A Full Decade

Ten years ago today I pressed click and posted my first blog. I’ve been writing the blog for a full decade now. This is number 1198—so in another week we’ll hit a full 2000. Thank you or reading whatever portion of those you’ve read.

Not every post makes it obvious what this blog’s purpose is. It is to share the concepts of the Spherical Model by discussing things related to the three spheres: political (freedom), economic (prosperity), and social (civilization).

I’m on a personal crusade to change the vocabulary from the right-left model to this more accurate three-dimensional model. It makes moot any discussions about whether some fringe group is right-wing or left-wing extremist; if they go against the northern hemisphere principles that lead to freedom, prosperity, and civilization, then they are southern hemisphere, leading to tyranny, poverty, and savagery. Degrees (distance south) may differ. Lateral direction toward chaotic tyranny or statist tyranny may differ. But if they’re southern hemisphere, that’s bad.

The Spherical Model is a way to move from “What party is proposing this?” toward “Does this idea/policy follow the principles that lead north?”

We’re not talking earth-north and south; we’re talking about the directions on the Spherical Model. (For a full description of the model, see the resources below.)

The Political, Economic, and Social Spheres of the Spherical Model

The three spheres each have some questions or principles you can consider, to determine whether a policy will lead north or south.

Political Sphere: Questions to Ask

1.     Is the policy being debated something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has the right to delegate to his/her government? 

2.     Does the policy infringe in any way on our God-given rights, including but not limited to those enumerated in the Bill of Rights?

3.     Is the idea being debated a proper role of government, some aspect of protection (including defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency, the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws), as enumerated in the Constitution?

Economic Sphere: Question to Ask

·       Who decides what will be done with the fruits of your labors? Someone always makes these basic economic decisions. Should it be the person who did the work to make the profit (north), or should it be some far distant wielder of power (south)? If you go north, you find prosperity; if you go south, you reach poverty.

Social Sphere: Principles of Civilization

1.     Not all religious societies are civilized (according to my definition, which differs from the archaeological definition), but every civilized society is a religious society. This absolutely does not mean state-sponsored religion or lack of religious freedom; in fact, the opposite is true. Freedom of religion is essential, and the flourishing of religion in general must be encouraged.

2.     The family is the basic unit of civilized society. Whatever threatens the family threatens civilization. So preserving and protecting the family is paramount in laws and social expectations in a civilized society.

 

Example

The three spheres interrelate. But it's probably easiest to see things in the political sphere, so let’s take a look at those three political sphere questions and apply them, for example, to the national $15 minimum wage, being proposed right now. 

With question one, do you have the right to force your neighbor to pay a particular wage to his employees? You can suggest. You can use peer pressure. But you don’t have that right. Nor does he have the right to impose that on you. So we, the people, do not have that power to grant to the government.

And the second question, do you have a God-given right to make an exchange with your neighbor for goods and services? Yes, assuming the exchange does not break a duly legal law (written by the legislature, signed into law, and not breaking the overriding law of the Constitution, which supports our natural rights). Do you have the right to prevent such a free exchange between your neighbor and someone else? No. Even when you think your interference is for someone’s own good? No. Nor does he have the right to prevent you from making an exchange of your choice. The exchange is a representation of the work you have done—the wealth you have created. Money is just an easy way of exchanging that representation of your spent life. To interfere with a free exchange is to interfere with your life, your liberty, and your property. 

And the third question, does the government protect your life, liberty, and/or property by either limiting or forcing an exchange against the will of the participants? No, it interferes or limits those things. Government's job is to protect those things, not infringe on them.

Here’s something we say here often:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

So, if the goal of a minimum wage is to prevent people from being taken advantage of and give them a minimum living amount in exchange for their work, let’s see if it does that.

A business exists to create wealth. It does this by providing goods and services that others are willing to pay for. The price is set by the market—by the customers’ willingness to pay. If the cost is too high, the customer won’t pay it. If the cost is too low, there may be too much buying and the supply won’t keep up. So the business owner isn't setting the price; the market is.

If the market sets a particular price for, say, a sandwich at a fast-food restaurant, and the revenue brings in enough for the business to pay a worker $8.50 an hour, but not $15.00 and hour, what happens when the minimum wage is imposed? The business cannot afford to pay the workers that. The alternative is to let go any workers who cannot bring in the needed revenue to meet their $15.00/hour pay and hope the remaining employees can work even harder than they've been doing. In other words, entry-level workers, who are building up their skills, are not legal to hire. They can’t gain the experience needed to get a $15.00/hour job. Instead, they get no pay. They are worse off.

