In a recent post in The Beacon, I contemplated whether I should wear a mask to class. Throughout campus, there are signs that say Face Coverings are Expected, but as I noted, not mandated. Classes are now back in session, and that decision was easier than I contemplated.

When I got to campus, few people were wearing masks outside, and many were maskless inside the building. In my classes, only about half of the students wore masks. With half the class unmasked, there seemed to be little point in my wearing one, so I didn’t.

Subsequently, I received an email (to all faculty) from the president of the faculty union noting that “students are not following FSU’s ‘expectation’ that masks are to be worn indoors” and asking me to sign a petition to the university’s president and Board of Trustees making masks mandatory.

I doubt that many readers are interested in my own personal experiences, but I do think it is interesting to see (1) how things are playing out in a state that prohibits mask mandates, and (2) how college students view an expectation that they wear masks indoors.

From their own actions, it is clear that many students resist attempts to pressure them into wearing masks. Some students who were wearing masks told me that they did not care whether others wore them, but chose to wear one just to prevent other people from feeling uncomfortable. Among college students, anyway, masks and mask mandates are not popular.

Meanwhile, in a state that prohibits mask mandates, some people in positions of authority (university administrators, a faculty union president, and school boards across the state) are demanding and in some cases implementing their own policies that violate the governor’s policy.

The policy prohibiting mask mandates comes from the governor. So, I do find it interesting that the president of our faculty union will present a petition to the university president and Trustees, rather than to the governor.

Suppose they were to succeed, resulting in a mask mandate at the university. Would those on campus then recognize the authority of the president and Trustees and mask up, or would they recognize the higher authority of the governor and claim it is still their choice?

My previous post on the subject referred to some people as anti-authoritarian authoritarians. They seem to be trying to claim authority over those below them while trying to undermine the authority of those above them. I’m watching with interest.

The post To Mask, Or Not? A State of Resistance appeared first on The Beacon.

The university’s announced policy was that masks were recommended, but it was up to individuals to make that decision. That is in keeping with Governor Ron DeSantis’s executive order that bans mask mandates. My decision was not to wear one. I’m vaccinated, healthy, and willing to take that risk. I’m aware of the argument that I may increase the risk to others, who in this case are all college students. I am a senior citizen, so presumably more at risk than my students.

Yesterday I received an email signed by four high FSU officials, including outgoing President John Thrasher. Among other things, it says in bold type, We expect everyone to wear a face-covering or mask at all times when inside any FSU facility, even if you are vaccinated. My question is: should I wear a mask?

One interesting thing about the email is its authoritarian tone. It also expects other actions, including the expectation that everyone gets vaccinated. It’s not exactly a mandate, because that would directly violate the governor’s executive order, but it’s interesting that the message would be written in such an authoritarian tone when that message itself is anti-authoritarian by resisting the governor’s policy of letting individuals decide for themselves.

Some will be tempted to say I should follow the science, typically followed by a statement that the science says to wear a mask. But this is not a question for science, it is a public policy question. Science can provide information about the consequences of various actions but is insufficient to determine public policy.

For example, science can tell us that driving faster is more likely to result in accidents, serious injury, and death, but science cannot determine what is the optimal speed limit. Similarly, optimal policy to respond to COVID is not a question for science, even though science can provide information about the consequences of various policies.

The policy of the state of Florida is that whether to wear a mask is my personal choice. I work at a state university that is actively opposing the policy of those above them in the hierarchy of state government.

Should I yield to these anti-authoritarian authoritarians and wear a mask?

The post To Mask, Or Not? Should I Yield to Authoritarians Who Resist Authority? appeared first on The Beacon.

Yet far more disturbing to anyone interested in civil liberties was the threat of a government crackdown on the basis of the business owner’s political opinions. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Boston mayor Thomas Menino both indicated a willingness to keep the restaurant out of their cities, using their power as government officials to fight the culture war.

While the most consistent left-liberal voices for civil liberties, among them the ACLU, have defended Chick-fil-A’s right to open a business regardless of the proprietor’s political views, there has been far too much silence or even enthusiasm toward these threats of political coercion, which carry potentially totalitarian implications. A government that can prohibit people from engaging in peaceful commerce based on traditional cultural and conservative political values is as big a threat to civil liberties as anything the left imagines a conservative Big Brother poses. Most strikingly, left-liberals often, with a lot of justification, decry the Red Scares in American history—the private and public ostracism and at times oppression that befell communists, communist sympathizers, or anyone deemed too far radically left in America. Communism posed a real threat to world peace and liberty, and its political leaders collectively murdered close to a hundred million people in the 20th century. If Americans should have a right to pursue work despite their sympathies for such a violent ideology, surely Chick-fil-A shouldn’t be blacklisted simply for holding traditional views on marriage.

