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Like most Americans, Scott Hatfield doesn’t understand what the Enlightenment represents. Nor does he understand how completely I reject it:

Again, you’ve boxed yourself into a corner because of your rhetoric. The hyperbole about the Enlightenment era as a whole was not needed to make the point that absolute secularization has born some bitter fruit, but you just had to have your broad-brushed flourish. I guess that’s the Vox Style. Oh, well, dead horse. You haven’t addressed the central point that good things came out of the Enlightenment (such as the Bill of Rights). If I’m wrong, please show me where the First Amendment can be derived purely from Christian theology as widely accepted prior to 1800.

The Bill of Rights and the First Amendment are absolutely not products of the Enlightenment. First, for Scott’s edification, I point out that the Enlightenment is a fundamentally authoritarian movement:

The first major Enlightenment figure in England was Thomas Hobbes, who caused great controversy with the release of his provocative treatise Leviathan (1651). Taking a sociological perspective, Hobbes felt that by nature, people were self-serving and preoccupied with the gathering of a limited number of resources. To keep balance, Hobbes continued, it was essential to have a single intimidating ruler. A half century later, John Locke came into the picture, promoting the opposite type of government—a representative government—in his Two Treatises of Government (1690). Although Hobbes would be more influential among his contemporaries, it was clear that Locke’s message was closer to the English people’s hearts and minds. Just before the turn of the century, in 1688, English Protestants helped overthrow the Catholic king James II and installed the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. In the aftermath of this Glorious Revolution, the English government ratified a new Bill of Rights that granted more personal freedoms.

In other words, PRIOR to the publication of Locke’s work and long before 1800, the English Protestants established a Bill of Rights that explicitly rejects the Enlightenment concepts of Hobbes and most of the French philosophes who came along later. There was little new about the American Bill of Rights, it was mostly an explicit extension of its English predecessor, which includes freedoms of speech and religion, from Parliament to the individual. Even the original Bill of Rights built upon the concepts of the Magna Carta Libertatum of 1215 and Henry I’s Charter of Liberties of 1100. When viewed from a historical perspective, it is obvious that democracy, divided government and guaranteed rights cannot reasonably be considered Enlightenment concepts, as all three predated the Enlightenment by centuries. Indeed, the distinguishing factors of the American and French Revolutions were that while the former was a) Christian and b) skeptical of government power, while the latter was a) anti-clerical and b) trusting in government power. One has merely to examine the broad limitations on the “human rights” of a genuinely Enlightenment-based government, such as the First French Republic, the European Union, or the United Nations, to understand that the concept of unalienable individual rights endowed by a Creator is not only foreign to the Enlightenment, it is downright antithetical to it.

In summary, the Bill of Rights did not come out of the Enlightenment, it was the result of combining the medieval tradition of the English Common Law with 18th century American Christianity. This latter influence is overt, because it was from their shared Christian tradition that the American revolutionaries derived the concept of God and God-granted rights as being superior to government, whereas the Enlightenment tradition does not recognize God and therefore accepts no supra-governmental limitations; all Enlightenment rights are expressly granted by government and can be freely abrogated by it at will. I recommend that Scott examine Article 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Articles 17 and 18 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner may have best summed up the primary challenge of a post-Christian Europe. “I knew what was the West, and I don’t know what the West is now.”

It’s incredible that so few people understand why most college degrees are worthless nowadays:

My daughter said to me the other day, “Why bother going to college Mom? You have a great degree, from a great college and it means nothing. I think I might move out of the country.”

When a) a college degree is no guarantee that the possessor has even a rudimentary education and b) half the population has one, it’s downright stupid to waste time and resources acquiring one, especially if you’re pursuing a degree that isn’t in a technical field for which there is proven demand.

Brad Wardell explains why copy protection is pointless:

Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he’s simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose…. “When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.”

TIA is in a similar position. Most of its potential audience has never heard of it, so worrying about a theoretical loss of bookbuyers based on a few thousand downloads is absurd. As it happens, more copies of the physical book have been sold than been downloaded for free… and the fact that the most easily found etexts are those of the bestselling books should suffice to prove that only a very small percentage of ebook pirates were ever potential customers.

It was only a matter of time before people began to notice one of the truly great blogs… and get offended by it:

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

Events will prove you wrong:

We imagine we can ditch Christianity and yet the good things we have inherited in our way of life will continue. They will not. Christianity formed Western civilisation and is so consubstantial with it that if Christianity goes, the lot goes with it. Let TS Eliot, writing in 1934, give us a text to think about this Easter: “Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?”

