Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin

Fayette Durlin and Peter Jenkin write from Brownsville, Minnesota.

We usually think that weekly and biweekly magazines are largely concerned with issues of the moment, ephemera cast up by the daily tides of political contention, and that for more thoughtful articles about deeper issues we must turn to the monthlies and quarterlies where writers have time and space to propound their ideas. Jonathan Last, however, a writer for The Weekly Standard, has written in four and half pages in the 12/10 issue a brilliant piece of considerable profundity that should be pondered by every thoughtful conservative.

The article, "A Nation of Singles" is about demographic trends revealed by the election, but if you think it goes over the ground again of the growth of our Hispanic population, the topic that engaged everyone's attention, you'll be surprised. Mr. Last does deal with that, but in a discriminating way. What everyone focused on was the jump in the Hispanic population from 2000 to 2010 - 43 percent. Our total population grew during that decade by 27.3 million, and 15 million were Hispanic. When that trend is extrapolated, of course, you get some whopping numbers, so that by 2050 Hispanics would make up 29 percent of the population. But as the author points out, such projections "come from assumptions based on the 2000 census," and since then trends have changed. We don't have all the figures yet, but we know the number of immigrants has declined. What's more striking are the numbers of Mexican immigrants (Mexico has traditionally contributed nearly 2/3 of our Hispanic immigrants): in recent years there "has been a net flow of zero immigrants from Mexico." Is this just a result of the recession, suggesting that once our economy recovers the immigration rate will again accelerate, or is it a result of something else?

Here Mr. Last steps back to consider other aspects of demography, like some of the factors that determine immigrant flows. He points out that receiving countries have low fertility rates while sending countries have high rates. The news is that Mexico's fertility rate is in a steep decline, approaching if not already at replacement level. The author's conclusion: "The boom days of Hispanic immigration may already be a thing of the past." Furthermore, the birth rate of immigrants has been dropping steadily.

Mr. Last then turns his attention to what he sees as a much more consequential trend: the rise of single voters. Over half of the voting age population is single. Not only did singletons vote decisively for Obama (+16 for single men and +36 for single women), their share of the vote increased by 6 percent. What does this portend? After briefly discussing some of the influences on the marriage rate (urbanization, no-fault divorce, legitimization of cohabitation, and so on) he centers his attention to the deeper issues: the "waning of religion in American life," and the "mastery of contraception: that decoupled sex from baby making."

He then discusses the singleton phenomenon in an international context, where our situation looks relatively benign compared to the most advanced Asian and European countries, where "people are running away from marriage, children, and family life at an amazing rate." Are we destined to go that route? And is it feasible? After all, there are limiting factors, such as the ensuing absence of young workers to support increasing numbers of retirees.

For the moment, he poses the question of what Republicans should do instead of pandering to singletons, a proven skill of Democrats. He wants Republicans to work to reverse the trend to promote marriage. As he points out, marriage is good for everyone, as all research has shown. He goes further:

Marriage is what makes the entire Western project - liberalism, the dignity of the human person, the free market, and the limited democratic state - possible . . . [marriage] is an arrangement which ought to be celebrated, nurtured, and defended because its health is integral to the success of our grand national experiment.

Noble words, but then the question arises of how? We think that here President Obama is going to play a role. It's clear that he has no intention of cutting spending, far from it, and it follows that the recession as we have experienced it so far, is soon going to get a lot worse - and last a long time. At the root of the flight from marriage is affluence; hard times will reverse that trend. Remember you read it here first! *

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Corbin advertised the place for sale in a New England magazine; in the spring and early summer people came by to look at it, and I did my best to sell it to them because I thought it was a beautiful place and a bargain (five thousand dollars for fifty acres), but I'm afraid they were only window shoppers. They were a reminder that we had to move by Labor Day. I had been trying for some time to get a job, but academics looked askance at a man who had spent the last two years not only unacademically but also inexplicably, although I said as little as possible about my actual doings. A couple of colleges were interested, but when they found out that I had no money to pay my way to distant interviews, their interest lapsed.

I was anxious, of course, but because of my Micawaberish temperament, not nearly so anxious as you might think. Something would turn up, and meanwhile I went about my usual tasks. There were some changes around us: Not long after he dropped us, Otis was fired from the creamery, and his response was to hole up in his house, drink all night and sleep all day. Although we saw his light burning and snatches of TV noise would float across the gorge, we did not see him again that summer. With binoculars we watched his garden, the one we had helped him plant, grow and thrive, ripen and decay, saved from being overwhelmed by weeds only by the black plastic, because Otis never went near it.

Miff left his brother's place in Toonerville and went to work for a farmer about ten miles away, and he stayed there as long as I knew him. There were two other hired men, Billy and Noah, as well as Billy's wife, who did the cooking, and they all lived in a house across the road from the farmer's. Miff brought them to see me "on business," as he put it. They were jolly and loud, much younger than Miff, not alcoholics in the sense he was, but they liked a beer party on Saturday night. We finally worked out this deal: every Saturday they brought me the fixings - malt, hops, sugar, yeast, bottle caps - for four cases of beer (four times twenty-four sixteen ounce bottles) and took away two cases. I then made four cases, two for them and two on my own account. They wanted it as strong as I could make it, so by using wine yeast and testing the wort with a hydrometer, I added enough sugar to bring it up to thirteen percent, awful stuff that tasted like whiskey, but they loved it.

What puzzled me about the visitors that summer, and we saw many more than the year before, was the constant recurrence of the Beautiful Simple Country Life theme. I could not foresee that this was the vanguard of what would be a swelling horde. As yet, we didn't really understand the phenomenon, but we would get a thorough education before the summer was over, sometimes dramatically.

I have already explained how once we realized we were becoming actors in fantasies about our own life, we discouraged BSCL people simply by not playing the game, by not giving the expected answers to their leading questions. Now we were getting tougher cases. When, despite our discouraging attitude, they got that goofy look and said things like, "I love your Simple Life," I would take sterner measures: "Good. Let's go out and turn the manure pile." Or, "Help me slaughter a chicken; you hold the legs while I chop the head off. Mind the blood." That worked with most people, but a couple of friends were obstinate. Charles, for instance, the New Yorker who printed our jelly cards, had been one of the gang of helpers during our first week and had been up several times since. He was the first person to utter a phrase which I have heard, with sinking heart, innumerable times over the years. "I want to live like you." (There is an even phonier variant: "We live the way you do.") The first time he said it, I retorted that he didn't know what he was talking about, that a week of our life would send him rushing back to his well-paid job in the city, sobbing with gratitude for the complexities of modern sophisticated urban life. The second time I enumerated details of our simple life. Thereafter I shrugged and said nothing.

Charles had recently married an enthusiastic young woman, Gretchen, who also said she wanted to live like us, and to that end they often made trips to Vermont to look at real estate. One evening in early July they pulled into the dooryard with Gretchen's parents as we were romping in the grass with the children, all of us barefooted. We took the visitors inside, gave them tea and wine and Jo Ann's wonderful gingersnaps, and were hospitably attentive. The parents had emigrated from Germany in their youth, and their life work had been running a market garden on Long Island. Gretchen was their only child, and they were very proud of her college degree and teaching job. I plied them with questions about their farm, and they seemed, for the hour they were with us, to have a fine time.

Two weeks later Charles stopped by to tell us a strange tale. They were hardly out of sight of the house when his mother-in-law burst into tears, and begged Charles not to take her daughter to Vermont to live like that - the poverty! The squalor! Did you see those children? BAREFOOT! She painted a pathetic picture of her grandchildren wallowing in a northern Tobacco Road. Her husband, while refraining from tears, was also strongly moved, and again, it was the bare feet that had done it. All the time he had been forcing himself to be civil, to drink the dandelion wine and eat the gingersnaps, he had been filled with revulsion, sickening revulsion! Charles and Gretchen had to promise over and over again to clothe and shoe their putative children with reckless prodigality before the wailing and shouting subsided. A harrowing scene, Charles said, and I could well believe it. I didn't ask, but I'd bet that on the way to our place he told them that he and Gretchen wanted to live like us.

The most revealing BSCL episode occurred when Belle and Brad appeared at our door. She was a self-assured well-dressed woman in her early fifties who had been handsome once, and who still retained the carriage, the gestures, the habits of looks and laughter of a woman who has been much admired. When she introduced herself I knew who she was, because Paul Farrar knew one of her daughters and had gone to see them last summer at their place beyond Woodbury. I knew that her husband was the head of an important international agency in Washington, so I was surprised when she introduced Brad, a tall, broad-shouldered young man with dark wavy hair, gleaming teeth flashing under his cavalryman's moustache, and an air, a hint of some quality that I couldn't quite name but that seemed a little incongruous with a weighty figure on the world stage, at home in Zurich, Paris, Bonn, etc.

Belle was looking around the room with the beginnings of that fond and foolish smile associated with BSCL admirers. "Ralph was at our place many times, but I was never here."

Brad was looking around, too, but his glance was sharper, what I would call an appraising eye. Well, that probably went with his position; you don't rise to the top of a powerful organization without casing the joint, as it were. They sat together on the couch, and we made tea and put cookies on a plate (I was damned if I'd waste anymore of my wine on people who might denounce me as soon as they were out of my sight).

"I wish Brad could have met Ralph," Belle said, gazing fondly on him. She turned to us. "Brad's a sculptor."

He chuckled. Sculptor by night, cab driver by day, he said. Or was it the other way around? I was so confused, trying to reconcile these occupations with my notions of what went on at an international agency, just beginning to realize he was not Belle's husband.

"A man has to eat," he went on resolutely, "And until I break the stranglehold of the flunkeys of the art establishment, driving a cab is an honest way to earn a living!"

Belle put her arm through his and looked up at him admiringly. Jo Ann rearranged the cookies while I busied myself with the teapot. The quality that I had not been able to name at first was the touch of coarseness that marks the opportunist. I asked Belle if she were up for the summer. Not yet. She and Brad would be here for a little while to get the house ready for a later visit by the whole family and Brad needed a break from his terribly wearing labors.

When we served tea, Belle remarked that Corbin would never drink it when she offered it to him; nothing stronger than water for him. "He'd sit on the porch for an hour while his laundry was being done, and during that time he'd drink exactly one glass of water."

"Laundry? Did you say laundry?"

"Yes. Every Friday evening Ralph brought his laundry over to do in our machine, and that was when he'd talk with Arthur about the Simple Life. Arthur really looked forward to those evenings; he said that Ralph was a real cracker barrel philosopher."

"But in his booklet he claimed that he did all the laundry in the little rock pool beside the house. Or rather, his wife did it while he read poetry to her."

Belle smiled reminiscently, gazing inwardly at the vision I had recalled. "Yes, I remember that; wasn't it pretty?"

I looked at her with my mouth metaphorically open, but she was without guile. There was no point in pursuing that, so I asked her how Corbin got to their place. In his car, of course; he had one of the first Volkswagen microbuses. Funny, I said, that he never listed that in his expenses.

"Well, it couldn't have cost much; he got fantastic mileage."

It had begun to rain, and the children came running in. I can say without a blush that they were very attractive because they looked like Jo Ann, and Belle was much taken by them, especially by Nell who, with her blond pigtails and big blue eyes, was quite striking. Belle chatted with her and called Brad's attention to her.

I watched complacently while my mind was churning with Belle's revelations. For nearly two years we had been oppressed by the myth of the man, by the damned booklet, by the fuzzily insistent disciples, by my disillusioning experience living in the place where he claimed to have performed his wonders, and now this woman had begun to dispel the mythic fogs and what had loomed obscurely was beginning to look quite commonplace. From her description of the Friday night visits, for instance, I saw that the homespun philosopher role had been one of his major routines, and I realized that that was what the disciples were after: they wanted me to be like Corbin, to entertain them as he had done with Simple Living baloney.

I was grateful to Belle, and when they left, I invited her to come back any time. Of course, she was attracted to the BSCL, especially as it as embodied in our children. She would talk to them, or gaze at them with that goofy look, and then she would turn to us and say things like, "I admire your life so much!" Those were the moments when I almost wished for Charles's mother-in-law. But what could I do? If she were being foolish and sentimental (as she certainly was), it was over our children, and what parent can resist that? She thought of us as Corbin's followers, keepers of the flame, and she was going to write to him about how beautifully we lived the Simple Life he so eloquently preached. I tried to deprecate the idea in a polite way, I tried to turn the subject, I even encouraged Brad to talk about his sculpture (a non-starter). It would have been hopeless to argue or to try to enlighten her, as her acceptance of the laundry tale despite the direct evidence of her senses showed. It wasn't cognitive dissonance; she wasn't up to that level of rationalization, didn't need to be. Like the credulous zillions who would uncritically savor the glowing accounts of the Simple Life led by hippie homesteaders printed in practically every newspaper and magazine in North America over the next fifteen years or so, she was infatuated with the myth. It was pleasant to contemplate, elevating, and subtly flattering; to believe was to be sensitive.

We had many visitors that summer, mostly acquaintances who often brought along their own friends to view the bizarre Gardners. While I doubt that any of the visits had so dramatic an aftermath as the one by Charles's in-laws, I do not kid myself that anyone went away full of admiration. For a couple of hours we offered a sort of unique entertainment in their conventional lives, but it was too much, altogether too strong, too highly flavored. There was the strange life, the disreputable poverty, the primitive situation, and the forceful personalities of both of us. It was fine, even exciting for a short visit, and the more unconventionality the better, tell us another wild story, challenge us with your insights, thrill us and chill us with your daring views. I recognized gloomily that, like Corbin, I was becoming a cracker barrel ass in my own right, everyone's pet non-conformist.