The law has not only made it illegal for a business to pay less than $15.00 and hour; it has made it illegal for a worker to work for less than $15.00 an hour even when it’s to his advantage to do so.

If you’re looking at fairness as the goal, do you think it’s fair to enforce a $15.00/hour minimum on a small town in the Midwest—where that’s about the median income and can get you a decent home—and also in Los Angeles where it might buy your groceries but wouldn’t begin to make a dent in the rent on a one-bedroom apartment? Such a law actually imposes unfairness.

You can see how the political and economic spheres are interconnected here. We know what the northern prosperity zone would look like: healthy, prosperous economy, with each worker benefiting from his own labors, and having the opportunities to meet his financial needs and build up wealth. There would be no guarantees of the success of every single person, but there would be better opportunities than in any other system in any country at any time in history.

Maybe you can also picture how the economic sphere ties into the social sphere: wherever there are needs that a person cannot meet with their own efforts, caring people step in to fill the need. If it’s an economic need, they do that by charitable giving, or philanthropy.

However, when government takes from one person to give to another, the government isn’t charitable or generous. It is simply thieving. That’s a southern hemisphere policy, and it makes for tyranny, poverty, and savagery. An honest look at data bears that out.

While the Spherical Model is new—and still obscure a decade later—the principles are what our founders tried to design our US Constitution to adhere to. What I believe we’d find, if we had an honest look at the historical data, is that every time the principles are met, we get the desired outcomes of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. But mostly we have experienced people in power insisting they’re “helping” us by limiting our freedom, limiting our use of the fruits of our labors, and leading us away from a thriving civilization—and then saying they’re there to solve those problems for us if we just turn over power to them.

I’m hoping the Spherical Model gives us a better way to think about ideas, and a better way to talk about them.

 

Resources

If you’d like a better look at the Spherical Model concept, here are some resources:

The long version is at the website SphericalModel.com. This contains an introduction and four longish articles:

 

·         The Political World Is Round

·         The Economic World: Free Enterprise vs. Controlled Economy

·         Civilized vs. Savage

o   The Family Is the Basic Unit of Civilization

 

The short version is available in print form in this blog:

 

·         The Political Sphere Is Round. December 29, 2014

·         Spherical Model Review, December 31, 2015 

·         What the Spherical Model Is All About, December 31, 2020. 

 

Since the concept is three dimensional, maybe you’ll understand it better visually, with this very low-tech video of me explaining it in under ten minutes:

 

 

Better All Three Ways

This past Saturday was our senatorial district convention, which was postponed from March because of Covid-19. There was a good turnout. And it was kind of thrilling to have an actual get-together in person after so many months of isolation.

There we are at the Senatorial District 7 Convention
photo from Mark Ramsey's Facebook page

Much of my day was spent in the resolutions committee, working on the platform. Our SD7 is bigger than most, and more conservative, and hopefully more influential. So we put out our version of the entire platform. We’re required to use the previous platform as a starting point, so we used underlines and strikeouts to show changes we were making. Surprisingly, at the end of the day, after our chair presented some of what we’d done, both in the temporary committee and in Saturday’s permanent committee, no one wanted floor debate; the committee as a whole accepted it as we did it. I’ve never seen that happen before.

The SD7 Resolutions Committee at work; that's me second from right
at the table. Photo from Pauline Ramsey's Facebook page

Our chair, Mark Ramsey, gave me a lot of credit for the editing I did (and still had left to do after the convention to clean it up); I don’t know where else grammarians actually get applause. It was a privilege for me.

Before we got to that, I did hear a few of the speeches. And a highlight was my Congressman Dan Crenshaw. He has an easy way of speaking, putting profound truths in a conversational, understandable way. When I’m looking for ways of wording things that connect with people, I turn to him.

His ten-minute talk, without notes, talked about the contrast between what the other party offers and what we conservatives offer. And these came under three categories: political, economic, and social. Where have I seen that before? [Hint: SphericalModel.com]

So I’ll share portions of his talk to show ways of presenting, in a brief and conversational way, soem of the things that I talk about here all the time.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, the quick photo I took
before using my phone to record his talk

The Political Sphere

Dan started out talking about what “liberalism” used to mean:

You know, liberalism used to stand for a couple of different things, like free speech, like the right to peacefully assemble, equality of opportunity. These are actually liberal foundations. But the Democrat Party has completely left those. They’ve completely trampled over their good-natured liberals—whom I still disagree with on many issues. But at least they’re actually liberal. At least they actually stood for the foundations of a liberal democracy. At least they actually stood for what our founding stood for.

