Columbus--Restoring after the Revisionists

There were certain historical stories told when I was growing up, many decades ago, that gave us heroes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Christopher Columbus. Yes, Columbus was one of those. And we had a day to celebrate his story. This was before holidays all got shifted to Mondays, so mostly they were school days, and we learned about that person on their day—and maybe for the week or two of surrounding days.

Christopher Columbus, screenshot from
The History Channel; I found it here.

Then, in my adulthood, there’s been this movement to disillusion us about these heroes. And others. We could add Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. And probably others.

But what I’m learning is that the disillusionment is based on fake “facts.” There wasn’t really a cabal of historians for centuries secretly hiding facts in order to sanitize and glorify the heroes. While human, with the sensibilities of their times, our American heroes were really extraordinarily good men who accomplished great things for mankind.

I don’t know why the lies are there. It seems perverse to tear down, with lies, someone we should admire and honor—someone who isn’t here to defend himself or set the record straight. It seems related, in most cases, to hating America. I’m not certain whether this weird hero destruction goes on in other countries as it does here.

But why would it be considered a “good” thing to hate your country, and the iconic figures who helped make it? That seems cynical, pseudo-intellectual, and just plain ugly.

Dinesh D’Souza has done a good job debunking some of this anti-American fake history, with America—Imagine a World without Her and other books and documentaries. I’ve also turned to a series of history books by various authors: The Real Benjamin Franklin, and The Real Thomas Jefferson, for example.

Today is Columbus Day. I’ve written about Columbus a couple of times (here and here). I believe the real historical record is in his favor.

This past weekend I heard the best debunking of the Columbus maligning I’ve heard in some time. This was Michael Knowles, in his Daily Wire podcast on Friday. You can get the audio here, or you can see it, with some extra visuals, by scrolling down to last Friday on his Facebook page.

Later I found much of that 20-minute segment written as an article by Knowles. There’s extra humor in the podcast, and I recommend that. But for now I’d like to share a few of his points. This first is an example of what we truth seekers are up against.

The typical mainstream media anti-Columbus hit piece goes as follows: cite a well- known passage from the Admiral’s diary out of context, juxtapose it next to the testimony of his chief political rivals, and pretend that all of this information has only recently been uncovered.

Vox’s Dylan Matthews follows this strategy with his outlet’s typical sobriety in his 2015 article, “9 reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant, and scoundrel.” Perhaps the worst charge Matthews alleges is that “Settlers under Columbus sold 9- and 10-year-old girls into sexual slavery.” Matthews asserts, “This one he admitted himself in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, a friend of the Spanish queen: ‘There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.’”

One might conclude from Vox’s article that Columbus devised the plan or at least approved of it. But the opposite is true. Columbus doesn’t brag about selling those girls into slavery or even defend the action. On the contrary, in the very next sentence, Columbus writes, “I assert that the violence of the calumny of turbulent persons has injured me more than my services have profited me; which is a bad example for the present and for the future. I take my oath that a number of men have gone to the Indies who did not deserve water in the sight of God and of the world.”

There are attacks that quote Columbus’s contemporary rivals, who maligned him at the time, and he spent energy refuting. Knowles makes this comparison:

The report’s author is none other than Francisco Bobadilla, Christopher Columbus’s chief political rival and the man who successfully usurped power from him in the West Indies. A modern analog would be to say that a document written by Walter Mondale proves Ronald Reagan was a terrible president.

Columbus’s behavior, as testified by those who knew him and saw how he acted, debunked those accusations then, and they should not be picked up as pseudo-fact again in our day. Among the accusations are ways the natives were treated.

Columbus spent years of his life refuting the document as a vicious libel and turned down as a matter of principle lucrative agreements with the Spanish crown that did not correct for history what he regarded as calumny. This is not to say that Columbus is guiltless in the Spanish treatment of natives. But the Left’s claims of Columbus’s special monstrosity are without foundation. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, the first resident Bishop of the Americas and most vociferous defender of the indigenous islanders against Spanish slavery and brutality admired Christopher Columbus to the end and expressed as much in his History of the Indies.