I was lifted out of that mood by an extraordinary man with a Simple Living story that made our experience seem inconsequential. When I went to answer the knock on the door I expected to find someone standing on the porch, but Howard Bloom never stood anywhere. He had so much energy to expend that he was in constant movement, pacing, bobbing, stretching, cracking his knuckles, shuffling back and forth. He wore the thickest glasses I've ever seen, he had a prominent nose and bony chin that seemed almost ready to meet, and words, words, words tumbled headlong from his lips. He looked like a benign, absent-minded gnome and sounded like no one but himself.

I gathered from the torrent of speech that Corbin had sent him, had written to ask him to be his agent, to look the place over and make sure everything was all right, to help sell the place, "and so on and so forth," a favorite phrase that signified a change of subject. Now he began to apologize for seeming to snoop, but I assured him that I understood Corbin's solicitude for his property; he was far away and he didn't know me from Adam.

If I say that coming into the house and sitting down to tea and cookies subdued Howard, you must understand this relatively, as an easing-off in nervous movement but no let-up in the word count. How many people responded to Corbin's ad? Any likely prospects? He talked about the real estate business and then remarked that Corbin had gotten the ad free through a deal with a friendly editor. That was typical of him, too cheap to put it in the hands of an agent.

I put down my teacup. This was the first time I had heard anyone make an even faintly derogatory remark about Corbin. Then he said that Corbin was annoyed at not hearing from me for months. "That's his problem. I used to write regularly, but his replies were so obnoxious - here, I'll get the last one." I got the letter. "This was over a year ago, after I'd told him about the exceptionally cold winter. See, right here: 'What's the matter? Is the Vermont winter too tough for the professor?'"

Howard read the letter, holding it close to his glasses. "Oh, Corbin's a prick, everyone knows that. Besides, what the hell would he know about the winter? He never stayed here after October. And so on and so forth -"

"Wait, wait. Do you mean he never wintered here?"

There was an urgency in my voice that stopped him. He looked at me closely. I think he was seeing me for the first time, really paying attention to me. "You read that goddamned pamphlet of his, didn't you?" He shook his head. "I bet a bunch of his disciples came around and told you what a great guy he was, right?" He shook his head again. "You need a talking-to." Pacing around the room, bobbing and weaving, gesticulating, pouring out the words, he told me in general and in particular about Ralph Corbin, and about much else relating to the subject. As he summed up:

Who cared whether he lived on fifty dollars a month or five-hundred? Who cared whether he lived here though the winter or mooched off churchy groups down South? Who cared how he did his laundry? Who cared whether he had a car or not? He lived just like the rest of us, but because he'd made up this moralistic crap that living poor was righteous, he had to make up all those lies about his life. Then he could parade his moral superiority. That's where the disciples came in. They were just nebbishes who wanted to live as he said he did, but didn't have the guts.

It was so obvious when he explained it that I was ashamed of my obtuseness, but he waved that aside.

Oh, we were much more foolish; we were absolute sheep. We got hooked worse than you did. That's how I know it inside out.

It was a remarkable story. Howard and his wife Edith had long been ardent believers in the Simple Life and its associated causes: vegetarianism, organic gardening, whole grain bread, bird watching, vaguely lefty politics, etc., saving their money for a move from the evil city to the wholesome countryside. A dozen years ago, when they were in their early forties, they had thrown up good jobs to follow Scott Nearing, whose paeans to the Simple Life convinced them that they could live on pennies per day. They moved to Vermont, bought a house near the guru, and before you could spell nature backwards, began to make unsettling discoveries, chiefly that Nearing had a trust fund, just as did the other disciples who lived nearby, so they could afford to pretend that they gained their livelihood by a few hour's work each day in the pumpkin patch, or whatever was their "cash crop" (a pretentious phrase still in use). Howard and Edith had no such resource, only their savings, dwindling fast. Another discovery was that the Nearings were sanctimonious autocrats, "Pricks like Corbin," he said, specialists in self-righteousness. Howard said Edith couldn't stand that, and that was the flaw, the opening, and then they saw the rest of it.

Luckily, they were able to sell their house and move north, where they found a nice place and congenial work. I owe much to them. They were friends for years, but the best thing Howard gave me at that first meeting: understanding, not only of Corbin, but of the whole Simple Life fantasy.

At the very end of August I landed a teaching job. How it came about is a story from another opera, but a hint, a whiff of the whole experience may be scented in this fact: when the president hired me he thought I was someone else. I borrowed a truck from the college, and when I drove up to the house on the hill, the first thing I noticed was Aster's empty tether. There was the stake in the ground, there was the chain lying in the grass, and there was her collar at the end of it. Until that moment all my thoughts had been about the possibilities of the job, the house we were going to rent, where the children would go to school, the details of a new life. Now, holding the old worn collar in my hand, my mind turned away from the future, and I saw an ending and a loss. Jo Ann came out of the house, saw me with the collar, and nodded sadly. She had sold Aster that morning to the cattle dealer. We knew that the cow had been the sign and symbol of our life on the hill, and now that life was over.

We were ending a life lived in a beautiful place that perfectly suited our needs, a life that had, in a way, been idyllic, especially for me. I was quite free of obligations except to my family. Securing food and fuel - milking the cow, tending the garden, making butter, cutting wood - were almost my only concerns, and those tasks done, I was ready for anything: a hike to the High Meadow, arguments for hours over the quiddities of Marxism, daredevil toboggan rides, writing and writing into the small hours. I was young and full of animal spirits, there was an early morning freshness in my outlook, a spontaneity about my acts and decisions.

Appropriately, with the assistance of some of the same people who had helped us two years before, we loaded the truck, and managed the move. The three older children were excited, and in the rushed activity of packing and loading the truck we did not notice that Curdie, who had come there as a two-year old and had no conception of anywhere else, was downcast. When visitors left us they "went down the road," and the phrase in her lexicon meant leaving the known world, so when, sitting between Jo Ann and me, we were actually pulling out of the driveway and turning down the narrow road where the boys used to walk to the school bus, she spoke up for the first time that morning.

"I don't want to go down the road," she said quietly, "I want to stay."

In the next issue, "Casting Up Accounts."

Philip Vander Elst

Philip Vander Elst is a British freelance writer, lecturer, and C. S. Lewis scholar. His many publications include Power Against People: A Christian Critique of the State.

Do you find it difficult to believe in God or accept the claims of Christianity? I did, when I was an atheist, but I changed my mind, and my reasons for doing so may be of interest to you in your own personal journey and attempts to make sense of life.

I am a freelance writer and lecturer. Since graduating from Oxford in 1973, with a degree in politics and philosophy, I have spent most of my professional life in politics and journalism, loving, as I do, the world of books, ideas and debate. Two questions in particular have always interested me. Is there a God? And, if there is, what is the connection between God and freedom?

Growing up in a non-Christian family with intellectually gifted but unbelieving parents, I used to think that belief in God and the supernatural had been discredited by the advance of science, and was incompatible with liberty. Religious faith seemed to me to involve the blind worship of a cosmic dictator, and the abandonment of reason in favour of "revelation." Why, in any case, should I take religion seriously, I thought, when the existence of evil and suffering clearly discredited the Christian claim that our world owed its existence to a benevolent Creator?

My scepticism and hostility towards Christianity, which developed in my teens under the influence of thinkers like Ayn Rand and Bertrand Russell, grew even stronger while I was at Oxford. Then, at the age of 24, I met my future wife, who turned out to be a Christian. Shocked by the discovery that this highly intelligent and beautiful woman was "one of them," I determined to find out whether there was any good evidence for the existence of God and the truthfulness of Christianity, making it quite clear from the outset, however, that I was not prepared to become a believer just to cement our relationship!

I started to read C. S. Lewis, whose Chronicles of Narnia I had enjoyed as a child. I did so for three reasons. First because he had himself been an atheist, and might therefore be able to answer my many questions and objections. Secondly, because I respected his intellect. Here was a man who had graduated from Oxford with Triple First Class Honours in Classics, Philosophy and English, and had then become one of the greatest British academics of his generation. If he could have made the journey from atheism to Christianity, perhaps I was mistaken in thinking that you had to bury your brain in order to believe in God. Furthermore, and this was my third reason for studying his writings, you couldn't accuse C.S. Lewis of being glib or shallow about suffering. Having lost his mother at the age of 10, been unhappy at school, and then gone on to experience the horrors of trench warfare during the First World War, he was obviously only too aware of the problem of evil. His discussion of these issues would surely, I thought, be illuminating.

This proved indeed to be the case. As I read Lewis's three most important books, Mere Christianity, Miracles and The Problem of Pain, I found myself not only following in the footsteps of a person who had wrestled with all the issues that were troubling me; I was also discovering intelligent and convincing answers to all my doubts.

The Problem of Evil Points to God

Since my own father had died when I was only 17, I found what Lewis had to say about the problem of evil particularly pertinent. As he rightly points out, we cannot complain about the existence of evil and suffering, and use that as an argument against the existence and goodness of God, unless we first believe that the standard of right and wrong by which we judge and condemn our world is an objective one. Our sense of justice and fairness has to be a true insight into reality, before we can we be justified in getting angry and indignant about all the pain and injustice we see around us. But if this is the case, what explains the existence within us of this inner moral code or compass? According to atheism, human beings and all their thinking processes are simply the accidental by-products of the mindless movement of atoms within an undesigned, random, and purposeless universe. How then can we attach any ultimate meaning or truth to our thoughts and feelings, including our sense of justice? They have, on this view, no more validity or significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. But if, on the other hand, we refuse to accept this conclusion, insisting, for example, that it is always and objectively true that you should love your neighbour and you shouldn't torture children, we are led away from atheism. The presence within us of an objective moral law "written on our hearts" points instead to the existence of an eternal Goodness and Intelligence which created us and our universe, enables us to think, and is the eternal source of our best and deepest values. In other words, Lewis argues, atheism cuts its own throat philosophically, because it discredits all human reasoning, including the arguments for atheism.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning." (Mere Christianity).

Only by acknowledging that there is a God, he concludes, can we hope to make sense of human existence, the world we inhabit, and, paradoxically, the problem of evil.

But if God is goodness personified and therefore, as our Creator, the divine source of all that is good, true and beautiful, why is there so much evil and suffering? What has gone wrong? The Christian answer to that question, Lewis argues, is that our world has been damaged by rebellion against God. An originally good creation has been spoiled.

If you find this hard to believe, consider the evidence. Look at all the many examples there are of benevolent and intricate design in Nature: the nest-building instincts of birds, the incredibly complex structure of the human brain, the navigational systems of bats and whales, the biological software of DNA in every cell of our bodies, sexual reproduction, etc. All this exists side by side with harmful viruses, disease and death. Can its obvious implications be ignored? Consider, too, the significance of the fact that human beings possess an inner moral code they cannot get rid of yet seem unable to obey. Does all this not suggest some process of deterioration from hopeful beginnings? Is it not also significant that many ancient peoples and cultures, including the Chinese, have some tradition of a lost Paradise in the dim and distant past?

Convincing Explanation of the Origin of Evil

Speaking for myself, I find this evidence convincing, but what has really persuaded me of the truthfulness of the Christian explanation of the origin of evil and suffering, is its inherent philosophical credibility. As C. S. Lewis points out, true love is a voluntary union of free individuals giving themselves to each other for their mutual delight and for the mutual enjoyment of life and all its blessings. Consequently, when God created the first human beings, He gave them the gift of free will. He did so in order that they and all their descendants might share His life, His love, His joy and His beauty, with Him and with each other. As part of this gift of free will, God also gave human beings creativity and intelligence in order that they might be good stewards of the world in which he had placed them, sharing its joys and adding to its wonders and beauty. But the problem with free will is that it can be corrupted and misused. Our inner freedom to relate to God and other people in harmony and love, can be turned on its head. We can choose, instead, to reject our Creator and live only for ourselves. And that, sadly, is what has happened to the human race. It is what lies behind the famous biblical story of the "Fall of Man" in the Garden of Eden: our ancestors disobeyed God, with deadly consequences for themselves and posterity.

For the reasons I have already mentioned, I have no doubt that the "Fall of Man" was a real historical event, but what gives the whole story its "ring of truth" is its totally convincing picture of the disastrous consequences of turning away from God. A creature rebelling against its Creator, Lewis argues, is like a plant refusing to grow towards the sunlight. It results in a broken relationship that separates that creature from the eternal source of all life, love, truth and well-being, including its own. It was therefore inevitable that when the human race separated itself from God through that original act of disobedience long ago, hatred, disease and death came into the world. Some creationist scientists and theologians believe that the "Fall of Man" damaged the whole of God's originally perfect creation (as described in the book of Genesis), introducing death and disorder into the animal kingdom and the natural world. Others argue that even before the "Fall of Man" the natural environment had already been damaged by rebellion against God in the angelic realm. But whatever you may think about all this, one thing seems crystal clear and made perfect sense to me: separation from our Creator is inevitably self-destructive.