That has been completely trampled over as of late. And I don’t mean that figuratively. We can see it quite literally being trampled over.

I’m old enough to be his mother (he’s the same age as son Political Sphere), so I remember when “liberal” meant something different. In a personal journal I described myself as a liberal—when I was 18, before college, but I was voting conservative Republican. To me it meant freedom-loving and open-minded, rather than any political philosophy. I attached a note in that journal some years later to mark the change in meaning.

Dan talked a bit about what is happening in Seattle. And he talked about a bad movie he saw recently in which the government response to chaos was to send out some sort of mind-control signal to stop people from committing crime. Just fiction. Still, he asked himself,

Is this like the liberal utopia that they want? Where there’s so much anarchy that it takes complete centralized government control to persuade human nature, to affect human behavior?

He points out that they think they—the leftists, which I call southern hemisphere tyrannists—can change human nature. It can’t be done. Over thousands of years, we’ve developed institutions, like the church, to help guide people toward better behavior than their unbridled nature would lead them to do. As he says,

You can’t rely on haphazard government intervention based upon principles that were thought of just five minutes ago. And they change, constantly. You never know what the next attack is by the left. They’re determined to create a sense of crisis in order to justify their revolution.

They seem to like the romantic notion of revolution. It’s a “youthful exuberance,” trying to do something important, to effect change. But, he says, what we’re seeing is “an attack on America at its core”:

It’s one thing to say that we have improvements to make. We will always have improvements to make, and we should lock our arms together and to speak out for the improvements that we need to make, and live up to our founding ideals.

But it is quite another to say that those ideals are evil to the core, when in reality they are not. When in reality they are based in truth. When in reality the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written by men who learned these ideals and took them from the best ideas that mankind ever had—from Jerusalem, to Rome, to Athens, to London. And conservatism stands for these great ideals. Conservatism stands for a republic, a functioning political system that actually works. Not mob democracy.

He goes on,

Democrats actually want mob democracy. They’re not hiding the ball on this. When you want to get rid of the Electoral College, when you want to remove states’ rights, when you want the federal government to have centralized control over the society and the economy—  They also say they don’t like that small states have two senators. That’s a federalist system that they want to undo.

They want 51% of the population to tell the other 49% what to do, because they believe they can change human nature. They believe they can control your thoughts and your feelings. And they believe that preferences across a vast country don’t matter. This is what they believe.

How does our side compare?

Our political system allows us to live together peacefully. It’s a republic, with checks and balances and states’ rights, and a federalist system. And that matters. Our founders thought very hard about this. Because they were students of history, and they saw what worked and what didn’t. They saw what was stable and what wasn’t.

We stand for stability. They stand for chaos.

The Political, Economic, and Social Spheres side by side

The Economic Sphere

So, that’s the political sphere. Then he turns to economics:

We also stand for a better economic system. Our founders understood this too. Most rational people understand this, that property rights matter. You can’t just confiscate somebody’s property. And one of the primary roles of government is defending that, through law and order, through law enforcement. They want to upend that too, defund the police. Our economic system, our economic way of looking at things, the free market is superior to socialism in every way.

He considers that there’s a spectrum of socialism, from full-on communism, to the socialism-light of some mainstream Democrats. But he offers an example of what these “light” socialists mean to do:

If you’re a company above a billion dollars in revenue per year, then your board has to be certified by the federal government. That’s pretty dang close to a government takeover of an institution, of an industry. Fundamentally, they want to tax more and more and redistribute that wealth. It’s collective ownership of wealth and prosperity. Those are the words they use. Then they call it democracy.

And here’s the important point I wish we could get across:

Fundamentally, it doesn’t work. That’s the thing. It doesn’t work. There’s no cases. No cases at all. About 25 countries have tried socialism. They’ve all failed—in blood, and slavery, and mass death and starvation—because it doesn’t work. The economic system has completely been discredited.

We have to maintain personal property rights: “The ability to keep your money, because you earn it. The ability to freely exchange with others.” He turns to what we’ve seen in reaction to the pandemic. It’s a problem when “foolish politicians,” mostly on the left, but not totally, but these policy makers

make a mistake by thinking that we could force you to engage in safe behavior. That didn’t make sense. It’s been discredited now. But the reality is, it was never government’s role to force your business to close—while Walmart stayed open.

Here’s what we need:

We need leaders that actually think through their civics education and understand what the proper role of government is—how do you enforce guidelines?

Maybe coercion is the wrong way to deal with law-abiding citizens.

