, we will remain on the receiving end of the Establishment’s overwhelming control of the media and academia. The World Wide Web offers a way to get around both of these Establishment operations, but in these two fundamental areas of American history — the New Deal and Keynes’s original introduction to Keynesianism — we have not yet begun to fight.
The intellectual battles over the New Deal and Keynes were part of a continuing war. Conservatives and libertarians lost both in 1936, but not because of their lack of theory. Mises had provided the basis of the answer in 1912 with The Theory of Money and Credit. Hayek also had the foundation: Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933). But neither of them sat down in 1936 to write definitive answers to Keynes. Neither of them ever did. Mises wrote a major book in 1957: Theory and History. By then, Keynes was triumphant in Western academia. Hayek’s final book was in 1988: The Fatal Conceit.
You have to fight when the battle comes to you. It is not good enough to be well armed. You have to stand your ground and fight.
Loss of Faith: The Coming Break-Up of the Nation-State
Article by Gary North from 23rd September 2011.
Excerpts:
In 1953, his [Robert Nisbet’s] book, The Quest for Community, was published by Oxford University Press. It received some attention, mostly favorable, but it was hardly a bestseller. He asked these questions: “Why was it that the modern world had turned to totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century? What had taken place in the societies that gave birth to totalitarianism?” He concluded that it had to do with the breakdown of social order. Those institutions to which men had given allegiance throughout history, such as the family, the church, the guild, the fraternal order, and similar voluntary institutions, had faded in importance in the twentieth century. This left only the isolated individual and the modern nation-state. Men gained a sense of belonging through their participation in mass-movement politics. Totalitarian leaders began to attract individuals who were isolated, even though they were living in large cities. These leaders were able to offer a sense of brotherhood to millions of people who felt alone in the midst of cities. The modern totalitarian state functioned as a substitute for the family, church, and voluntary associations that for millennia had given people a sense of purpose and participation. So, totalitarianism was born out of radical individualism, institutionally speaking, even though as a philosophy, totalitarianism is completely opposed to individualism.
Man is cut off from any source of positive or negative sanctions in response to a transcendent system of morals. So, with the triumph of Darwinism and secularism, faith in transcendental morality has disappeared among the intellectuals. This in turn has undermined their faith in progress. There is no way to define progress unless there is a universal scale of values, meaning good, bad, and worst: the guides for mankind. The god of any society is the source of its laws and the enforcer of these laws. In the Darwinian universe, this means collective mankind. The trouble is, mankind cannot be trusted, precisely because mankind is afflicted with moral perversity.
Then he raises a crucial issue. This is the issue of what he calls religious renewal. “Whatever their future, the signs are present — visible in the currents of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, even millennialism found in certain sectors of Judaism and Christianity. Even the spread of the occult and the cult of the West could well be one of the signs of a religious renascence, for, as it is well known, the birth of Christianity or rather its genesis as a world religion in Rome during and after the preaching of Paul was surrounded by a myriad of bizarre face and devotions.” There are also other signs. “By every serious reckoning the spell of politics and the political, strong since at least the seventeenth century, is fading. It is not simply a matter of growing disillusionment with government bureaucracy; fundamentally, it is declining faith in politics as a way of mind and life” (p. 356). With politics fading as a religion, there could be a revival of supernatural religion. That, too, was basic to the replacement of Roman empire by Christendom, although Nisbet never said this explicitly.
The importance of the language of theology and millenarianism for the Marxist revolutions
In 1988, Dr. Gary North gave a speech on Karl Marx and Marxism. The portion relevant here starts at this point and extends to the end about 12 minutes later.
Here’s what he says: In 1660, when Charles II acceded the English throne, it was clear the Puritan revolution had failed. From then on, the language, but not the system, of political tracts was secularised. For example, prior to 1660 there was regularly talk of the three ages of man being the age of the Father, the age of the Son and the age of the Holy Spirit. After that date, especially in the 19th century, there was often talk of the age of religion, the age of metaphysics and the age of reason.
This fed into the Marxian belief in an atheist millennium that was about to be ushered in, in fact that it was assumed to be “inevitable”.
However, the professional revolutionaries hit a brick wall in 1965, North says. And that was the undeniability of the failure of a socialist revolution in Indonesia. In a strong counter-revolution, 100.000 ethnic Chinese were killed by “racial anti-communists”. These, I assume, were Muslims (North doesn’t say).
North goes on to say that from then on, communists realised they couldn’t take over a country with deep religious roots. They would have to restructure their ideology and pitch and re-write their pamphlets.
They realised that they have to have a religious and theological foundation if they wanted to capture the minds of the people.
Out of these thoughts was born the “liberation theology”, which was, or is, particularly active in Latin America.
North finishes by saying that recruitment for revolutionary movements is based on a vision of world transformation and whose side you need to get on to drive progress toward a “new world order”.