It is inevitably self-destructive not only because it results in death, but also because it is destructive of freedom. Apart from God, we lack the inner strength to resist the downward pull of our fallen natures. Without His help, we cannot overcome all the temptations we face to give in to our lowest impulses and pursue our own interests at the expense of others. And if, in addition, this diminution of our inner freedom is accompanied, as in so many lives, by positive disbelief in God, a new danger arises. We lose our sense of accountability and belief in moral absolutes because we no longer believe that there is a Divine Judge to whom we are ultimately responsible. That is one of the reasons why militantly atheistic socialist regimes have produced the bloodiest tyrannies in history, slaughtering 100 million people in internal repression during the 20th century. It also helps to explain the growth of crime, delinquency and sexual immorality in post-Christian secularised Western societies.

If the human race has cut itself off from God through sin, what has been God's response? Has he abandoned us, and all His creation, to corruption and death? On the contrary. The whole of the rest of the Bible after the third chapter of Genesis describes God's rescue plan. And at the heart of that rescue plan is the greatest and most extraordinary event in history: the incredible but true story of God coming down into our world to live and walk among us as a human being - as a first century Jewish carpenter from Nazareth, called Jesus.

Before I started reading C. S. Lewis, I dismissed this whole idea as an absurd fable. Even if Jesus had really existed, how could one believe that he had performed all those miracles recorded of Him in the New Testament? Hadn't the advance of science revealed that our universe is a beautifully ordered cosmos governed by physical laws which cannot be broken, but which can be described in the precise language of mathematics? Didn't the laws of physics and chemistry rule out the possibility of a man walking on water or rising from the dead, as Jesus was said to have done? And how could one believe that Jesus had once turned several jars of water into wine at a wedding feast, or fed five thousand people with only five loaves of bread and two fish? You could only believe such stories, I thought, if you were scientifically illiterate, as everyone clearly was in ancient times. Furthermore, I asked myself, how on earth could Jesus' death on a Roman cross "save" us from our sins and reconcile us to God? No one had ever explained this mystery to me!

Re-examined My Objections to the Supernatural and Miracles

Once again, however, Lewis's writings forced me to re-examine my objections to Christianity and the historical claims about Jesus on which it is based. As he points out in his brilliant book, Miracles, you cannot rule out the supernatural on scientific grounds without first begging the question of God's existence. Atheism denies the supernatural by definition, but if atheism is false and God exists, who is to say that God is not able to intervene in His creation? If a human author can change the ending of one of her plays or novels at the stroke of a keyboard, then surely the Creator in whose image we are made can alter the natural environment, reverse the progression of a disease, or conquer death in ways we consider "miraculous." In any case, argues Lewis, the whole idea that it is somehow unscientific to believe in God and therefore in the possibility of miracles, is both historically and philosophically mistaken. Modern science owes its very origin to monotheistic religion. To quote Lewis: "Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver." (Miracles). That is why most of the great founding fathers of modern science believed in God and were Christians who took the Bible seriously. To mention just a few of them and the scientific disciplines they helped to establish, they include: Galileo and Kepler (astronomy), Pascal (hydrostatics), Boyle (chemistry), Newton (calculus), Linnaeus (systematic biology), Faraday (electromagnetics), Cuvier (comparative anatomy), Kelvin (thermodynamics), Lister (antiseptic surgery), and Mendel (genetics). All these men believed in an ordered universe and in the possibility of discovering how it functioned because they were convinced that the evidence of intelligent design in Nature indicated the existence of an Intelligent Creator. As Kepler put it, writing in the 17th century:

The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

Lewis not only persuaded me that there is no reason to disbelieve in miracles and the supernatural on scientific grounds; he also pointed out the absurdity of attributing all belief in miracles to ignorance of the natural laws revealed by science. Jesus' contemporaries in first century Palestine may have lacked the knowledge of modern physicists, but they were perfectly well aware that His virgin birth or His instantaneous healing of lepers were events which went against the normal course of nature, otherwise they would never have regarded them as miracles. Joseph, as we are told in Matthew's Gospel, was resolved to break off his engagement to Mary precisely because he knew as well as you and I do that women don't usually become pregnant without first having had sex with a man! Similarly, as we are told in John's Gospel, "Doubting Thomas" refused at first to believe the report of the other disciples that Jesus had risen from the grave, since he knew as well as any modern atheist that the victims of a Roman crucifixion did not normally return from the dead. It is therefore irrational to dismiss all reports of miracles as the unreliable testimony of credulous witnesses. You must examine the evidence for them with an open mind.

If, responding to this challenge, we look with an open mind at the accounts in the New Testament of the miracles of Jesus, Lewis argues, we are brought face to face with an interesting and significant fact. Instead of finding there the stuff of fairy tales - talking animals or frogs turning into princes - we are confronted with something much more rational and believable. What we see in most of Jesus' miracles is what God does in the natural world, as its Creator, but localised and speeded up. Thus every year, for example, tiny seedlings of grain created by God grow into vast harvest fields of wheat and thousands of loaves of bread. The same process of multiplication took place in Jesus' feeding of the five thousand, but localised and speeded up. Similarly, God is always turning water into wine by the action of sunlight and rain on the fruit of the vine, and by the involvement of human beings in all the stages of winemaking. At the wedding feast in Cana (recorded in John's Gospel), Jesus, as God the Creator Incarnate, also turns water into wine, but here again the conversion process is localised and speeded up. Exactly the same parallels apply to Jesus' miracles of healing. Human beings created by God are constantly recovering from illnesses and diseases through the medical stimulation of their bodies' God-given immune systems. So when Jesus healed lepers with a touch of His hand or a word of command, we again see God the Healer at work, but localised and speeded up, as man to man in ancient Palestine. In other words, says Lewis, the purpose of Jesus' miracles was not just to show God's love for humanity but to reveal to the people around Him (and to us) the presence among them of their Creator and Saviour.

In addition to convincing me of the inherent reasonableness of the New Testament record of Jesus' miracles, Lewis's writings also helped me to understand why the Christian concept of God as a union of three persons within one Godhead (the "Trinity") made sense, and why "God the Son," the second person of that "Trinity," had to come down into our world as Jesus, to "die for our sins" and conquer death on our behalf.

As Lewis explains in his most readable book, Mere Christianity, God is Love personified since, as our Creator, He is the divine source and origin of all human (and animal) love. But since love involves relationships between people, we should not be altogether surprised to discover that God in His own Being is a loving union of three distinct persons - described in the New Testament as "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit." It is of course true that this revelation may at first appear startling and strange, but it does not seem unreasonable once you think about it. The same thing applies to the apparently perplexing and contradictory notion of unity in diversity. How can God be a union of "three-in-one"? Well, says Lewis, what appears to be an impossibility in our dimension of being is not necessarily an impossibility in God's dimension of Being. To use his very helpful analogy, you can't picture a union of six separate squares in a two dimensional world, but you can picture a cube in a three dimensional world. So just as a cube is one body made up of six separate squares, so God is one Being made up of three separate persons. Again, this revelation may come as a shock, but it does not seem unreasonable. And this, argues Lewis, is another reason why Christianity has that strange "ring of truth." It gives us information about God that no one would ever have thought of making up, yet still manages to make some kind of sense. It involves a mystery about God that goes beyond our human understanding but not against it, which is surely what we ought to expect if there is a God.

I must emphasise, at this point, that the Christian concept of the Trinitarian nature of God is not something that Christian theologians simply invented many decades after Jesus' death and resurrection. It emerged quickly and naturally as Jesus' first disciples and followers came to understand the logical implications of His life and teachings, and reflected on what He Himself had said about His relationship and union with His "Father." And since love was and is at the heart of that relationship, and explains why God created the universe and gave us the gift of life, it also tells us why His rescue plan for the human race necessitated His arrival in our world as a human being, and His cruel death under Pontius Pilate.

We Are Alienated from Our Creator

As Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, the difficulty we face as fallen human beings, whether we realise it or not, is that we are alienated from our Creator because the moral imperfection we have inherited from our rebellious ancestors - our wrong thoughts and motives, as well as our bad behaviour - inevitably separates us from God. This may seem unjust, extreme, and hard to believe, since we are accustomed to being a mixture of good and bad ("nobody's perfect!" we say), and cannot, in our fallen state, altogether help being imperfect. But the problem is that our Creator God is not only Love, but Goodness and Justice personified, and therefore infinitely "holy" - to use the language of the Bible. This means that He cannot overlook our moral failings and be united to us in love, since His perfect character is repelled by our sinfulness. His justice demands that the human race should bear the full destructive consequences of turning away from Him and flouting His will. We personally may not have rebelled against God at the dawn of history, but like all human beings since that time, we have been morally and spiritually damaged by the severance of that spiritual umbilical cord between God and Man that used to exist in the Garden of Eden. God's love and goodness and joy can no longer flow unimpeded through us, because our human nature has been corrupted and we have become broken vessels that cannot retain the water of divine life. That is to look at our situation from God's point of view. If we examine it from our own human perspective, the problem doesn't get any easier. In order to be reconciled to God, the debt owed to Him by our wrongdoing must be paid, but we are morally and spiritually bankrupt. Reconciliation with God also requires perfect repentance, but it takes a good person to repent since repentance involves not only eating humble pie and saying sorry to God, but also surrendering our lives to Him. If we want to reconnect with our Creator, we must abandon our self-centredness, but the problem is that the worse we are, and the prouder we are, the harder it is for us to do this.

Given this dilemma, what did God have to do to resolve it? How could He reconcile His justice with His mercy? How could He save the human beings He had created in love from the consequences they had brought upon themselves by the misuse of their free will? How, in other words, could God save us from death and separation from Him in eternity? And let's be clear what this involves, however upsetting it may be. To be separated from God in eternity, means to be consciously and forever separated from the source of all life, all love, all joy, all truth, and all beauty. That is an indescribably terrible fate, about which Jesus spoke with real horror in the Gospels, but it is what we all risk if we refuse to accept God's rescue plan for ourselves. So what, then, is God's rescue plan? How can we be reconnected with our Creator?

According to Lewis, God could only save us by becoming a human being and dying on our behalf, because only in this way could He enable us to go through that process of dying to self without which true repentance and reconnection with Him is impossible. Just as we are enabled to think because God created our minds and nurtures our intelligence, so, argues Lewis, we can now repent of our sins and give ourselves to God, because the capacity to die to self is now part of God's divine nature in Jesus, and can therefore be communicated to us through our union with Him. Our ability, if we choose, to be reunited with God, was also won for us by Jesus because, as Man, and therefore our representative, His death on the cross paid the debt owed to God's justice by human sin. Like a judge who imposes a fine on his guilty son and then takes off his judge's robe and pays that fine himself, so Jesus, God the Son Incarnate, suffered the penalty of sin in our place. But since He was and is divine as well as human, He overcame death and rose from the grave on our behalf, having torn down the barrier separating fallen human beings from their Creator. That is the meaning of the Atonement and the Resurrection.

Evidence for Truthfulness of New Testament

Persuaded by Lewis of the reasonableness of the Christian message, I then examined the evidence for the historical truthfulness of the Gospel records in the New Testament. And once again closer scrutiny of the facts forced me to abandon my old prejudices against Christianity. The first thing I noticed was the internal evidence for the truthfulness of the Gospel accounts. Far from being self-serving propaganda, the Gospels faithfully record the weaknesses and failings of Jesus' disciples, including their frequent inability to understand what He is talking about. Peter, to cite the most famous example, refuses to believe Jesus when He warns him of His impending arrest and execution, and is firmly rebuked for it. Later, at the Last Supper, he swears he will never abandon Jesus even if all the other disciples do, but then goes on to do precisely that, denying all connection with Him in the courtyard of the High Priest's house after Jesus' arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. The other disciples are revealed in a similarly poor light. On one occasion they are shown quarrelling about who amongst them will occupy the highest positions in Jesus' Messianic Kingdom. At other times they, like Peter, are shown to be either unwilling or unable to accept Jesus' teaching that He, the Messiah, must suffer and die "as a ransom for many." Not surprisingly, they too abandon Jesus at the moment of supreme crisis in the Garden of Gethsemane. Even more significantly, all the disciples are taken by surprise by the Resurrection, despite having been told in advance by Jesus, before His arrest, that He would come back from the dead. Indeed, this very fact, mirrored in their slowness to accept the testimony of their women and the evidence of their own eyes, offers powerful support both for the truthfulness and reliability of the Gospels as a whole, and for the reality of the Resurrection. And this brings me, finally, to the two most compelling and convincing reasons for believing in the truth of the Christian message and the story on which it is based: the undeniable fact of the Empty Tomb, and the subsequent careers and martyrdoms of Jesus' closest followers.

As Frank Morison (originally a sceptic) argued long ago in his illuminating book, Who Moved the Stone? none of Jesus' enemies and opponents of the newborn Christian Church could deny the disappearance of Jesus' body from the tomb in which He had been buried by Joseph of Arimathea. Despite having every religious and political incentive to do so, neither the Jewish religious authorities who condemned Him, nor the Romans who crucified Him, were able to produce Jesus' body, and by doing so, give the lie to the preaching of His resurrection by the disciples. If they had done so, Christianity would have been snuffed out instantly. But they didn't because they couldn't. Secondly, only the fact of the Resurrection and the disciples' encounter with the Risen Jesus can adequately explain the change that took place in them, and their subsequent careers. Having been a frightened, broken-hearted, and demoralised group of men, they emerged from hiding and became a band of joyful and heroic missionaries, boldly and fearlessly proclaiming the Christian gospel, in the teeth of persecution and suffering. What is more, all of them except John eventually suffered painful martyrdom for doing so. Three of them, including Peter, were crucified; two were stoned to death; another two were beheaded; Thomas was killed with arrows in India; Philip was hanged on a pillar in Phrygia; another disciple was beaten to death, and Bartholomew (Nathaniel) was skinned alive in Armenia. Is it likely, if the disciples had stolen Jesus' body (as their enemies alleged), that they would have endured all this for something they knew to be a lie? Is it, in any case, psychologically credible to believe that these men, emotionally shattered by Jesus' arrest and crucifixion, would have had the will, motivation, strength, or courage to attempt to snatch away His dead body from under the noses of the soldiers guarding His tomb?