So last week we saw the limits of left-liberal tolerance and belief in the First Amendment. The week before, the typical disdain for the Second Amendment was on full display. After the shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the call for more gun control reached a fevered pitch. Putting aside the incoherence of gun laws as a method of stopping people bent on committing the most severe of all crimes, mass murder, we see here a willingness to ditch a precious civil right in the name of safety. Just as conservatives were all too willing to cheer on a nationalist police state after 9/11 in the misguided attempt to achieve pure security from terrorism, so too have liberals been enthusiastically willing for decades to abandon a principal human right in the foolish attempt to maintain perfect safety at home. The way gun control is enforced always results in great injustice—violations of rights to privacy, the erosion of due process protections, the disadvantaging of poor and minorities who do not regard the police as adequate protectors of life and liberty. The history of gun control as a method of oppressing the weak and disenfranchised, particularly racial minorities, should give all humanitarians pause before they jump on the civilian disarmament bandwagon.

Civil liberties are grounded in key principles of a free society, including an unflinching distrust in secular government and a respect for property rights. Without property rights, bodily integrity, freedom from censorship, and guarantees against lawless prosecution are impossible to maintain. Without distrusting government, society loses sight of the importance of civil liberties in the first place. The left has long attempted to marry a loyalty to civil liberties with a trust in government and an attitude toward property ranging from ambivalence to hostility. This contradictory approach to the principal issues of a just society fundamentally explains the unreliability and hypocrisy so often seen with many progressives when civil liberties are under attack.

The post Progressive Betrayals of Civil Liberties appeared first on The Beacon.

For the renowned Christian scholar and writer C.S. Lewis, such a view was fatally flawed morally, intellectually, and spiritually, producing the twentieth-century rise of the total state, total war, and mega-genocides. For Lewis, Christianity provided the one true and coherent worldview that applied to all human aspirations and endeavors: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” (The Weight of Glory)

In his book, The Discarded Image, Lewis revealed that for Medieval Christians, there was no sacred/secular divide and that this unified, theopolitical worldview of hope, joy, liberty, justice, and purpose from the loving grace of God enabled them to discover the objective, natural-law principles of ethics, science, and theology, producing immense human flourishing. Lewis described the natural law as a cohesive and interconnected objective standard of right behavior:

This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all values are rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) “ideologies,” all consist of fragments from the Tao itself. Arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. (The Abolition of Man)

And in his recent book, The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark has further shown “How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and the Success of the West.” Similarly and prior to the rise of the secular nation-state in America, Alexis de Tocqueville documented in his 1835 volume, Democracy in America, the remarkable flexibility, vitality and cohesion of Christian-rooted liberty in American society with business enterprises, churches and aid societies, covenants and other private institutions and communities.

In his book, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, William Cavanaugh similarly notes that for Augustine and the ancient world, religion was not a distinct realm separate from the secular. The origin of the term “religion” (religio) came from Ancient Rome (re-ligare, to rebind or relink) as a serious obligation for a person in the natural law (“religio for me”) not only at a shrine, but also in civic oaths and family rituals that most westerners would today consider secular. In the Middle Ages, Aquinas further viewed religio not as a set of private beliefs but instead a devotion toward moral excellence in all spheres.

However in the Renaissance, religion became viewed as a “private” impulse, distinct from “secular” politics, economics, and science. This “modern” view of religion began the decline of the church as the public, communal practice of the virtue of religio. And by the Enlightenment, John Locke had distinguished between the “outward force” of civil officials and the “inward persuasion” of religion. He believed that civil harmony required a strict division between the state, whose interests are “public,” and the church, whose interests are “private,” thereby clearing the public square for the purely secular. For Locke, the church is a “voluntary society of men,” but obedience to the state is mandatory.

. . . .

For the full article with footnotes, please click here.

The post Secular Theocracy: The Foundations and Folly of Modern Tyranny, Part 1 appeared first on The Beacon.

HT: Carl Haberberger

The post <i>The Daily Show</i> Skewers San Francisco’s Ban of Happy Meals appeared first on The Beacon.

Some friends have wondered why I care about this so much, especially in a country at war, with a Bill of Rights in tatters and the dollar slipping every day. It just seems to me there’s something vaguely. . . anti-American. . . about all this. This is to say, American culture has long sustained a very statist system in terms of foreign policy, Social Security, public schools, regulations, wars on drugs, gun controls, peripheral acts of censorship, corporatist subsidies, middle-class welfare, national-security excuses for eroding civil liberties, and so forth.

