Unavoidable externalities exist, of course; the emissions of carbon dioxide produced by breathing, working humans, for example. Others are avoidable, like the wood chips from a lumber mill, which can become an externality by being dumped into a nearby river, or which can be absorbed by the lumber mill by simply cleaning them up and using them in some other way. And some externalities are positive, as when a game-management company increases the population of deer on private hunting grounds and that spills over onto public ones. But some, of course, are negative, like our coal plant emissions or the overheating of river water by factories. All of these are externalities; some of them are desirable and some are not. But all of them are economic failures.

According to the principle of commutative justice, a transaction is supposed to ensure that both parties are enriched to the same objective degree. Clearly, externalities fly in the face of that, because it involves forcing some enrichment or (more likely) detriment on others who are not parties to the transaction. Capitalists, of course, deny the principle of commutative justice (in fact if not in principle), but they espouse a notion of pricing that is supposed to exclude externalities. The price in a transaction is supposed to describe the entire cost-benefit calculation of the parties. But the price does not describe externalities; indeed, capitalists often define externalities precisely as those costs or benefits not reflected in the price.[1] In both cases, though, the existence of externalities means that the system has failed in some way. For a distributist who believes in commutative justice, justice is being denied those who are forced to endure costs without any compensating enrichment; for a capitalist, the price is failing to reflect the true costs of the transaction, which leads to a market failure. Externalities are a problem for both systems.

This is where the government is supposed to step in. Government economic activity is designed to require the internalization of externalities; that is, to require parties to transactions with externalities to absorb the external costs of those transactions. (We’re concerned here primarily with negative externalities, but in principle positive externalities are also a problem.) Government agencies see an industry with some substantial externalities; say, the coal industry. They insist that the coal industry internalize its externalities; that is, pay to clean up or prevent its own pollution. The coal company will then reflect the costs of this cleanup in the price of its electricity, which means that the transaction, the sale of electricity, now truly contains the full costs, including the cost of ensuring that those not parties to the transaction will not be effected by it. So, at least, goes the theory.

There are two problems with this theory, however. The first is that government sometimes simply fails; but that is unavoidable not the subject of this essay. The second problem is industry capture, sometimes also called regulatory capture. Companies which produce externalities substantial enough to be noticed by the government are typically large and powerful; they are also typically the ones with the most knowledge of a given field. So the government recruits members of these companies to assist in the regulation of the industries. But these recruits are often still more loyal to their former companies than to the government, and ensure that the government doesn’t regulate the industry any more than necessary to conform to statute and placate public opinion, even when this regulation doesn’t fully compensate for negative externalities. Government regulators and industry executives also have a tendency to move back and forth between these fields; they work in the regulatory agency until they can obtain a better-paying job in the industry, and ensure that eventuality by using their regulatory positions to assist the industry where they can. The industries thus, in a real sense, control at least partly their own regulators. This phenomenon has gotten blatant enough that large corporations, far from internalizing their externalities, are openly externalizing their internalities, as well, an occurrence seen most spectacularly in the corporate bailouts. Profits are internalized, of course, but even normally internal costs are externalized by persuading the government, through capture of industry regulators and the more or less open purchase of votes via fundraising and lobbying, to absorb them and spread them across society.

Obviously, this is a problem, and a problem that we’ve seen extensively in numerous fields of endeavor, especially financial regulation and intellectual property. The government here is simply not doing its job; it’s allowing private interests to overcome its pursuit of the common good, the latter of which is, after all, the entire purpose of its existence.

Distributists often feel as though their opinions are never heard and that they have no chance for affecting positive change in society. However, this area is one in which the public is already very sympathetic to our cause. The depravities of Goldman Sachs and the revolving-door of regulatory agencies to high-paying industry jobs are still very much fresh on the public’s mind, and the scourge of government by lobbyists is already widely hated by everyone the lobbyists aren’t already paying. Here, therefore, is one area in which distributism must make its voice be heard, standing up for a right economic order in our times.

Distributists should push for legislation which will help prevent this sort of blatant abuse of regulatory power against its proper end. Laws prohibiting regulators from taking jobs within or payments from their regulated industries for a period of time after their employment, say five years or so, would be an excellent start. Insulating government regulators from industry vote-buying, perhaps by raising the standard by which elected officials can hire and fire them, might be another. The ingenuity of the distributist mind should not be limited here; we must pursue all just means of ending this pernicious practice.

The distributist platform includes, of course, a sensible conception of the state and its role in society, a topic too broad to embark upon here but which has been treated extensively in the Review before. But the internalization of externalities is the rhythm to which we all must beat our drums. Corporations must not be permitted to force the public to absorb their costs; they must not be permitted to own their own regulatory agencies; and they must not be permitted to purchase legislation favorable to their own interests at the cost of the common good.

1. This is an inadequate definition because transactions can still have an effect on others even when the price reflects the possibility of those effects and the necessity of dealing with them. Such pricing reflects external effects of the transaction, but it does not eliminate them and it does not necessarily accurately reflect the cost of dealing with them. In such cases, the nature of an externality still exists even when the price is supposed to cover it.

This topic constantly comes up concerning the ill-advised changes in the liturgy effected in the 1960s. In the old days, we’re told (by which we always mean “before the liturgy was changed”), nobody understood the liturgy, because it was in Latin, and as we all know nobody can possibly understand anything that’s in a different language. That’s why nobody likes to listen to opera or Gregorian chant, or watch soccer games that are narrated in Spanish. Because nobody understood the liturgy, nobody participated in it. Everybody just sat there with their eyes down at a prayer book, or even praying the rosary. They were praying the rosary because that was something they could do in a language they knew; they were reading prayer books—many of which had prayers other than those of the Mass in them—because they were in English, or whatever language those other people speak, not in Latin, which nobody speaks. This is all a Very Bad Thing. People should all be paying attention to the prayers of the liturgy themselves, word for word, and they should not be paying attention to anything else. That’s the only way to participate in the liturgy.

