Passover and Easter: Celebrations of Rebellion Against Authority

It's that season. Everything is in flower. The birds are chirping, and two of the major religions have a holiday that falls very close to the vernal equinox. So is it all about flowers and springtime? You would think so, if you saw the Easter decorations or went to an Easter egg hunt.

My Hyacinths in bloom

But though it's true that Easter is named for a pagan holiday about springtime, rebirth and fertility, two of the world's major religions celebrate acts of rebellion against oppressive authority -- successful and unsuccessful rebellions-- at this time.

The single daffodil that bloomed by my lagoon this year

In Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way, though the story is set in China during World War II in a concentration camp run by the Japanese, some of the characters are influenced by the Judeo-Christian symbolism of the Passover and Easter scenarios. Marah Fallowfield, for instance, sees the Camp Commandant as a sort of Pharaoh whom she asks to let her people go. She also warns him of the consequences, should he fail to do so. But Commandant Izu is working from another playbook, and he eventually has Marah crucified. What is ironic about the good faith, literal belief of these innocent characters is that the vast majority of people who celebrate these springtime holidays do not see them as celebrations of rebellion at all. Most devout Christians and Jews understand all their holidays as ritualized submission to authority! That right there is the real conflict in my new novel.

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Historically, there is a process whereby people forget. Successful religions are founded by rebellious visionaries, but they are kept alive only if those in power find them useful.

For instance, while Passover is about slaves rebelling against their masters in Egypt, the big focus for most believers is on the supernatural miracles and the absolute necessity of total submission to the priesthood and the payment of  taxes in gold to a particular god and not some other god. Though the new testament is about a man who called himself a "messiah" -- which is another name for the King of Israel -- and who was crucified for failing to pledge allegiance to the puppet king installed by the Romans -- most Christians put the emphasis on the need for ultimate submission to their God in the form of Church membership, including paying a tithe. So while the holiday celebrates rebellion from rulers who tax people, those who take it seriously do not think they should follow the example and also rebel. They believe they should submit.

In the same way, when Americans celebrate the 4th of July, which is the time when they declared their independence from the British, but had not yet won it in an armed rebellion, most  see the patriotic holiday not as a time to renew the fight for liberty, but to show submission to the Federal government -- which is much more oppressive than the British were in 1775-6.

Springtime seems to be a natural time to celebrate liberation. Coming up soon is April the 19th, an American holiday about a struggle for liberation from great Britain in 1775, but oppression of Americans by the ATF in 1993. There's just something about spring in the air that makes people long for freedom -- and other people eager to crush that longing in the bud.

A wasp on my peach blossoms

Some of the most successful films at the box office these days are about teenagers rebelling against oppressive governments -- The Hunger Games and The Divergent Series --  but there seems to be a real disconnect when it comes to understanding what real oppression would look like.  It would look more like the British in 1775 or the Romans in the time of Christ or today's Bureau of Land Management hounding ranchers, and a lot less like some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland in which people have to fight each other to the death on a daily basis. Even in the Courtyard of the Happy Way. most of the daily life was undramatic and ordinary, and people just tried to keep their nose clean and do their jobs. Oppressors want you to be happy. When people chant slogans learned straight from the Nazi death camps, such as: "When we're no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves." --  they are unwittingly giving in to oppression. By all means, we should change ourselves for the better, but only if it helps to change the situation. If the situation is intolerable, we do not adapt to accept it as normal.

Assimilation is the Natural Result of Tolerance

There is one sure way to eradicate an ethnic minority, but it is the complete opposite of what most people think. It is not through persecution, discrimination, harsh measures or intolerance that differences between and among people disappear. Distinct ethnic identities merge with the dominant culture exactly to the degree that they are shown tolerance and kindness and given an equal opportunity to thrive.

One example of how this works is seen in this video by Charlie Hyman about the Kaifeng Jews.

Here is an excerpt from Hyman's narration in the video:

"Treated as an untrustworthy community by the Yuan, the Jews of Kaifeng had their so-called Golden age during the reign of the Ming,...It is during this prosperous age that the Jews underwent extensive Sinification.... By 1489, the Kaifeng community matched their neighbors in dress, language and daily life... The Jews of Kaifeng adopted the practice of ancestor worship. ...They melded the teachings of Confucius and traditional Judaism... This vigorously autonomous group was almost completely absorbed into the greater Chinese community by the process of Sinification...  The key to this development was tolerance. Kaifeng citizens accepted their Jewish neighbors as equal. .