The Social Sphere

Already you can see that there’s an interrelationship between the political, economic, and social spheres. But finally he covers the social sphere, or culture:

Conservatism is superior along a third line, and that’s our cultural perspective. Conservatives are the only ones that stand for cultural narratives that actually keep a society functioning. What do I mean by those? Well, first of all, we’re in a church. So we stand for moral truth. We understand that our laws are actually derived from the Ten Commandments. There are things that are true and cannot be argued with. You have to have a starting point. You have to have an anchor in morality. You can’t just decide what you want it to be.

We’re also the only ones who defend things like personal responsibility and accountability for your actions.

We’re the only ones who actually defend ordered liberty, the freedom for you to choose to make mistakes and to succeed, and then to be rewarded as such.

This is important. The fact that we even have to defend a simple ideal like a meritocracy is crazy. But we do. We’re the only ones that stand up for it.

He ends with this point about our neighbors who are Democrats—who are mostly decent people and not radical America-hating revolutionaries.

Here’s the infuriating part: your liberal neighbors absolutely teach these same principles to their kids. You know why? Because they actually love their kids, and they want their kids to succeed. You teach your kids these basic principles because you love them.

Maybe it’s time we actually used the same principles for the American people—because we actually love the American people, just like we would love our kids.

Indeed. If everyone who knows enough to want their children to succeed, so they teach them how to be decent and productive human beings who can live in peace among their neighbors—if every one of these people voted for conservatives rather than socialists, I believe we’d see an overwhelming majority choosing the good. People struggle to come here from all over the world because of the good we have here.

People who love America, and love one another, want freedom, prosperity, and civilization; they don’t want what the other side offers: tyranny, poverty, and savagery. It ought to be an easy choice, if we can just get them to hear messages like Rep. Dan Crenshaw offers in his everyday life.

Why Spend So Much Time on the Social Sphere

The Social Sphere

In the Spherical Model, we talk about how the three spheres—political, economic, and social—interrelate. But we talk a lot about social issues. There’s a reason for that. Or maybe several reasons.

One: It’s the sphere in which the individual has the most ability to effect change for the better.

Two: Lack of civilization (savagery) leads to lack of freedom and prosperity. So the social sphere seems to be a larger contributor in the interrelated spheres.

Three: It’s essential to have enough individuals and families living civilized lives in order to make the self-governance necessary for freedom and prosperity possible. Alternatively, limited freedom and prosperity can hinder civilization, but they don’t necessarily lead to savagery. It’s harder for the basic unit of civilization—families—to live civilized lives when they live under tyranny and/or the poverty of a controlled economy. But within the family, it’s still possible.

Four: The social sphere is where the principles of civilization, as well as the principles leading to freedom and prosperity, get passed on from generation to generation.

I said it this way at the beginning of the Civilization section of the Spherical Model:

The Civilization Zone is more important than either the Free-Enterprise [economic sphere prosperity zone] or political Freedom Zones; it is essential for the others. A civilized people (people who choose to be honest and caring with one another) are essential in order for free enterprise to function. No amount of regulation and manipulation by law enforcement can compensate for people unlawfully and unethically taking advantage of one another or refusing to care for the less fortunate. And if regulation and manipulation are used to control the greed, then it’s not a free market anyway. Likewise, it takes a civilized people in order for a free society to work. No amount of government control can force out corruption among a people in power who choose to grant favors according to bribes and special interest pressures. The public behavior will mirror the private behavior of the people. But with a truly civilized society (people choosing to be moral), free enterprise and political freedom can and will thrive.

What does it mean to be civilized? What are the necessary elements of civilization? And how do they contribute to the other spheres?

By way of review, here are the main rules for civilization—the northern hemisphere of the social sphere:

1.       Not all religious societies are civilized, but every civilized society is a religious society. This absolutely does not mean state-sponsored religion or lack of religious freedom; in fact, the opposite is true. Freedom of religion is essential, and the flourishing of religion in general must be encouraged.

2.       The family is the basic unit of civilized society. Whatever threatens the family threatens civilization. So preserving and protecting the family is paramount in laws and social expectations in a civilized society.

These are big ideas—and not without their controversies in today’s world, so let’s take them piece by piece.

A Religious People

It is in the social sphere that we understand and honor the idea that life is precious, a divine gift from God. Races and types of people are not lesser humans; all human beings are created equally valuable, with equal standing before the law. So, without God, there is no concept that life is divine and worth protecting. And without God, there are no God-given rights. Nor do individuals feel obligated to live according to standards they either set for themselves or have imposed on them externally. Belief in facing God beyond this life obligates humans to live better lives than they would if goodness were meaningless.

Without a religious people—a critical mass of believers—who feel obligated to live their lives in the way God commands, you don’t get a people who are good enough to live freely, self-governing.

