The old darkness returns

Transmission electron microscopic image of a measles virus

It was only a matter of time. In Texas, an unvaccinated six-year-old child has died of measles:

The Texas outbreak began in a small Mennonite community near Lubbock, home to 260,000, and has since spread. To date, there have been over 130 cases across Texas and New Mexico, with 18 patients hospitalised, local health officials said.

On Wednesday, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the nation’s newly confirmed top health official, called the Texas outbreak “not unusual”, a claim disputed by doctors and local residents.

This is the first measles death in the U.S. in ten years. And more may follow soon, because the outbreak isn’t under control yet. Over 130 cases have been reported so far, but since measles is devastatingly contagious, it’s a sure bet that the true number is much larger. Some of the sickened children were so ill that they had to be hospitalized:

Dr. Lara Johnson, a pediatrician and the chief medical officer at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that the patients who were hospitalized were admitted because they were having trouble breathing and needed supportive care such as supplemental oxygen.

…She added that her team has cared for “around 20” kids with measles so far. Several of those patients required intensive care. None of the hospitalized had been vaccinated against measles.

As a reminder, measles is far from harmless. 1 in 1,000 infected people will die, with children and infants at special risk. The virus can cause lethal pneumonia, or it can invade the brain, causing coma, permanent seizures, blindness or deafness. There’s also evidence that measles erases immune system memory, making survivors vulnerable to other diseases that they were previously immune to.

The epicenter of the measles outbreak is Gaines County, in rural western Texas. The county is home to a conservative Mennonite enclave, and it’s a hub for homeschooling and private religious schools. Almost one in six kids have skipped one or more vaccines. It’s the exact kind of place you’d expect a disease outbreak to strike first and hardest.

The last major measles outbreak in the U.S. was in 2019, in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave in Rockland County, New York. You’d think that would remind people why vaccines are important. However, they tried their hardest to learn nothing from it, and they succeeded. Three years later in 2022, there was a polio outbreak in the same place.

There are similarities between the 2019 and 2022 outbreaks and this one. In all three cases, the biggest, most glaring commonality at the heart of the problem is religion.

Mennonites are a Protestant Christian denomination with historical ties to the Amish. Like ultra-Orthodox Jews, they have no specific religious beliefs against vaccination, but they tend to be isolationist, suspicious of the modern world, and resistant to secular education. This leaves them uninformed, undereducated and distrustful of vaccines, which makes their communities fertile ground for an extremely contagious virus to rip through.

This old darkness, long banished by science, is creeping back into the world. This measles outbreak can be laid squarely at the feet of anti-vaxxers and religious fundamentalists. These ancient scourges of humanity were finally under control, on the verge of being wiped out.

Thanks to the forces of unreason, we’re lowering our guard and they’re being allowed to return. It’s not a natural disaster beyond our control, but a completely unnecessary and self-inflicted betrayal. It’s like the palace guard unbarring the doors and ushering enemy invaders inside. Those who allowed this to happen, or encouraged it, deserve to be considered traitors to humankind.

Measles was the first, but more will come soon. This week, there was a case of rubella reported in Texas. Like measles, rubella is an airborne and highly contagious virus. It’s usually asymptomatic or mild in adults, but if a pregnant person contracts it, it causes devastating birth defects, miscarriage and stillbirth.

Fortunately, the rubella case turned out to be a false positive – this time. But since the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine has been a particular target of anti-vaxxers, wherever protection against one of these diseases is low, the others have an opening to return as well.

Thankfully, those of us who care about our kids’ lives and respect the authority of science can still get vaccinated. It won’t be as effective as if we had herd immunity, but MMR and other vaccines are highly protective on an individual level. That’s the good news. The bad news is that anti-vaxxers aren’t going away, and they don’t care who suffers and dies because of their bad counsel.