Stanford professor emerita Carol Delaney marvels at the ignorance. “They are blaming Columbus for the things he didn’t do,” she explains. “It was mostly the people who came after, the settlers. I just think he’s been terribly maligned.” Delaney points out that in the man’s own writings and the writings of those who knew him, Columbus seems to be “very much on the side of the Indians” and even adopted the son of an American Indian leader he had befriended.

Columbus was devout, which may irk modern-day cynics. He believed he was led by God, and reports several miraculous details that led him forward fortuitously. And he believed he was sharing both Christianity and civilization with poor people who lacked these sources of happiness. He was respectful and gentle with the natives.

Columbus land in the New World
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
I found it here.

Possibly he was not a strong enough leader as a colonial island governor—for which there was no precedent—although he managed to overcome multiple mutinies through sheer force of will during the original voyage. But he was not a tyrant. In a letter to the Spanish crown, his Lettera Rarissima, he wrote these self-defending words:

“Let those who are fond of blaming and finding fault, while they sit safely at home, ask, ‘Why did you not do thus and so?’ I wish they were on this voyage; I well believe that another voyage of a different kind awaits them, or our faith is naught.”

I like Knowles’s accusation against the ungrateful and ignorant, who are willing to believe any word against an American hero, but fail to consider the documentation we’ve had for centuries:

The modern left-wing revisionist sits comfortably in the freest, most prosperous, most charitable country in the history of the world and from a position of wholly unmerited luxury slanders the man who made it all possible.

A few days ago I suggested asking the question, sincerely, “What makes you think that?” That’s a good question to ask about Columbus. If you think he was an evil tyrant who ruined the entire “New World,” what makes you think that? What are your sources? Why do you believe those sources instead of more positive, historical records?

And, if you weren’t being taught to believe that America is evil, would you think that solely from your own experience and evidence?

As for me, I flew my American flag today, in celebration of Christopher Columbus and his intrepid voyage that led to the eventual founding of America.

Start with Ourselves

During weeks like this, when the news is covering mainly one horrible event, it can wear on a person.

One response is, as Mr. Rogers’ mother advised, to look for the helpers. And there have been many. Stories of heroes, in Las Vegas, who acted instinctively to do what would help others—those are the stories that really tell who we are as a people. Here’s one.

Johnathan Smith, hero
image from CNN

The less helpful response is to insist that anyone who doesn’t believe in taking all the guns from all the law-abiding citizens lacks compassion. And I feel the urge to respond. If pinned down, these gun haters aren’t against all guns; they’re against anyone but the government having them. Because they won’t be against police and military having them—unless they’re in favor of dying defenseless. So, they’re really just against non-government citizens having weapons to defend themselves. I’d like to know why they suddenly trust the government so much.

There’s talk of outlawing the bump stock, apparently used in the Las Vegas shooting to make a semi-automatic rifle fire almost like an automatic rifle. Fully automatic weapons are already outlawed. The NRA is not against outlawing the bump stock. Most shooting ranges already forbid them. If a person isn’t trained in rapid fire—the kind of training you might get in the military—it’s easy to lose control and shoot the ceiling or anything (or possibly anyone) within range.

So there’s a good chance there will be some agreement on this. At the very least there may be some control over where such items can be owned or used, since they make a legal weapon into what is essentially an illegal weapon.

I don’t know how the debate will go. What I expect, though, is that when a murderer doesn’t have access to one way of killing, he will find another.

What we really need is a better way to identify the kind of mind and heart willing to mass murder. I don’t know if that’s possible. Isn’t that the idea of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report? I don’t think things went well when interventions pre-empted actions.

Even better would be creating minds and hearts that don’t go so far awry.

Scarlett Lewis, the mom of one of the Sandy Hook Elementary victims, says that gun control isn’t the answer; misuse of guns is a symptom of a larger societal problem. She suggests teaching young people social and emotional learning. A program she promotes focuses on five points: how to have positive and healthy relationships, deep connections, coping skills, resilience and compassion.

Lewis believes we can see the end of these killings, if we teach every child how to cope with anger, how to be compassionate, and how to love.