This all ignores two facts, however. One, that it’s possible to understand the liturgy without understanding each individual word said therein; and two, that everybody is not the same.

As regards the first point, this seems clear. There is a famous story about Pope St. Pius X, who controversially (at that time) wanted to move the age of First Holy Communion down to the age of reason, seven or eight years old. Many people objected to this, saying that children that young, even if they had reached the age of reason, couldn’t be expected to understand the greatness of the Sacrament they were about to receive. Pope St. Pius X turned to a young girl, seven or eight years old, and asked her, “Whom do you receive when you receive Communion?” The little girl responded, “I receive Jesus.” The great pope then said, “This girl understands the greatness of the Sacrament, and can worthily receive it.”

It’s certainly true that the vast bulk of people in the old days did not understand Latin, and consequently were unable to understand the words of the priest, as he said them, solely by listening during the Mass. However, that most emphatically does not mean that they didn’t understand the Mass. They knew, from diligent instruction by competent catechists, that the Mass is the unbloody renewal of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ at Calvary, that this Sacrifice is reenacted in an unbloody manner on the altar every single day at every single Mass, and that by the Mass Jesus Christ becomes truly present, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, under the species (the appearance) of bread and wine. What more does he need to understand about the Mass? Does he understand it any less because he can’t decline mensa or give all the possible forms of suscipere?

Go through a Novus Ordo Mass, where most of the people don’t even remember the times when all Roman Masses were in Latin, and see how many of them understand the nature of the Mass as well as those poor, benighted souls of the elder days, who were cruelly forced to have Mass in a dead language for centuries!

Second, it’s important to remember that everybody is different. For many people, learning Latin and following the liturgy orally as much as possible would be very beneficial; for many, attempting to follow each individual word of the priest would be more distracting than anything else. For some, it is better to remain silent and meditate upon the sufferings of Christ; some of these people will even (horror or horrors!) choose to do so by praying the rosary during Mass, as a way of focusing their attentions on the Sacrifice that is being renewed on the altar. Some will follow along, in Latin or in the vernacular, in a missalette; others will find it more helpful to pray other prayers, usually found in a prayer book, which more effectively focus his attention on the great mysteries of the Mass.

In the words of the great Pope Pius XII in Mediator Dei:

Many of the faithful are unable to use the Roman missal even though it is written in the vernacular; nor are all capable of understanding correctly the liturgical rites and formulas. So varied and diverse are men’s talents and characters that it is impossible for all to be moved and attracted to the same extent by community prayers, hymns and liturgical services. Moreover, the needs and inclinations of all are not the same, nor are they always constant in the same individual. Who, then, would say, on account of such a prejudice, that all these Christians cannot participate in the Mass nor share its fruits? On the contrary, they can adopt some other method which proves easier for certain people; for instance, they can lovingly meditate on the mysteries of Jesus Christ or perform other exercises of piety or recite prayers which, though they differ from the sacred rites, are still essentially in harmony with them.

How can we argue with that?

One of the constant objections to the old liturgy was that it was run by “liturgical nazis,” who insisted that all liturgies be the same. But why, then, did we in the old days so explicitly recognize these many valid ways of participating in the liturgy, while in these new, enlightened times we insist that everybody must be the same?

I don’t intend to offer a definitive answer to this question; I only intend to offer a little food for thought. We’ll take, as a paradigmatic example, homosexuality. We can approach this question in two ways: the religious way, and the nonreligious way; that is, the Darwinist way. We’ll approach it the religious way (the correct way) first.

The answer is easy here: if homosexuality is genetic, then it’s a result of the corruption of genes, the same way that albinoism or sickle-cell anemia is. It’s a mistake, a problem, due to original sin and the corruption of human nature that original sin caused. We all have such corruptions to a greater or lesser extent; it would not surprise me to learn that among these corruptions, in some people, is a genetic switch that turns their sexual desires on their heads. If, on the other hand, homosexuality is not genetic, then it’s a deliberate choice, a product of conditioning, or both. In either case, it’s clearly a corruption of the natural sexual desires, and a sin. I believe the truth to be somewhere in the middle here; for some homosexuals, the desire is genetic, while for others it’s by choice, for others it’s by conditioning, and doubtlessly for others it’s brought about by some other condition. I don’t see what difference it makes; no matter where the desire comes from, living out the desire is immoral. The desire for too much food is also often inborn; it’s still sinful to eat too much.

Next, we’ll look at it from a Darwinist perspective. Remember that, if we believe in evolution, reproduction is the end goal here; we want to spread our genes to as many descendants as possible. That’s how fitness is measured: the spreading of the genes. That which does not pass down its genes is unfit; it does not survive, and by not surviving it strengthens the species as a whole. Sometimes, whole species fail; this is good, because it makes room for more fit species to arrive, as the dinosaurs made room for the mammals millions of years ago.

From this perspective, we can ask, is homosexuality genetic? Without specifically studying the genes themselves, we can’t answer this question; but we can say, “Probably not.” For how would such genes have been passed down? Perhaps some homosexual behavior is genetic; but some normal, heterosexual intercourse would be necessary for the genes to be passed down. So even if homosexual behavior is genetic (or genetically neutral), exclusive homosexuality is most probably not genetic, because it would be impossible for genes encoding such exclusive homosexuality to persist more than a generation. Furthermore, we can say that partial homosexuality, or “bisexuality,” is probably also not genetic, except perhaps in cases when no females are available. For homosexual behavior in other instances would distract attention and energy from the pursuit of female (and thus gene-passing) mates. So while we can’t say definitively, we can certainly say that genetic homosexuality seems unlikely, while genetic exclusive homosexuality seems particularly so.