The Texas child who died of measles was the first, but won’t be the last. If we keep going the way we’re going now, over the next few years, these diseases will keep spreading and the deaths will multiply until they become routine. Before long, they’ll fade into the background noise, and people will shrug their shoulders in resignation. They’ll accept it as one more evil that no one can do anything about, the same way we as a society treat school shootings.

Image: Transmission electron microscopic image of a measles virus. Via CDC/Cynthia S. Goldsmith; William Bellini, Ph.D.

The Probability Broach: Blaming capitalism on socialism

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

Lieutenant Edward “Win” Bear sits in his car, contemplating his life choices:

Twenty-seven years on the force, and now the pain was creeping down my left arm into the wrist. Maybe it was the crummy hours, the awful food. Maybe it was worrying all the time: cancer; minipox; encountering an old friend in a packet of blackmarket lunch meat…

Forty-eight was the right age to worry, though, especially for a cop. Oh, I’d tried keeping in shape: diets, exercise, vitamins before they got too risky. But after Evelyn had split, it just seemed like a lot of trouble.

Ayn Rand uses this same dishonest tactic: describing evils that exist because of unregulated capitalism, and blaming them on socialism. This is a case in point.

Smith expects us to believe that government regulation – not greed or the hunger for profit, not sloppiness or corner-cutting, not callous disregard for customers’ health, not relentless competitive pressure in a Prisoner’s Dilemma market – is what compels businesses to sell tainted vitamins and adulterated food.

This assertion runs smack into a wall of reality. When these kinds of scandals happened for real, it was because businesses were unregulated – not because regulation somehow forced them to do it. I’ll quote the famous passages from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about the American meatpacking industry:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white — it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one — there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

…and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!

This stomach-churning description has a recent parallel, the 2024 listeria outbreak at a Boar’s Head meat-processing plant. When food safety inspectors checked the plant, they found mold, vermin and filth:

Between Aug. 1, 2023, and Aug. 2, 2024, inspectors found “heavy discolored meat buildup” and “meat overspray on walls and large pieces of meat on the floor.” They also documented flies “going in and out” of pickle vats and “black patches of mold” on a ceiling. One inspector detailed blood puddled on the floor and “a rancid smell in the cooler.” Plant staff were repeatedly notified that they had failed to meet requirements, the documents showed.

Needless to say, in an anarcho-libertarian world like the one Smith envisions, problems like this would be impossible to detect or do anything about. With no regulatory watchdog, there’d be no way to track outbreaks of foodborne disease. There would be nowhere to report them to, and no one whose job it was to connect the dots and figure out what all the sickened people were eating.

Even if you assume private parties would arise to perform this function, there’s another problem. In a world of absolute property rights, there would be no universal rule about what level of cleanliness was required. No business would be compelled to let anyone in to check if sanitation standards were being upheld. Nor would there be anyone with the authority to order a recall. True, a business might do it voluntarily to protect their reputation, but they’d have just as strong an incentive to deny or minimize the problem.

Lt. Bear continues his ruminations:

Maybe it was a depression they wouldn’t call by its right name, or seeing old folks begging in the streets. Maybe I just watched too many doctor shows.

Again, bear in mind that this is supposed to be a socialist dystopia, where the government exercises power over the economy. So why are there are so many homeless elderly begging on street corners? Are there no social safety nets, no public housing, no fiscal stimulus programs? Smith makes it sound like people are completely on their own, which is supposed to be what happens in major depressions in capitalist economies.

It would be one thing if Smith tried to make a case for how this all came about. But he doesn’t. Other than these brief asides, the book contains very little description and no backstory for Win Bear’s world.

For libertarians, it’s an article of faith that the government is the cause of every evil. They don’t view it as a policy position to be justified through argument, but a dogma, not to be doubted or questioned. They take this so thoroughly for granted, they tend to forget that not everyone else believes it.

New on OnlySky: This too shall pass

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about an enduring consolation from the golden age of philosophy.

As the story goes, an ancient king asked his sages for wisdom that would be true and helpful in both good times and bad. The sages’ reply was: “This too shall pass.”