 ..Various dynasties have desperately tried to assimilate myriad cultures, with decidedly mixed results. Yet in a situation in which the Chinese authorities made little attempt to Sinify a populace, this foreign group became completely Chinese in almost every way. Simple acceptance and societal integration was all it took for the community to abandon their previous ways of life and essentially become Han....One has only to look at the emphatically independent Jews of pre-war Poland and Russia to know how little Jews assimilate when treated as the Other. But because the Ming never thought to hate and fear them, today in the streets of Kaifeng, the descendants of Jews and the descendants of ethnic Han walk side by side, indistinguishable. It begs the question: if China had treated the people of their nomadic frontier as equal, instead of as barbarians, would those 56 ethnic groups have dwindled one by one until only the Han remained?"

Had Hitler chosen to treat Jews in Europe as equals, he would more surely have eradicated Judaism than by setting up extermination camps. The surest way to erase differences between people is kindness. And the surest way to keep ethnic minorities strong is to set up barriers and build walls and establish ethnic quotas, as in affirmative action.

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 Related Reading

http://hubpages.com/literature/ISRAEL-The-Two-Halves-of-the-Nation

https://www.amazon.ca/Israel-The-Two-Halves-Nation/dp/093824514

Bullying the Thrifty

Years ago, I read a children's book by Judy Blume, called Blubber. It was a book about bullying. And I was disappointed in it, because it did not vindicate the obese little girl who was bullied. It merely showed the people doing the bullying that what they did was not "nice".

The copy of the book that I read had this cover.

My disappointment need not reflect on the value of the book to other people. I was just hoping for a different book, one that looked at things from the point of view of the person being bullied, who had some secret virtue that no one was aware of, and I wanted the turning point to be when that virtue was revealed. But Judy Blume never showed how the bullied girl felt about anything. Instead, she described in detail the revulsion that even "nice" girls in the class had for not only the person of the obese girl, but also her character: she was phlegmatic, she had no sense of humor about her problems and she did not stand up for herself, making her an easy target. I learned a lot about normal people and how they think when reading this book, but I was disappointed that there was no turn-around, no empathy and no appreciation of a different point of view. In the end, the nice girls decided not to bully, because they did not like how they felt about themselves when they were being vindictive, but not because they had learned to admire and respect the victim of their bullying. Deep down inside, the main character still felt the victim deserved to be bullied, but she now felt it was beneath her to engage in bullying. To my way of thinking, this book represents the "Kindness Movement."

A person who has been bullied isn't looking for kindness. What is needed are honest, smart  people --  people who are perceptive enough to see what it is that each of us has to offer. Victims don't want charity. They crave fairness. Bending over backwards to be kind, ordinary people miss the virtue behind the presumed sin.

In Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way, Bertha Higginbotham is a character who resembles the victim in Blubber.  She comes into the camp morbidly obese, and even after losing a lot of weight on the Weihsien diet, she is still quite heavy, when everyone else is emaciated. Jealous of her good health, people accuse her of stealing sugar, on the mere circumstantial evidence of her weight. That would be like accusing your co-worker who earns the exact same salary as you do of theft, merely based on the fact that he has savings, while you do not. People do this every day, and nobody thinks anything of it. Who will stand up for the thrifty? In my book, it was Father Horvath.

When politicians suggest that we tax the rich, they are not going after corrupt people who have stolen from others. They advocate taxing  anyone with savings, and they rely on the hatred of the masses for the financial Bertha Higginbothams of this world, who may seem unattractive, but who have hidden virtues. 

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Wealth Creation is Not Building -- It's Selling

"This man is creating wealth," someone remarked about the video embedded below.

It is certainly very impressive what can be made with very simple technology and raw materials. But is that wealth creation? Or is it merely consumption of raw materials? Arguably, when you cut down trees to build yourself a house, you are merely consuming the resources at your disposal. But when you sell what you build to somebody else,  you have created wealth.

Wealth has no objective existence apart from a social situation in which the value of some objects is compared with the value of others. Without a market, there can be no wealth.

I once went to look at a house and ten acres when I was shopping for a new home. The house was in a desolate, wooded area. The owners had lived there for years and had cut down all the trees on their acreage, using them to heat their home. They now told me proudly how they felt they had improved the land by clearing it. But I came from the big city, and I was looking for land with unspoiled woods on it. From my perspective, the property lost value when the trees were cut down.

What is more important: hard work, creativity or raw materials? I know people who can argue about this for hours on end and never come to an agreement. Why? Because there is no objective, universal answer to this question. It depends on the circumstances. Important to whom? That is the question they don't seem to grasp.  Some  are under the impression that standing trees are not valuable, but lumber is. There are even those who think that by clearing their land, they are improving its resale value. In this fantasy, you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can consume the wood, and what remains is even more valuable! It's like eating your dinner, and then selling the waste for fertilizer. It can be done, my friend, but it depends entirely on the market.

An excerpt from Our Lady of Kaifeng: Courtyard of the Happy Way

Sometimes, good fertilizer is hard to come by, and people will pay for our night soil. Sometimes, nobody wants our refuse, and we have to pay to have it hauled away. Like beauty, value is in the eye of the beholder. The market decides, and the market is just the shifting opinions of a large number of people.

