Bernie Sanders tweeted that yesterday, and it’s pretty damn awesome.
Perhaps Bernie is unaware that the Chinese regime has also, for a very long time now, been killing female infants in order to control their population.
Perhaps he’s unaware of China’s notoriously barbaric one-child policy.
Or perhaps, like the socialist Sierra Club — which has explicitly advocated that “state and federal laws be changed to encourage small families and discourage large families” — Bernie Sanders also supports this sort of authoritarian regime.
I love it even more when I’m being lectured by sanctimonious liberals who are simultaneously engaged in high hypocrisy:
Judicial Watch announced today that it has obtained records from the U.S. Department of the Air Force revealing that Barack Obama’s February and March 2015 travel for golf vacations and fundraisers totaled $4,436,245.50 in taxpayer-funded transportation expenses. The documents regarding the Obama travel expenses came in response to two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests filed by Judicial Watch.
To date, the Secret Service has not provided requested information, as required by FOIA, regarding security costs.
Using the Air Force’s official cost estimate of $206,337 per hour, the newly released records obtained by Judicial Watch show:
Obama’s February 14, 2015, golf outing to Palm Springs required a five-hour flight, costing taxpayers a total of $1,031,685.
Transportation for Obama’s February 19 day trip to Chicago cost taxpayers $619,011.00.
Transportation for Obama’s March 2015 fundraising trip to Los Angeles cost taxpayers $1,980,835.20.
Obama’s March 28, 2015, golf outing to Palm city required a 3.9-hour flight, costing taxpayers $804,870.3
In Palm Springs, Obama played golf at the luxurious Sunnylands country club, located on the former estate of the late ambassadors Walter and Leonore Annenberg. Obama reportedly spent the weekend on the exclusive, gated property, where he has twice stayed before.
Obama’s February trip to Chicago was billed by the White House as a non-political event to declare the Pullman Historic District a national monument. But, press reports indicated that the trip was heavily political. In a CNN story entitled, “Obama gives Emanuel re-election boost:”
President Barack Obama went to Chicago bearing gifts Thursday for his former chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emanuel … But the day had all the trappings of a campaign – and Obama even made an unannounced stop at a Kenwood campaign office for Emanuel on his way out of town. “I’m glad he’s my mayor, and I’m glad he’s going to be my mayor for another four years,” Obama told volunteers.
Obama’s travel to California was solely to raise money for the Democratic National Committee and to show his support for fellow Democrats nationwide. His visit to Los Angeles began with an appearance on ABC’s late night comedy program “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and continued on to include a “roundtable discussion” fundraiser hosted at the Santa Monica home of ICM Partners cofounder Chris Silbermann and his wife Julia Franz. Guests paid up to $33,400 per couple for attendance, donations that will be used to aid DNC activities during the approaching 2016 election cycle. Obama’s March 12 fundraising trip to Los Angeles was his 32nd fundraiser in L.A. County since he became president.
In Palm City, Obama played golf at the “spectacular” Floridian National Golf Club, where members pay a $50,000 initiation fee and $15,000 in annual dues. According to the resort’s website, “This stunning, yet formidable par 71 will certainly impress. At 7,114 yards, the 18-hole course offers perfectly manicured rolling fairways and greens, demanding hazards, breathtaking views of the St. Lucie River, and is surrounded by natural preserve and native wildlife.”
“Taxpayers should be outraged that Barack Obama’s wastes 4.4 million of their precious tax dollars on golf vacations and political fundraising,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And to make matters worse, the Secret Service has simply refused to respond to our requests for documents about the security costs of these controversial trips. The Obama travel scandal is about abuse of office, abuse of the taxpayer, and contempt for the rule of law.”