My interpretation of North’s words here: From 1965, “Stalinist” communists implicitly agreed with the early “cultural Marxist” Antonio Gramsci, whom they had up until then treated as a heretic. The Italian Gramsci had in the 1920s written essentially that in Europe a Bolshevik revolution would not succeed because of the “cultural hegemony” of the Catholic church. It was these writings that inspired the Frankfurt School a generation later to their – largely successful – cultural revolution which has totally marginalised the church, where it has not been co-opted.
The Traditional Enemies of the Caesars of This World
Orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians
Excerpt from Gary North’s book “The Judeo-Christian Tradition” (1990), which can be downloaded for free here.
From the conclusion (pp. 160-162):
For the Sake of the Peace
I have done my best to honor Orthodox Judaism. When Orthodox Jews tell me that they honor the Talmud, I accept this statement as true. I do not attempt to argue that they really don’t accept it as true, that they really and truly take it only metaphorically, that “no rational person could believe such things in today’s world.” In short, I do not treat them as theological liberals treat me and those like me. If a man says that he believes something, and if he is a member of a group that has repeatedly been persecuted for adhering to certain ideas, then I assume that he is telling me the truth. He really does believe what he says he believes.
What the Orthodox Jews says that he believes is the Talmud. He also says that he believes in the Torah, what I call the Old Testament. I think that the Talmud is unfaithful to the Old Testament. The Orthodox Jew – or any Jew, for that matter – thinks that the New Testament is unfaithful to the Old Testament. What we have here is not a failure to communicate. This is not a debate over semantics. This is a debate over biblical hermeneutics, as formidable a disagreement as men can have in life, for its consequences extend to eternity.
Orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians disagree about many things, especially the theological integrity of their respective systems. The Talmud has some graphic things to say about Jesus and His followers. The New Testament has some graphic things to say about the Jews of that day: whited sepulchers, blind guides, gnat strainers, hypocrites, thieves, and dogs. Paul wrote: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision” (Philippians 3:2). The dog in those days was not a domesticated beast or “man’s best friend.” Dogs roamed in packs and devoured the weak.
What good does it do to cover this up? None. What good does it do to de-emphasize it? A great deal. Why? For the sake of the peace.
Both sides should be aware of the unbridgeable barrier between them. Both sides should also be aware of the equally unbridgeable barrier between them and the Caesars of this world. It has been the Caesars of this world, not the Christians, who have been the great enemy of the Jews. It is the Caesars who have been the great threat to the Christians, not the Jews.
Orthodox Jews and orthodox Christians are the traditional enemies of the Caesars of this world, because the Caesars are tied to time rather than eternity. Their efforts have meaning only in terms of time. But Jews and Christians are tied to eternity, and live or die in terms of this commitment. They are therefore the ultimate traitors to the time-bound systems of this world. This is why persecution always comes, especially after some crisis has called into question the survival of a particular world system. In this sense, both Jews and Christians are “a separate people among us” in the eyes of the humanists. What Rosenstock-Huessy wrote of this world’s leaders is equally true in every era: “The ruler who gives his name to an hour of history must be absorbed completely in that hour. He must dive into its waves and be lost in it more than any other man. For it is the ruler’s business to mark the epoch, to appear on the stamps or coins of his country. Rulership, because it personifies an epoch, always finds itself in a polarity to the workings of Eternity.” [Footnote: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man (Norwich, Connecticut: Argo, [1938] 1969), p. 222.] What he wrote of the Jews applies equally well to orthodox Christians in history:
The pagan leader is the servant of time. The Jew can never “believe” in time. Since every Jewish leader or prophet thinks of Eternity or of innumerable generations, the star of Judah always shines most brilliantly in times when there are no pagan heroes. When a nation is despoiled of its governing class, when a national failure has brought a darkness without comfort or illumination, the nation is struck by the fact that the Jews are not leaderless in the absence of a king or emperor. Anti-Semitism always becomes especially violent in times of a lost war. The Jews must be guilty: this is the word that is quickly passed round. For are they not as ready to shoulder hard times without a complaint as they were to profit in the good? The star of Judah shines bright, and pogroms break out, whenever the Gentiles have just buried their Nebuchadnezzar or their Tiberius with disintegration. [Footnote: Ibid., pp. 222-23.]
As this becomes increasingly clear to both orthodox Christians and Orthodox Jews, I think the response of both groups will be to de-emphasize the words of mutual condemnation found in the Talmud and the New Testament. This is not to say that either group will deny the truth of its respective holy book, but it is to say that there is a time to emphasize differences and a time to emphasize similarities. To put it graphically, if you are in a foxhole with someone of a rival covenant, and the enemy’s shock troops are coming over the ridge, your immediate concern is not the precision of your partner’s theology; it is whether he can shoot straight and whether he can spare a few rounds of ammo.
I can see the enemy coming. Hand me that 30-round clip, Yitzhak, and we’ll discuss the fine points of our theology later.
Regarding that last remark, I think this is exactly what Jordan Peterson is doing while discussing and interpreting the whole book of Exodus with about 10 or so other scholars, some of which are Jews (e.g. Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro).