Having answered that, we can ask: is homosexual behavior moral? Well, if we define morality as “conducive to a proper end” (as traditional Catholic moral philosophy defines it as “conducive to eternal salvation”), then we can clearly say that no, homosexual behavior is clearly not moral. Evolution, of course, occurs with no particular end in mind; it just naturally and unconsciously selects the most fit for survival. But every creature clearly desires to survive and pass on its genes, or else natural selection doesn’t work at all. So man naturally desires to survive and pass on his genes; but homosexual behavior inhibits or prevents that. Exclusively homosexual behavior makes it impossible to pass on the genes; it is thus immoral to engage in such behavior. Nonexclusively homosexual behavior, on the other hand, makes it harder to find and secure a suitable female mate, if only because it takes up valuable time. Therefore, homosexual behavior is immoral whether it is exclusive or not; but even more so if it’s exclusive.

Abortion can be analyzed in the same way; so can contraception. In both cases, the Darwinist must find that they are immoral because they are contrary to the natural desire of all creatures to survive and to pass on its genes. So the Darwinist who supports using condoms and encouraging people to be homosexual must take one of two tracts in this support:

1. Argue that Darwinism is no longer applicable to man, since we’ve surpassed the necessity for natural selection.
2. Alter Darwinism to allow for some bigger picture.

In the first case, if Darwinism is no longer applicable to man, then what is? Christianity is just as valid an answer to all the questions that the Darwinist attempts to answer through appeals to our instincts and our evolution. There is no reason to favor a more liberal over a more traditional approach to moral questions in this case.

In the second case, some Darwinists will claim that natural selection now demands us to consider the future of our whole species, threatened by overpopulation or destruction of the natural environment or some similar bogeyman which demands that we immediately moderate our natural desires for individual procreation. But since when has natural selection involved a species loyalty? Natural selection is about survival of the fittest individuals, not about the survival of the fittest species. Indeed, the fittest individuals often develop into new species precisely because they were fitter than the other members of their species. If people die or fail to reproduce because they were unable to procure food or other essential resources due to overpopulation or other hardship, then it’s because they were not as fit as those that survived. That’s how natural selection works; survival of the fittest. To attempt to save the whole species rather than the fittest individuals thereof throws a monkey wrench into the operation of this natural law.

As a practical matter, though, most liberal Darwinists just punt at this point. It’s a matter for freedom, individual choice. But that doesn’t answer the question. It answers the question of whether individuals should be compelled to certain behavior, and whether certain behavior should be punished (even if it sometimes answers it wrongly). But that’s not what we’re asking here. We’re asking if such behaviors are moral, not whether they are legal. And the bottom line is that Darwinism, and naturalism in general, has no real answer to that.

The real answer, the only intellectually satisfying answer, is to stop worrying about where man’s body might have come from and to start worrying about what man is. Man is a rational animal with a definite end, namely his happiness, which is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue in a complete life. With the advent of Christ, we are able to know even more specifically that this activity of the soul itself must be directed toward eternal salvation. That which is conducive to salvation is moral; that which is not, is immoral. That is the truth that we all must come to know.

Praise be to Christ the King!

The Unix Way is built upon having many, many small tools which do one thing and do it well; these tools are joined together in appropriate ways such that any one part can be swapped out without effecting the total tool chain. It does this in a number of ways; the most important can be summed up as follows:

1. A program should do one thing and it should do one thing well. Programs that try to be all things to all men—Microsoft Office comes immediately to mind—don’t play well with others, and bloat beyond all usefulness.
2. A program should, as far as possible, work with simple text streams. Text is a universal interface that everybody can deal with. Sometimes binary data formats are unavoidable—digital media files are about the only example I can think of—but for the most part data is suitably stored in simple text. This allows data to be used by many different programs for many different purposes, rather than (like a Powerpoint file) used by only one program in the universe, and only for the purposes that that one program deems worthwhile. This also means that a program doesn’t care where its data comes from or where it’s going; it’s just dealing with text streams. One can then replace the source of its data with anything, replace its destination with anything, and the program will continue working as before, without change.

The most frequent use for this boils down to redirection and pipes.

Redirection is simply telling a program to take its input from something other than normal, or to send its output somewhere other than normal. Well-behaved Unix programs take their input from “stdin”, a standard file descriptor which means “standard input.” Normally this is simply the keyboard; redirection, though, means that it can come from anywhere.

Take wc as an example. In its simplest form, wc does a simple word count. It will take its input from stdin and tell you how many characters, words, and lines are in it:

wc
Type: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
Output: 1 16 68

It’s that simple. But let’s redirect its input; we don’t want to just type everything in, we want the information from a file:

wc < file
Output: 52 1069 12280

And so we know the number of lines, words, and characters in the file “file”. That “less than” sign redirected the standard input to wc to be from the keyboard to from a file. Add a “greater than” sign and standard output, rather than being to your screen, will be to a file, too:

wc > filename < file

No output this time, because it went to a file. But if you open the ifle “filename”, you’ll find the same output there that went to your screen before we redirected it.

Which leads us to pipes. Pipes take the standard output of a program and send it directly to the standard input of another program. A trivial example (which is also the original “Useless Use of cat” award winner, but which serves well as a basic pipe example) is as follow:

cat file | wc
Output: 52 1069 12280

This accomplishes little, of course, but it’s only an example. cat prints the contents of one or more files to standard output; in this case, though, that means to the pipe, which sends that standard output to wc‘s standard input, which then outputs as normal. This example is trivial, and even useless (wc file would have given us the same data), but it shows well what pipes are and gives an inkling of their true power.