My former scepticism about the Resurrection was further challenged by the undeniable and highly significant fact that St. Paul, the great "Apostle to the Gentiles," had originally been the fiercest opponent and persecutor of the Early Church. Here was a man who had been passionately convinced that the Christian claims about Jesus were dangerous blasphemy, and that those who believed them deserved imprisonment, beatings and death. Then, suddenly, this same man changed a hundred and eighty degrees and became the greatest and most widely travelled evangelist of the fledgling Christian Church, a transformation, moreover, which began during an anti-Christian heresy-hunting missionary journey! What else, other than his encounter with the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, could possibly explain Paul's dramatic conversion? This conclusion is further reinforced by the telling references in one of Paul's pastoral letters to the many different witnesses to whom Jesus appeared after His resurrection, most of whom, Paul declared, were still alive at the time he was writing. (See: 1 Corinthians 15: 3-10). Would he have dared to say all this, implicitly challenging sceptics to interrogate these living witnesses, if Jesus had not risen from the dead? And would he, like the other apostles, have endured beatings, imprisonment, stoning by hostile crowds, and eventual beheading, for a message he knew to be false?

The more I thought about all these points, the more convinced I became that the internal evidence for the reliability of the Gospels and the New Testament as a whole was overwhelming. Apart from any other consideration, the picture of Jesus they presented was so vivid and compelling. In its pages you see Him challenging the powerful, comforting the poor, exposing hypocrites, and healing the sick and the broken-hearted. He treats women as equals and shows tenderness to children. Even more strikingly, when Jesus speaks of His divine status ("He who has seen Me, has seen the Father"), He doesn't convey any impression of madness or megalomania. Instead, His words seem to carry authority, and His enemies are never able to out-argue or outwit Him. In fact, they do not even deny the reality of His miracles, merely attributing them to sorcery! If God ever did come down into our world and live and walk among us as a human being, I thought, then surely Jesus was that Man.

Finally, the last nail was hammered into the coffin of my former atheism by the realisation that there was very good external evidence for the authenticity and truthfulness of the Gospels. There are first of all significant corroborating references to Jesus' existence and execution in the writings of Roman historians like Tacitus and Suetonius, as well as in those of the first century historian, Thallus. There is similarly corroborating evidence about some of the details of Jesus' life and death in other non-Christian sources like the Jewish Talmud. To quote one of these, the first century Jewish historian, Josephus, writing in about A.D. 93:

At this time [the time of Pilate] there was a wise man who was called Jesus. His conduct was good and (he) was known to be virtuous. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders. (Antiquities of the Jews)

In addition to all this, the manuscript evidence for the authenticity and reliability of the Gospel texts is earlier and more plentiful than that for any other document of ancient times. In particular, the historical reliability of Luke's Gospel and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, which is full of explicit political, legal, medical, cultural and topographical details, is confirmed by a lot of archaeological evidence as well as by plentiful documentary evidence from non-Christian sources. According, for instance, to classical scholar and historian, Colin Hemer, in his study, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, 84 separate facts in the last sixteen chapters of the Acts of the Apostles have been confirmed by archaeological and historical research.

So, confronted by all these facts and arguments - philosophical, scientific, and historical - I surrendered my sword of unbelief to God, and asked Jesus to forgive my sins and come into my life during the hot, dry summer of 1976. In the years that have followed, I have never regretted that decision, despite many ups and downs and trials of my faith. Through prayer, worship, and the company of other Christians, I feel I have begun to know Jesus personally and to understand something of the breadth and height and depth of His love for me and for all His creation. If, therefore, my journey from atheism to faith has helped in any way to persuade you of the truth of Christianity, I can only hope and pray that you too will experience the joy of reconnecting with your Creator by asking Jesus to forgive your sins and come into your own life. He loves you and is only waiting for you to make the first move.

On the other hand, if you are still unconvinced by my testimony but are willing to explore these issues further, I invite you to read I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, (Crossway, USA, 2004). It is a very readable yet scholarly book that sets out, in massive and very interesting detail, the philosophical and scientific evidence for the existence of God, as well as the historical and archaeological evidence for the reliability and truthfulness of the New Testament. Get hold of it and see whether it can resolve your doubts or answer your objections and questions. *

Paul Driessen

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. He is the author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death. This article was adapted from a speech given at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Let me begin with a somewhat simplified summary of how we got to where we are today.

Twenty-five years ago, the Club of Rome, United Nations Environment Programme, and allied organizations concluded that - to gain political power, dominance and control - the environmental movement needed to identify common enemies against which they could unite.

Thus, for over two decades, one of their greatest unifying principles became imminent catastrophic manmade global warming, which they said was the greatest disaster ever to face humanity, wildlife, and planet - once the global cooling panic had subsided.

But a curious thing happened. This year, as they prepared for the Rio+20 Earth Summit, organizers realized that few people and legislators around the world wanted to talk about this issue. It had lost its panache and credibility. It had become too polarizing, even toxic.

And so they changed their focus. Instead of a climate cataclysm, they emphasized the idea that humanity, wildlife, and planet now face an imminent sustainable development calamity.

Our lifestyles, energy systems, economic growth, and living standards are not sustainable, we were told. They are still causing global warming, global climate change, global climate disruption, and weird weather. But now the real problem is a looming sustainability crisis.

We face ecological devastation, the mass loss of plant and animal species and biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources that poor people and future generations are going to need.

Among their demands were an intergovernmental panel on global sustainability, new UN agencies, expanded budgets and powers, greater UN and activist control over energy and economic development and "genuine global actions" by every nation and community.

All this, they said, would foster "social justice" and "poverty eradication" - but only in the context of climate protection, biodiversity, "green growth," renewable energy, and an end to "unsustainable patterns of consumption and production."

These concepts - and the implementation of programs to bring them about - would be defined, evaluated, and carried out by UN-approved scientists, regulators, and activists, assisted largely by computer models.

To ensure that they would have sufficient funds to implement their agenda - the Rio+20 organizers also called for contributions from FRCs - formerly rich, formerly solvent countries like the United States, Spain and Great Britain, set at 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product, which works out to $105 billion per year for the U.S.

In addition, they also wanted the power to tax global financial transactions and other activities - with revenues flowing directly to the United Nations, to be given to activists or otherwise used as its agency directors see fit.

While these regulators and activists met in Rio de Janeiro to set up national and international programs, other organizers were meeting in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. They were devising new strategies to implement sustainability programs at the local level: through laws and ordinances that create "carbon neutral" communities and promote renewable energy, restrict energy use and economic development, and place restrictions on personal freedoms, property rights, and living standards.

To garner support for their plans, those activists also expressed a commitment to poverty reduction, "social justice" and the right of all people to "fulfill their aspirations for a better life." However, once again, this would have to happen within the context of sustainable development.

In the end, the mandates metamorphosed into amorphous "goals," and efforts to achieve a binding agreement fell short. The summit ended with promises to convene again in other exotic locations, to pursue the same agenda, in the name of ensuring that future development will be more "sustainable."

The breakdown resulted largely because a lot of poor countries began to realize that "social justice," "poverty eradication," and "aspirations for a better life" would be permitted only or mostly in the context of "sustainable development" - under guidelines that really mean much more limited development, justice, and poverty eradication than those countries are willing to accept.

But with all this as background, let's get to the nub of this issue - the very notion of sustainable development, as promoted in Rio and elsewhere, and as distinguished from what every person, company, and community should do to protect the environment, conserve resources and improve people's lives.

Probably the most-quoted definition is the one coined by former WHO director Gro Harlem Brundtland. She said sustainability means we may develop, and meet the needs of current generations, only to the extent that doing so "will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs."

As you might guess by now, I'm not at all persuaded that this definition is sensible or workable - or means anything at all. It's almost right out of Through the Looking Glass, where Alice meets the Cheshire Cat.

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice protested.

"When I use a word," the cat replied, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," replied the cat, "who is to be master - that's all."

Master, and subjects. Which is why I think President Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, is on target when he says you cannot talk about sustainability without talking about politics, power, and control.

Let's examine this UN/Brundtland definition more closely. It says we can meet the needs of current generations, only to the extent that doing so "will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs."

So, how many people - at least five or ten years ahead of time - predicted that electricity would safeguard and enhance our lives and economy the way it does today?

How many predicted natural gas electricity generation and home heating? The Apollo moon landing? Laptop computers? Fiber optic cables to replace copper? Al Gore's internet? Mobile phones?

Closer to our era, how many of you predicted flash drives? Digital photography? Cell phone cameras?

Exactly. And we've barely scratched the surface. In fact, the pace of technological change has become mind-numbing.

And yet, under sustainability dogma, we are supposed to predict future technologies - and ensure that today's development activities will not compromise their projected energy and raw material requirements.

We're also supposed to safeguard the needs of future generations - even if it means ignoring or compromising the needs of current generations, including the needs, aspirations, health and welfare of the most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished, politically powerless people on Earth.

So, can anybody here predict some of the most important needs and technologies that future generations will have, ten, fifty, a hundred years from now?

Can you at least list some of the most important energy, metal, and mineral resources that future generations will need to manufacture those technologies that you cannot predict - and how much of each resource they will need?

On to a related issue: Can you tell me how many years or decades an energy, metal, or other natural resource has to last, before developing and using it will not be sustainable?

What if a new technology comes along that lets us find and develop new deposits, or make existing deposits last decades or centuries longer? Something like 3-D and 4-D seismic, deepwater drilling and production, metallic mineral analysis gear in a backpack, or horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, for example?

How long must those expanded reserves last, before using them won't be sustainable?

Can someone explain how UN bureaucrats and environmental activists will determine which resources current generations must use less of - and how much of each resource current generations are allowed to use - if they cannot answer any of the previous questions any better than you can?

Can someone explain why or how organic farming is sustainable - whereas biotechnology is not sustainable, even though biotech crops require far less water, land, and insecticides to produce the same amount of food crops, and can even reduce soil erosion, protect against plant viruses and dangerous pathogens, and can incorporate special nutrients that prevent blindness or counteract severe diarrhea?

Can someone explain why oil and gas are not sustainable - whereas corn ethanol and biodiesel are sustainable, even though just this year's U.S. ethanol quota requires 40 percent of our corn crop, corn grown on an area the size of Missouri, plus millions of gallons of water and enormous quantities of hydrocarbon-based pesticides, fertilizers, and tractor fuel, and vast amounts of natural gas to run the distilleries, to produce a fuel that gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline?

Is it sustainable, ethical, or moral for the United States to use so many of the world's oil, gas, rare earth, iron, platinum, gold and other resources - because we refuse to allow exploration and development here in America?

That raises another closely related question.

Can anyone here tell me how much current generations have to sacrifice - so they will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs, which no one can possibly predict?

Can you tell me how much longer 700 million Africans, 400 million Indians, and another 300 million people in other countries must continue to live without electricity and all its countless blessings, because sustainability ideologues don't like coal, gas, nuclear, or hydroelectric power plants?

Or how long these people must remain destitute, diseased, and malnourished, because the same activists don't like economic development, insecticides, DDT, or biotechnology?

Can anyone cite one instance where future generations gave a spotted owl hoot about our current generations?

Do you suppose human ingenuity, creativity and innovation - our God-given intellect, what my friend Julian Simon called our Ultimate Resource - will suddenly stop functioning, and send us into a new Dark Ages? Assuming no government confiscation of our God-given rights to innovate, create, invest, and build - do you suppose human beings are ever likely to stop doing so? Neither do I.

In a nutshell, then, the fundamental problem with UN/activist "sustainability" is that it is infinitely elastic and malleable. You can never really know what it means. It's always just what they choose it to mean.

And it's the perfect weapon in the hands of anti-development activists. Whatever they support is sustainable, but whatever they oppose is unsustainable.

I think we can safely say it's at least open to question whether UN-style sustainable development has much of anything to do with saving our planet or safeguarding the needs of future generations. or current generations.

For developed nations, it means communities and families must stop being so healthy, prosperous, upwardly mobile, and free to chart their own destinies.

For poor countries, sustainable development means communities and families must accept a foreseeable future that is still rife with disease, malnutrition, destitution, deprivation, and desperation.

For poor countries, it means sharing artificial scarcity. Foreign aid, but nominal electricity and development. Better lives, but only slightly better. Fulfill your aspirations, but keep them small.

Above all, the UN/activist version of sustainable development means unelected regulators would increasingly control energy use, economic growth, wealth redistribution, and people's lives, living standards, health and well-being. Worse, they would do so without the safeguards, checks and balances of robust science, independent courts, democracy, transparency, honesty, integrity, or accountability.