Records released earlier this year by Judicial Watch showed that Michelle Obama’s 2014 trip to China cost more than $360,000 in air transportation costs. Judicial Watch uncovered an expensive combination of trips by the Obamas to Africa and Honolulu, which cost taxpayers $15,885,585.30 in flight expenses. The single largest prior known expense for accommodations was for Michelle Obama’s side-trip to Dublin, Ireland, during the 2013 G-8 conference in Belfast, when she and her entourage booked 30 rooms at the five-star Shelbourne Hotel, with the first lady staying in the 1500 square-foot Princess Grace suite at a cost of $3,500 a night. The total cost to taxpayers for the Obamas’ Ireland trip was $7,921,638.66. To date, the known travel expenses of the Obamas and Vice President Joe Biden exceed $61million.
You always knew what a douche Donald Trump was, but you may not have known precisely why.
Here are three reasons:
Number 3.
He believes in a single-payer healthcare system.
Like all progressives, he supports the full socialization of American medicine.
He is perhaps ignorant of the fact that the fifty percent socialization of American medicine, which we enjoy today, has made American medicine all but completely unaffordable.
It’s leftwing policies like Medicare and Medicaid that we have to thank for that. Donald Trump supports this.
The following comes courtesy the good people at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), who have quietly yet tirelessly been fighting the good fight against propaganda and misinformation since 1984.
That photo is of course from Tiananmen Square, twenty-six years ago today, when the entire world watched an anonymous Chinese man stand alone in front of advancing tanks, not backing down in the face of communist totalitarianism.
Surely, it’s one of the defining photos of the 20th Century, but let us also not forget Chengdu:
June 4th indeed marks the twenty-sixth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China–when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.
At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?
Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.
The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.
It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.
When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.
They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.
The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.
Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).
The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.
It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.
In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:
Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.
Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.
But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”
Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.
At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”
A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.
But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.
Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.
But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.
Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).
During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.
It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:
China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.
The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”
What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.
A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.
Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.
What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.
Remember those many years ago — circa 2005 — when Peak Oil was all the rage, and people like me were routinely ridiculed by the Church of Environmentalism for writing articles such as this one?
Well, you won’t believe it, but it looks as though some of that leftist dogma was perhaps incorrect after all.
The following excerpt comes from the Institute for Energy Research (IER), in a recent article called “Peak Oil theory may have peaked“:
The chart above shows why Hubbert was considered such a visionary, at least for a while. After his 1956 prediction, U.S. production did indeed rise and then peak just in time for the window Hubbert had given himself. The gentle decline in U.S. production from the mid-1970s through the early 2000s was also consistent with Hubbert’s theory, which treated the total national output as an aggregation of individual wells, each with a technically defined, bell-shaped curve lifecycle of output.
Yet as the chart also shows, the nice bell shape started turning around in 2009 and took off like a rocket in 2011. Looking at monthly figures, U.S. field production of crude in December and January were the highest values since 1972, and not far behind the all-time record set in 1970. Although the sharp decline in the world price of oil since last year may halt the rapid spike in U.S. output, it is obvious from the chart that the mechanistic model of “peak oil” theory is incorrect.
“Finite” Resources Never Run Out With Enough Ingenuity
The fundamental problem with “peak oil” theory is that it adopts a Malthusian mindset, in which we view humanity as the stewards of a single pool of oil that gets smaller every time we burn a barrel.
Please read this article to find out why the “Malthusian mindset” is not just incorrect but so wildly incorrect.
Vijay Jojo Chokalingam, an East Indian (pictured above, before and after), wanted to become a doctor. But he didn’t have the GPA or the test scores. And so he shaved his head and trimmed his eyelashes. Then he (re)applied to medical school — this time as a black man.
He says — and, to judge from his before and after photos, there’s no doubt about it — his “change in appearance was so startling that my own fraternity brothers didn’t recognize me at first. I even joined the Organization of Black Students and started using my embarrassing middle name that I had hidden from all of my friends since I was a 9 years old. Vijay the Indian-American frat boy become Jojo the African American Affirmative Action applicant to medical school.”
The experience prompted him to write a book called Almost Black – The True Story Of An Indian American Who Got Into Medical School Pretending To Be An African American, and you may read more about it here on his website.
“More than 16 million uninsured Americans have gained health coverage,” Obama recently tweeted, while simultaneously neglecting to mention that this is exactly what you’d expect when you force people to buy insurance.