Like the Golden Rule, this is a maxim that doesn’t originate from just one culture. It’s been independently invented by people in various times and places. And like the Golden Rule, it’s stood the test of time because it’s a sound principle. It’s still relevant to us today, and it can bear us up in dark times if we let it. Remembering the transience of our circumstances is a valuable antidote both to hubris and to despair.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

In the depths of darkness, in times of ascendant fascism and societal disintegration, present bias leads us to despair. It seduces us into believing that that humans are inherently corrupt and evil and that the cause of progress is hopeless. It tells us that things will never change, so belief in a better tomorrow is foolish naivete.

In good times, too, present bias leads us astray. It’s one of the reasons why people don’t save for rainy days, why they’re not prepared for a layoff, a health crisis or any other unexpected blow. It’s why lottery winners blow through their fortunes, because they believe they’ll have limitless money forever.

On a larger scale, present bias is the reason liberal voters’ hopes end up dashed time and time again. We have a habit of getting too excited, hailing every progressive victory as the dawning of a new era of enlightenment. But history tends to move in cycles of advance and retrenchment. When the inevitable backlash appears and undoes some or all of what was achieved, it comes as a crushing disappointment, all the more so because it was unexpected.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

The Probability Broach: Peak oil

The Probability Broach, chapter 1

It’s time to plunge into The Probability Broach. The opening narration tells us that it’s July 1987, in Denver, Colorado.

Every chapter opens with a fictitious quote setting the scene. Here’s how the first chapter begins:

…would cease operations early next month. In a joint press release, executives of the other networks regretted the passing of America’s oldest broadcasting corporation and pledged to use the assets awarded to them by the federal bankruptcy court to continue its tradition of operation “in the public interest.”

In a related story, TV schedules will be cut back by an additional two hours in eighty cities next week. Heads of the FCC and Department of Energy, officially unavailable for comment, unofficially denied rumors that broadcast cutbacks were related to recent media criticism of the President’s economic and energy policies.

—KOE Channel 4
Eyewitness News
Denver, July 6, 1987

As I mentioned earlier, Atlas Shrugged spends almost all its run time in the “regular” world, with just a brief sojourn in the capitalist utopia of Galt’s Gulch. The Probability Broach does the opposite. It starts out in the “regular” world, but spends only a short time there before switching tracks to its sci-fi libertarian utopia, the North American Confederacy, where it spends the rest of the story.

Both Ayn Rand and L. Neil Smith are trying to pull the same trick on their readers. They portray a dystopian world of repressive government and economic decay, and they want you to think it’s our world – either now, or in the very near future if we don’t adopt those authors’ politics.

In reality, these authors’ so-called regular worlds are just as fictional as their utopias. They’re not the product of any real or proposed set of progressive policies. Rather, they’re a pure conservative straw man about what would happen if liberals took power.

The narrative starts:

Another sweltering Denver summer. A faded poster was stapled crookedly to the plywood door of an abandoned fast-food joint at the corner of Colfax and York:

CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
The Secretary of Energy Has Determined That This Unit
Represents An Unjustifiable Expenditure of Our Nation’s
Precious And Dwindling Energy Reserves. DOE 568-90-3041

Smith’s protagonist is Lieutenant Edward W. Bear, known as Win, a detective for the Denver police force. Like a thousand other gumshoes from hardboiled crime fiction, he’s middle-aged, world-weary, bitter and cynical from a long career dealing with the worst of humanity. Also from the handbook of genre cliches, he’s the sole honest man in a world of pervasive corruption, betrayal and violence.

He’s sitting in his car, trying to eat lunch, sick to his stomach from a brutal murder scene he witnessed that morning. Win narrates:

Most of all I longed to take off my sodden jacket, but the public’s supposed to panic at the sight of a shoulder holster. I knew that sweat was eating at the worn, nonregulation Smith & Wesson .41 Magnum jammed into my left armpit. The leather harness was soaked, the dingy elastic cross-strap slowly rasping through the heat rash on the back of my neck.