But Happy Meals? They are a ritual, however vulgar, tacky and easily associated with public health concerns, that is at the core of modern American culture. And I make no apologies for a society where children want little more for lunch than a lame hamburger, some soggy fries, and a cup of sweetened water, all wrapped up in a box with easy crosswords plastered on it, and accompanied by a junk piece of plastic made in China.

This is one element of living in a free society. Even a semi-free society. Parents will occasionally buy their kids fast food, and that food will sometimes come with a toy. It’s the Crackerjack thing. It’s the prize in a box of sugary cereal. It’s what it means to be an American.

Is there a health epidemic? If so, stand up to the corn lobby and end corn subsidies. If McDonald’s is really so unnatural, and maybe it is, it won’t stand free market competition. Address the horrible school lunch programs. Better yet, rethink this whole program of forcing kids to sit in classrooms for 8 hours a day. Stop externalizing the costs of health care.

But the prohibition of Happy Meals is a shot across the bow of American freedom. It is an attack on American institutions, family rights, common sense, free enterprise, and the particular meaning of childhood in our culture. Yes, there’s a thousand things worse than a Happy Meal ban, but there’s a million things worse than a Happy Meal. The war on American fun continues apace. And I ask those who think this is petty—what’s next? They are already taxing lemonade stands and banning Happy Meals. They are putting more cops in public schools and monitoring children at every turn. They are spying on students at home through their laptops, adulterating classic cartoons by purging them of images of tobacco and persecuting pupils for drawing pictures of weapons and bringing aspirin to class. Poor kids.

The post First They Came for the Happy Meals appeared first on The Beacon.

Here Is the Final Part Continued from Part 2:

Scientism

For Lewis, science should be a quest for knowledge, and his concern was that in the modern era science is too often used instead as a quest by some for power over others. Lewis did not dispute that science is an immensely important tool to understand the natural world, but his larger point is that science cannot tell us anything that is ultimately important regarding what choices we should make. In other words, Lewis shows that “what is” does not indicate “what ought” to be. Scientists on their own are not able to address moral ethics, and all social and political questions are exclusively questions of morality. Lewis furthermore viewed as nonscience, or scientism, all those disciplines that attempt to replicate the scientific method to analyze man: “[T]he new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. . . . If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. . . . Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about science. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value” (“Is Progress Possible?” pp. 314-15).

Lewis “dread[ed] government in the name of science” even more. For him, the connection was clear: “That is how tyrannies come in.”

In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. . . . We must give full weight to the claim that nothing but science, and science globally applied, and therefore unprecedented Government controls, can produce full bellies and medical care for the whole human race: nothing, in short, but a world Welfare State. It is a full admission of these truths which impresses upon me the extreme peril of humanity at present. We have on the one hand a desperate need: hunger, sickness, and dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnipotent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement? . . . The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the world-wide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. . . . All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect, some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it had done before? (“Is Progress Possible?” pp. 315-16)

. . . .

For the full article, please click here.

The post C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism, Part 3 (Final) appeared first on The Beacon.

Continued from Part 1:

Moral Relativism and Utilitarianism

Of central importance in Lewis’s discussion of natural law is his critique of the moral relativism of utilitarianism (“the end justifies the means”) as a theory of ethics and guide to behavior. Lewis claimed that the precepts of moral ethics cannot just be innovated or improvised as we go along. Picking and choosing among the code of the Tao [natural law as in “the way” or “the path”] is inherently foolish and harmful. He noted, for example, that attempts to define moral ethics as the product of a physicalism of survival and instinct create a profound dilemma. On the one hand, the utilitarian (or “Innovator,” as Lewis called him) tries to make judgments of the value of human choices by claiming that one decision is good or not. But on what basis is this valuation made if the only standard that exists is instinct? Lewis shows that all such valuations necessarily must use an objective standard of the Tao to do so, even if only partially.

The Innovator . . . rates high the claims of posterity. He cannot get any valid claim for posterity out of instinct or (in the modern sense) reason. He is really deriving our duty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to all men is an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to our descendants is a clear deduction from it. But then, in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? . . . [T]he Innovator may place economic value first. To get people fed and clothed is the great end, and in pursuit of it, scruples about justice and good faith may be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about the importance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the Innovator were himself using the Tao he could never have learned of such a duty of justice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a jingoist, a racialist, an extreme nationalist, who maintains that the advancement of his own people is the object to which all else ought to yield. But no kind of factual observation and no appeal to instinct will give him a ground for this opinion. Once more, he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our own kin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers (The Abolition of Man, p. 43, italicized in original).

. . . .

For the full article, please click here.

The post C. S. Lewis on Mere Liberty and the Evils of Statism, Part 2 appeared first on The Beacon.