Force, as I’ve always said, is the heart-and-soul of all (so-called) progressive ideology.
For those who, like me, are being nailed with a “penalty tax” — which, in case you’ve forgotten, is not actually a tax — and likewise for those people who have gotten cancellation notices or have seen premium increases, the news, unfortunately, is not quite so rosy as Obama and his clownish administration would have you believe, all their propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
Also, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the absurdly obvious: namely, forcing people off existing plans in order to force them into more expensive (and inferior) plans does not, to any sane person, constitute success. In fact, that sort of thing only occurs in the minds of bureaucrats and all other similarly insane people.
Here’s what Barack Obama’s tweet actually translates to:
“Forcing people into my bureaucratic nightmare worked even better than I thought it would” (Barack Obama, March 25th, 2015).
Which is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that health “insurance” — i.e. pre-paid healthcare — is the primary reason healthcare is so wildly expensive in America today.
If there’s anyone out there who truly believes Obamacare is a good thing, ask yourself:
Which plan is Obama and his family on?
Ask yourself further:
If Obamacare is so excellent, why are Democratic Senators begging for another delay?
Prediction: we’ll only hear crickets chirping in response to my challenge for anyone — anyone — to defend to me this bureaucratic monstrosity known as Obamacare. And the reason we’ll only hear crickets chirping is that anyone who attempts to defend this will, in effect, be defending the wild notion that the IRS has and should have legitimate control over your health.
“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.” — Barack Obama, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration set a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
The government took longer to turn over files when it provided any, said more regularly that it couldn’t find documents and refused a record number of times to turn over files quickly that might be especially newsworthy.
It also acknowledged in nearly 1 in 3 cases that its initial decisions to withhold or censor records were improper under the law — but only when it was challenged.
Its backlog of unanswered requests at year’s end grew remarkably by 55 percent to more than 200,000. It also cut by 375, or about 9 percent, the number of full-time employees across government paid to look for records. That was the fewest number of employees working on the issue in five years.
Don’t be fooled by the latest cover of National Geographic and their absurd conflation of climate change (so-called) with the other items they’ve listed on that same cover.
No serious person, skeptic or believer, denies that climate changes.
In fact, that’s precisely what skeptics have been saying for years: climate by definition is constantly changing, and so how is it, many of us ask, that anyone can say the optimal earth temperatures occurred (roughly) between 1850 and 1980?
Dr. Richard Lindzen, climatologist and professor emeritus at MIT, recently addressed this very point in the following exchange:
(Dr. Lindzen’s takedown of Bill Nye, who isn’t a climate scientist but an engineer, is also quite edifying.)
All of which, however, is slightly beside the point — and one is more than a little disheartened to see that a venerable magazine like National Geographic doesn’t have even the most rudimentary grasp of the issue at hand.
Politically, global warming and climate change have little if anything to do with climate science, and the fact that this subject has become such an overwhelming political issue is a fine testament to how poorly the world understands the legitimate functions of government, and why those functions are legitimate.
Indeed, it turns out that the whole anthropogenic global warming (AGW) position can be easily defused without any reference to science at all, because the error, at root, is epistemological.
The truth about global warming which many don’t want to hear is that it’s become so polarized only because it’s turned political. The essentials of the subject have thereby been swallowed up in an ocean of misinformation, equivocation, and propaganda.
Let us start by defining terms:
Statism is concentrated state authority. The word refers to a government that believes it has legitimate power to any extent over individual rights and freedom of trade.
Statism is also called Authoritarianism.
Opposition to laissez faire derives in part from ethics, but even more fundamentally from the science of epistemology.
Ethically the fundamental political question is this: are humans free by nature?
The answer to that depends upon the answer to an even deeper question: why (if at all) are humans free by nature?
And the answer to that is epistemologic.
The human brain — to address the latter query first — is individuated and rational by nature, and because of this, humans by nature possesses the faculty of choice.
Rationality is choice.