If it were only—hell, make that five years ago. A man could enjoy a sanitary lunch in an air-conditioned booth. Now, CLOSED BY ORDER signs flapped on half the doors downtown; the other half, it seemed, had been shut by “economic readjustment.” And unlicensed air conditioning was a stiffer rap than hoarding silver.

Like Atlas, TPB begins with the world already in a state of decay, but never circles back to explain how things got to that low point. Like Rand, Smith assumed his intended audience would take this for granted and wouldn’t demand a deeper explanation. Still, it’s fun to pull at the threads of a fictional world and see how it holds up.

Why is there an energy crisis in this world? What’s changed from five years earlier?

Obviously, Smith’s description of energy shortages echoes the real-world 1973 OPEC oil embargo, where Arab states refused to sell petroleum to Western allies of Israel, and then the 1979 oil crisis after the Iranian revolution.

To people who read this book when it came out, those would be recent memories. Americans from that era remember long lines at the pump, skyrocketing prices for gas, painful inflation, and government plans for rationing. However, Smith never says if his timeline went through the same crisis, or if something else happened instead.

Is there an actual energy shortage? Did Smith’s world hit peak oil early and then fail to develop any alternatives to fossil fuel (solar and wind energy don’t exist in this book), resulting in permanent depression because energy really is scarce? Or is there plenty of energy, but no one can get it because the government is hoarding or mismanaging it?

Are the repressive laws a heavy-handed response to a real crisis, or did the government concoct a crisis as an excuse to pass repressive laws? Which answer a libertarian goes for says a lot about their politics. Do they believe socialism is a well-intentioned attempt to help people that inevitably goes bad, or was it only ever an excuse to seize power and impose tyrannical rule?

Smith doesn’t say, but his explanation seems to hew closer to the latter. He believes that government never has done or can do any good for anyone, that it’s always power-hungry tyrants imposing rules on people against their will. In his worldview, “government = evil” is the only thing you need to know. It accounts for everything, so no deeper cause-and-effect explanation is necessary.

The Probability Broach: Meet L. Neil Smith

Before I begin my review of The Probability Broach, let’s discuss its author: L. Neil Smith (or Lester Neil Smith III, to be more precise).

Smith was born in 1946 in Denver. He died in 2021, but his personal website is still up. I assume a fan or like-minded fellow traveler is paying the hosting bill.

His account of his life mentions:

Neil’s boyhood favorites were Arthur Clarke, Theodore Sturgeon, Isaac Asimov, Richard Wilson, Robert Scheckley, and of course, Robert Heinlein. It was through his interest in science fiction that he encountered the works of Ayn Rand in 1961, when he read Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged and knew he had found the worldview that would guide him the rest of his life. He also recognized the unique way the ideas of Rand and Heinlein compliment each other, and it was this direction he began to take philosophically and politically.

It goes on to detail his involvement in politics:

Neil joined the Libertarian Party in 1972 (serving on the national platform committee in 1977 and 1979) and became a life member of the NRA in 1974. It was in 1972 that he met the great libertarian teacher Robert LeFevre. In 1977, frustrated by the course American politics was taking, Neil began work on a highly polemic science fiction novel, originally titled The Constitution Conspiracy, which he hoped would do the same thing for libertarianism that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for Abolitionism or Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the works of H.G. Wells did for socialism.

That book, of course, became The Probability Broach. Smith’s website says it’s “widely considered the definitive libertarian novel”, although it suspiciously neglects to mention who’s doing the considering. It’s also amusing to note that the book won the Prometheus Award, an award for libertarian fiction that was created by… L. Neil Smith.

Even among libertarians, Smith never ascended to the heights of mass popularity. According to his Wikipedia page:

In 1999, Smith announced that he would run for president in 2000 as an independent if his supporters would gather 1,000,000 online petition signatures asking him to run. After failing to achieve even 1,500 signatures, his independent campaign quietly died.