What is of greater value today: the structures built by the man in the video embedded at the beginning of this post, or the right to own the land on which the structures were built? If you own the land free and clear, you can choose what to do with the trees and the lumber. But how much would an army to keep other people out cost? And would the market value of those wooden structures be enough to pay for it?

Welfare is not Free

Back when I was practicing law in the 1980s, social workers pressured women to leave less than perfect husbands and to go on welfare. Welfare in those days was called AFDC - Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Once a mother went on welfare, the Federal government would turn around and garnish the wages of the father of her children, to recoup the cost of paying her support. So in the end, the welfare wasn't free. It came at a terrible cost.

Welfare was not just a way to tax other people to pay for a poor woman's children. It was a scheme to separate families and to use the money stolen from the breadwinner to decide how to raise the children. Once the woman was on welfare, social workers checked on her and judged her with impunity, and often they found ways to take her children away from her. By this time she was alone, and there was no one to help her fight the social workers, because her husband had been banished and his money taken from him.

Yes, a lot of those men were not model husbands and fathers. Some were alcoholics or addicts, some were abusive and some were just deadbeats. Many of those men had lower IQs than their wives -- or at least they had not finished high school, while the wives had. The social workers used this fact to convince the women that their husbands were beneath them. They tried to tell the women that they could do better. But the demographics of the dating market were such that the women could in fact not do better. If they had been able to find better husbands, they would have married better men in the first place.  They were a lot worse off under the thumb of the social workers and the Federal child support enforcers than they had been when left to their own devices in their less than perfect marriages.

I wrote about some of these issues in The Debt Collector.

Today, with the ACA mandate, more families are coming under the thumb of Federal welfare, because people who used to be self-supporting and ineligible for Medicaid are now being forced to enroll in this Federal program in order to avoid tax penalties. But once they are enrolled, they often find that they have lost a lot of their civil liberties. Their prescription drug use is subject to scrutiny without any privacy. Their children are subject to social worker visits. And none of this is actually free -- when they die, the Federal government will confiscate their homes and other assets to pay for the Medicaid expenditure.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/17216-another-obamacare-surprise-estate-recovery

Many progressives think that anyone opposed to the ACA must not care about the poor. But this program is engineered to create more poverty and to take more and more rights away from those currently only on the brink of poverty. Welfare is not free. Its highest costs are borne by those forced to submit to its tender ministrations.  This is how welfare has always worked.

Spiritual Impulses and Common Sense

What is the difference between being religious and being spiritual?

Religious people follow received doctrine, often based on a holy text that is then interpreted for them by clerics and priests. They may never have seen a god face to face or heard the voice of a demon or experienced a miracle, and usually they don't ever expect to do so. But they believe -- or profess to believe -- what they have been told by religious authorities.

A spiritual person has direct experiences of a spiritual nature. He sees visions, hears voices and receives messages directly from the spirit world. His holy knowledge originates in his own mind, and he is more likely to find himself at odds with authority. That is why genuine visionaries are so often martyred.

Religious people by and large are non-limerent, Spiritual people experience limerence both as a personal unidirectional attachment and as a general flow of ideas. They do not study; they are inspired. They do not "work at a relationship"; they fall in love. They do not memorize doctrine -- they receive epiphany.

In Our Lady of Kaifeng, Marah Fallowfield is spiritual, though non-religious. Ted Sesame is religious,  but decidedly un-spiritual. The conflict between their points of view can be seen  most clearly in this scene:

Sesame was cross. “Fine. Then here's your answer. Mr.

Ch'en is a deranged dope fiend. If he thinks that we can build a

whole airport for American planes to land just outside our

camp, without the Japanese noticing, well, he's completely

insane.”

“And besides,” Gilkey said. “we have over fourteen

hundred people here, most of whom are either elderly, women

or children. There is no way that we could make any sort of

exodus from this place without the majority getting killed or

dying of exhaustion en route.”

“In Exodus there were women and children and infants

and elderly people. And there were no airplanes or airports.

And they got out okay,” Marah said. “They went on foot, and

all they had to eat was some unleavened bread and gold that

they stole from their neighbors. Which you would think would

not be any good for purposes of ordering food in the desert.”

“Well, yeah, but they had manna dropping from heaven

and Moses to part the red sea for them,” Sesame replied.

“And we don't?” she asked. “We have a camp full of

saints and martyrs, social workers and philosophers and

clergymen, and nobody can perform miracles? Can't Eric Liddell

part the China Sea for us? And you, Mr. Gilkey, who are so

good at creating extra space just by redistributing rooms,

couldn't you work a loaves-and-fishes miracle for us, too?”

“This is real life, Marah, not the Bible,” Sesame said.