What does God command? Take a look at the Ten Commandments. The first four cover honoring God—and no other entity—as supreme, as the very definer of Good. Then we honor family: honor thy father and thy mother; and thou shalt not commit adultery. Then we honor life: thou shalt no murder. Then we honor truth: thou shalt not bear false witness (lie). Then we honor property rights: thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not covet.

The Ten Commandments
at the Texas State Capitol

So the religion required of a religious people needs to include, for the sake of civilization, believing in and honoring God, family, life, truth, and property rights.

Think about how honoring life affects the political sphere. If you want unalienable rights, they have to come from God. Otherwise, they’re just privileges granted or taken away by the ruling power. Without God, there are no God-given, or inherent, rights that you have by virtue of being human. Having them interfered with or taken away by government doesn’t mean you are not, as a human being, entitled to them; it just means that some tyrannical force is wrongly attempting to deprive you of them.

If you want freedom—to pursue your life and livelihood as you see fit, to be free from servitude—you need to value life. And you need to have others in society value life as well, or you might end up beaten, dead, or enslaved.

If you want justice, you need to have a system that both honors each individual equally before the law, and that values truth. Imagine trying to get justice when wrong is done to you, if there’s no respect for telling the truth.

Similarly, if society doesn’t value property rights, people lack incentive to care for things. And they can’t keep the things they value, or what they have earned. And if you can’t enjoy the fruits of your labors, because someone else lays claim to them, then your life—the hours, days, or years you spent laboring—is really someone else’s belonging.

Every society improves by placing higher and higher value on those things we’re commanded by God to honor.

Strong Families

And what good would it do to have a civilized people who honored these things as commanded, if they didn’t pass them on to their posterity?

The Spherical Model family,
when we were young and cute

Family is the basic unit of civilized society. That’s not simply a platitude. A civilization—the society of people living together in peace and harmony and goodness—can be as small as a single family. The more families there are in a society who are living the principles necessary for civilization, the larger the civilization can be. It can grow to the size of a neighborhood, and a community, a town, a county, a state, and eventually a nation.

If a critical mass of people around the world were living the principles necessary for civilization, that’s how we would get world peace. Some problems are simple, just not easy.

Family is a particular thing. A family is a married couple and the children that come from their union. A certain number of single-parent households, resulting from a death or divorce, can be accommodated, but only if there is a critical mass of intact families.

That means marriage is a particular thing: the permanent covenant between a man and a woman, to be exclusive, and to care for their offspring. It is simply not, as redefined by fiat in the courts, “a temporary declaration of connection to a sexual partner.” That leaves out permanence, exclusivity, and the biological possibility of procreation.

People can make whatever social arrangements they like, but only families make the essential contribution to civilization.

All this means it isn’t really possible to be a “fiscal conservative” but a “social liberal,” meaning you believe in free-enterprise principles but you favor things like abortion and same-sex “marriage,” or any other sexual revolutionary idea. To make that claim simply means you do not understand the philosophical basis for believing what you do. Maybe you think, yes, it’s right that the person who earns the money should decide how to spend it, because you’ve seen how well that works, and it seems right. But you haven’t connected that to the religious values of life, liberty, and property.

But the spheres are interrelated. You can’t choose prosperity while also choosing savagery. Because if you choose savagery, you’ll also get tyranny and poverty. Maybe not immediately in your personal experience. But soon enough. Decay can be significant within a decade—or even one or two terms of a presidency. And catastrophic results are likely, or maybe inevitable, by a third generation.[i]

Trying to pass along the underlying philosophies that lead to freedom instead of tyranny in the political sphere, prosperity instead of poverty in the economic sphere, and civilization instead of savagery in the social sphere—that’s what we do here at the Spherical Model. And that’s why we spend a lot of time on the social sphere.

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[i] The length of collapse from socialism is about 70 years (mentioned in this post). The social data provide by Daniel Unwin on societies that move away from strict monogamy show collapse by the third generation, which is probably 75-100 years (mentioned in this post). Reference: Joseph Daniel Unwin, Ph.D., “Sexual Regulations and Cultural Behavior,” address given to the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society. (Library of Congress No., HQ12.U52)

Some More Political Philosophy

I was listening, last night, to the latest Uncommon Knowledge interview, with Sir Roger Scruton of Great Britain. He specializes in political philosophy, which is what we do here at the Spherical Model.

Sir Roger Scruton
photo from Uncommon Knowledge

Host Peter Robinson describes his way of thinking like this:

I take it that you decided that you intended to work in the tradition of Aristotle, philosophy as it bears on ordinary political life. Is that correct?