As an example, the other day I was reading with my son, who is obsessed with airplanes, about the fastest airplane in history: the North American X-15, which achieved the incredible speed of…7,274 km/hr. Now, I’m an American, and so was the plane; a speed in miles per hour would seem only polite. But the source I was reading didn’t give miles per hour, and rather than just searching the web, I decided this problem would produce a good example of the power of pipes.

I’ve written the dozenal program suite, which includes a converter for units from the metric, customary, and imperial systems in TGM (a dozenal unit system) and vice-versa. As a side effect, this program (tgmconv) also serves as a converter for metric to customary or imperial and vice versa. However, it only accepts dozenal numbers as input, for obvious reasons, and outputs them in dozenal, while I had a decimal number to input and wanted a decimal number at the end to explain to my little boy. (Who’s only just mastering basic math; no need to confuse him with radices.) Fortunately, the dozenal suite includes a decimal-to-dozenal converter and a dozenal-to-decimal converter, as well. So here’s my basic need:

1. Take 7,274 and convert it into dozenal.
2. Convert the result of step 1 in km/hr into mi/hr.
3. Take the result of step 2 and convert it to decimal.

In less elegant systems than Unix, I’d be forced to open some huge, bulky program for each of these tasks; or, if I’m lucky, one gigantic one, which would require repeated manipulations of several layers of menus to accomplish each step, and which would probably result in me forgetting the result of one step before I’d gotten to needing it for the next. Instead, I used pipes:

doz 7274 | tgmconv -i km/hr -o mi/hr | dec

doz 7274 convert 7,274 (decimal) into dozenal, and prints it to standard output. The standard output is grabbed by the pipe and sent to the standard input of tgmconv, which has two flags; the -i km/hr indicating that the input unit (which gives a unit to the standard input it was receiving) is kilometers per hour, and the -o mi/hr, which indicates that the output unit (which applies to what it would emit on standard output) is miles per hour. tgmconv obediently converted the unit and emitted the result on its standard output. That standard output was grabbed by the next pipe for the standard input of the next program, dec, whose mission in life is to convert dozenal numbers to decimal. It did so, and finally emitted the result: 4,519.8540 miles per hour.

Go ahead; search the Internet for it. That’s right; it’s precisely correct.

This example is pretty trivial, too; and the great Unix shell is made powerful not only by pipes and redirection, but also by its ability to be scripted. But it provides an example, even if a simple one, of the great power of the pipes. Oh, glorious pipes! Great Unix! Live forever on my box!

Praise be to Christ the King!

In the first place, the plutocracy is able to more or less openly purchase new intellectual property legislation for its own purposes. In America, as well as almost everywhere else in the world, we have a concept known as the public domain. The public domain is the whole body of intellectual works which do not belong to anyone; they are owned by the public. Take, for example, The Canterbury Tales. It was written by Geoffrey Chaucer, but Geoffrey Chaucer doesn’t own it; his descendants don’t own it; the crown doesn’t own it, and the British government doesn’t own it. Nobody owns it; or more properly, everybody owns it. It’s in the public domain; a Thomist would say that it’s become a common good. Anyone who wants to can print a new edition, without permission from anyone; can take the stories and modify them to produce a new work; or do anything else he wants to with them.

Intellectual property laws prevent things from falling into the public domain; that is, they offer private ownership of what would otherwise be a public good. Chaucer had never heard of such a concept and probably would have found it risible if he had, but centuries later it became a common notion that providing the creator of some intellectual good with an exclusive right to reproduce his work for a limited period would probably increase his monetary profit and thereby give him an incentive to produce more artistic work. Prior to this notion, of course, some of history’s greatest literature was somehow produced without any restrictions on copying whatsoever, but that was the original idea: give people an incentive to produce more. As is expressed in the American Constitution of 1787, Congress has the power

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The whole point, though, was simply to ensure that science would see more advancements and arts would see more creation. In other words, it was to protect the public domain. The exclusive right to copying was for a limited time precisely because those works which that right encouraged would then fall into the public domain and be available for the enrichment and use of everyone thereafter. The first American copyright and patent act, for example, granted such rights for fourteen years, with an optional additional period of fourteen years. After that, the works would become common goods, available for everyone.

Now, of course, that justification and arrangement is nothing but a cruel joke; intellectual property law doesn’t exist for the enrichment of the public domain, but for the enrichment of content owners and publishers. Not for content producers, who typically sell their rights to a rich corporation in order to secure its wide distribution (for which they often have little other choice), and who typically see only a fraction of the income generated by their work. Since the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1998, copyright now extends for the entire life of the author plus seventy years; for all practical purposes, works published during our lifetimes will never enter the public domain, and our grandchildren will likely be the first to see it do so, even assuming that Congress does not, under pressure from the plutocracy, extend the term of protection yet again.

Why is it called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act? Why is this an example of the workings of the plutocracy? Because Mickey Mouse was originally created in 1928, in the famous Steamboat Willy cartoon. This meant that its copyright was due to expire in 2003, and that, of course, would not do. So Disney left no stone unturned in ensuring that it purchased appropriate legislation for extending the terms of copyright to allow them to keep Mickey Mouse under their exclusive control.

Not to mention, of course, that the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published in 1926, and would have entered the public domain in 2001 but for this extension. Who owns the rights to Winnie-the-Pooh? Three guesses; the first two don’t count.

Nor was this the first time that copyrights had been extended in order to ensure that Disney wouldn’t lose its grip on cartoon characters created before la Grosse Misére. Under the Copyright Act of 1909, the term of any copyright—like that on Mickey Mouse—was a maximum of fifty-six years. Add fifty-six to twenty-eight; Disney’s copyright was set to expire in 1984. Disney saw that coming and successfully lobbied for the Copyright Extension Act of 1976, which extended the period of copyright for them to the 2003 date which they later found so unreasonably close. This extension was, and is, often sold as merely conforming to the Berne Convention, but the United States wasn’t even a party to the Berne Convention until 1988. The extension was, like its 1998 successor, the plutocracy protecting its assets, nothing more. Disney is only the most egregious and obvious of the examples; more than one member of our ruling plutocracy was involved in purchasing these bits of legislation.