“So you don't actually believe!” she cried. Here before

her stood a professed Christian who said he believed in the

literal transubstaniation of matter in the Eucharist, and here

was she, the staunch atheist, and yet he had faith in nothing but

compromise when it came to practical reality, whereas she

believed in miracles ...

People with common sense are rarely spiritual.  Visionaries are usually low on common sense. Great religious movements are built on the hard work of plodding multitudes with common sense, but no vision. But without the visionaries, how would they ever get started? And once the people with common sense take over the faith, how can the vision be maintained?

 Kipling had an apt verse on this head:

He that hath a Gospel

To loose upon Mankind

Though he serve it utterly—

Body, soul and mind—

Though he go to Calvary

Daily for its gain—

It is His Disciple

Shall make his labour vain.

--Rudyard Kipling

Beware of the false spiritualist, though. That would be the person who tells you that spirituality leads to a calming effect and will make you reconciled to the status quo. Such people are soap peddlers. No real spiritual leader ever had as his goal the perpetuation of the status quo. Visions don't work that way!

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Queen Isabella and the Paradox of How Tyranny Drives Exploration

This blog post is a follow up to my earlier post about why we have not colonized Mars yet.

http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2016/02/yaron-brook-ayn-rand-and-virtue-of.html

I got a comment recently to the effect that "If you are free you can use your power to reason and act on it and huge advancements are made. Going to Mars is a stupid idea relative to how we are now. It is not beneficial."

It's actually quite a bit more complicated than that.

• The greatest freedom does not necessarily lead to the highest degree of technological advance, because if you are happy with your current situation, you tend to have less incentive to change things.
• It's not "stupid" to want to go to Mars. That is a value judgment. Some people are naturally interested in exploring the world and learning what is out there, even when there is no "need" for a new invention or more space. Not everything in life is about dire "need". The only issue is who will pay for the curiosity itch. Under free enterprise, the curious pay for their curiosity themselves.

Chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers in their natural habitat have less technology than people living in the Scandinavian countries or in habitats that are not naturally suited for apes to live in. Why? Partially, because there is no "need" and hence it would not be "beneficial", as the commentator said about colonizing Mars.

But whenever conditions get too crowded in the environment in which we evolve, some of us are spurred to move out and travel great distances and go to places where food does not just grow on trees, and you have to find ways to heat during winter and to store seeds and grain and dead meat, and do all sorts of things that do not come naturally and require thought and planning. Later, when people who have done this look back at their ancestors and their contemporary cousins who are still in the natural lifestyle, they think they themselves are much more advanced and the others seem primitive and lazy. But necessity is the mother of invention, and if you don't have to work for others in order to survive, why should you? Arguably, there is less freedom under more advanced technology, because things that nature gives us for free in a tropical paradise-- warmth and food -- have to be worked for, and people find themselves specializing in certain skills and trading with others who have other skills. As long as people work only for themselves and not to support others by force, it's still free enterprise, but when property taxes to pay just for getting to hold onto a plot of land are figured into the equation, people are forced to work for others to pay the cash for the taxes on the property every year. Once health insurance becomes mandatory, they have to work for others just for the right to exist. And now freedom to decide how to live is gone, which is a great incentive to move someplace else where one might be able to find more freedom from serving others by force.

That's one side of the issue. The other side is that there will always be people who are curious about what is found beyond the distant horizon. Scientists want to know -- they pursue knowledge for its own sake. Explorers are people who want to travel far from where they live. They don't care if they profit. They have the itch. But who will pay for it? Many space aficionados admit openly that the Statist desire to beat other countries is the motive behind the funding they hope to get from their government. Take Leslie Fish's song, "Queen Isabella", in which it is explained that Christopher Columbus got state funding that was entirely motivated by colonial expansionism and misguided missionary zeal. The would-be space explorer realizes that only through an arms-race competition with other nations did NASA land a man on the moon. And the hope is that some new Queen Isabella, equally deranged, will continue to fund the space program.

It is not "stupid" to want to visit Mars. It is not "stupid" to try to teach an ape human language. The thirst for knowledge for its own sake is as old as mankind. The only problem is: how to pay for the experiment? As long as it is privately funded, no experiment need be "beneficial" -- because it does not involve unwilling participants.

Questions like "what do we need?" or "what is beneficial" depend entirely on the person asking them. In a free society, what one person wants is not what another wants. Each decides what is beneficial to himself. And no question is stupid. Knowledge for its own sake is fine, as long as you pay for it yourself.

Freedom does not entail constant growth. Science does not serve technology; it is a value in its own right. Expanding technology is not necessarily a product of free enterprise. In a free society, people are left to be as lazy or as industrious as they like -- as curious or as lethargic as their own nature dictates. There is no norm. There are no rules -- except that you don't force another person to work at something that he does not choose to do. If you want to go to Mars, you pay for it yourself.