The experience appears to have soured him on politics, as he recounts:

I’ll say it up front: I will no longer be available to anybody as a candidate for any political office.

…the Libertarian Party, which I once regarded as our last, best hope for freedom, now seems irrevocably broken. At best, it wastes the time and energy of thousands of wonderful people. At worst, it’s become a gruesome pit of vermin whose personal psychological and emotional problems drive them to attack anyone who actually does something, instead of arguing purposelessly and endlessly with them about it.

What, you might be wondering, left him so disillusioned and embittered? Well, he tells us: he was ticked off at another Libertarian Party member who accused him of initiating force (a big no-no in libertarian circles), just because he said that politicians who lie to the public should be executed by hanging.

As this interaction hints, Smith spent a great deal of time engaging in that most cherished libertarian pastime: arguing with other libertarians. He said that the Second Amendment should be the Libertarian Party’s “principal – even their only – election issue”. He sneeringly derided libertarians who care about any other issue, or who care about this issue less than he judged they should, as “Nerf libertarians”.

That brings us to the other thing you should know about L. Neil Smith. He was a gun nut – no, a serious gun nut. An essay on the front page of his website says:

If a politician isn’t perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash—for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything—without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn’t your friend no matter what he tells you.

Smith’s political philosophy can be summed up as: guns everywhere, for everyone, all the time. His ideal world is one where everyone carries deadly weapons at all times. That includes children, as soon as they’re old enough to physically hold one. (This is depicted in The Probability Broach.)

This horrifying fantasy flows from Smith’s anarcho-libertarian ideology. He believes that the state shouldn’t exist; therefore, it’s up to each individual person to protect themselves from evildoers. Or, possibly, the causality goes the other way: he fetishized guns because they made him feel manly, and because of this, he adopted an ideology that gives him an excuse for wanting to carry one around all the time.

Most of Smith’s books were published before the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School that arguably began the modern era of gun massacres. However, he’s certainly old enough to have lived through earlier gun slaughters, like the 1966 University of Texas clock tower massacre.

None of those atrocities dissuaded him from his conviction that guns, guns and more guns are the solution to literally every problem. He can’t appear to perceive any possible downside to selling a machine gun, for cash, to anyone who wants one, with no ID, no background checks, without even asking what they plan to use it for. If mass killings and random shootings were a concern to him, he took pains not to say so.

Smith’s website also features reverent pictures of his personal gun collection, including this incredible line:

I get this piece out first thing in the morning, when I go to the kitchen to make coffee, because most of my other weapons are so cold they hurt my arthritic hands. Guess I could use the Glock for that, as well, but this one just feels good.

Does… he think guns are somehow required for making coffee?

Now you know L. Neil Smith. Next week, we’ll see the anarcho-libertarian literary vision that sprang from his mind, as we dive into The Probability Broach.

New on OnlySky: A less crowded future

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the bright side of global population decline.

For most of the 20th century, the world feared the consequences of disastrous overpopulation. Doomsayers predicted famine and ecological collapse as humanity consumed every natural resource. But those fears weren’t born out, because history took a swerve. The birth rate is falling rapidly all over the world, as humanity becomes more educated, women gain more autonomy, and the economy shifts to less labor-heavy professions.

Now doomsayers are raising a brand-new set of fears. However, contrary to those dire forecasts, a less crowded future might not be such a bad thing. It will present its own challenges, but a world with fewer people could bring many unexpected bonuses. It will mean ecological regeneration, fewer wars, more power for workers, and a stronger attitude of loving and cherishing every child, which we should have held all along.

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

To keep the population at a steady level, each woman has to have 2.1 children on average. Some countries—especially in sub-Saharan Africa—are still above this replacement rate. But most others, especially wealthy nations like Japan, China, South Korea, and most of Europe, are well below.

As a consequence, the global birth rate is falling. It’s barely above replacement now, and if present trends continue, it will drop below that tipping point soon. Previous forecasts predicted we’d hit this mark in the next several decades. But as new data comes in, it appears it could happen as soon as 2030.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Let’s review The Probability Broach!