What would be amusing if it wasn’t tragic is the way that parochial Americans who don’t know the first thing about Europe point to the dying European countries, especially the Scandinavian ones, as evidence that secular post-Christianity is viable. The rector’s article also shows how foolish it is for Christians to think that there will not be severe consequences when the Church follows the lead of Man.

The comments following the article are particularly interesting. It is amazing how many idiots genuinely believe that the Enlightenment was a significant factor in forming a Christian civilization that predated it by centuries. The Enlightenment was, and is, nothing more than a destructive perversion of Christianity that led to the horrors of the French Revolution, the October Revolution and the future evils of the European Union.

It’s not about Democrats or Republicans. It never has been:

Both parties are quick to employ our military. It’s the only foreign-policy tool we have that works. Neither party is a peace party – each just wants to pick its own wars. The hypocrisy in Washington is as astonishing as the dishonesty about security needs.

And why is the military the only policy tool that works? Because it doesn’t have to do anything but break things and kill people. That’s the one thing that government is perfectly capable of handling. Why so many people want more of it, when there is centuries of evidence demonstrating that all one ever gets from it is more broken things and more dead people, is something I will never understand.

Ben Bernanke defies the common Keynesian position:

It was in large part to improve the management of banking panics that the Federal Reserve was created in 1913. However, as Friedman and Schwartz discuss in some detail, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve did not serve that function. The problem within the Fed was largely doctrinal: Fed officials appeared to subscribe to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s infamous ‘liquidationist’ thesis, that weeding out “weak” banks was a harsh but necessary prerequisite to the recovery of the banking system. Moreover, most of the failing banks were small banks (as opposed to what we would now call money-center banks) and not members of the Federal Reserve System. Thus the Fed saw no particular need to try to stem the panics. At the same time, the large banks – which would have intervened before the founding of the Fed – felt that protecting their smaller brethren was no longer their responsibility. Indeed, since the large banks felt confident that the Fed would protect them if necessary, the weeding out of small competitors was a positive good, from their point of view. In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. …

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

This jocular statement has never gotten the widespread attention it deserves, even if the current Fed Chairman errantly attributes this demonstration of Fed responsibility to the famous monetarist when it was actually the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard who first made the conclusive case in his 1963 book America’s Great Depression. It’s interesting, however, to see how Bernanke is, despite his promise, following the same general model that his predecessors did. I’ll have more detailed analysis of this in a future Voxonomics to see just how closely the Fed is imitating history, but needless to say, this doesn’t bode terribly well for the future.

I have to say, I’m really impressed with this timely step by WorldNetDaily, even though I knew nothing about it. If I understand my principles of socionomics, this is a definite bear sign as a broadening interest in technical analysis usually indicates volatility and a down market.

Here’s the first experiment in Voxonomics… although apparently not in podcasting per se. For a variety of reasons, the RSS feed I created doesn’t appear to be validating. I’m not sure I’m going to do this every week or not, we’ll have to see if it’s of any interest first.

Like Mississippi, many states use an inflated graduation rate for federal reporting requirements under the No Child Left Behind law and a different one at home. As a result, researchers say, federal figures obscure a dropout epidemic so severe that only about 70 percent of the one million American students who start ninth grade each year graduate four years later.

But whatever would we do without a public school system that can barely move half the students that enter it even with social promotion? If you tried to design an even half-way rational means of educating a child, just what aspects of the present system would you retain? And as the CPI fiction shows, these are far from the only federal figures being severely fudged.

Joseph Farah realizes the wisdom of not blindly supporting Republicans:

How bad would McCain be? I’ll put it this way: Worse than Bush. Are you ready for that? I’m not. All things being equal, I’d rather watch the Democrats destroy America for the next four years, holding out hope that a new kind of Republican leadership might arise to fight back in 2012.

If you can’t get a republican Republican, then let the Democrats pillage and burn for four years. That way you’ve at least got a chance of putting things back in order, as both Bushes have proved, all electing a democratic Republican president accomplishes is to ensure that the government pillaging is followed by even more pillaging. If you’re going to have democrat-style rule anyhow, let the Democrats take the responsibility for it. It’s true that one shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But John McCain is not good and the perfect should always be the enemy of the bad.