Getting out of savagery and up to civilization is a simple but not easy process. We live in a fallen world, with too much evil. A lot will still go wrong. But we can start with ourselves, and with helping and encouraging those around us. The basics include those things that get us beyond our selfishness, the things we get from the Ten Commandments: honor God, life, family, property, and truth. A person who follows this path doesn’t plan and carry out savage atrocities.

During the LDS General Conference last weekend, Elder M.Russell Ballard said this:

We need to embrace God’s children compassionately and eliminate any prejudice, including racism, sexism, and nationalism. Let it be said that we truly believe the blessings of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ are for every child of God.

I testify that “the trek continues,” and I invite you to stay on the gospel path as you continue pressing forward by reaching out to all of God’s children in love and compassion, that we may unitedly make our hearts pure and our hands clean to receive the “multiplicity of blessings” awaiting all who truly love our Heavenly Father and His Beloved Son.

Good and Evil Are Both Real

Darkness is the absence of light. Evil is the absence of good. If good exists, then evil also exists wherever there is not enough good.

Late last night a man took aim from a 32^nd story window in Las Vegas, shooting into a crowd of concert goers, killing 50 or more, injuring hundreds, maybe as many as 500 (estimates are still fluctuating). The perpetrator killed himself as a SWAT team entered his hotel room. Multiple rifles were found. Video footage from people in the crowd sounds like machine-gun fire; i.e., fully automatic weaponry, which is not available for sale. Eventually information should come out about where the murderer was able to obtain such weapons.

Image from BBC News

This was an act of terrorism. It was designed to kill as many innocents as possible. While ISIS claimed credit, there is no evidence of any connection, so that seems unlikely at this time. We don’t know if we will uncover a motive for such an evil act. What we do know is that murdering innocents is evil.

Graphic from BBC News

This morning, while covering this atrocity, Ben Shapiro was talking about evil. He referred to a book:  Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence, by Roy F. Baumeister. In this book, the author talks about four types of evil, or motivations to do violence (I’m summarizing from Ben Shapiro’s explanation):

·         Instrumental: This is the idea that you have an object in mind, and you don’t care what means are used in order to gain that end. You want money; you don’t care that it’s not your money; you go to the bank and rob it, and if don’t care if you shoot somebody in the process. That is instrumental evil. Violence is just an instrument you’re willing to use to get what you want.

·         Ego-driven: Quoting Baumeister, “Violence is perpetrated by a subset of people who think well of themselves. And indeed it mainly occurs when they believe that their favorable images of self have been threatened or attacked.” This is what we’re seeing on college campuses where protesters commit actual violence because they think someone might say words they find offensive. They even call speech that disagrees with their views violence, to justify actual violence against those who disagree.

·         Ideological: This is the people who believe, for example, that communism justifies the murder of a hundred million people, because you’re creating utopia. If people would just succumb to your vision, they wouldn’t need to be wiped out of your way. It’s also what we see with Islamic terrorism, although that can also come under instrumental or ego-driven evil.

·         Sadistic: This is the idea that you enjoy violence, that you grew up from a kid who tortured puppies, and now you go out and you murder human beings.

Often we think of evil in that fourth category. Evil seems inexplicable. The Las Vegas shooting might turn out to be in that category. But this type is actually the least common.

Sadism requires a mind that has released a person from sensing guilt, allowing unfettered “enjoyment” of inflicting pain. Most of us aren’t likely to embody this type of evil. It’s rare, because most of us feel guilt when we do wrong; guilt, or conscience, stops us from committing evil. Shapiro also says it’s the only one of the four types we can profile against.

The other three are evils all of us mostly sane people are susceptible to. And the only solution to these first three types of evil--the only way to civilization--is moral education. We need to learn that the only justification for violence against human beings is self-defense.

Moral education teaches you that your desire for money, or some treasure, or some outcome must be subordinate to the safety of fellow human beings.

Moral education teaches you that your concerns about your identity, or your beliefs, are not that important. Disagreement isn’t an attack. As Shapiro says, “We have to stop feeling offended when we are disagreed with politically. We have to stop attributing evil motives to people who disagree with us, because then we’re more likely to become evil ourselves.”

