Minor Thoughts from me to you

On a whim, I started reading Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton. I downloaded it several months ago (because the copyright has expired, it's freely available), but just saved it as something to read later. Today, as it turns out. I've already been entertained and enlightened by the first 11 pages.

Take this excerpt for instance. Chesterton clearly shows the folly of teachers and parents who want children to have a "high self-esteem", no matter what.

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has 'Hanwell' written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus." And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, "Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?" After a long pause I replied, "I will go home and write a book in answer to that question." This is the book that I have written in answer to it.

Don't feel bad if that quote doesn't drive you to read the whole book. Chesterton himself had no interest in reading the book!

If any one is entertained by learning how the flowers of the field or the phrases in an omnibus, the accidents of politics or the pains of youth came together in a certain order to produce a certain conviction of Christian orthodoxy, he may possibly read this book. But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

Alan Greenspan's memoir is due for release tomorrow, and the news stories teasing its contents, they be a-poppin'.

Not that this is actually going to help Mr. Greenspan's book's sales as much as it might, since hilariously, both of the articles I've read on the subject today failed to mention the book's title. How much good does free publicity do when the journalists all forget to type in the name of your book?

But then, maybe "America's elder statesman of finance" should've expected as much; after all, while the leaking of his new book's anti-Bush comments are like manna from Heaven to the anti-Bush crowd, most of the rest of the tome is probably nothing people want to hear. While Mr. Greenspan is no longer a believer in Objectivist principles, as Ayn Rand's disciples have furiously noted, the time he spent as a member of her inner circle in the 1950's did ingrain in him at least some modicum of true respect for capitalism - so much so that Mr. Greenspan still advocates a U.S. return to the gold standard. That sort of talk is anathema to the majority of Democrats and Republicans today.

Mr. Greenspan was such a great chairman for the Federal Reserve, though, precisely because of this prevalent mindset in America that one should have faith in free markets just as most people have faith in Jesus Christ: sure, it's important to believe in them, but completely counting on them is just folly. Unlike his belligerent brothers and sisters in the Libertarian and Objectivist movements, Mr. Greenspan decided he was willing to play ball with this delusion. Once nominated to office he gladly went about saving America's government from its own policies, treating every symptom he could find while being careful not to directly attack the disease. As Leonard Peikoff, Ayn Rand's disappointment of an intellectual heir, has fumed: "When he was on the Social Security commission, he helped them to save the rotten institution, rather than to phase it out."

Ironically, such behavior is exactly the target of his mentor Ms. Rand's best-known book. In her final novel, Atlas Shrugged, Ms. Rand's characters learn that capitalists cannot survive by simply doing their best within a framework established by the collectivist mentality of their fellow brothers and sisters.

Of course, Atlas Shrugged ends with its featured capitalists hiding in the mountains and the whole world around them going to Hell in a hand basket, and therein lies the rub. Many feel that abiding by principles to which you confess belief extremely limits one's ability to accomplish anything in this world. Thus Mr. Greenspan chose, much like President Bush himself has, to simply guide the U.S. economy according to whatever plan he thought (a) would help at all and (b) he could get away with. The man who wrote articles like this in 1966 lowered the dollar in the 1990's. Judge the results for yourself.

The name of his autobiography, by the way, is The Age of Turbulence.

You're welcome, Alan.

The Reformed Expository Commentary Series (an interview, from Tim Challies).

There have been a few times in the past few months that I've mentioned the Reformed Expository Commentary Series. This is a growing series of commentaries written from a distinctly Reformed perspective and targeted at both pastors and laypersons. Having used these commentaries for both research and personal devotions, I am very enthusiastic about them and am anxious to spread the word.

To that end I recently took the opportunity to ask the editors, Richard Phillips and Phillip Ryken, a few questions about the series -- who it is for, how it can be used, how it has been created, and what the future holds for it.

I'll have to at least give these commentaries a once over. I've been thinking about building a library of commentaries. I like the sound of these.

If you'd as recently as yesterday pitched me a story told through diary entries about love between two citizens of a collectivist government set in the distant future - a future in which the very word "I" is no longer remembered - I would have naturally assumed you were talking about Ayn Rand's Anthem, a novella she published in 1938.

As it turns out, the premise and general thrust of the book was undoubtedly pulled from another novel, written and published in Soviet Russia fully six years before Ayn Rand herself would immigrate from the USSR to America: We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

I discovered this by accident; I was flipping through my mother's copy of a book entitled 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, skimming the chronologically-listed entries, when I stumbled upon We's description:

"We is a prototypical dystopian novel... The novel consists of a series of diary entries by D-503, a mathematician and a thoroughly orthodox citizen of the authoritarian, futuristic state to which he belongs. The diary sets out as a celebration of state doctrine, which dictates that happiness, order, and beauty can be found only in unfreedom, in the cast-iron tenets of mathematical logic and of absolute power. As the diary and novel continue, D-503 comes under the subversive influence of a beautiful dissident... He finds himself drawn towards... the anarchism of a private love. He no longer identifies with 'we'..."

The writer of the entry declares it "not a straightforward denunciation of communism, but a moving, blackly comic examination of the contradictions between freedom and happiness that state socialism produces."

The parallels to Anthem are obvious and too close to be coincidence, especially considering the two respective authors hail from the same country. And I'm not, as it turns out, the only one who's noticed; [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella) lists the similarities and differences between the two.

The question is of course begged, then, as to whether those similarities listed constitute a case of plagiarism. Ms. Rand being my favorite modern author for the last decade, I'm certainly biased, but my general understanding of creativity leads me to answer in the negative. Beginning from the same premise as an already-published work, even knowingly, is not plagiarism if a story proceeds to explore different possibilities allowed for by that base. This, even Wikipedia agrees Rand does.

Really, Rand couldn't help but do so; We _is a story about Collectivism gone as far as it can possibly go, but its conclusions as to where "as far as it can possibly go" is don't mesh with Rand's own beliefs. _We involves a society's evolution to the point of colonizing new planets; Rand cannot imagine that a collectivist state would ultimately result in anything but a new age of barbarism, so the collectivists of her Anthem are, many centuries after their ancestors built skyscrapers, technologically capable of manufacturing only candles. We is a comedy; Anthem is clearly frustrated, even enraged. We declares communism to be reasonable but ultimately monstrous; Anthem objects that there is anything reasonable in communism. Finally, We results in the protagonist's "reeducation", which is to say his demise; Anthem results in his triumph.

This last detail should not be overlooked as simply an arbitrary difference in plot. Involving any other two writers, it very well could be taken as such, but an important principle of Rand's Objectivist philosophy is the impotency of evil. The triumph of the hero in her books is a statement regarding the nature of the universe, which she believed "benevolent" (the only exclusion being her character Kira in We The Living, who's controversial death still makes Rand's followers uncomfortable).

Both books are anti-collectivist and involve several sci-fi propositions, but each proclaims a very different worldview - justification a-plenty for two separate stories.

Or even more, maybe, because I learned one more surprising fact from Wikipedia today when I looked up the book; _Anthem _entered the public domain in 1966, after Ms. Rand failed to renew its copyright.

Anybody have a good idea for an Anthem-based story?