Living and Dying to Show the Preciousness of Christ
This book had plenty of great insights into how preposterous much of the climate action is. Not only is it almost entirely “gesture” it is built on a very dim view of humanity in general and our resilience in facing problems and solving them through industrious work. This was a great book. Worth your time (just ignore his Carbon Tax proposal)!
Another one minute book review. Enjoy!
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Gonna start doing short reviews of books I’m reading. Here’s the first.
Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Sowell was like a skilled chef, everything cooked to perfection, seasoned beautifully, and something for every palette. If you can’t enjoy it, it’s because you choose to hate great food, and you probably prefer Kale chips to potato chips, and would somehow enjoy eating bread made from sawdust. There is a multitude of fascinating takeaways, and Sowell takes us back through history to show that “black culture” is really Scottish clan culture. He makes a compelling defense of why America isn’t an inherently racist country, and explains why the Founders weren’t perpetuating racism by not ending slavery at our founding. Contrary to the statue smashers over in Portland, the Founders laid the groundwork for ending slavery.
Perhaps the most poignant point which Sowell makes is that while every ethnicity has at one time been enslaved, and in turn enslaved others, it was only in the West that this temptation to enslave our fellow man was overcome. It was the cause of liberty which ensured the eventual end of slavery not only in the West but (almost) throughout the whole world. Ironically, it is in places where Western values are not predominant that slavery still exists (I would assert it would be more accurate to say Christian ethics). However, current narratives regarding race/slavery would have us believe that America’s founders simply perpetuated/entrenched slavery, rather than planting the seeds of liberty which would grow the fruit of abolition of the institution of slavery. This book is a potent antidote to the woke-sorcery which has beguiled our universities, press, and culture.
1984 by George Orwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Finally got around to reading this classic (is it a classic?). Terrible timing on my part. Basically, reading 1984 it is just like scrolling through a newsfeed in 2021.
Orwell was a prophet in many ways. He saw the temptation of authoritarianism. He saw the danger of what he termed “the mutability of the past.” He was right that the direction our culture is headed is towards the proliferation of sex to the point where sexual enjoyment is nonexistent. Orwell sees that the intimacy which sexual union creates also brings loyalty to an entity outside of the State’s oversight and authority.
He couldn’t have foreseen that Big Brother would be an example of using gendered (and oppressive) language and thus would be guilty of ThoughtCrime, but the Ministry of Truth would correct that in a future edition of the Newspeak dictionary. Big Sibling will suffice, comrade.
The story was well told. It isn’t a warm fuzzy ending. It doesn’t really offer any solutions, only warnings. The solution, I would submit, is hot Gospel. Jesus died for your sins; so love your wife, raise your kids, go to church, work hard.
Some of my highlights:
“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
“Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”
“Now that he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.”
“You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?â€
“The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act.”
“The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
“But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.”
“…the object was not to stay alive but to stay human…”
It’s Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Contrary to the media, the politicians, and many preachers of doom and gloom, things are getting better. Easterbrook lays out in well documented detail how every metric shows that the standard of living is getting better for every human on planet earth. Yes, incrementally. Yes, not at the same pace in every place. But things are getting better.
Easterbrook is no conservative, and not sure if he’d call himself a liberal; but either way, he offers equal opportunity critique of the doom and gloom prophets of the left and right. He advances a position he calls dynamism.
I would call it postmillennial optimism without the Gospel. As such, where he is able to see the wonderful advances in technology, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, rising incomes, less crime, etc., he isn’t able to see that without Christ, it is all so much chaff and stubble.
The problem he lays out is that, all too often, we are told how bad things are. Politicians love to talk of some bygone golden age, which we have fallen away from and need to recover, or else everything will spiral into chaos. They love to talk of emergencies (cough COVID), cataclysms, and other nations stealing our jobs. Environmentalist loons warn that we have like 14 minutes until the planet combusts into a flaming ball. Conservatives bemoan rampant crime in the cities. Left and right, politicians try to tell the middle class that they’ve got it real bad.
The problem is that at every turn and by every measure, our projections are usually not only off, but very off. We use less land to grow more food. We have higher life expectancy than ever, thanks to the reduction of deadly diseases and effective treatments for such infirmities. Crime is trending downward almost everywhere in the world. Incomes are rising worldwide. Cars & factories run more efficiently than ever anticipated. Acid rain has become a non-issue.
The list could go on, but the long and short is that we tend to focus on bad things, and exaggerate them. Instead, we ought to recognize that there are still plenty of “issues” to solve, but also be able to do so optimistically. Easterbrook, rightly, points out that human ingenuity should be seen as a resource for solving our problems, not as a drag on our attempt to solve problems. An important point to be sure.
The first half of the book deserves 5/5 stars. There are some laugh out loud stats, which cut across the grain of the prevailing media narratives on various topics. However, the second half was 1.5/5 stars. Easterbrook floats some ideas that just need to be round filed (i.e. UBI, same-sex parenting as a good thing, and some other stinkers). That said, he does a great job of pointing out that a pessimistic outlook would make us think that everything is going to the dogs. I’ll leave off with this insightful quote:
Groups that sink into siege mentality usually wind up on the margins, while optimists slowly achieve their goals.
Gregg Easterbrook.
Also, here’s an interview with Easterbrook at the start of the COVID-craziness.