And Sir Roger Scruton answers,

Well, yes. I've always thought that philosophy has ordinary life as its subject matter. That's what it's about. But it's also a reflection on ordinary life and its meaning.

Philosophy in those terms, instead of, “I wonder if I can prove whether this tree really exists,” seems more likely to be fruitful.

He particularly got my attention when he was talking about former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

Sir Roger Scruton: She came into our lives as a representative of our country at a time when the country looked particularly enfeebled by the trade unions, by the whole labor party attempt to rope society into a communal prison run by the state. All that was wonderful. We felt, we don't actually have to go along with all that crap. We can do our own thing. And we can revert to our natural condition as rebellious, eccentric Englishmen. But she felt that she had to embellish it with a complete doctrine, which she borrowed from the Institute of Economic Affairs, and about the need for market solutions to every social problem. Now, I'm all in favor of market solutions where they apply, but not every social problem does have a market solution. There is a need for the maintenance of traditions in education and in culture and in the law, which are not traditions of free enterprise.

They continue this conversation:

Peter Robinson: Again, [Scruton’s book] How to Be a Conservative. "Pressed for arguments," I'm quoting you, "Mrs. Thatcher leaned too readily on market economics, and ignored the deeper roots of conservatism in the theory and practice of civil society ... " You've just said this, but I want to tee it up again. " ... family, civil association, the Christian religion and the common law were all integrated into her ideal of freedom of the law. The pity was that she had no philosophy with which to articulate that idea." She felt it. She knew it. But she had not thought it through in a way that permitted her to articulate it. Here's Mrs. Thatcher.

Now, if I may go a step backward, and I am doing something very dangerous, because my knowledge of this history is tenuous. Yours will be deep. Winston Churchill had the capacity to articulate this deeper conservatism. Throughout the war he's talking about love of native land. He uses the phrase ... He actually uses the phrase, which would today have the man thrown in jail. He uses the phrase, "Christian civilization." Yet, in the 1945 election, in the face of the socialists, because he lacked a vocabulary to talk about free markets, he was naked before Attlee and this socialist impulse.

So what I'm getting at is, it almost seems to me as though there's a kind of ideological teeter totter. Conservatives in Britain either get to talk about free markets, or they get to talk Churchill, McMillan, Eden to the extent that he talked about anything. Heath later on. Or they get to try to talk about cultural conservatism. Somehow, the two don't seem to go together. Is there some reason for that, or is it mere happenstance?

Sir Roger Scruton: That's a very insightful observation. I think since Edmund Burke, we've had this tension between the adoption of the free market as the instrument of economic organization, the primary way in which a society should create and exchange goods, and the sense that some things should be withheld from the market, and that those things are just as important but much more difficult to defend.

Of course, Burke was talking about those things which should be withheld from the market: love, family and so on. All societies have recognized from the beginning of history that a market in sexual relations is the end of all social coherence. It's always very hard to say why. That's just one example. All the things that matter to us, as soon as we recognize how much must they matter, we want to withdraw them from the whole business of exchange and proliferation and, as it were, have them to ourselves. It's that aspect of humanity which is so difficult to articulate. But as you rightly say, Churchill did articulate it. And does it so much easier when it's under threat.

Hmm. So, we have free-market conservatism, and we have social conservatism. And we should mention that this is within the frame of thought that the people are choosing how they will be governed—which is what we call classical liberalism, but since the term liberal has been hijacked to mean its opposite, we mean freedom of limited government, as guaranteed in the US Constitution.

So there’s a political sphere, an economic sphere, and a social sphere. To be conservative, then, is to reach for political freedom, economic prosperity, and social civilization. The opposites, whatever words they use today—liberal, socialist, progressive—reach for political control over people, or tyranny: economic control over people, or poverty; and social decadence, or savagery.

The Spherical Model is a way of saying that these three spheres of conservatism interrelate. To be an economic conservative only is to be incomplete. To be a social conservative only is to be incomplete. To expect freedom without a free economy and a self-governing people is an impossibility.

Later in the conversation, they were talking about cultural issues, particularly concerning sex, marriage, and family:

Sir Roger Scruton: We all of us fall away from the standards that are required in this area. That is undoubtedly the case, because this is the biggest area of temptation. But it is also the biggest area in which examples are needed, and in which a culture of resistance is needed. That culture of resistance was absolutely vital to the protection of the working class family, and especially of children who need a father at home and have lost that protection.

It is undeniable that it's liberal propaganda which has made it almost impossible to say those things. It's not possible to say the things that are needed in this area, unless you're Charles Murray and don't care what's said about you anyway.