UN-style sustainability means regulators will have nearly unbridled power and authority over our economies and lives - but with virtually no accountability, liability, or penalty, for any harm, disease or even death that they might cause when they screw up, or when they impose decisions that are at best ill-considered, and at worst fraudulent, callous and corrupt. *

Editorial - Barry MacDonald

John Quincy Adams, by John T. Morse, Jr., American Statesmen Series, Houghton Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1882.

The Leftist idea of minting a platinum, trillion-dollar coin as a way to get around Republican resistance to raising the debt ceiling was revealing - it shows how the Left thinks. The idea was doomed by the comic image of a $1,000,000,000,000 coin. But here clearly is the mindset: there is no limit to the amount of money government can create out of thin air, so we don't have to worry about overspending.

Paul Krugman, the prominent left-wing economist, in a blog posting, says that the monetary base has tripled over the last four years, meaning the Fed has created three times the currency in circulation and bank reserves (in other words, the liquid form of money), and yet interest rates and inflation have remained low. True, so far interest rates are low, and inflation hasn't soared - not yet.

If we could create wealth by minting a trillion-dollar coin, why stop at one trillion? Why not mint a decillion dollar coin (with 33 zeros)? We could pay off each nation's debt forever.

Of course such a gimmick would not create incentives for entrepreneurs, spur productivity, improve the quality of goods and services, prompt efficiency to lower the costs of healthcare, or elevate prosperity (as shale gas fracking does); it takes the pressure of the scarcity of resources and competition to create the drive to make the most of what we have - this seems such common sense that we at the St. Croix Review assume every American instinctively understands the magical thinking connected with a trillion-dollar coin.

But not after the last election. During the pre-Christmas fiscal cliff negotiations between the Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, and President Obama, Boehner told The Wall Street Journal that the President blamed his trillion-dollar deficits and the nation's $16 trillion debt on our flawed healthcare system. Boehner said: "They blame all of the fiscal woes on our healthcare system!" Boehner said to the president:

Clearly we have a healthcare problem, which is about to get worse with Obamacare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem.

Boehner repeated this message so often that near the end of their talk President Obama said "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that."

How could any intelligent person believe that the nation's debt was caused by our healthcare system? President Obama's response is just a flimsy, disrespectful, and dismissive excuse, not a serious explanation; President Obama is above explanation. Once again, it shows the mindset of the president and the Left: we don't have to worry about overspending because there is no limit to the amount of money government can create from nothing. We don't have to worry about imposing debt on our children and grandchildren. We don't have to worry about hyperinflation. We don't have a spending problem.

The real problem is that a majority of voters also agree with the president - they believe there is no spending problem. The debt, deficits, and overspending were a prominent part of the Romney campaign and yet the President was reelected. Whether a majority of American voters have lost touch with common sense or have been bought off with government benefits, there is only one conclusion: Too many Americans are unwilling to face up to the unhealthy state of our economy.

Washington, D.C. has become a vortex drawing to itself the nation's wealth. Its politicians assume God-like authority to borrow, tax, spend, and direct every aspect of our complex economy. Not only the politicians but also the media "watch dogs," educators, artists, and entertainers are all blind to how far from modesty and humility our government is. And now too many voters are blind to the house-of-cards our economy has become. What is to be done?

For those of us who see the truth the answer lies in our spirit of opposition. We must hold on to our principles with courage and perseverance. There is no telling how long the battle will be or what events will intervene to change our course. No avoiding hard times ahead. Not everyone can take direct action, but we must support the lawmakers who will effect change. In American history there is no better example of courage and perseverance than John Quincy Adams.

John Quincy Adams was the son of our second President, John Adams. Like his father he had a wealth of experience. He went with his father on his first diplomatic mission when he was ten years old to France. For the next eight years he lived in Paris, the Netherlands, Russia, and England. John Quincy Adams was fluent in French and Dutch and was familiar with German and other European languages. He served as Minister to the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia. He persuaded Czar Alexander to let American ships trade in Russian ports. He led the U.S. peace commissioners in negotiating the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.

As President James Monroe's Secretary of State John Quincy Adams wrote the Monroe Doctrine, warning European nations not to interfere in the affairs of the Americas. He negotiated fishing rights off the Canadian coast with England, established a part of the U.S. Canadian border, and transferred Florida from Spanish to U.S. sovereignty.

As our sixth president he promoted education and modernized the American economy. He paid off much of the national debt. He lacked patronage networks and was stymied by a Congress controlled by his enemies who were able to undercut him. He lost his re-election bid to Andrew Jackson in 1828.

And then he did something singular and extraordinary: He got himself elected as a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts where he served for seventeen years, nine consecutive terms, until his death in 1848.

He felt revulsion for slavery at a time when such sentiment of was not ascendant among the powerful in Congress. He wrote:

Slavery is a the great and foul stain upon the North American Union, and it is a contemplation worthy of the most exalted soul whether its total abolition is or is not practicable.

He spoke of "slave-drivers" and the "flagrant image of human inconsistency" of men who had "the Declaration of Independence on their lips and the merciless scourge of slavery in their hands."

The following sketch was published in 1882 by John T. Morse, from his biography John Quincy Adams. It reflects a time untouched by political correctness:

He was by nature a hard fighter, and by the circumstances of his course in Congress this quality was stimulated to such a degree that parliamentary history does not show his equal as a gladiator. His power of invective was extraordinary, and he was untiring and merciless in his use of it. . . . Men winced and cowered before his milder attacks, became sometimes dumb, sometimes furious with mad rage before his fiercer assaults. Such struggles evidently gave him pleasure, and there was scarce a back in Congress that did not at one time or another feel the score of his cutting lash; though it was the Southerners and the Northern allies of Southerners whom chiefly he singled out for torture. He was irritable and quick to wrath. . . . Of alliances he was careless, and friendships he had almost none. But in the creation of enmities he was terribly successful. . . . From the time when he fairly entered upon the long struggle against slavery, he enjoyed few peaceful days in the House. . . . When the air of the House was thick with crimination and abuse he seemed to suck in fresh vigor and spirit from the hate-laden atmosphere. When invective fell around him in showers, he screamed back his retaliation with untiring rapidity and marvelous dexterity of aim. No odds could appall him. With his back set firm against a solid moral principle, it was his joy to strike out at a multitude of foes. They lost their heads as well as their tempers, but in the extremest moments of excitement and anger Mr. Adams's brain seemed to work with machine-like coolness and accuracy. With flushed face, streaming eyes, animated gesticulation, and cracking voice, he always retained perfect mastery of all his intellectual faculties. He thus became a terrible antagonist, whom all feared, yet fearing could not refrain from attacking, so bitterly and incessantly did he choose to exert his wonderful power of exasperation. Few men could throw an opponent into wild blind fury with such speed and certainty as he could; and he does not conceal the malicious gratification which such feats brought to him. A leader of such fighting capacity, so courageous, with such a magazine of experience and information, and with a character so irreproachable, could have won brilliant victories in public life at the head of even a small band of devoted followers. But Mr. Adams never had and apparently never wanted followers. Other prominent public men were brought not only into collision but into comparison with their contemporaries. But Mr. Adams's individuality was so strong that he can be compared with no one.

He was not fitted to cross the countryside rousing gatherings of people. There were writers and agitators who did raise the consciousness of the American people towards the monstrous institution. (I might say, by the way, that slavery was an evil of pre-ancient origin not exclusive to Western civilization, a fact not recognized by today's American, anti-America critics.) There were wild abolitionists, such as John Brown, who took extreme measures and went to war with slavery.

But Adams had to walk a fine line in a House overwhelmingly controlled by his enemies. He said:

The most insignificant error of conduct in me at this time would be my irredeemable ruin in this world; and both the ruling political parties are watching with intense anxiety for some overt act by me to set the whole pack of their hireling presses upon me.

At any moment his opponents could combine to slander and disgrace, censure and expel him from Congress. He had to be careful not to give them the pretext. Through strength of will and a bold posture he intimidated a throng of antagonists.

Among fellow lawmakers he could count on the support of no one, but he did enjoy the steadfast enthusiasm of the voters from his district, and, as the years went by, he became the champion against slavery in Congress, and he gained many admirers nationwide. No one else had his prestige, experience, knowledge, ability, courage, and passion.

His method of attack was to present petitions from citizens for the abolition of slavery, and very often for the prohibition of the buying and selling of slaves within the District of Columbia. His stream of petitions forced the slavers to adopt a countermeasure which seemingly stymied him for years, yet the measure was unconstitutional and at odds with the conduct of a free government. In February 1836, the slavery interest in the House resolved that:

1. That Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in any State; 2. That Congress ought not to interfere with slavery in the District of Columbia; 3. That whereas the agitation of the subject was disquieting and objectionable, "all petitions, memorials, resolutions or papers, relating in any way or to any extent whatsoever to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon."

This was the infamous "gag rule" that forbade any discussion of slavery. It was a mistake made by the slave-holding party: they had assumed an untenable position. Adams became the persistent advocate of the right of petition, and thus he gained much more leverage with the public than he could have acquired just on the issue of slavery alone. Year after year when the House established its rules he would stand and say:

I hold the resolution to be a violation of the Constitution, of the right of petition of my constituents, and of the people of the United States, and of my right to freedom of speech as a member of this House.

And each time he was confronted with a chorus of "Order! Order!" and voted down.

Once the public recognized him as an heroic advocate, a torrent of petitions descended on him, all having to be read, sorted, and presented. He presented thousands of petitions, dozens or hundreds at a time, each time encountering shouts of "Order! Order!" Some of the petitions were sent by his enemies, praying that Mr. Adams be brought to the bar of the House, censured, and expelled - he read out these petitions, welcoming such a debate, but his enemies avoided the contest.

A great game of antagonism was played out. Some of the petitions were not what they purported to be. Once he said he hesitated to present a petition because he questioned its authenticity: it claimed to be from slaves. Before he presented it he asked the Speaker for his opinion, whereupon a great clamor arose. Much vituperation was directed at him. There were cries of "Expel him! Expel him!" it was said that the petition should "be taken from the House and burned." He was accused of a "gross and willful violation of the rules of the House and an insult to its members." He was threatened with criminal proceedings before a grand jury so that the people might "see an incendiary brought to condign punishment."

It was proclaimed:

. . . he has committed an outrage on the feelings of the people of a large portion of this Union; a flagrant contempt on the dignity of this House, and, by extending to slaves a privilege only belonging to freemen, directly incites the slave population to insurrection; and that the said member be forthwith called to the bar of the House and be censured by the speaker.

Unperturbed Adams waited for the hubbub to subside. When the occasion arose he pointed out he had not presented the petition, he said beforehand he doubted its authenticity, and he merely asked the Speaker for his opinion of its worthiness. And furthermore the petition of the slaves requested slavery not be abolished! He suspected that the petition had not been written by the slaves themselves but by their owner - thus the air went out of the balloon, the furor dissipated, and his opponents were brought to condign humiliation.

Eventually the tide of public opinion turned against the slavery interest and John Quincy Adam's "invincible perseverance" was rewarded. At the beginning of each session the rules of the House were established, and year after year the majority favoring the gag rule dwindled. In 1842 the majority was four; in 1843, three. In 1844 the struggle lasted weeks. On December 3 a vote abolishing the gag rule won by one hundred eight to eighty. "Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!" Adams wrote in his diary. The gag rule stood for eight years.

On February 21, 1848, at 1:30 p.m. the Speaker was conducting business when he was interrupted by cries of "Stop! Stop! - Mr. Adams!" It was thought that John Quincy Adams rose to address the speaker, but he fell over unconscious. He was surrounded by his colleagues, carried to a sofa in the hall of the rotunda, and then to Speaker's room. Late in the afternoon he was heard to say, "Thank the officers of the House." Soon afterwards he said, "This is the last of earth! I am content!" He lingered until the evening of the 23rd when he died - in the capitol building where he had fought his bitterest battles.

I do not wish to draw a strict moral equivalence between slavery and the financial chicanery of today's Democrats, but President Obama's arrogance is the slave driver's arrogance, and both the slavers and the President have shown disrespect for freedom and the Constitution.

Presently the America people are mesmerized by the ideal of maternal government, massive and powerful, able to succor multitudes. The American people have been incrementally lured into ever deepening dependence by promises that cannot be kept. Intellectuals, news people, artists, poets, novelists, actors, and entertainers - most are proponents of the Left. To oppose the zeitgeist is to be maligned as a kook or a crank. The coalition against right-sized government seems solid and permanent, just as the institution of slavery once seemed unshakable. But it is not so.

Taxing, borrowing, deficits, debt, suffocating regulations, the straining economy will bring America to a crisis; the foolish and arrogant delusions of Democrats will not stand.

It has often been remarked that free governments deteriorate once they fall into financial irresponsibility. But America is unique in its founding, in its Constitution, Bill of Rights, and in its history. We need not fall into some ugly kind of dictatorship. We have the heritage of a free people. We have the experience and memories of freedom. A revival of respect for the Constitution is possible.

What we need is the ability, courage, and most of all, the perseverance of John Quincy Adams. He at times doubted whether slavery could be overthrown, and did not live to see its passing. But he fought for its abolition nevertheless. What we need are fearless advocates for a free economy. As the leviathan crumbles we need able spokesmen and elected officials to explain to the American people why Big Government fails.