But the constant extension of copyright, blatant as it is, isn’t even most outrageous of the plutocracy’s abuse of intellectual property laws. “Digital Rights Management” has to take that cake all for its own. Take, as an example, the region codes which are present on DVDs. The large content distributors were concerned that illegal copies of their DVDs would be made cheaply in foreign countries and then sold in America, thus depriving them of their profit. Consequently, they successfully lobbied Congress for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), which in part made it illegal to attempt to circumvent “region codes” placed on DVD media. These region codes make it impossible to play a DVD on a player that was not specifically produced for a given region. So, for example, if I bring my American DVD to Europe and attempt to play it there, it won’t work, despite my having paid perfectly good money for it; if I attempt to circumvent that restriction, I’m in violation of the DMCA and subject to civil and criminal penalties.

Simply put, the content distributors are taking advantage of the “global market” in order to cheaply produce their DVDs in foreign sweatshops and sell them for extremely high prices in the Western world. We, the customers, might also be tempted to take advantage of the global market and order our DVDs from places where they are produced and sold more cheaply. But we can’t do that, because DVDs produced for sale in these countries won’t play on our American DVD players thanks to the region codes, which we are prevented by law from circumventing. The content distributors set prices in America at whatever they want, and we are forced to pay those prices rather than pay cheaper prices in another region because the region codes which prevent us from using those cheaper products are legally enforced. So, to sum up: the plutocracy is permitted to take advantage of the global market to reduce their costs, while we are legally prevented from doing the same thing.

Note that this has nothing to do with so-called “piracy” of DVDs; we can’t do this even with legitimately purchased DVDs that were produced for a different region. For example, Return to Treasure Island is only sold for European players, not for American players; those interested in getting it in North America are out of luck, because it cannot be legally played here.

Our laws are built to favor the wealthy and the powerful at the expense of the poorer and the weaker; welcome to the plutocracy.

Praise be to Christ the King!

First off, as the opening blurb notes, this generation of children were “[b]orn when Ross Perot was warning about a giant sucking sound and Bill Clinton was apologizing for pain in his marriage.” I read this with some degree of surprise and skepticism. Quick, I thought: subtract, carry the one…eighteen-year-olds were born in 1992? Really? Born after the Berlin wall came down, after the end of the entire Cold War, after the first war in Iraq was started, fought, and finished, and yet they’re old enough to vote and drive automobiles? Shocking, but true.

I’m sure older generations share the same thoughts about me, of course. “What?” they’d say. “You were born after the Vietnam war, and yet you can vote and drive cars?” And it’s a valid point; younger generations by nature remember different things than older. But this generation (as the subsequent parts of the report make clear) is both myopic and amnesiac, so its lack of memory of such minor world events as the forty-year nuclear standoff between America and Russia, as just one example, is particularly important.

Furthermore, these older generations and I were, mostly, born in the same era of history. My parents and I, for example, were both born during the Cold War. There were two Germanies and two Berlins, the latter of which were separated by a big wall, and people fairly regularly got shot trying to get across it. Having nuclear missiles pointed at us was a fact of life that we all took for granted. We were both aware of where the fallout shelters were located, though we rarely thought about it; we do, in fact, know what the fallout shelter sign looks like, and it was odd to neither of us. We both wrote papers for school in longhand (my first, anyway, though admittedly I was very young), we grew up familiar with the clack-clack-clack of typewriters, we didn’t get to use calculators in school (at least, not until pre-calculus), and we all knew how to draw graphs by hand. We’ve had to wait six to eight weeks for something we sent off for to arrive. We grew up listening to the radio (you know, radio that comes over the air, for free) and know what magnetic tape is. We both experienced the wonder that was cable television and the VCR when they became common (though again, I was young, I do clearly remember both). We both knew about film, both strips of film for playing movies and regular film for photographs. We’ve had to walk up to the television in order to change the channel, and we were both familiar with that giant metal mess on every roof in the neighborhood that picked up television signals. And so on.

Not so with this generation. They’ve never thought of Russia as an important world power; two Germanies is an alien thought to them, much less one Germany which is under an oppressive, dictatorial regime which shoots people for trying to get to the other one. If they know any physical recording medium, it’s CDs and CDs alone; most likely they’re more familiar with digital recording. They’ve never had to rewind magnetic tape onto reels; have never seen, much less used, film, either moving picture or regular picture; and have probably never seen a typewriter, certainly never actually used one. And so on.

This is a much more significant difference between my generation (I’m on the very tail end of mine, I think) and the next than there is between mine and my parents’. For this reason, I think it’s sometimes interesting and instructive to go through silly little surveys like this. I’ll go through it a piece at a time, skipping any bits I don’t think are interesting; hopefully I’ll get some comments.

Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

What a depressing characteristic. But it’s unquestionably true; indeed, only about half (at a guess) of my graduating class could write in cursive. I write in it exclusively; it’s just plain better than printing. Indeed, not long ago “writing” was cursive; printing was something different, something children did before they learned to write. But longhand is a vanishing art, it seems; a shame, since it’s an art that all can practice.

Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

This is one of the many instances of the mindset survey that gives one the impression of a generation of hyperactive impatients, and in some ways that’s exactly what we’ve got. Mail is very quick; when I was a child, sending away for things always took “six to eight weeks” according to the catalogues, and it really did. Now it takes a couple of days at most. And email is too slow? Really? One wonders what this generation is willing to wait for, if they’re willing to dedicate so little time and energy to communication that even email takes too long for them.