Moral education teaches that your ideology isn’t worth killing people for. You want communism? Go to someplace people have already chosen that, or set up your commune on a private island somewhere. Don’t impose it by force on anyone. You want Sharia law? There are places you can live under that law; go there. You want your ideologies to win? Try expressing your reasons in a persuasive way. Imposing your ideologies on others is tyranny, and tyranny is evil.

We’re seeing evil in people’s reactions to the atrocity.

CBS legal executive Hayley Geftman-Gold tweeted that she felt no sympathy for the victims. Calling them “Repugs,” she said, “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans are often republican gun toters.” That’s evil. I don’t know whether you’d categorize it as ego-driven or ideological, or some combination. It was recognized as unacceptable, and she was fired for her comments. This person didn’t commit the atrocity, but she thinks people she judges as inferior (because country music = non-Democrat voter) are therefore worthy of being mowed down by machine gun. That way of thinking is evil. And evil thought comes before evil action.

Hillary Clinton and Tom Brokaw both claimed that the shooting was because of gun sales, which should therefore be denied to sane, law-abiding US citizens, since the shooter used guns that were ILLEGAL ALREADY. In fact, legal automatic weapons have been used in a total of three crimes since 1934. And atheist Richard Dawkins mocked, in a tweet, “Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah! / Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns.”  In other words, they used this sadistic violence to support their political ideology. While that is clearly multiple steps less evil than committing mass murder, it is using the murder—as though it is a good thing, because we should “never let a crisis go to waste.”

Not related to this incident, but while the rains were still coming down following Hurricane Harvey, a Florida sociology professor tweeted that the people of Texas deserved the death and destruction because they are evil GOP voters. (Note to the professor: Harris County, where the majority of flooding happened, went for Hillary Clinton.) He added later that Floridians who voted for Trump deserved any disaster that Hurricane Irma inflicted. That’s hate speech. It reveals that he thinks people’s lives are worthless if they do not agree with his politics. The professor did, by the way, get fired.

What do good people do when they see others going through tragic circumstances? They send love, prayers, and help—just like you saw in Houston following Hurricane Harvey. Here’s a suggestion of how to help the suffering in Las Vegas. And this:

What do evil people do when they see others going through tragic circumstances? Decide whether or not the sufferers are people they hate, and if so rejoice in their suffering. If there’s room in your heart for that much darkness/evil, you really need to fill yourself with more light/goodness.

Ben Shapiro concluded:

All I would suggest for everybody is that we focus in on how we cleanse our own hearts of the tendency to do evil things, how we look at the world. And that we think a little bit more about the fact that we’re all brothers and sisters in this fight against evil people. And we really need to focus together on how we can make our country a better place across the board without tearing each other apart over simple political disagreements.

The how-to for cleansing our hearts of the tendency to do evil would fill another entire post. But for now, let me suggest some of the goodness I filled my life with this past weekend. It was the semi-annual General Conference for my church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with hours of one good, uplifting talk after another. Here are a couple that share the good:

·         Jean B. Bingham, General President of the Relief Society

·         Elder W. Craig Zwick, of the Quorum of the Seventy

What Makes You Think That?

There’s a question I’ve learned that can be helpful when someone is upset about something that you’re not ready to buy into—or maybe more likely, they’re upset about something you know is false. You have to be able to ask this without snark, without obvious skepticism. Ask to sincerely know where they are coming from:

“Really? What makes you think that?”

What I think is that most people want to be able to think of themselves as good. They’re trying to figure out what’s right and wrong, and they want to choose the better side, but maybe they have very little guidance about what that is. And that makes them vulnerable to manipulation. Sometimes what they think they know just isn’t true.

As Ronald Reagan used to say about his political opponents, “It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so many things that aren't so.”

There’s a clear example of this type of error going on in recent news cycles. NFL players have decided to protest our flag and country during the national anthem before football games. The purported reason? Racist cops killing unarmed black men and getting away with murder.

That’s the narrative. As Kaepernick said, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.… There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Colin Kaepernick
Image from here

As David French wrote yesterday, 

Standing for the National Anthem is meaningless if it’s mandated, and such a mandate undermines the essential liberty of free speech.