Our fate does not depend upon the toss of a trillion dollar coin, but upon our character. When it comes to the pivotal test, when the system of income expropriation and redistribution wears out, I believe we will not surrender our American freedom. *

We would like to thank the following people for their generous support of this journal (from 11/15/2012 to 1/9/2013): Mary Ellen Alt, Margaret Barrett, Charles L. Blilie, Carl W. Borklund, Glenn Bressler, Mary & Fred Budworth. David Bundsen, Price B. Burgess, Brooke Cadwallade, William C. Campion, Mark T. Cenac, John B. Charlton, Tommy D. Clark, John D'Aloia, Dianne C. DeBoest, Peter R. DeMarco, Francis P. Destefano, Jeanne L. Dipaola, John H. Downs, Thomas Drake, Don Dyslin, Donald R. Eberle, James D. Emerson, William D. Forare, The Andersen Foundation, Reuben M. Freitas, James R. Gaines, John B. Gardner, Gary D. Gillespie, William B. Glew, Franz R. Gosset, Judith E. Haglund, Alene D. Haines, Violet H. Hall, Paul J. Hauser, John H. Hearding, M. Heatley, Bernhard Heersink Daniel V. Hickey, Jaren E. Hiller, John A. Howard, Thomas E. Humphreys, David Ihle, Joe L. Ireland, Arthur H. Ivey, Burleigh Jacobs, James R. Johnson, Charles W. Johnson, Louise Hinrichsen Jones, Edgar Jordan, Paul W. Kampfe, Ken E. Kampfe, Frank G. Kenski, Robert E. Kersey, Robert M. Kubo, John S. Kundrat, Allyn M. Lay, Alan H. Lee, Mildred S. Linhof, Rema MacDonald, Gregor MacDonald, Paul T. Manrodt, John Mariol, Lloyd W. Martinson, Edwin Meese, Delbert H. Meyer, Robert P. Miller, Robert L. Morris, Richard S. Mulligan, David Norris, King Odell, Mitzi M. Olson, John A. Paller, Nancy J Parise, Eric D. Peterson, Frederick D. Pfau, Gary Phillips, Charles J. Queenan, Jack J. Quinn, Marilyn E. Radke, Richard O. Ranheim, David P. Renkert, Kathryn Hubbard Rominski, Robert E. Russell, John A. Schulte, Harry Richard Schumache, Alvan I. Shane, Joseph M. Simonet, Dave Smith, Elsbeth G. Smith, Philip Stark, Carl G. Stevenson, Norman Stewart, Dennis J. Sullivan, Norman Swender, Terry C. Tarbell, Kenneth R. Thelen, Paul B. Thompson, Elizabeth E. Torrance, Kevin Turner, Vernon & Ruth Warner, Alan Rufus Waters, Donald E. Westling, Nancy D. Williamson, Eric B. Wilson, Walter Wood, Piers Woodriff, Willaim P. Wortman, Ronald S. Zaczek, David W. Ziedrich.

The following is a summary of the December 2012 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In "What Now?" Barry MacDonald addresses the result of the presidential election.

Michael S. Swisher, in "America's Best Colleges! Really?" writes about the corrosion of ethics emanating from American universities, and what can be done about it.

Mark Hendrickson, in "An Open Letter to Mitt Romney," thanks him for his valiant efforts, remarking that he will be spared much anguish, given the make-up of the electorate, in trying to solve problems without possible solutions presently; in "The Great American Policy Divide, and the Democratic Temptation," he says a growing number of Americans are intent on seizing the wealth of the successful through government confiscation; in "The Unstoppable March Toward National Bankruptcy: Who's to Blame?" he affixes blame, and he lets us know the Democrat plan following national bankruptcy; In "What the Obama Phone Tells Us About America's Health," he writes about big and small aspects of the "culture of thievery" corrupting America; in "The Kind of Energy Policy the U.S. Needs," after showing how rich America is in energy resources, he states six solutions to our energy problems.

Allan Brownfeld, in "Thanksgiving: A Time to Reflect Upon America's Uniqueness," gives examples of America's enduring strengths; in "Can a Free Society Endure if the Values Needed to Sustain It Are Not Transmitted?" he says that a free society depends upon a virtuous people; in "What Does an Epidemic of Cheating Tell Us About Today's American Society?" he writes that the teachers are showing students how to cheat, with dreadful consequences for all of us; in "A Look at Late 20th Century America from a Perceptive and Talented Observer," he reviews the life and writings of the celebrated columnist, Joe Sobran.

Herbert London, in "Sandy Slams New York," describes the horrible effects of hurricane Sandy on New York City; in "Coming Apart Over Sequestration," he lays out the consequences of the approaching cuts to the Navy for the nation's security; in "Obama's Ship of State Without a Helmsman," he makes the case that President Obama has no worthy vision of America's role among nations; in "Cover-up 2012," he writes that the press has been derelict in its duty to seek the truth about what happened to the American consulate in Benghazi.

Paul Kengor, in "America's Fundamental Transformation," writes about the consequences of the election; in "Our First 'Red Diaper Baby' President?" he looks at the influential people in President Obama's life who were Communists or sympathizers; in "Communism on Parade? High School Marches to Marx and Lenin," he discusses the widespread American ignorance of the evilness of Communism; in "On Libya Three Decades Ago: We Should Remember Reagan's Resolve," he describes Reagan's clearness of purpose which has stood the test of time.

Jigs Gardner, in "Greenism: Strategy, Roots, Consequences," says that Green ideologues view humans as a cancer on the earth, and that we should be denied the benefits of technological advancement. Greenism is an ideology as inhumane as Communism and Nazism - a fact unrecognized by just about everyone. And, ironically, Greenism is harmful to the environment.

In "Fortunate Friendships with Russell Kirk and Bill Buckley," Timothy Goeglein recounts his warm memories to two extraordinary men.

In "Versed in Country Things - The Portent," Jigs Gardner writes about a startling event, about picking mushrooms, about hands-on and book learning, and about the strange quirks of country folks.

Jigs Gardner, in "The Red Badge of Courage," puts his finger on why Stephen Crane's novel on the Civil War succeeds.

In "There Oughtta Be a Law. . . ." Joseph S. Fulda takes after New York City policemen who accept favors from merchants on their beat.

Joseph S. Fulda

Joseph Fulda is a freelance writer living in New York City. He is the author of Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism. Joseph Fulda is a contributing editor of The St. Croix Review.

The reader, seeing the title, is likely to wonder whether he is really reading this corner and this author. Ah, but there are all kinds of laws; let me elaborate.

Most police officers, it must be said, do their often-thankless jobs with courage, integrity, and under circumstances that are, to say the very least, trying. But there is an ample literature suggesting that a sizable, if small percentage-wise, minority do otherwise. (See, for example, the symposium entitled "Police Misconduct" edited by James Frank in Criminology & Public Policy, Vol. 8, Number 4, 2009.) Aside from the scholarly literature, there is also a sizable record of court judgments, lots of anecdotal evidence of varying credibility, and numerous widely available videos, not all of which are other than veridical.

For those who perform their duties with honor, one can hardly give enough kudos. But this piece focuses on a problem that simply must be fixed because of those who act otherwise. There is a widespread practice among New York City merchants to give discounted goods and services to officers of the law, sometimes as high as twenty percent. Like almost everything we human beings do, this practice stems from mixed motives - including, but not limited to, fear of not buying already paid-for protection (sometimes almost to the breaking point), true gratitude and respect, and matching the competition. Now, were this discount applied across-the-board to all government employees, it would be no more than a marketing strategy and no different from any other form of volume discount. But this I have not observed; it seems to be limited to those with the power to arrest or, and much more subtly, withhold protection, by simply turning a blind eye.

Given this, matching the competition along this dimension should hardly be necessary; there should be no fear of not paying for services already paid for, and as for the gratitude and respect, a simple "thank you" and otherwise completely equal and ordinary treatment fully suffice.

But there are many ways to write a law banning all such discounts. The wrong way is to punish entrepreneurs simply trying their darnedest to survive in a harsh and highly over-regulated environment. A much better way is to write a provision into the civil service laws mandating a short, but not insignificant, suspension for any police officer accepting such a discount - with termination for repeated offenders - entrapment excluded, sting operations excluded, officers with preexisting relationships excluded, and only taking effect after a phase-in period in which notice of the ban is very widely disseminated.

Over time, such a ban may actually serve to reinforce good behavior on the part of those charged with enforcing the good behavior of others. Because of the unique powers accorded to police officers, the current system is a form of very gentle, very quiet, very soft, but very real coercion. I say it should end. Yet it cannot end without such a law, because coercive or not, as the discounts are not expressly asked for, I do not see any way to challenge the practice in court for lack of standing. It is for this reason that the legislature must be proactive. *

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. Jigs Gardner writes on literature from the Adirondacks, where he may be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Because I was set up for it and knew what I was doing, sugaring was much easier this year, and I made better syrup with less labor. In the midst of it, however, when I was complacently congratulating myself on the fruits of my foresight, there occurred an incident that could have been a disaster, due entirely to my negligence.

At the beginning of the month, as was my custom in winter, I went up on the roof to clean the chimney. Interrupted by the arrival of a visitor, I left the job half done. Two weeks later at three AM the cat jumped up on our bed, meowing frantically, waking us up to a houseful of smoke, pouring from the joints in the kitchen stove pipe as it made its way across the common room ceiling and up into the children's room. Dashing upstairs, I roused the children, and as I shepherded them out I saw that the pipe where it entered the chimney was red hot, and I could hear the fire roaring in the chimney. Leaving the children in bed with Jo Ann, I ran out, naked and barefoot, through the snow to the barn where some of the number ten cans not in use as sap buckets were stored. Grabbing one, I raced back to the house, slipped on work gloves, ran upstairs, pulled the pipe out of the chimney and jammed the can in its place. Shaking with relief and the shock of delayed fear, I walked slowly downstairs to reassure everyone and put some clothes on. The whole episode had taken less than three minutes.

When I went outside, there was a column of flame like a great torch shooting out of the chimney, casting a lurid light on the snow, even on the trees at the edge of the woods. The roof was of galvanized metal, the chimney was new and tile-lined, and there was no more fear of fire once I had closed the pipe hole, so I was content to let it burn itself out - thus giving the chimney a definitive cleaning. But that roaring flare in the night troubled me as if it were an obscure symbol, a portent. I knew it was no such thing, but so it seemed in my imagination, and because of that, because it burned in the back of my mind, it did indeed perform the classic office of a sign and wonder, a warning that saved me from a dangerous delusion.

The very next evening I was up in the woods tending the fire when I was startled by a footfall in the road below and a voice out of the darkness. Who's there? Miff? I'll meet you at the house. Quickly I topped up the pans, loaded the fire and shut it up, and ran in my moccasined feet down the trail on the frozen snow. Miff was on his way back to Toonerville from a visit to his sister in the village, and he thought he'd stop to pay a social call. The three of us sat at the long table in the glow of the lamp, drinking tea and chatting, and somehow we got to talking about hillbilly music. Miff wanted to know if we had ever listened to it. Jo Ann hadn't, but I had. Right after the war I lived for a year with a relative who kept the radio tuned to a station that played it, and by chance the numbers I heard and remembered were Miff's favorites: "Cool Water," "San Antonio Rose," "I'm Dreaming Tonight of My Blue Eyes," and we recalled them together fondly. Miff had a resonant tenor, and when we were done with our mutual repertoire, he sang a song he had composed himself, conventionally melancholy verses about a lost love, the West Virginia hills, and the sound of train whistles in the night. We talked about the South, and living in a warmer climate, and maybe the three of us could go to the Grand Ol' Opry together, and so on. It was a very pleasant evening. I said I'd walk him part way down the hill.

How long could it have taken us to walk out the door, across the porch, down a short path to the driveway, and then fifteen or twenty yards to the road? Less than a minute certainly, but time enough for me to erect a happy daydream about moving to West Virginia with Miff, helping him start a new life, etc., etc. I have been told that in the literature of social work this is called a rescue fantasy, flattering to the fantasist's ego. The night was clear and cold, and with the part of my mind not playing make believe I was thinking there'd be a good sap run on the morrow as the sap warmed the trees. When we reached the road and turned down hill, Miff bent down and retrieved a bottle of wine from the snow bank. He said nothing, I said nothing, but the movement was decisive: a flame in the night, a warning, a portent.

Starting down the hill, we could see a light on at Otis's, and Miff asked me about him, but it was little enough I could tell. In our first autumn I had seen him a few times, but he was away all winter and I never saw him last summer, although I heard him often enough. He had been carrying on with Alice, a summer resident who lived farther along that road, and at night they'd wander back and forth between the two places, singing drunkenly. In the fall he had taken a job at the creamery in the village, where Miff's sister worked, so we talked about that.

All this aimless chattering as we stepped along in the starlit darkness, our boots crunching on the frozen snow, was an expression of our constraint: I kept thinking of Miff hiding the wine so Jo Ann and I wouldn't drink it, and he must have known he'd made a misstep. Halfway down the hill we parted. Standing for a few moments in the road, I listened to his steps receding, growing fainter and fainter. I called out good night and heard his answer as a distant shout. As I slowly ascended the hill, my mind was a confusion of images: Miff stooping to the snow bank, Miff singing his song, the three of us gathered around the lamp, the sugar fire in the woods, and a voice out of the darkness, and above all, the flame towering from the chimney.