And choice presupposes the freedom to choose. This is the locus of the inseparable, indivisible link between reason and rights. Ultimately it is only the individual who can exercise the power of volition, or not. Government bureaus cannot. The state cannot. The collective cannot. Only the individuals who make up these entities.
If humans did not possess the faculty of choice, humans would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, just as animals for this very reason are amoral.
But human action is chosen.
This, then, is what finally gives rise to the fact of human freedom as an epistemological necessity.
It’s also what it means to say that humans are free by nature: we are born with a cognitive faculty that gives us the power of choice: since this faculty is the primary method by which we thrive and keep ourselves alive, we must (therefore) be left free to exercise that faculty — and leave others likewise free.
Please note that this is not just some cryptic theory on how human freedom could conceivably be defended: the rights of each individual are demonstrably rooted in our cognitive quiddity – and for this precise reason, human freedom without an accurate and thorough understanding of our epistemologic nature can never be fully understood. Or defended.
In the words of Samuel Adams:
“Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.”
And Claude Fredrich Bastiat:
“For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources.”
It is precisely the lack of epistemological grounding that has made rights and therefore human freedom vulnerable throughout all of history.
The evolution of the human brain created rights; it happened at the exact moment when this same evolution created a rational animal called a human being – which is to say, when nature created the capacity of free will.
Philosophy, then, being the most general science, unifies facts from all disciplines into an indivisible whole.
Thus, without proper philosophical underpinnings, scientific facts, no matter how airtight they are, remain unincorporated.
It is this point that provides us with the real and final connection between global warming and individual rights: the provenance of rights, including private property rights and the freedom to trade that property, is found ultimately the human being’s freedom of will, and it is only statist politics – also known as coercive government – that can with impunity negate the individual’s natural rights.
It does so through force, either directly (as in physical expropriation or imprisonment), or indirectly (as in compulsory taxation or fines).
The statist politics that the AGW position explicitly calls for are in this way antithetical to the methods by which the human brain and the human species properly functions and flourishes.
That is the fundamental argument against Authoritarianism, in any of its multifarious guises. It is a foolproof argument, and it is the first and strongest line of defense: because each and every individual is free by nature, we are free to, in Adam Smith’s words, “truck, barter, and exchange.”
But there’s much more to it than this.
It must first of all never be forgotten that the philosophy of science is only a species of philosophy proper.
This has crucial ramifications.
Science is the systematic gathering of data through observation and reason.
Science is built upon knowledge, and knowledge is built upon reason.
Reason derives from the nature of the human mind — which is to say that humans are the rational animal.
Epistemology – one of the two main branches of philosophy – is the science of knowledge.
Epistemology, therefore, studies the nature of reason.
In this way, all science is hierarchically dependent upon epistemology.
In the realm of human conviction, there exists at any given time only three primary alternatives: possible, probable, and certain.
Possible is when some evidence exists, but not much.
Probable is when a lot of evidence exists, but not all.
Certain is when the evidence is so overwhelming that no other conclusion is possible.
Obviously, then, what constitutes possible, probable, or certain is the amount of evidence and the context of knowledge within which that evidence is found.
To conclude certain, or even “over 99 percent certain,” to quote James Hansen of NASA, requires a sufficient knowledge of all relevant data and all potentially relevant data.
This is as true in a scientific laboratory as it is in a court of law.
It means that nothing – the complexity of clouds, for instance, or aerosols, deep ocean currents, cosmic rays, sun spots, et cetera – nothing is poorly understood, or insufficiently understood.
It means that the science has culminated to such a degree that our knowledge of it is complete or near-complete – so much so, at any rate, that there is essentially very little left to learn.
It means that because the evidence is so great, the conclusion admits no doubt.
It means, moreover, that the data-gathering process is not biased or influenced in any way by anything extracurricular, like activism.
Such is the nature of certainty.
From an epistemological standpoint, certainty means absolute.
And yet it’s many of these same AGW scientists who, today, under the insidious influence of postmodernism, assure us that there are no absolutes in science – “science doesn’t deal in truth, but only likelihood,” to quote another NASA scientist, Gavin Schmidt.