“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

Really? Among middle-upper class yuppies, maybe; the people I live with and work with couldn’t pronounce “macchiato,” much less know what it is. (I can pronounce it, but I’ve got neither an idea nor an inclination to acquire an idea of what it means.) Part of this is prejudice; my father taught me that coffee is coffee, and its purity should not be impugned by the additional of corruptive elements like cream, sugar, and other creative flavorings. (I’ve always, consequently, drunk it black.) But I question whether this is true. Our society (my generation and my parents’ not excepted) is becoming increasing coddled and corrupt, but I don’t think it’s so coddled and corrupt that we’re all willing to pay seven dollars for a hazelnut mocha latte, even if we do know what a “mocha” is.

Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

Gah! Sad, but true. “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you? Punk?” I’ve never been a big fan of his westerns, but occasionally he produces something really great, like Gran Turino. It’s funny that nobody remembers Dirty Harry anymore, but I’ll confess that I can’t remember the last time I thought of him, either.

Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

Yes, when did this happen? They just sort of snuck up on us, I suppose. These days, the superiority of foreign cars is sadly a given, rarely questioned, Korean cars not excepted. The fact that these foreign cars owe their market successes in large part of favorable trade policies in Japan and Korea that America kindly refuses to reciprocate is neither known nor cared about by most. That, of course, isn’t limited by generation, either.

They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

That’s right! And they don’t know what rotary phones are, either! It’s getting common not even to have a landline phone. Anyone else remember when the idea of a pocketbook phone was risible?

Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

More than that, they probably have never taken film in for development; instant gratification, all the way. But you used to not know what a picture would look like until days later, sometimes weeks. You’d take four or five pictures of everything to make sure at least one turned out right. And you only got thirty or so pictures on a roll; then you’d have to take that roll out and replace it. Don’t let the light shine on the film part, or you’ll lose it!

Not to mention stringing long strips of film into a film projector, so that you could watch a film with the sound obscured by the clattering of the motors as the film made its way from one reel to the other, and “rewinding” meant literally rewinding it back onto its original reel. Ah, those were the days!

Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

Ha! Really? I was just a bit too young for the glam rock of the 80s (heard the older kids listening to it, of course), and in those heady days of my wasted youth I cut my teeth on Nirvana. I’m much too young for the popular music of my youth to be on an oldies station. Aren’t I?

Fortunately, I’ve found better music since.

Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

What a miserable commentary on our society. We come from a great civilization, which has been producing great music for centuries; yet the repertoire of our people consists of the last fifty years of popular piffle produced by huge record companies solely in consideration of maximization of profit by taking advantage of a suddenly large and powerful youth demographic. And not only that, but even our highest political events are accompanied by this cacophonous wailing. Can’t we do better than this?

I must say that the generation following mine is actually better than mine in this matter; while their taste in music is little improved, if at all, they at least direct fashion in music rather than receiving it all passively, as my generation and my parents’ did. Nothing, after all, is all bad.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

This is the most earth-shattering of all the differences; Russia is really just another country to the next generation, like Poland or Japan. Nothing interesting. I remember when Russia invaded Georgia recently, some younger people urging an immediate American military response to that invasion, scoffing at the possibility of war with Russia as no big deal. I was thunderstruck.

What? War with Russia is no big deal? That’s the nightmare scenario that’s been giving people the sweating terrors for decades! That’s end-of-the-world quality scary! We’re talking about worldwide desert, Mad-Max destruction here! Of course, they don’t know who Mad Max is, either.

But they have no recollection of such fears; even my generation has only a slight one, though it’s enough in general to make as at least aware that Russia remains a powerful country. (Sadly, some people want us to fight her anyway, despite knowing better; but that’s another question.)

Anyway, just some interesting tidbits. I’m aware that I’m probably not entirely typical for my generation; I remember clearly things that most people my age don’t, for example. But these are my thoughts. And note that I’m not doing a “these young whippersnappers” curmudgeonry here; I’m young enough that I can’t credibly do an imitation of a crotchety old man. I like computers and email; digital photography has many advantages over old-school film; I’m not a fan of rotary phones (remember how you used to hate calling people with lots of nines and zeroes in their numbers?); and so on. The next generation isn’t all bad, and overall isn’t any worse than my own or my parents’ (both of which are pretty bad, in a lot of ways). These are just off-the-cuff thoughts on a few issues raised by this little survey. Anyone else have any?

Praise be to Christ the King!

I started out in the GNU/Linux world in the summer of 2000 with Mandrake Linux (which has since become Mandriva), which for reasons I can’t really remember I didn’t like, and didn’t stick with for longer than a few days. I then got my hands on a Red Hat 7.1 CD, which I installed; that was a disaster, and I didn’t stick with it for more than a few weeks. The rpm system just didn’t do it for me, and mixing that with just learning the superior operating system paradigm of Unix was trouble.

Then I found Debian. And I’ve never looked back.

Debian was the greatest thing I’d ever seen. The deb system (at the time, dselect was the greatest front-end; since then they’ve come up with aptitude and apt-get, which are so easy that installing and removing software is something I do on a whim, just to see what it does) was like a dream; the enormous collection of packages (25,000 strong these days) was like a wonderland of useful utilities; and the free world of GNU/Linux was opened up to me.

In 2005, I was in a car accident, and my computer (I lived with my wife and two children in a tiny 800 square foot apartment; we didn’t have room for a desktop) was smashed to death. We managed to salvage the data, but I had to buy a new laptop; and my law school didn’t play nice with Linux at all. So I was forced to return to the dark side until 2007, when I installed (again, on a whim) Ubuntu, and was hooked on GNU/Linux again immediately. Granted, I had to mangle Ubuntu pretty thoroughly to make it much like GNU/Linux, but I did it and was pleased.