In order to have a country with peaceful liberty, we need people who love the country and respect and revere it willingly. Those “taking a knee” are doing a lot that’s wrong, and it isn’t really about their First Amendment right to protest. They’re accusing their fans, who are innocent of the wrongs being protested, in a nation that can never meet their approval, because their accusations have no connection to reality.

For me, it’s no sacrifice to tune them out. Deciding not to watch NFL football is no loss. I can hardly get myself to pay enough attention to know who’s playing in the Super Bowl every year. But there have been plenty of instances when I’ve had to decide whether some entertainment was worth suffering through the hateful accusations from some entertainer using his/her celebrity to spread “so many things that aren’t so.”

We may have come to a point where it isn’t enough just to have NFL owners tell them what they have to do under contract of employment. We want them to choose not to protest the country that gives them greater freedom and opportunity than any society in their race’s history.

The symptom that our culture is seriously ill comes from a youth football league (ages 8 and under) that decided to do the “cool” trend and “take a knee.” Their coach, botching a teaching moment, made sure they knew why they were doing it. One third-grade boy answered, “Because black people are getting killed, and nobody’s going to jail.” So the coach joined them in disrespecting our flag and country.

screen shot from here

Did it not even occur to that coach to ask a kid that age, “What makes you think that?” Or, “Who told you that? Because, you know, that’s just not true.”

Because, in fact, black men being murdered by non-black police officers is not a trend. It is not something on the rise. It is a rarity, and it's inconceivable that such a murderer would be protected from prosecution.

Larry Elder (a black commentator, so he gets to say things without the knee-jerk racist label) listed some of the facts on his radio show a couple of days ago—all from reliable research. I found the facts repeated today in an article he wrote. I’ll summarize:  

·        Unarmed black men killed by police are extremely rare. An estimated 21 black males get hit by lightning in a given year. In 2015 (latest statistics) 17 unarmed (not necessarily nonthreatening) black men were killed by police, including those killed by black police officers.

·        Blacks are not more likely to be pulled over by police than whites. Whites have nearly as many encounters with police in a typical year as blacks do: whites 1.2 encounters, blacks 1.5. Any racial disparity in traffic stops is due to “differences in offending” in addition to “differences in exposure to the police” and “differences in driving patterns.”

·        Blacks who encounter police are not treated more harshly than whites. Bureau of Labor studies show, “Only 0.6 percent of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. … Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police violence include violence that is legally justified.” And an earlier study of the 75 largest counties in the nation concluded there is “no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites.”

As Larry Elder says,

Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.

Where the rare uncalled-for police shooting happens, we’re all in favor of prosecuting the offending officer, and improved training—and maybe even more cameras—to keep such incidents from happening ever again. The few high-profile cases meant to show the problem end up exonerating the police, but those cases get referred to anyway, and when someone is brought to the truth on such a case, the response tends to be, “Well, it’s still happening all over the place where we don’t hear about it.”

But what if they could learn that that’s a lie?

Every time the media repeats the “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” lie, they are doing yeoman’s work as racial dividers. Any time an authority figure such as a football coach or manager doesn’t say, “That protest is for your own time; it’s bad for business if you disrespect the flag and country that the fans who pay our salary love and revere,” they’re countenancing the lies.

I’ve read To Kill a Mockingbird, the Emmett Till story, The Help, and others. I know those bad situations existed. But they’re decades in the past. Mostly before my lifetime, and certainly before my adulthood. The stories seem foreign to most Americans. There are 320 million of us; of course you can find a few outliers. But institutional racism is simply not an issue in this nation.

When blacks—particularly those who make millions of dollars playing a ball game—complain that this country is so bad, they need to be pinned down: “What makes you think that?”

If I were to guess, I think it might be some kind of leftover from their early life in a worse place—which they escaped from but not everyone else did. Something like survivor's guilt. I don’t know how we get a word in, when we’re not being listened to and the truth is substituted with some fabrication, but it would be good if the “oppressed” learned the secret formula for avoiding poverty in America:

1.       Don’t have sex before age 20.

2.       Don’t have sex until after marriage.

3.       Stay married.

4.       Obtain at least a high school diploma.

Only 3 out of 100 who follow this formula remain in poverty. Everyone else gets work with enough income for the family to eventually move up into the more comfortable middle class. This is true regardless of race.