Peter Robinson: Or Sir Roger Scruton.

Sir Roger Scruton: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: That makes two of you.

Sir Roger Scruton: Yeah. Exactly. The point is, it's an area in which the truth has been made unsayable by the liberal censorship.

When pressed, he said that liberal censorship is a main reason Donald Trump was elected:

Sir Roger Scruton: People have been living under a regime of liberal censorship, which makes it very hard to say things without being accused of faults like racism, xenophobia. You yourself mentioned this, which nobody wants to be accused of, but which are very easy to—  These are accusations, which are very easy to make, because there's no criteria on the basis of which to make them, other than the feelings involved.

We do, as individuals, have non-mainstream-media outlets. Like this blog. I can say here what Charles Murray and Sir Roger Scruton say, but I am only safe from the accusations while I am obscure. Even so, the accusations sometimes come. I will nevertheless keep speaking truth as clearly as I can, because I love truth.

I just want to add one more of his comments—this one about immigration issues, particularly illegal immigration. He has a way of making the issue clear:

Sir Roger Scruton: You have a house, which you share with your wife and children, assuming you have them. You do recognize the right to keep out of that house people whom you've not invited in. Don't you?

Peter Robinson: I do.

Sir Roger Scruton: Having invited people in who start smashing things up, you recognize a right to exclude them?

Peter Robinson: I do.

Sir Roger Scruton: Yeah. Just multiply that by a few hundred thousand, and you'll recognize that people taken as a whole have that right. That is another part of democracy, that we live in a place. We have the right to exclude from that place those whom we think are not going to fit into it or to whom we don't want to extend a welcome. If we didn't have that right, we wouldn't feel secure in occupying the place that we claim as ours.

Political philosophy has the means to explore the ideas, and find the truths—aside from the push and pull of political waves. While we still have to function in a political world, at least we can have the depth of understanding that explains what it is we conservatives want to conserve.

The Political Sphere Is Round

This is the last post for 2014, and I thought it might be a good time to re-introduce the Spherical Model. I’ve done this from time to time, since the blog title is obscure when you don’t know what it’s about. This is just an intro. For more full information, go to the SphericalModel.com website. And there’s also a best-of-the-blog collection, Part I, Part II, and Part III. But for now, here’s a first step.

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Back in 2004, during our homeschooling decade, I was looking for a way to explain political ideas. And I began to ask questions, like: Is there a better way of looking at political ideas than right or left?

Because there is nothing innately conservative about the right or innately liberal about the left. In fact, the directional terms come from the seating arrangement of European parliaments, in which conservatives favored retaining the monarchy while liberals were in favor of people’s power.

So the typical line model we use to describe political ideas as right and left is just a seating arrangement. Yet we’ve come to think of this line as a spectrum.

Political conversations tend to describe the far ends as extreme, assuming there’s some virtue in being balanced in the middle. And we refer to our nation as center right—just a little more conservative than exactly center.

But what are the extremes? Do we assume communism or socialism at the extreme left, and fascism at the extreme right?

That can’t be right, because communism and fascism are both totalitarian statist tyrannies, just slightly different flavors. Nazi means “national socialist party” and the communist Soviet Union’s name was Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

So if Nazism and communism aren’t diametric opposites, then what are the logical extremes?

How about total government control, or tyranny, versus total lack of government control, or anarchy?

That’s better. Then freedom is that perfect balance in the middle.

But wait; there’s a problem with this model too: It’s common in history for people suffering in anarchy to turn for relief to total government control—anything for security. But in this model, as a people move to the left, they have to pass through that balanced freedom section. You’d think that it would be very common for someone to stop and say, “Hey, this freedom is good. Let’s stop going leftward and stay here.” Yet that pretty much never happens. But going directly from chaos to state control is historically common.

Plus, notice that there’s not that much difference between the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of anarchy. Total government control means the state has all the power—the police, the military. The state can do what it wants, and the mere citizen is without any rights except what the state decides to grant.

Anarchy, on the other hand, means that power belongs to whoever is stronger and meaner than the next guy. If you threaten to beat people up (or kill them) if they don’t give you all their belongings, and you’re strong enough to mean it, then you have power. If someone else is stronger or better armed than you are, then you have to yield power to them.

In other words, anarchy, while less organized, is power in the hands of the strongest and best armed—just like a tyrannical government.

So maybe government tyranny and anarchic tyranny are pretty close to the same thing. When I show this, I use a ribbon, labeled at the ends, and fold it in half, so it looks something like this:

Tyranny and freedom are really the opposite extremes.