But I didn’t stay with Ubuntu for too long; it was too limiting. And upgrading was a nightmare; doing a dist-upgrade was troublesome at best, and usually just backing up your data and reinstalling from disk was a better idea. Nothing doing; before long, I was back with Debian.

My old friend Debian. Versatile; free; solid as a rock. Nothing beats it.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Indeed, writing is such an amazing yet simple thing that those unfamiliar with it often mistake it for magic. In Black Robe, for example, there is a compelling scene in which the Jesuit priest, Father LaForgue, is seen writing in a journal. One of the Indians asks him why he is sitting around doodling, and he responds that he is writing, and decides to give the Indians a demonstration. Father LaForgue asks the Indian, Chomina, to tell him something that Daniel, the other Frenchman in the party, wouldn’t know; Chomina responds that his wife’s mother died the previous winter in the snow. Father LaForgue writes it down and then carries it over to Daniel, who had been busy with other chores. Daniel reads it aloud, and the Indians were shocked and amazed; how had Daniel learned this? No one had told him about it. Never having experienced writing, it was difficult for them to understand how words could be put on paper, where no one actually speaks them. Indeed, they began at that moment to suspect the Black Robe, as they called Father LaForgue, of being a demon, because he was able to pass knowledge without speaking.

The stuff of writing, the spoken word made permanent without speech, is called text. You are reading text right now. Every book we have ever picked up, every letter we have ever written, every sign with letters on it is full of text. Text is speech unspoken; it is a great thing, an amazing thing. Too often, we take it for granted; but it is one of the greatest things man has ever produced.

The advent of computers has enabled us to deal with text in many very interesting and exciting ways, and it has greatly multiplied the amount of text we have at our disposal. It has also made it much easier to produce text; we have lots of tools which allow us to type things, which is a faster and easier way of producing text than writing. (Not always better; but certainly faster and easier, once the learning curve of typing has been surmounted.) Unfortunately, these tools have often been the cause of a decrease in the quality of our writing. Part of this is due simply to the volume; when it’s so easy to write and publish, one is bound to get more low-quality writing and publishing. However, some of this is due to the tools we use; the vast majority of us use the wrong tools, tools which make our writing worse, and the experience of writing more difficulty and less enjoyable than it has to be.

Marshall McLuhan famously stated that “the medium is the message,” and in this context the medium is also the messenger. The way we write is affected by the medium with which we write. This relates to computers to the great divide in producing text: the word processor and the text editor. This distinction bears a little discussion.

The word processor has two primary characteristics, the first of which is a necessary characteristic and the second of which is common but not necessary.

1. WYSIWYG: Word processors are all so-called “What You See Is What You Get” editors of text. That is, the text is entered and displayed to the user in precisely the same format that the user expects to see in the finished document. The fonts, font families, characteristics, sizes, formatting, and so on are all applied right there on the screen, and they are applied in real-time, while the user is typing.
2. Binary data formats: Most word processors utilize binary data formats. That is, the content of the writings that are produced with these programs is encoded in a binary format that is not directly readable by human beings or by any other program. Microsoft Word and Corel Wordperfect both use formats of this type; Openoffice does not.

Text editors, on the other hand, are simply what they sound like: text editors. They are much more akin to sitting down and writing in longhand than word processors are. Those of us old enough to remember writing stories and documents in longhand—even if barely old enough—will know that one simply sits down and starts writing. One marks the logical structure of the document—where chapter breaks are located, for example—by writing “Chapter 1.” One does not carefully format this in a particular font, or ensure that the spacing above and below is appropriate, or adjust the margins in a certain way. One simply writes it, then proceeds with the text. There is no option for significantly altering the style of the document, because it’s all just text. When one wants the document styled in a certain way, one sends it to a typesetter, who looks at the logical structure one has put in the work—chapters, sections, underlines, and so on—and turns them into stylistic formatting. He is the one who bothers with making sure that all the chapter headings are fourteen points high and in small caps; the author writes text, he doesn’t typeset it.

In a text editor, the situation is similar. All the text is in the same font, and all the text is in the same size. There is no option for italics or boldface. Structure can be indicated by special punctuation marks, spacing, and similar devices, but not by visual formatting. It’s just text; formatting is a different job.

When someone is writing in a word processor, he isn’t thinking as much about the text because the formatting is constantly before him. He can’t type and not see things come up the way they’ll eventually look. It’s difficult to write in this context and not think about that appearance, sometimes even more than the text. But should this really be the concern of the author? Shouldn’t an author be thinking about what he’s writing, and think about its appearance at a later time, or even leave its appearance to someone else entirely?

The text editor makes this a reality, just as writing in longhand does. Visual formatting can be done by other programs, and should be done by other programs, which do it better; TeX and LaTeX are the best choices for this job, though there are others. They do this the same way that a manual typesetters formatted a document in the days of longhand writing; the author puts little clues in his document about its logical structure—that is, where the chapter and section breaks are, which text is more emphatic, and so on—and the typesetter converts those into visual realities. Indeed, with computers, the author can be in complete control of this visual formatting, informating TeX and LaTeX exactly how he wants his document to be formatted—and still keep that formatting entirely separate from the production of the actual text of the document, allowing him to focus on writing while he is writing and formatting at some other time, so as not to distract himself with pretties when he should be focusing on content.

So what text editor should you use? There are lots of choices here, but my recommendation is vim. vi is a text editor written by Bill Joy for Berkeley Unix decades ago, and vim is vi-improved. It’s got lots of features such as syntax coloring to help you keep your documents markup even further separated from your text, and its command mode is immensely powerful.