That’s a pretty good guarantee. For those exceptional 3%, if that’s all we had to deal with, we could easily identify what more needed to be done to help them along. Unfortunately, we also have to deal with mounting numbers of people who don’t live the formula but then want to blame someone else for their unwise choices.

What we could use, as a people, is a way to identify what leads to the sense of oppression. Chances are it’s the untruths promulgated by people who gain power when they stir people up to anger. That’s a millennia-old tactic, tied to all those historic cultures living in tyranny.

If we want freedom, prosperity, and civilization, we could use a better combination of understanding and truth.

One Month Later

Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Corpus Christi on August 25^th, and made its way north to Houston August 26^th, beginning the biggest flooding event in recorded US history. That was one month ago today. So I took a drive, camera in hand, to see how things look now, compared to that crazy day.

Today’s post is mostly a photo essay.

There aren’t any hills in Houston. We use overpasses and skyscrapers for views. So when you see a little hill like this one, you know it’s not natural. This is the Addicks Reservoir Dam, not far from the spillway. Most of the time, it’s just part of the road.

Clay Road runs over Addicks Reservoir Dam

Addicks Dam south of the spillway

Eldridge Parkway goes through the reservoir. During heavy rain, it floods, and they close it. This has happened maybe a dozen times in the nearly 20 years we’ve lived here. It’s part of the plan. It was closed until a few days ago. There’s still water in the reservoir that hasn’t drained yet.

Eldridge Parkway, running through the reservoir, is finally open,
but there's still a lot of water alongside the road.

Bear Creek Park is the alter ego of the reservoir. Our kids used to play baseball here. There are soccer fields, camping areas, playground equipment, a lot of forest primeval, and other things you’d expect in a park. That’s how we make use of the space between floods. It has probably been out of commission for an entire month several times. We don’t know how much longer it will still be water instead of playground.

The road through Bear Creek Park is closed
while the park is serving as the reservoir.

Bear Creek Village was one of the worst hit neighborhoods. For those who think people shouldn’t be building in flood zones, understand that this neighborhood is 40-60 years old. They probably thought they’d never flood. But it turns out, when the reservoir fills up with 800-year flood waters, they do flood.

It took quite a while to get the water out so the mucking out could be done. Finally now the debris removal is underway. You can see the heavy equipment at work, and some really big trucks.

Debris removal is underway in Bear Creek Villages

There’s still a lot of debris to pick up.

Sometimes you see stacks of furniture, like this, that remind you there was a live family that lost all of this.

The post office I usually use is being rebuilt.

Bear Creek Post office before
(Photo from Melissa Willis)

Bear Creek Post Office
reconstruction underway

Closer to my house, you can see more lawn scars—the places where the debris sat before getting picked up. Some houses are marked with a C or an H. I believe those were put there by rescuers. I haven’t been able to learn what they stand for. Maybe “clear” and “hazard.” I’m not sure. I'm not sure how they remove them either. But that's a minor detail by comparison with rebuilding the home's interior.

In my neighborhood, I was able to do a few side-by-side comparisons.

After the mucking out.

Same corner after debris removal. Dusty, but looking near normal.

The street the boats went down to rescue people is clear and dry again.

Where boats launched to do rescues into the neighborhood.

Dry again, and looking pretty good.

This was our entrance underwater, and back to normal now.

Our entrance, once the heavy rains stopped. It was underwater
for about a week. That means those homes were underwater that long too.

Back to serving as a road again. You can't even tell.

The Mormon Helping Hands were still out this past weekend, but we're reaching the end of mucking out. Unfortunately, homes that haven't been able to do that yet may be a total loss. The church where I play music with friends once a week is back to normal today; a week ago it still had refugees sleeping in the sanctuary, and a dog refugee room somewhere at the back (we could hear them). That was a long time for a church to be used. Schools are open, and students have been reassigned to new schools as needed.

So Houston lives on. The streets were designed to flood, as backup waterways when the bayous are too full. There’s a lot of engineering that helps this city handle massive amounts of rainfall. But when several feet (not just inches) come down all at once, even this system is overwhelmed.