When I got back to the house and saw Jo Ann sitting at the table by the lamp, I experienced a rare moment of clarity. Her love for me and our children was the great truth of my life, and the stupidities, delusions, and wishful fantasies I was prone to were a paltry response, even a denigration of that truth. It would not be honest to say that I at once reformed, but at least I squelched the Miff fantasy. I told her about the hidden wine bottle and my misgivings, and then I wrote to a friend, a medical researcher who could tell me something about alcoholism. Jean, and the books she lent me, told me many interesting things, but what was most important to me then was the conclusion that alcoholism is an addiction, meaning that everything else, including friendship, takes a distant second place after the alcoholic's need for drink. Rescue fantasies, always foolish, are doubly so in the case of drunks. In an unusual show of common sense, I accepted someone else's wisdom, guiding my relations with alcoholics thereafter in the light of that. I don't mean that it cooled my friendships, only that it lowered my expectations, helped me to maintain objectivity and a certain distance, and over the years kept me from behaving foolishly.

A visitor who came to see us in May, confused by my directions, got stuck on the road that ran past Otis's. As I walked back with him to help him out, we passed Alice's summer place where I noticed a large planting of rhubarb, at least twenty hills, growing lushly beside the house. I thought about that rhubarb for the next few days; it was a resource not to be wasted, but how could I exploit it? Stewed rhubarb was one of my favorite desserts, so was rhubarb pie, but the few hills at Corbin's supplied those needs amply. I could can it, but there was much more than I would ever want to can. Looking into our collection of cookbooks, I found nothing of interest until I turned to the original edition of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School Cookbook (1896) and found rhubarb marmalade. I liked the look of it, but it required sugar and oranges. At first, my mind was barren of schemes, but gradually a daring stroke evolved.

That evening, when Otis got home from his job at the creamery, I walked over. He was spading up his garden, no small job because it was almost as large as ours, and we talked about his plans. With a horticulture degree from Cornell, whatever he had to say was worth listening to, if you could stand his dispiriting manner. To look at his tomato seedlings we had to go into the house, something I usually avoided. He had not finished it, neither inside nor out, and it looked like he never would (twenty years later, still unfinished, it burned down). Essentially, it was a storeroom for bundles of shingles, kegs of nails, bathroom fixtures, piles of pipe, stacks of lumber, and coils of wiring, covered with the dust of seven years since he had moved in. His actual living space was a squalid corner walled off by Army blankets hung from the rafters; there he had his cot, refrigerator, kitchen range, and sink. He talked about the seedlings, which looked great to me - dark green, leafy, stocky - in his usual negative way: the claims made for the varieties were probably lies, heh heh, when he set them out there'd be a frost, heh heh, sinking my spirits until I feared I would slink away without making my proposition. "Phil, do you like rhubarb?" I suddenly blurted.

Startled, he took a moment to come up with his vintage formulation: "Well, if it's cooked right - not like they do it around here, stewed to death - if it's cooked just right, it isn't as bad as some of the poisons people give you for dessert, heh heh."

Taking that as ecstatic approval, I unfolded my plan, opening blandly, "Maybe you know the lady down the road. . . ." I wanted him to get permission for us to pick the rhubarb, then I'd make marmalade, ummm, delicious stuff, and we'd give some to the nice lady, and if Otis would buy the sugar and oranges, we'd go halfies with him.

The poor man was at a loss. He had played the part of Cynical Hermit so long that he'd forgotten mutually beneficial ventures could exist. I watched him go through the hackneyed collection of gestures indicating Deep Thought - pulling an ear lobe, scratching his head, rubbing his chin, frowning - when he finally said, "I'm crazy. You'll probably kill me with botulism, but I'll do it, heh heh."

Thus was born the rhubarb deal, as well as our strange friendship with Otis. The rhubarb part was a cinch. Next morning we walked to Alice's, pushing a wheelbarrow in which the children took turns riding, and we filled the barrow, an old-fashioned one with high wooden sides, with rhubarb. We had enough sugar to stew some and begin canning. Otis stopped in after work and to my surprise, was interested in everything, peering into pots, admiring the filled jars, studying recipes. When he had eaten a bowlful of stewed rhubarb and pronounced it "not bad," I knew we were on the way.

There was a definite change in him when he brought the sugar and oranges the next evening. He was awkwardly jovial, as one performing a dimly remembered act, uncertain of the sequences and rhythms, by turns tentative and blundering. He was making friends with us, shedding much of the Old Sourdough carapace, speaking and acting in an almost normal manner. At the time we enjoyed the friendship without thinking about it; later we conjectured that this was the first friendship, certainly the first with a family, he had had in years.

So the rhubarb was canned and the marmalade was made, and it was a great discovery, far better than I hoped it would be. Every year after that I made kettle after kettle and sold it as fast as I made it.

The friendship developed rapidly. He took us on a tour of the creamery, and when the weather warmed up we went swimming at the dam a few miles away. We helped him set out the plants in his garden - four varieties of tomato, four of cabbage, two broccolis, two cauliflowers, three peppers, two celeries, Brussels sprouts - which gives you some idea of his gardening capabilities. What was more important because he couldn't do it alone, we helped him unroll long sheets of black plastic between the rows, an innovation then. When it was done, the garden was very impressive. I could not have imagined its fate.

Things went along smoothly, Otis dropping in three or four times a week for nearly two months. Then we had some visitors who stayed awhile, and then he stopped coming over. One day I killed a porcupine, and knowing Otis liked the meat, I called across the gorge and he came to get it. The guests were present and he was awkward; he looked askance, spoke only to me, and made a quick getaway. I did not see him again for years. We lived a few miles away then, and he would stop in once or twice during the spring and summer, knowing that I was the only local source for herbs and unusual plants. We were on good terms, but he was always staggering drunk (deliberately, I think) and the happy ease of those weeks that began with the rhubarb deal seemed less a memory than a trick of the mind, a fantastic illusion. At the time I was baffled, trying in vain to recall the discordant word or act that could have affected him. Not until years and circumstances acquainted me with a number of eccentrics did I learn to expect that sudden transition from warm friendship to cool distance at any time, caused by his inability to bear the responsibility of maintaining a normal friendship with all its ups and downs and give and take. The strain is too great, some pretext is invented, and the eccentric is immensely relieved to return to his exclusive conversation with himself, the only person he can trust.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, and we had all those jars of luscious marmalade, and Otis did another thing for us: he told us where mushrooms grew, up a steep wooded hill along the road to his place. "Plenty of Boletes up there," pointing as we were driving by, "You see the dagoes from Barre there after a good rain."

Thereafter I scoured the hillside, often taking the children with me, working all the way around to the bare knob above Alice's, windswept and matted with patches of fragrant wild thyme. I imagine the steep hillside had been logged in the 1930s; now it was covered with a dense growth of young spruce and balsam fir, virtually impenetrable in places. Usually, I beat the Italians to it, but not always; nevertheless, I usually filled my basket because I fared farther and I was willing to crawl on hands and knees through damp thickets. Older men, they were content to stay near the path, an old logging road that meandered up the hill. I could tell when they had been before me by the discarded stem ends, neatly sliced off with their sharp clasp knives, that dotted the ground. We greeted each other courteously when we met, and once I had an illuminating conversation with an old stonecutter on his way up as I was going down. He asked to see my basket. Poking at the variety of mushrooms, buff, yellow, orange, red, he shook his head. "Ah, you shouldn't pick them, only these, the white ones," pointing to Boletus edulis.

But the others are edible, I objected. He shrugged and pointed to the Steinpilz. "These. These are the best."

I asked how he learned. By going with his father, who taught him to pick that Bolete and no other. Well, I said, you'll never make a mistake. Picking my way down the hill, I thought about the two forms of knowledge, the old man's practical experience and my book learning, for I had laboriously taught myself out of a book some years before. Knowledge gained by practice is very useful, especially in the mastery of technique, but that incident emphasized for me the value of book learning for its range, its opening to whole worlds of knowledge. Each has its value and its place, and I am thankful that we are able to move freely from one to the other. Too often the genteel are scornful of practical knowledge, just as the unlettered scorn book learning.

A final episode from that time. Seth and I went for a ramble in the woods beyond the Big Meadow, wandering here and there, looking at dogtooth violets and blue cohosh, unfurling cinnamon fern, and traces of old logging roads. We came upon a plant I had sought for years, the wild black currant, hardly a shrub, just a few spindly stems, one, two, and three - why, there were fifteen or twenty plants there, and as I stepped back to gain some perspective, a tiny dappled fawn leapt up from underneath my feet and tottered a few yards away on unsteady legs. We stood transfixed, watching it for a minute or two before we slowly backed away, leaving the fawn staring after us. *

Greenism: Strategy, Roots, Consequences

Jigs Gardner

Jigs Gardner is an Associate Editor of the St. Croix Review. This essay is adapted from a speech given at the annual meeting of the Property Rights Foundation on October 20, 2012.

A critical attitude toward Greenism has lately emerged, largely confined to specific issues, like global warming, although some excellent books by Steve Milloy and Paul Driessen have gone beyond particular issues to more general accounts of where Greenism is taking us. I am grateful to these critics, but no one, so far as I know, has named Greenism's most effective strategy, nor has anyone revealed its roots. Critics have been bemused by the trees and missed the forest. It is my purpose to show you the forest.

From the beginning, human beings have been environmentalists. They had to be or the species would not have survived because, like all animals, we must eat to live, and since consumption is never immaculate, we excrete waste. It is not healthy to wallow in one's own filth, so those humans who kept their surroundings relatively clean survived and thrived. They voided their excrement in the back of the cave, the same place where they threw the mastodon bones, and in time, when they lived in settlements, they dumped their refuse in communal dumps beyond the village, the so-called kitchen middens beloved of archaeologists, and later their waste went into canyons and rivers and holes in the ground, and eventually we used incinerators and sanitary landfills.

This is the rule of environmental change; as our economy develops and we create more wealth, we become dissatisfied with the old solutions and we change them; the solution at one stage of development becomes a problem at the next stage. We solved our waste problem at one time by discharging it in rivers - out of sight, out of mind - but when we gained more wealth and our sensibilities were refined, and we saw more uses for clean rivers, we created sewage treatment plants.

There are two observations to be drawn from this account. First, everything depends on wealth. Because we live in an economy of scarcity so cannot pluck the trees for bread, we must match our expenditure to our resources. We must first create wealth before we can spend it on the environment. Conversely, without ample resources, the environment suffers. Remember that. The second observation is that human beings are at the center of the process; we stop fouling the river, not because of the river in itself but for our own sakes. We have more uses for the river, and a clean river pleases us. Our focus is on our own comfort and safety and economic development and pleasure, and it is from this point of view that everything is judged.

This is true of all forms of environmental amenities, not just waste disposal. Think of conservation. The national parks and forests, State parks, and Migratory Bird Act were part of a drive to preserve the natural world for ourselves, for our use as well as pleasure.

Until the 1960s environment was no more than the neutral name for our surroundings - it had no other significance. Then it was radically changed by the emerging forces of Greenism and it became a concept charged with ominous significance; a sacred, mystical entity, sometimes vaguely universal as in "saving the planet," sometimes quite specific and material, as a snail darter or a spotted owl. Now human needs were no longer at the center, because we were now seen as enemies of nature; if we were present it was as villains, destroyers of the environment dragged on stage to be accused in a show trial, as in the ever more rigorous mandates of the Environmental Protection Agency. We are all guilty of using fossil fuel to run our vehicles and generate electricity, so we shall be punished by shutting down coal-fired stations and by being denied inexpensive fuel.

We must understand this redefinition that has made our environment into a moral bludgeon. Only selfish, heedless people would despoil such a sacred entity, and it is by shaming us, by making us feel guilty about the environment, that we are cowed into submission. We must grasp this master strategy, the redefinition of environment over the last fifty years, because until we do Greens will always have us on the defensive. I cannot stress this enough.

Now I shall tell how this magic word was used twenty years ago to destroy the forest industry in the Pacific Northwest, a story that's probably generally familiar to my readers, so I shall confine myself to my own small role in the affair and what I learned from it.

Because this deals with a supposedly endangered species, the spotted owl, I must say a few words about species extinction. You have probably read that every day, in our needless destructive way, we are exterminating species at a great rate, that every time an acre is cleared in the Amazon jungle untold number of species are destroyed, some of which might eventually have yielded a cure for cancer. The truth is that we know nothing about species extinction. Absolutely nothing. We don't know how many species are on the earth today, nor how many were here yesterday, or last year, or fifty years ago, or 500 years ago, and we know of only a few, fewer than 100, cases of extinction in the historical record, like the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon. While we understand what happened to the dodo bird - it was edible, like a large turkey, it was flightless, and it lived on an island - there is still argument about the pigeon's demise, the last one of which died in a zoo eighty-nine years ago. Some observers think that in the endless churning of evolution species are being created and destroyed all the time. The current theory about the spotted owl, by the way, is that it was losing out in competition with the barred owl.

So the purported extermination of the spotted owl, something specific, identifiable and countable, a denizen and representative of the sacred environment, was being used to kill the lumber industry, and somehow I got involved, by mail, with a group on the Olympic peninsula - loggers, sawyers, businessmen - who had formed in opposition to the Greens, and I began to write for their newsletter. The owl business was still before the court, the situation was still up in the air, and most people seemed to think common sense would prevail. The group staged rallies and held benefits and raised money and advanced arguments in the newsletter, and before long I saw that they didn't know what they were up against, they were fooling themselves, and their cause was doomed. I was a veteran of some bruising forestry struggles in Nova Scotia in the 1980s, so I was not completely ignorant, but I was ignorant enough, as you shall see.