A paperback copy of the book "The Probability Broach" lying on a desktop

Ironically, my copy came used from a public library

[Previous: Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead]

It’s time I reviewed another work of libertarian fiction. I’ve picked a good one: the 1980 novel The Probability Broach, by L. Neil Smith. For readers who enjoyed my reviews of Ayn Rand, you’re in for a treat.

Since you may not be familiar with this novel, here’s a brief summary. The protagonist is a detective from a corrupt, authoritarian socialist dystopia. In the course of a murder investigation, he stumbles through a dimensional portal into a parallel universe that’s a super-advanced libertarian utopia. He learns how much better it is, then has to fight to defend it from invaders from his own universe.

As opposed to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, which strove for a more realistic tone, The Probability Broach is straight sci-fi. It’s a shorter book, with a brisker pace of storytelling. Its more recent publication makes it feel less dated, as opposed to Atlas which treats railroads and radio as the height of high-tech. Smith also occasionally has a sense of humor, whereas Rand had none.

You might wonder what the point is of reviewing another libertarian novel, especially since The Probability Broach is an obscure book with nowhere near the popularity of Ayn Rand. I have three reasons for wanting to write about it.

First, Rand was what’s called a minarchist. She believed in a minimal state whose only purpose was to protect people from crime and enforce contracts. Smith was a true anarchist; he didn’t believe there should be any state at all. The contrast between these brands of libertarianism offers a wealth of opportunity to explore why the state exists and what its rightful powers should be.

The second reason is that TPB says more about how the author believed his politics would work in practice.

Atlas Shrugged is frustratingly light on detail about Rand’s preferred alternative. Most of it takes place in the “outside” world, which has been taken over by scheming socialists. It has only a few chapters in Galt’s Gulch, the mountain retreat where the world’s greatest capitalists hide out to live free. Many crucial details about how Rand thought such a society would function were missing.

By contrast, almost all of TPB is set in Smith’s utopia, the North American Confederacy. It doesn’t have the doorstopper monologues Ayn Rand is famous for, but he does try to explain how his society resolves disputes, handles crime, defends against invasion, and so on. (That’s not to say his answers are good ones, as we’ll see; but at least he acknowledges that these issues deserve to be addressed.) This gives insight into the world libertarians want: what it would look like, how it would function, and how everyday life would be different.

The third reason is that it’s just plain fun to write about. TPB is bonkers in the way only a true believer can be.

Ayn Rand wrote as if her only audience was herself. She took the stance that the truth is so obvious, it doesn’t need to be defended. It only needs to be proclaimed, so the faithful can bow their heads in agreement while the heretics go shrieking into the shadows. She had the dogmatic confidence of a religious sect that believes in predestination.

TPB wants to evangelize. It doesn’t start with the conviction that everyone already agrees with the author. It wants to appear reasonable, to paint an appealing picture. It tries to convey the message: “Look how much sense this makes!”

But that earnest insistence is undercut by a parade of wild absurdities that leap out from almost every page. (Here’s a foretaste: kindergarteners with guns.)

Possibly the best part of all is the climax, which accidentally offers a perfect demonstration of why libertarianism doesn’t work. It’s a self-refutation so enormous, it’s hard to believe the author overlooked it.

The contrast between the dead-serious message and the ludicrous plot is deeply hilarious, and it furnishes plenty of entertaining material for a review. It’s going to be a great ride!

New posts in this series will appear on Fridays. They’ll be published first on my Patreon page, so if you’d like to get early access and maybe a few bonuses, consider subscribing!

New on OnlySky: The passing of the American era

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about America and how we had a long run as the world’s reigning superpower, but now that era is coming to an end.