The learning curve is a bit steep; however, once that’s been surmounted you’ll feel hopelessly crippled anytime you use anything else. That includes when typing quick email messages into a webmail window; my primary impetus in installing and using mutt, and in choosing blosxom for the blog software for my upcoming serial novel, was precisely to allow me to type my content in vim rather than have to use one of these silly text windows (such as the one WordPress has provided, which I’m using now), which doesn’t have half the interface or a tenth of the power of a real text editor. vim, like most text editors, can be used with a mouse and menus if you wish; but once you’ve gotten past that learning curve, you won’t want to, as moving your hand from the keyboard to the mouse will be an intolerable waste of energy. The keyboard commands are so quick, so easy, and so powerful that doing anything else is simply a waste.

So please, forget about your word processor; it’s stupid and inefficient. Adopt a text editor, learn it, master it, and focus on your content rather than its appearance again. The world will be a better place for it.

Praise be to Christ the King!

So simple, it’s brilliant! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? All these years we’ve been throwing condoms all over Africa, billions of condoms, and yet AIDS just continues to spread! Why didn’t anyone ever think of just asking people to limit their sexual contact?

Oh, wait. Somebody did. The Catholic Church. That’s right.

The problem is that we live in modernity, and modernity wants to have its cake and eat it, too. It wants to eat everything and anything it wants and still remain trim. It wants to sleep with anything it feels like sleeping with and never get sick. It wants all the joy and fun in the world but none of the consequences. It wants negative behavior with freedom from the negative results. It wants anything other than self-control, the submission of the passions to the reason.

The only way to lose weight—short of invasive surgery, anyway—is to eat less and move more; that is, to control the appetite, to subject the quantity and quality of the food we eat to the control of the reason. Similarly, the only way to prevent the negative effects of unvirtuous sexual activity is to subject the sexual appetites to the control of the reason. This means limiting sexual activity to the married state.

Modernity can’t have its cake and eat it, too. We need to abandon modernity and return to sensible ethical thinking focused on the virtues, perfected by the grace of Jesus Christ.

Praise be to Christ the King!

But why, the capitalist will object. Why would anyone produce if no one can consume? Why would I, a maker of widgets, go through all the trouble of producing those widgets if no one wants to buy them? But a still better question is, what is the man who needs widgets to do if I haven’t gone through all the trouble of producing them? The consumer is dependent upon the producer. If the producer cannot sell to this consumer, he can sell to another, or he can produce something else; the non-producer, however, simply has to wait until somebody else makes what he needs. That is why production is prior to consumption in an economy.

This primacy of production is even more pronounced in necessaries, particularly the most basic, like food and clothing. The producer of food will always need food; he is motivated to produce enough at least to ensure that he may eat. The consumer of food, on the other hand, is entirely dependent upon the producers of it. If the producers do not produce enough, or produce in too low a quality, the consumer dies. The same is true for a society as a whole: if that society fails to produce sufficient food, it must either import that food, compensating for that importation by some other valuable production, or simply go without, which clearly is not a viable option. Either way, it must produce rather than merely consume, and production is again seen to be primary; for without production, no consumption can occur.

Which brings me to my present topic: the primacy of agriculture. By “agriculture” here I mean, very loosely, the production of food; it includes farming, gardening, animal husbandry, hunting, fishing, and anything else that results in some food product at the end. It’s clear from the foregoing that agriculture is the most necessary of all productive industries. Agriculture is the oldest and the greatest profession. Without a healthy agricultural base, all economies are doomed, for workers cannot work if they cannot eat. Before we worry about whether we’ve got enough motor vehicles, good enough highways, fast enough computers, and big enough office parks, we need to worry about whether we’ve got enough food. We take it entirely for granted these days, but we shouldn’t. It’s the bedrock of all human endeavor, the root of all human production. Without it, we can do nothing.

Yet despite this, the farm and the farmer are treated with scorn. Farmers are stupid, uneducated yokels. They speak strangely and do weird things; frequently, even their relations with their livestock are called into question. Their children are either drunken jocks resigned to the inevitably of their descent into agricultural drudgery, or motivated geniuses studying their hardest so as not to have to endure a life of working in the fields. One thing is certain: nobody wants to be a farmer. Farmers are the ones who are stuck with it, especially illegal aliens, who do the work that Americans—you know, people who have gone to school and know better—don’t want to do.

This attitude comes with our increasing distance from production, our transformation into consumptive sheep incapable of producing anything on our own. Think long and hard; how many people do you know who are engaged in a productive endeavor for a living? How many people do you know who actually make things, instead of being one of the many links in the long chain passing them along the line? Even when most people think about starting a business, it’s rarely about starting a productive business; rather, it’s about starting a real estate firm, a law firm, a restaurant. It’s usually about providing services which utilize the valuable goods produced by others, rarely about producing valuable goods themselves.

Even our legislation tends to reflect this bias against agricultural production. When was the last time we in America had a real, popular debate about farming legislation? The Great Depression. The plutocrats so thoroughly control the Department of Agriculture and other farming-related wings of our government that such issues rarely see the light of day. Yet we live in a vast country, with some of the most fertile land on the planet. We unquestionably have far more land than we need to feed ourselves; even most of our individual states could easily themselves without importing much food from other areas. But are we importing only luxury foods, like pineapples and chocolate and other things that are not necessary and simply cannot grow in our own climate? No; we’re importing far more of our food than we need to import, and it’s exposing us to food insecurity and public health risks.

The USDA estimates that America imported $71.9 billion worth of food in 2009. Our farms and herds only produced about $282.1 billion of food. About a fifth of the food that we produce is, therefore, imported. A nation with nearly a billion acres of farmland imports a fifth of its food supply. Both our plutocratic parties claim to be concerned about our dependence on foreign oil (though in typically plutocratic fashion they never do anything about it); why do they never express concern about our growing dependence on foreign food, a much more fundamental and necessary good?

The state which cannot produce its own food is the state which is forever dependent upon others. It is time that our society restored agriculture to its proper primacy, and its practitioners to their honored place in our states.

Praise be to Christ the King!