What makes the Bible unique
Says Gary North:
What makes the Bible unique among all books is its permanent ethical
applicability within a world of historical change. This is because it is the Word of
God. It applies perpetually because it is valid eternally. No other document in man’s
history has possessed or can possess this characteristic.
(From the book: “The Judeo-Christian Tradition”, p. 89, FN 6)
Gary North on Marxism
On the death of Kennedy, Lewis and Huxley
All on the 22nd November 1963
Article by Gary North, titled The Fathers In The Wilderness.
Excerpt:
With the death of John Kennedy on November 22, 1963–also the day of death for Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis–the rhetoric of can-do liberalism was taken up by a crass Texan who knew how to wield power under the old rules, and who proceeded to involve the United States in two losing wars, the Vietnam war and the war on poverty. Can-do liberalism started twisting arms visibly, and by 1968, the humanistic forces of mindlessness, of revolution, and of drugged retreat reacted violently to what little was left of the humanist vision of Camelot. Lyndon Johnson was the invisible man at the Democrats’ 1968 convention, and he remains invisible. Simultaneously, bureaucrats took over the management of the dreams of Camelot, as bureaucrats always do, and “the Great Society” became an economic and foreign policy nightmare.”
Thus, by the early 1970’s, the old liberalism was crumbling ideologically, and by the late 1970’s, it was in full retreat institutionally. The rise of the neo-conservative movement has routed the Intellectual leaders of the old left, and the rise of the New Rights direct-mall politics and the New Christian Right’s voter registration drives among fundamentalists has begun to rout the political leaders. The extent of Mondale’s loss probably sealed the fate of the old left’s Presidential hopes. Some new left vision, some new age vapor, or some crisis-solving blue collar patriotism seem to be the humanists’ only political alternatives. They are in disarray. They control the reigns of power temporarily, but they are no longer being given a free ride by the conservatives.
The Era of Wilderness Wandering
With the rise of the Christian Reconstruction movement in the late 1960’s, and the rise of the Protestant “renewal” movement of the same period, the vacuum of fundamentalism is being filled. On the other side, liberation theology and neo-Anabaptist communalism have arisen to fill the void of the older theological liberalism. Each side looks at its aging leaders and hopes for something better.
What is called for now is a period of rebuilding the foundations. An enormous educational program is called for. The Christian day school movement and the Christian home school movement are the main long-term weapons in this educational counter-attack against humanism. Of secondary importance long-term, but of great importance short-term, are the new T.V. satellite Christian broadcasts and the advent of computerized mailing lists and newsletters.
The New Renaissance And A New Reformation
Article by Gary North from 1985
C. S. Lewis makes the observation in The Abolition of Man (1947) that occultism and humanism appeared in Western history at about the same time, during the Renaissance. They were two sides of the same revival of paganism. Thus, he argued, occultism and humanistic rationalism are not enemies in principle but rather cooperating philosophies that are united against Christianity and Christian civilization. This is the theme of his great masterpiece, the novel That Hideous Strength.
From 1964 onward, a new Renaissance took place–a recapitulation of the Renaissance’s revival of occultism, mysticism, and the quest for power. To this witches brew was added revolutionism. It hit the academic world in September of 1964, when the student riots began at the University of California at Berkeley. That revolution shook the foundations of the older liberalism. It launched a series of “scientific revolutions” or “paradigm shifts” in every social science.
The new humanism and the new occultism of the late 1960’s produced a new world view, which has in recent years begun to be called the New Age movement or New Age humanism. Such phenomena as “holistic healing,” Eastern mysticism, monistic philosophy (the world is one: pantheism), magic, astrology, and outright satanism began to multiply. It started as a campus phenomenon, and in many ways, this new Renaissance ended there, in the spring of 1970.
Continue reading here.
The Mythology of Spaceship Earth
Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.
The full article is here.
Excerpts:
The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacrificing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the modern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilemma, and the crisis of modern culture reflects man’s failure to resolve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Commissar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.
The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the external world will take care of itself. His assumption is that science and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.
[. . .]
Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he began to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after editorial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlightened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be obtained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned housing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.
Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the messianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.
Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men acting in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this generation? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wicker’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a noninflationary tax cut not be preferable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and recommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem technology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?
[. . .]
A LEAP OF FAITH
Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular instance of a “successful” government project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory completion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal preferences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the problem he states:
In contrast to the novel and uncluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.
But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large numbers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.
Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the unstated assumption that we can reduce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is precisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon indicate anything except the amazing capacity for spending that governments possess.
SPACESHIP EARTH
Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buckminster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of considering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]
[. . .]
The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those fundamental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dictatorships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world government implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is willing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:
Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.
THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS
I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary system’s increasing inefficiency, corruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the benefits of such a system:
But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from position to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a considerable source of strength.
This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intellectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.
GROUNDING THE SHIP
Dr. William G. Pollard, a physicist who was a part of the Manhattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theological framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:
Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civilization could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently necessary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be permitted.
We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.
At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some permanent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s taking control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.
When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in creating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The theology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progressive technology and planning.
The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in constructing spaceship earth.