What’s amazing, really, is how well the water was handled, how few lives were lost. And most important was how neighbors, from near and far, helped one another. Which needs to keep happening for some time yet.

There are a few areas that might not be rebuilt. And there are plenty of places still in the midst of cleanup—way before restoration. But what’s surprising is how much has returned to normal for most of Houston, and how much hope there is that most of us will have our lives rebuilt eventually.

We feel blessed here. So many people showed they cared about us.

Meanwhile, we’re watching the devastation in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria. We know a missionary there, who was flown out today, along with a hundred or so others. They had been working hard there, but  The island is in desperate need. there wasn't enough food, clean water, or housing for them. They had stayed in the mission office during the storm, packed in together. Most of them were unable to return to their apartments, so they lost all their belongings beyond the change of clothes with them.

There's no electricity. Spotty communication. Transportation difficulties. Prayers and aid need to go their direction next. That's what good people do for one another.

In the Mind-Changing Business

I was talking with son Political Sphere the other day, about Ben Shapiro’s speech last week at Berkeley. I watched it live-streamed, and he had watched it replayed later. We had both enjoyed it. We’re Ben Shapiro fans.

The Q&A following the speech was pretty epic. You may have seen a clip of him doing a little debate with an audience member on the issue of abortion. I’ll include it here, because it may be the clearest delineation of the two sides (and the obvious morality of one over the other) that you will see in two minutes.

Ben Shapiro isn’t someone you can safely disagree with; he will win in a debate. He will have the facts in his head, and be able to lay out the argument in a logical way. And, as Political Sphere was pointing out, he never uses an emotional argument.

I am a lover of truth. Sometimes finding truth requires not only laying out the facts and arguments, but also applying conscience, which can be emotional, but is trained toward truth—unless you have practiced overriding your conscience.

When someone uses an emotional appeal—“But what about the children?” “Shouldn’t everyone be allowed to love the person they choose?” “Do you want people to die without health care?”—the emotion is typically irrelevant to the issue.

Do we care about children? Of course. It may be that we care more; we actually want them to be raised in stable families and taught to become productive, civilized adults. A policy that doesn't bring about those results doesn't qualify as actual caring.

Are we against love? Of course not. We’re not even against people committing to the person they choose. What we’re against is being forced to give some other arrangement the imprimatur that God gives to actual marriage.

Do we want people to die without healthcare? Of course not. But forcing people to buy a type of insurance they don’t want and can’t afford, and which does not meet their particular needs, is not providing actual health care. What we see as a better way of getting care to everyone is free market plus philanthropy—both of which are hindered by government interventions.

Those are just examples. Emotional and logical people talk past each other, because one side rushes to place its ladder on the wrong wall and insists that we have to climb, while the other side looks around to determine where is the best wall to place the ladder against, and goes there instead—and then gets yelled at for not climbing the ladder on the wrong wall.

Earlier this week I listened to a Daily Wire Conversation with Ben Shapiro, a full hour of his conservative brand of fun, covering, at breakneck speed, political topics as well as music, movies, and religion. About ten minutes in, the host, Elisha Krauss, asks Shapiro about whether he intended to someday run for president. I’ve never heard him talk about any political aspirations before, and he wasn’t positive about any here either, but he didn’t rule it out. But he said something about his purpose—and the purpose of The Daily Wire, where he is editor-in-chief—that struck me:

Eisha Krauss: What would it take for you to run for president in 2020 or 2024?

Ben Shapiro: So, 2020 is not going to happen. I am old enough—like, right at the cusp. So I turn…  Let’s see, I was born in ’84. So, in 2020 I would turn 37. But the problem is that I wouldn’t want to divide the Republican Party, and whatever happens right now, President Trump is the titular leader of the Republican Party; there are a lot of people that are very loyal to him. The last thing you want to do is sink the candidate of the Republican Party in the primaries and destroy him for a general election. Or, alternatively, alienate half of the people who are big Trump supporters.

So I think it’s Trump of bust for the Republican Party in 2020.

Further down the line, yeah, we’ll see what happens. I don’t really have any intention of doing anything like that right now, but that’s because we’re focused, obviously, right now, on building the company, but in ensuring that the message gets out to the widest variety of people available.