What was mistaken about the argument of the anti-Greens was that it cried about jobs; think of the jobs that would be lost if the forest industry were shut down! Jobs, jobs, jobs. The same stupid argument has been used about the oil pipeline from Canada. Greens, of course, couldn't care less; after all, they thought of the industry as a collection of debased exploiters of the sacred environment. Some soothing pap was spread around about Green jobs in tourism, but like President Obama's Green jobs, they never amounted to anything.

In all such controversies the people who matter are not the contenders but the audience, and while the jobs argument might have meant something to them once, by then they had been taught to believe in the sacred environment and any supposed threat was regarded as a catastrophe. If you are told that your house is on fire, why should you care about jobs? So the Greens triumphed and that was the end of the forest industry and soon it will be the end of the forest, too. What I wanted the group to do was to argue that logging could go on without endangering the owls, a position for which there was abundant evidence. That supposed that the owls were the issue, a nave idea. The Greens wanted to end forestry, and the owl was merely a pretext: if we had gotten around that they would have come up with something else.

My argument was good so far as it went, but it didn't go far enough. We had to go beyond the issue of the owls to confront the whole Green concept of the environment that was only a cover story, a strategy to gain their real goal; they didn't give a damn about the owls nor about the forest. They wanted to stop any activity that would use our natural resources to increase our prosperity and improve our lives. Learn this truth; Greenism is by intent impoverishing. A year ago I listened to two of my relatives (I'm sorry to say) exulting over the campaign to close the nuclear generating plant in Vermont, because then the cost of electricity would go up by 30 percent. Wouldn't that be terrific! Then everyone would be forced to go Green. This callousness, this selfishness is a hallmark of Greenism. Nor is it confined to these shores. Robert, Paarlberg's book, Starved for Science, shows how Greens are preventing the spread of modern farming techniques to Africa. And they are doing the same thing in India. Paul Driessen's Eco-imperialism is the definitive study.

But come back to that strange idea; to stop any activity that would use our natural resources to increase our prosperity and improve our lives. Why would anyone want to do that?

Now we get down to the roots of Greenism. In this space I cannot go back to its beginning in the late 18th century, but I can go back 100 years to the time just before the First World War when the idea I'm getting at - utopianism - first appeared as a potentially mainstream idea in America. My readers probably know that various utopian communities were established here in the 19th century, but they were eccentrics of no consequence in normal American life. The utopianism I am speaking of began in Europe and there it would finally culminate in Bolshevism and Nazism, Communism, and Nationalism, but here it took the form of generalized radicalism, antibourgeois, vaguely socialistic, what we should call utopian greed, ready to attach itself to almost any cause. Its first proponents were Greenwich Villagers, Bohemians (to use an antique trope), and in the 1920s it spread to the artistic avant garde. By the 1930s Communism was the vehicle of utopian greed, and the Popular Front policy of 1935 attracted a number of ordinary Americans, not Bohemian. Stifled by the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, Communism as a utopian vehicle was killed by the Cold War, and there was a time, the decade of the 1950s, the Eisenhower years, where utopian greed was quiescent. With the emergence of the New Left in 1960, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring two years later, and then Earth Day, utopian greed sprang to life. Without utopian zeal behind it, Greenism would never have become so powerful.

Green ideologues believe in the goodness of nature: human beings and their civilization are a curse, and the only way to mitigate the curse is to live so-called "simple" lives in a de-developed, re-wilded country. Human enclaves will be just that, islands in a continent of wilderness, Green utopia. Obviously it's crazy, full of contradictions, but on the way terrible damage will be done to our lives, to our country. No Communist ever lived in a classless society, no Nazi ever experienced the 1000 year Reich, but remember what havoc they wreaked along the way to their unattainable utopias! I am not saying we will soon see Green concentration camps, but remember that James Hansen called for war crimes trials for global warming skeptics. What I am saying is that it is utopian greed that fuels the Greenism zeal to prevent development and diminish our resources. And that is how Greenism is the enemy of real environmental improvement; by reducing our wealth it ensures environmental degradation.

There's another consequence of utopianism, one that I think is a great weakness. Utopians always begin with general benevolence: everyone shall be uplifted, everyone shall share the benefits of the new order. Once the bandwagon gets rolling, however, it turns out that the circle of beneficiaries gets smaller and smaller. I need not recapitulate the history of Bolshevism or Naziism or even what happened in some of those 19th century utopian communities; the rulers quickly exhibit contempt for the masses.

Americans are not comfortable without the concept of class; we like to think we are all middleclass, but in fact there are strong class feelings beneath the surface. As upper middleclass utopians, Greens feel scorn for unGreens, Unutopian Americans, regarding them as helots, beasts browsing in the Walmart sties, Yahoos in Consumerland, and they hardly disguise their contempt. That's another reason Greenism measures are so punitive - the urge to coerce the recalcitrant herd, so obvious in this administration, comes from their scorn for their fellow Americans, and because we hate such condescension, this is a great Green weakness.

A couple of months ago I had a revealing conversation with a neighbor, a prominent Greenism ideologue just returned from a long trip surveying all the state lands and parks from Georgia to Canada with the idea of planning their merger into an unbroken wilderness along the eastern seaboard. He's now writing a book about it, sponsored by the Wildlands Project. We live on a country gravel road three miles long with a dozen homes and farms on it, a rural working class neighborhood, and I was praising the young people. They all have a job after school, two jobs in summer, saving money for college, and our sparsely populated road has produced three high school valedictorians in the last ten years. But my Green neighbor was having none of it. Those kids take to the woods on snowmobiles, they drive ATVs on hiking trials, and he knew they were unGreen as he could tell by listening to them for just a few minutes. People thus revealed themselves quite plainly, he said. Taken aback, I said that such knowledge in any but the most superficial sense was absurd, but he insisted that once he discerned what he thought was an unGreen attitude he knew all there was to know. He was looking at people in an instrumental way, as pawns, as means to his end.

From a humanist point of view he was abominably wrong. And that must be our point of view. We have been on the defensive, ceding the moral high ground to Greenism, but now we must take back that ground by showing that Greenism is environment's worst enemy, driven by a horribly destructive zeal, but even as we fight against this monstrous idea, we must remember that we are fighting for something. Not just for the freedom and prosperity of ourselves and our fellow Americans, but for people overseas, too. Keep that always in mind, let it burn as a flame before us and we shall defeat this profoundly anti-human cause. *

"America's Best Colleges! Really?"

Michael S. Swisher

Michael S. Swisher is Chairman of the Board for The St. Croix Review. He is the owner of Bayport Printing House, Inc., that does the printing of The St. Croix Review. This is the speech he presented at our 45th annual meeting celebrating the continued publication of The Review.

This, the forty-fifth annual meeting and dinner of Religion and Society, Inc., the foundation that publishes The St. Croix Review, marks another milestone. It is an occasion for sadness, as it is the first such event since the passing of our founder, Angus MacDonald, and there is an empty space where once was his informing presence. However, it is also an occasion for reassurance, since we are still here and carrying on his efforts. Barry MacDonald and your Board of Directors have worked diligently over the past year at refining our case statement and on other matters relating to promoting subscriptions and fundraising. We continue to publish a good selection of articles in every issue and have a strong group of regular authors.

Angus's memory has recently been the subject of a noteworthy recognition. Dr. John A. Howard, President Emeritus of Rockford College, a long-time supporter of The St. Croix Review, dedicated his book America's Best Colleges! Really? to him. This is not just a kind gesture, but also an appreciation of the objects of Angus's life and work.

Dr. Howard's book takes as its point of departure the annual publication by the magazines U.S. News and World Report and Forbes of lists purporting to list "America's Best Colleges" in a ranked order. These lists quite predictably show Harvard and Yale at the top, followed by the other Ivy League schools and a handful of other "first tier" universities such as Stanford, Chicago, and Duke, the more prominent state universities, and so on down the list. Yet, when we ask the question, "Best - by what standard?" the answer returned is made up of glittering and unquantifiable generalities about the eminence of the faculty, the standards for admission, and the esteem in which the schools are regarded by other academics, employers, and the like.

Conspicuous by its absence from the enumerated qualities is any reference to the schools' attention to what was always regarded as the crucial and central point of higher education - the fitting of our best and brightest young people for future leadership through moral formation. As Dr. Howard outlines in his subsequent pages, not only have "America's best colleges" largely abandoned this historic function, but in many ways have inverted it.

A short while ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is familiar with Harvard Business School, which is probably the pre-eminent postgraduate school of management in the United States. My friend remarked that, after the collapse of the fraud that was Enron, the Harvard faculty felt some embarrassment because Jeffrey Skilling, the president of that company, held a Harvard MBA. Some suggested that perhaps a course in ethics should be required of the business school's students. While some of us might say it is high time that it was, the truth is even worse: offering instruction in ethics at Harvard Business School, or anywhere at the professional or postgraduate level, could only be described as remedial education.

The failure of American colleges to engage in moral education is not a recent phenomenon. It began long ago. Dr. Howard quotes in his book a 1940 address given by Walter Lippmann, one of early 20th-century America's preeminent public intellectuals, warning that:

. . . . during the past forty or fifty years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum of studies the Western culture which produced the modern democratic state. . . . That the prevailing education is destined, if it continues, to destroy Western civilization, and is in fact destroying it. . . .

In a similar vein, the young William F. Buckley, Jr., who went on to become a key figure in the post-World War II revival of conservatism, first came to public attention with the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951. As subsequent experience has shown, and Dr. Howard has documented extensively in his book, the intellectual decay that Buckley pointed out then has since permeated the entire university system and has become even worse in the past sixty years. The moral relativism and politico-economic collectivism which began as philosophical conceits of academics like Herbert Marcuse were joined by the abdication of practical moral authority in the late 1960s and early 1970s by university administrators in the face of the student demonstrations and riots of the day. Such in loco parentis provisions as single-sex dormitories with parietal rules were swept away; college campuses became effective sanctuaries from the enforcement of laws against drug abuse. Forty years later, the student radicals who burnt their draft cards and "occupied," then vandalized, college deans' offices, are now the faculty members and college deans. At many schools, the "transgressive" has become the norm, and personal nihilism or antinomianism now supplement the moral relativism, socialism, and other "isms" that have flourished on campus for decades. In a final twist of inversion, stifling "speech codes" have been imposed to punish anyone who dares to express any criticism of this new order.

Where there is a moral void, there is also quite usually a spiritual one. Roger Kimball, in his recent book The Fortunes of Permanence, observes that:

It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God. . . . There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than de trop; it is an impediment to perfection.

When I first read that passage just a few days ago, I could not help but think of the broadcast of the Democratic National Convention this past September, on the occasion when a motion to restore a mention of God to the party's platform was brought to the floor. Though it was clear that the "nays" had it, the embarrassed chairman, Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, ruled the motion had carried - and was greeted by a loud chorus of boos and catcalls. One might expect Democrats to recognize that such a motion was merely lip service, and, if nothing else, made practical political sense in a nation where the vast majority of the population profess some sort of religious belief. However, the delegates were not reacting to the motion with any such calm rationality - their cries of derision were candid expressions of their deeply held sentiments, amongst which hatred of God is one of the most virulent. It is sobering to reflect that a great many, perhaps even most of those delegates, were alumni of "America's best colleges."

What has any or all of the foregoing to do with The St. Croix Review?

We are all victims, directly or indirectly, of the moral inversion that has permeated the academic world. In the direct sense, there is not a person, apart from the very oldest among us, who has escaped its effects on his own education. There are lacunae left in our knowledge, and abundant falsehoods that we must learn to identify as such before we can reject them. Indirectly, we are surrounded by a popular culture in which the arts, literature, and entertainment have been tainted, if not completely poisoned, by intellectual toxins.

The enemies of liberty and order, indeed, the enemies of Christendom and Western civilization, have made what the Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci approvingly called "the long march through the institutions." This has been the work of generations rather than years, and it will take generations, rather than years, to reverse it. What do we do in the meantime?

In the past, when the universities have ignored or suppressed true and valuable knowledge, independent scholars and scientists created alternative institutions in which it could flourish. Today we associate what is called the Renaissance with the arts, but the 15th-century rediscovery of ancient Latin and Greek literature preceded them. The universities of the time were not hospitable to these subjects, so those who were interested in their study pursued it outside them in learned societies. The flourishing of art, music, and architecture of the Renaissance were the outgrowths of their efforts. Eventually the universities embraced the classics. Then, in the 17th century, when early scientists such Galileo, Boyle, and Newton began to explore the foundations of astronomy, chemistry, and physics, the universities were no more hospitable to them than they had earlier been towards classical studies. Scientists therefore founded such organizations as the Accademia dei Lincei and the Royal Society as venues for their interests.

The St. Croix Review of course is not an institution of equal importance to the foregoing, but it is serving, in its humble way, a comparable purpose. Angus MacDonald was both a deeply moral man and the beneficiary of a first-rate education at a time before intellectual corruption had pervaded the academy. He founded our journal as a forum in which well-informed writers with sound principles could present their work, and intelligent readers looking for truth unobscured by what Bob Tyrrell has called the "Kultursmog," could find it. Edmund Burke spoke of the need to love the "little platoon" to which we belong, and this is ours. We have been doing this valuable labor since 1967. With your God's help, and your continued assistance, let us hope to go on doing it for decades to come. *