RATIONAL OPTIMISM

As "The Oasis for Rational Conservatives," To The Point espouses a world-view that could be called rational optimism.  It is encapsulated every week in (and in the very title of) The Half-Full Report.

Smart-aleck cynics claim the term "rational optimism" is an oxy-moron.  We can thank them for sharing, and suggest they learn a little history – such as about the most successful presidency of modern times, that of Ronald Reagan whose success was due in large part to his cheerful – and rational – optimism.

Sober cynics, however, who have studied history, claim that any optimism expressed today as America’s freedom and prosperity are being maliciously destroyed by the Fascist Left is like the devil-may-care insouciance expressed in the movie Cabaret.

The scene is Berlin in 1931 as Weimar Germany is facing the emerging Nazi threat.  Germans wishing to ignore the threat are welcomed to the Kit Kat Club with the movie’s theme song:

No use permitting
some prophet of doom
To wipe every smile away.
Come hear the music play.
Life is a Cabaret, old chum,
Come to the Cabaret!

But this is irrational optimism, stupid, adolescent, and cowardly.  Rational optimism is based on brains and gonads focused on optimizing the vulnerabilities of the evil with which you are confronted.

It is also based on as wide a context as possible.  So we’re going to start 500,000 years ago, and work our way right down to upcoming state legislature races.  Buckle your seat belts.

Near the hamlet of Saint-Acheul in northern France over a century ago, a number of primitive hand stone axes were uncovered all made the same way – a chipped-off flake, thin and pear-shaped, with a razor-sharp edge.

These "Acheulian" hand axes started turning up at excavated early man sites across Europe, Africa, and India.  They were made not by Homo sapiens, for he had not evolved yet, but by his evolutionary ancestor Homo erectus.  The axes at Saint-Acheul were made 500,000 years ago.  Far earlier ones, 600,000 years before that, were found in East Africa.  Far later ones, from 100,000 years ago, would be found – these made by Sapiens.

In other words, the main technology of deep Stone Age man never changed much for over a million years – for ten thousand centuries, folks kept using the same tool, not as creative technology but as an instinct no different from certain birds that make complex nests.

Then finally, the stasis stopped, and all kinds of new technology began developing.  What changed? 

400,000 years ago, folks figured out how to cook food, enabling them to trade a big gut for a big brain.  (Cooking food makes it much more digestible – chimps by comparison spend six or more hours a day chewing – which is why our brain weighs more than our intestines and it’s the other way around for chimps.)

200,000 years ago, there was a mutation in our version of a gene shared with many species (FOXP2) that allowed greater complexity of neural circuits for speech and language, and for finer control of facial and throat muscles.

And by then, in East Africa, Erectus had evolved into Sapiens – recognizably us.

But we were still making the same old hand axes from a million years ago.  Nothing changed.  Then something did.

It started with a tiny marine snail shell called Nassarius gibbosulus.  Around 80,000 years ago, folks in Africa began collecting them, smeared them with pigment, drilled a teeny hole, and strung them for a necklace for the world’s first jewelry.  The shells then started showing up in human habitations far from the sea.  This means they were being traded.  The Nassarius shell, as a medium of exchange, was the world’s first money.

It was Adam Smith (1723-1790) who first understood that trade – the exchange of one good for a different one – is what makes us human:  "No man ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog."

Animals – like chimps – can engage in reciprocity:  you pick the lice out of my hair, and I’ll pick the lice out of yours.  But only humans engage in trade, bartering or exchanging different things of different value to the exchangees.  A village on the lakeshore has a lot of fish, a village in the jungle has a lot of fruit.  Fish is more valuable to the latter than the former and vice versa for fruit, so the villagers barter.

Only people do this.  And all people everywhere do it.  There is no human society known to science or history that does not engage in trade with other societies.  There is no non-human species known to science that does.

Further, an agreed-upon medium of exchange, like Nassarius shells, exponentially accelerates and expands the capacity for trade among and between societies.  And that, in turn, exponentially accelerates innovation, prompting traders to create "new and improved" things with which to trade.

Thus, after trade networks had developed in Africa from Morocco to South Africa, about 50,000 years ago a small band of folks (of around 150) made it across the Bab-el-Mandeb mouth of the Red Sea and into Arabia to spread out all over the world.

(The completely amazing story of how everybody on earth today, except for Black Africans, is descended from this band of some 150 Adams and Eves 50,000 years ago, was told in Out of Africa, June 2007.)

As our ancestors spread into India, Asia, and Europe, they ran into other folks, Erectus and sub-species like Neanderthalensis, who still had the same instinct-made hand axes.  But we had innovations like spears and hand-axes tied to wooden handles.  (We also had some brain mutations going for us as well – see "Out of Africa.")  So we wiped the other folks out. 

There was little choice, as without a capacity for or understanding of trade, which is a peaceful cooperative interaction, the only interaction the other folks had a capacity for was war.  As any primatologist can tell you, the first thing primates of one group will try to do upon encountering a group of strangers is to kill them.

And as we spread into the world, trade networks developed between the spreading groups and innovation exploded:  bone points for spears, needles, bows and arrows, string nets for fishing, ivory flutes and ornaments, on and on.  Literally, history had begun.  The human race had begun.  Before, all was stasis, nothing changing, no history.

With money and trade, as one researcher puts it, "There is more invention between 80,000 and 20,000 years ago than there had been in the previous million."

The bottom line is this:  Trade – capitalism – is what makes us human, and made us human to begin with.