Every empire, no matter how powerful it was in its day, topples eventually. America’s fall may be a spectacular one, and it won’t happen because we were conquered by any external enemy. It will happen because we did it to ourselves: because a variously apathetic, ignorant, or racist electorate chose a president who’s unleashing chaos exactly as he promised, wrecking our democratic system in ways that will reverberate for decades.

It raises the question: When America has faded from the global stage, who will take our place? Is there any nation or coalition of nations waiting in the wings that has the ability and the desire to set the rules of a new, post-American world order? Or is the world’s future a multipolar free-for-all?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

Whatever happens in the next few years, the damage is done. America’s erstwhile allies will conclude, rightly, that we’re no longer a trustworthy partner. All our obligations and commitments are chaff that blows away on the wind, vulnerable to the whims of every election. On the intellectual front, America is lobotomizing itself: muzzling its scientists, threatening to prosecute doctors, cutting off funding for research and education. In a world of declining population, where countries that welcome immigrants are best-positioned to thrive, America is slamming that door shut. Xenophobic hostility is burning like a brushfire, and federal goon squads are being empowered to seize and deport as many people as possible, regardless of legal status.

The consequences won’t be felt overnight. The US is still an economic colossus, accounting for almost a quarter of global GDP. Sheer momentum will keep us coasting for some time, perhaps for another generation. However, the seeds of long-term decline have been sown.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

New on OnlySky: Is oligarchy the human condition?

I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the deferred dream of democracy and the stark reality that human beings have always been ruled by the few.

The early 21st century has seen a global turn toward authoritarianism. Nations that have always had oligarchical tendencies, like Russia, are growing more so, and formerly democratic countries like the United States are backsliding.

However, this isn’t a new threat. Almost every society, in almost every era of history, has been an oligarchy where a tiny elite class held enormous wealth and power. If anything, it’s democracy – true democracy, where everyone has an equal say, as opposed to democracy-in-name-only where the wealthy few still rule – that’s always been the exception. For all the reformers who’ve worked and fought for it, it remains a utopian ideal rather than a reality.

This raises the question: Is oligarchy natural for humans, in the sense that it’s an inherent part of our mindset and cultural makeup that can’t be overcome? Or is real democracy an ideal we might still one day hope to achieve?

Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter:

The hunter-gatherer tribes of our past led an egalitarian lifestyle. But almost every society since then has been marked by extreme inequality. Whether in the form of pharaohs, kings, feudal aristocrats, colonizing imperialists, or corporations run by mega-wealthy investors, oligarchy—rule by the few, usually the wealthy—has been a consistent pattern across history.

To be sure, the oligarchs have never gone unopposed. In every era, people have dreamed of some version of democracy, of shared prosperity. There have always been radicals who proclaimed that we shouldn’t bow to crowns or thrones, that everyone deserves to have a say in their own future.

Continue reading on OnlySky…

Two portraits of Christianity in America

A withered, dead tree in a desert

[Previous: Let them eat the Ten Commandments]

It’s a consistent theme across history that religions are only as tolerant as they have to be. When they’re in the minority, they call for individual freedom and state neutrality. But when they attain majority status, they immediately try to take over the government, write their beliefs into law and silence the competition.

The state of Oklahoma is a case in point. There was a time when the courts protected Americans’ constitutional rights. Now the right-wing takeover of the judiciary is all but complete, and Christian nationalists are sure they can do whatever they want and get away with it. They’re dropping any pretense of neutrality and seeking to cram Christianity into public schools across the state:

All Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible and the Ten Commandments in their curriculums, effective immediately, the state’s chief education officer announced in a memorandum Thursday.

At a State Board of Education meeting, Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters said the Bible is “one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution and the birth of our country.”

“It’s crystal clear to us that in the Oklahoma academic standards under Title 70 on multiple occasions, the Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country, to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system,” Walters said.

Every classroom in the state from grades 5 through 12 must have a Bible and all teachers must teach from the Bible in the classroom, Walters said.