Not bad. But it puts all those different kinds of tyrannies in the same location, and maybe there are differences.

A simple line doesn’t give us the dimensions we need.

So, how about if we use three dimensions—a sphere? If we draw a line at the equator, we can separate freedom (northern hemisphere) from tyranny (southern hemisphere). And then we can draw a longitudinal dividing line, with more local interests in the western hemisphere and larger interests—from state to nation, to international, in the eastern hemisphere.

I call this the Spherical Model.

Political Sphere



Down in the south, you can see that one side of tyranny is the chaos of anarchy, and the other side is the totalitarian control of government tyranny. It’s easy to get from one to the other—which is what much of world history has shown us. You can have communism, socialism, and Nazism as separate patches in their quartersphere, based on how much control they exert on their people (southern direction), or how far they plan to expand (toward the eastward extreme of world domination).

Up north in the freedom zone, location is mostly a matter of whose interest. Free people don’t yield power to a governing authority beyond the appropriate interest. Families make their own decisions about the care, upbringing, and education of their children. Communities on up to cities and counties decide on local law enforcement and protection needs. States (or provinces) deal with their particular infrastructure and laws. Only very limited powers are granted to a nation—as are enumerated in the US Constitution. And that sovereignty would never yield to an international power, but would cooperate with other free sovereignties concerning international issues.

If we identify ideologies according to level of control exerted onto free people, and also their level of interest, we can identify location on the sphere. And that will tell us how close we are to thriving in the northern freedom zone.

Economic Sphere

We can use the spherical model again for economic ideas: the north will be the prosperity of free enterprise, and the south will be the poverty of controlled economy. Those differences have direct relationships with political ideologies, so we can overlay the economic sphere right over the political sphere and see how things interrelate.

Social Sphere

And what about social ideologies? Again, we can use the same sphere; the north will be civilization, and the south will be savagery.

In all three overlaying spheres, the question becomes, not which is better, left of right? But what are the principles of freedom, prosperity, and civilization? There’s no too far north extreme; there’s only getting north enough and doing what it takes to stay there, generation after generation, without southward slipping.

The political, economic, and social spheres all have their own set of principles for reaching true north. We can take on the economic and social spheres another day, but I’ve started with the political sphere because it’s the easiest to see as the alternative to the right/left model.

So, if we want to be north on the political sphere, there are some questions that let us know whether we’re heading in the right direction:

• Is the policy being debated something that an individual has the right to do, and therefore has the right to delegate to his/her government? For example, a person has the right to protect his own life and property. He can, therefore, combine resources with his neighbors and hire a government entity, such as a sheriff, to do that job for him. Similarly, the several states can combine to delegate the power of defending the nation to a national government entity. Conversely, a person does not have the right to take his neighbor’s excess grain production, for example, and bestow it on himself, because his neighbor was more prosperous in a particular season. He can, of course, ask his neighbor for charity, but he cannot coerce the neighbor to give. That would rightfully be considered theft. Therefore the person cannot delegate the redistribution of wealth to the government to do for him—that would place him too far south on the sphere.
• Does the policy infringe in any way on God-given natural rights, such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights? Does the policy infringe on the free exercise of religion or try to establish a particular sect as a state religion? Is political speech hindered? Does the policy infringe on the right of citizens to bear arms? Does the policy constitute an illegal search or seizure? Does the policy deprive a person of life, liberty, or property when the person has not committed a crime for which that deprivation is the just sentence? Does the policy try to claim for government a power that was not specifically granted in the Constitution? etc. If the policy infringes on the God-given rights, then government cannot take that power without usurping power from the people—which is too far south on the sphere.
• Is the idea being debated a proper role of government: some aspect of protection (including national defense, protection from interstate crime, enabling international and interstate commerce, standardized weights and measures and currency to protect the value of wealth, the judiciary that guarantees the protective laws), as enumerated in the Constitution? If not, then accepting the idea is outside the Constitution—and is too far south on the sphere.
• Is the perspective appropriately local? It is important that any issue be handled at the most local level possible. Parents should decide the means, methods, and curriculum for educating their children, for example. An issue that affects a state should be handled at the state level, not the national level. National decisions should not be ceded to some international body. An inappropriate interest level is too far south on the sphere.

Next time someone suggests you are (or an idea is) far-right extreme, check to see whether their position is more accurately some level of southern statist tyranny. Missing the possibility of the entire northern hemisphere of freedom is common. Most of world history shows an oscillation between statist tyranny and anarchic tyranny, or from one statist tyranny to another. Change the discussion by changing the terms and then dealing with principles. Then move north to freedom.