Which means:  any form of anti-capitalism – from barbarian banditry to dictatorship by kings, communists, or liberal bureaucrats – is anti-human and an immoral impediment to human progress.

The researcher quoted above has written a book that provides the basis for this, although the bottom line conclusion is mine.  He is a British Viscount, son of the 4^th Viscount Ridley, and well known science writer, Matt Ridley.  His book is The Rational Optimist:  How Prosperity Evolves. 

I could not encourage you more to read it.  It is revelatory.

When you take the truly long view of human history over the last 100,000 years, you see grounds for optimism in general for the human race.  For with all the setbacks and scourges, for history seeming to be "one damn thing after another," much of humanity has continued to see ineluctable improvement over the stasis of the Acheulian Paleolithic.

But what about the short run?  It’s well and good to rhapsodize about the March of Progress Through Time – but what about the body of America being devoured by fascist parasites right now?

Well, let’s carry on with that biological metaphor as we take a look at how our economy is being Ruined By Red Tape, with hundreds of thousands of bureaucrat-parasites about to enforce hundreds of thousands of new rules and regulations under ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and other Democrat abominations.

Let’s regard these parasites and their rules as bacteria feeding on nutrients in a Petri dish.  There is a well-tested Bacterial Growth Phase that shows bacteria multiplying exponentially (the log phase), which, as the nutrients are overwhelmed by bacterial excrement, is always followed by a mass die-off of bacteria (the death phase).

The faster the log phase, the quicker the death phase.

There is simply no way all these rules can be obeyed.  There is no way for businessfolk or anyone else to know how they could be obeyed.  They have now multiplied far beyond our economy’s capacity to carry such rules.  So they will be ignored and disobeyed en masse.  The parasites and their rules – every one of which is illegal (as it is unconstitutional for the executive branch to make laws) – will enter the death phase.

Accelerating the Democrat Death Phase will be new Republican majorities, and not just in the House, but State Legislatures.

Before you wince at that, thinking of all those RINOs infecting the GOP, take a good gander at this:  The 2009 Congressional voting record compiled by the American Conservative Union.

In every single state, every single Democrat is more liberal than every single Republican in that state’s delegation in Congress – often by a huge percentage.  (There is only one exception:  Leonard Lance in New Jersey.)  Most R’s vote 80-90+% conservative, most D’s 30 to 0%.  Only one House R is in the 50s (Cao-LA), only 5 are in the 60s (and yes, the two RINO Maniac senators are the lowest R’s of all at 48%).

That’s the current 111^th Congress.  With the new Republican Majority infused with Tea Party blood, the 112^th Congress is going to much more conservative.  A great indication came this week with Roy Blunt’s new campaign ad, which closes with the line: "Roy Blunt – he’ll work for Missouri, not Barack Obama."

Go get ‘em, Roy!  As a Congressman under Bush, he was half-conservative, half-BigSpender (like for the Farm Bill).  Running for governor, he’s got Tea Party Religion.

It’s happening to a lot of Pub Establishment pols.  For every RINO lobbyist jerk like Trent Lott wanting to "co-opt" the TeaPartyers, there’s a dozen Pubs who are saying if-you-can’t-lick-em-join-em – and grateful to the TeaPartyers for giving them the courage to stand up for their conservatism.

And not just Pubs in the House and Senate.  Blunt is running for governor.  What’s happening in the state races is at least if not more important. 

One of the basic ways the Dems were able to control Congress for so many decades (1930-1994) was majority control of state legislatures which, every ten years, redraw Congressional Districts according to new Census info.

So this story (7/17) from National Public Radio (of all places) should bring a smile to your face:  GOP Favored In All-Important State Races.

There are 99 state legislature bodies (Nebraska is unicameral) – two are tied, while D’s control 60, the R’s 37.  These numbers are likely to more than flip this November.  A net R gain of 20 is being predicted, which would result in around 67 for the Pubs and a little over 30 for the Dems.  Hundreds of Congressional Districts all over the US will be drawn by Pubs next year and will stay in place until 2021.

That’s the future of the House.  As for the Senate, we saw last week in the HFR, the Pubs stand to gain up to 9 seats (maybe more – there’s always hope for Sharron Angle!) this November, which would split the Senate down the middle 50-50.

Look forward to 2012.  This year, 36 seats are up, 18 R/18D.  In 2012, 33 seats are up, 10R – and 23D.  Bad math for the Dems.  Plus 2012 is also the chance to dump RINO wimps like Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar, and Olympia Snowe.

Then add to this that the odds are near zero that a zero like Zero will be re-elected, that the odds are substantial that a real GOP ball-kicker will replace him in 2012.  It’s along ways out, but if I had to place a bet now, that person would be Chris Christie, and the ticket will be Christie-Palin.

Let’s get to closure.  These are bad times.  Our country that we love so much is in extremely grave danger.  More danger than we’ve ever been in since the Civil War.  But there is rational cause to believe we can get ourselves out of this.  There is a good solid evidential case to be made for rational optimism for America.

We have the TeaPartyers and the revival of Constitutionalism.  We have the lunatic overreach of the Dem Fascists going from the log phase to the death phase.  We have the electoral and redistricting math.  We have 100,000 years of history demonstrating that our principles of freedom and trade are human and theirs are not.

And we have the immortal words of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), which America’s Founders took to heart, as are millions of Americans today:

"Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any further obedience."

America will be free once more and soon.