If there’s any glimmer of hope, it’s this: even in a state as conservative as Oklahoma, this blatant Christian nationalism isn’t going unchallenged. Multiple school districts are shrugging it off. And as recently as 2016, Oklahoma voters supported church-state separation, resoundingly rejecting a bid to strip a secular provision from the state constitution.

But leave that aside for the moment. The political leaders of Oklahoma are proclaiming that America is a Christian nation. What does that mean to them?

Here’s a clue. At the same time as they’re preaching pious myths about how the Bible is the source of our laws, Oklahoma is also considering outlawing homeless shelters across most of the state:

A bill proposed in Oklahoma would make it illegal for almost all cities in the state to provide homeless shelters or outreach and halt existing programs.

Oklahoma Senate Bill 484, introduced and authored by Sen. Lisa Standridge, R-Norman, would prevent municipalities in all cities with a population under 300,000 from using city resources to operate homeless shelters or perform homeless outreach.

Only two cities in Oklahoma have more than 300,000 residents — Oklahoma City and Tulsa — which means that if SB 484 passes, the measure would affect every other municipality in the state.

…The policy is similar to Oklahoma’s anti-camping law that took effect Nov. 1, 2024, which criminalizes camping on unauthorized state land or rights-of-way such as under bridges or alongside public roads and highways.

Taken together, these actions send a clear statement. Oklahoma’s deeply conservative government wants schools to teach kids about the Bible and Christianity. At the same time, they want to make it illegal for homeless people to sleep outdoors and also illegal to build places for them to sleep indoors. They don’t see any contradiction between these messages.

(And yes, Oklahoma was also one of the states that refused federal money for feeding hungry children.)

Here’s my question. If Oklahoma is set on teaching the Bible, are they going to mention verses like these?

“And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee.”
—Leviticus 25:35

“For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.”
—Deuteronomy 15:11

“Rob not the poor, because he is poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate.”
—Proverbs 22:22

Call me cynical, but I’m guessing these passages won’t be included in the public school curriculum. Christian nationalists only want to teach the good stuff – the biblical passages about stoning gay people, butchering heretics, and commanding women to submit to their husbands. They ignore, or outright reject, the parts of the Bible that are suspiciously liberal, like caring for the poor, welcoming the stranger, loving your enemies, and the meek inheriting the earth. That woke stuff has no place in their version of Christianity.

This is the state of Christianity in America today. Whether it’s Christians who burn with hate and prejudice toward refugees and immigrants – and thus aspire to be among those the Bible condemns to hell – or the Christians who demand more and harsher persecution of gay and transgender people, or the Christians who want to make it illegal for homeless people to exist… American Christians, especially right-wing evangelicals, are a bubbling cauldron of hate and rage.

They try to outdo each other in sadism; they compete to see who can show the most cruelty toward the oppressed and downtrodden. At the same time, they thump their breasts and proclaim their superiority because they’re believers.

However, it would be unfair to leave it at that and say that these people represent all American Christians, rather than only most of them. There are a few – all too few – Christians who stand out as beacons of compassion and decency. Like Episcopal bishop Mariann Budde, who enraged right-wingers with a post-inauguration sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral:

“There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives,” Budde said.

“The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.”

Worth noting, Budde is also the bishop who helped lay Matthew Shepard to rest. After his murder, Shepard’s parents were reluctant to inter his ashes in their hometown, for fear that the grave would be desecrated by bigots. Budde stepped in, offering them space at the Washington National Cathedral.

If more Christians were like Mariann Budde, I’d have written something different. Even if Christians were trying to take over the government, but actually cared about using that power to help the poor and the needy and to welcome refugees because the Bible tells them to, I’d be more conflicted.

But that’s not the world we live in. It’s the worst ones who are occupying the seats of power and setting the agenda, and that’s been true for a long time. Their religion is a dead tree leaning over a dry spring. Whatever love or kindness it ever had was thrown away long ago. There’s nothing left of it but a withered cult of hate and power.

Image credit: David Brossard via Flickr; released under CC BY-SA 2.0 license