And I’m actually not sure whether you do more good convincing people outside of government, or being in government, trying to convince people. Once you sort of have the patina of government stamped on you, I wonder how many ideas you can actually…how many minds you can change, as opposed to being in the mind-changing business, which is what we do here.

He’s in the mind-changing business. That’s very close to what I do. Maybe that’s why it struck a chord.

It’s an educational mission, changing minds. Mine is more refined as, “Let’s reframe the structure of the ideas, so we can see how they interrelate, and thereby make decisions that will lead us in the right direction—toward freedom, prosperity, and civilization.” Shapiro’s arguments fit well in my framework, but he’s doing more of the nitty-gritty details, issue-by-issue, comparing the two sides and showing clearly which side makes more sense, both morally and economically. While I try to do that too, on certain issues, I don’t tackle as many issues each and every day.

There’s a book I’ve been spending some time on—referred to it before, The Eden Conspiracy, by Joe Harless—that is education oriented, with the purpose of producing “graduates who have skills, knowledge, information, and attitudes to become accomplished citizens.” I agree with that goal, but then we have to define what an accomplished citizen is.

The author suggests that a society of accomplished citizens would have these characteristics [p. 47]:

·         Exists under a democratic form of government.

·         Is lawful, orderly, ethical, and safe.

·         Allows freedom for its citizens—within the law.

·         Allows freedom for enterprise—within the law.

·         Provides equal opportunity for its citizens.

·         Values the family as the basic unit of society.

·         In partnership with the family, provides protection and development of the young.

That’s not too different from how I describe civilization in the Spherical Model. But there’s some difficulty, not only in getting schools to teach these values, but even to agree on which values, and what those values mean.

Harless mentions an anecdote from his household: p. 148

This reminds me of the time our four-year-old son was going to a friend’s house. As usual, my wife admonished Be a good boy. With all sincerity he asked, Mom, what IS a good boy? I don’t recall what she then told him, but the question became our family’s response when any of us became too soft [ambiguous] in our speech.

This lack of precision in speech is part of why there is so much strife in society.

For example, can we agree that being tolerant of differences is a necessary value in a non-homogenous, free society? Yes. But what does tolerance mean? One side simultaneously screes, “Don’t shove your beliefs down my throat!” while using the force of dubious law, social shunning, economic boycotting, and even fascist violence to enforce their beliefs on those who disagree.

A non-slave should not be forced to use his artistic talents to portray a message that goes against his religion, for example. It’s not about a couple getting a cake for a gay wedding; they can get that elsewhere; forcing a particular baker to do it is the ultimate intolerance—beyond what slaveholders ever had the power to force their slaves to do.

Tolerance doesn’t mean we must believe or do all the same things; it means we ought to calmly agree to disagree.

Ben Shapiro’s speech at Berkeley is important for several reasons. One is that it became clear to anyone paying attention that his speech was not a threat; those trying to shut down his speech were a threat. Also, he spoke clearly, rationally, and calmly—even respectfully—toward those who disagreed with him. And that civilized decorum allows for an actual conversation.

If there is an actual conversation, in which terms are agreed on for common ground, then there can be mutual understanding. That may or may not lead to changing minds, but at least it gets rid of the hostile assumption that anyone who disagrees with some prevailing viewpoint is evil and must be eliminated.

If an idea is right, if it’s true, it stands up to scrutiny. If you feel so threatened by someone articulating an idea that you don’t agree with that you must resort to violence to forcibly shut down that speech, maybe your idea is weak. Maybe you’re wrong.

On the Spherical Model, shutting down free speech is a southern hemisphere tyrannical behavior. It could be in the statist tyranny quadrant, with government preventing the speech; or it could be in the anarchical tyranny quadrant, with mobs preventing the speech. Either way, it does not lead to the enlightenment necessary for civilization.

What I believe—what I trust about humanity—is that minds can be changed to come to see the truth. I believe that most people want to think of themselves as good and right, and so, if presented the truth clearly, without clouding emotional pressure, they will choose truth. I might be wrong. But I hope I am right.

Truth is worth seeking and finding. And it’s worth finding ways to express it so that minds—and lives—can be changed for the better.