Truth is only relative, you see.
Quantum physics and thermodynamics have “proven” that the only certainty is that nothing is certain; definitions are purely a question of semantics; a unified philosophy is “circular reasoning” (or, at best, “system-building”); all moral law and all social law is subjective and unprovable.
The mind, in short, cannot know anything for certain. Yet AGW is virtually certain.
These are all epistemological assertions.
Syllogistically, the entire anthropogenic global warming position can be recapitulated in this way:
Global warming is human-made. Humans are ruled by governments. Therefore, government bureaus, centralized planning committees, and more laws are the only solution.
In 1975, when Leonard Nimoy was 45-years-old, he wrote a book titled, I Am Not Spock.
Some 20 years later, he wrote another book, a follow-up (of sorts), titled I Am Spock.
One finds oneself strangely heartened by Leonard Nimoy’s eventual acceptance of his iconic status — and the colossal shadow his most famous character cast.
What accounts for the sheer size of that shadow?
Answer: Spock represents eternal ideas, timeless themes, and that is why his character — and, for that matter, Star Trek — endures and will continue to endure.
However campy it may (or may not) now seem, Star Trek never ceased in its ultimate mission: to explore the question of what it means to be alive and human.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the original Star Trek series, was greatly influenced by The Twilight Zone, which came right before Star Trek, and indeed it was The Twilight Zone that popularized the use of science fiction as a vehicle for philosophical ideas.
From this standpoint, it was an ingenious method for probing the role of reason in human life.
That, I believe, largely accounts for Spock’s timeless appeal.
Leonard Nimoy was born March 26th, 1931, in the West End of Boston: Leonard Simon Nimoy, son of Max and Doris Nimoy — both Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, now part of present-day Ukraine — and he is exactly four days younger than his Star Trek co-star, William (“Common People“) Shatner.
The man named Valentinus (which comes from the Latin valens, meaning “powerful, brave, valiant”) was a martyred Christian of ancient Rome, about whom virtually nothing is known.
His name does not appear in the earliest redaction of Christian martyrs (354 AD), and it was Pope Gelasius who first included Valentinus — or Saint Valentine, as Pope Gelasius canonized him — “among those whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God.”
The origins of the Feast of Saint Valentine’s Day are equally murky, and it’s not actually known for certain if the feast of that day is meant to celebrate one saint or several saints with that same name.
The link between Valentine’s Day and romantic-sexual love probably came about in a time now called the High Middle Ages (HMA), when courtly love and all its dog-and-pony-show rituals propagated like bunny rabbits.
The English word love is sourced in the Old High German (OHG) luba and the Gothic lubo and the Latin lubere — all (like the archaic lief) meaning “pleasing,” “treasured,” “desirous,” “dear.” Even now, the German word liebling, directly related to lief, essentially means that same thing: “dear.”
The word agape, on the other hand, which is the Greek word from which charite ultimately derives, is in Latin caritas, and means “To esteem highly.”
Caritas never really denoted what charity denotes today: namely, giving things away for free.
According to Oxford, caritas meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; love founded upon esteem.”
It was specifically contrasted with amor, a word with a distinctly physical connotation. Oxford goes on to define the original meaning of charite (as opposed to caritas) as “Benignity of disposition expressing itself in Christ-like conduct.”
The word caritas quickly passed out of the monasteries and the churches, where Latin was so frequently used, and into the then more common usage: cheritet or cherite — both deriving from the word cher, meaning “dear,” “dear one,” or “to hold dear.”
Indeed, also to this very day, the word “cherish” means exactly that.
In addition to all this, there was for the same Greek word another Latin word used in those first biblical translations: dilectio.
Like caritas, the word dilectio also meant “To esteem highly.”
Etymologically, this is all significant because later biblical translations, starting in the 16th century, began rendering dilectio as love, and caritas as charity, so that some of the very earliest bibles were already using “love” and “charity” interchangeably, just as the first translators had used caritas and dilectio interchangeably.
Gradually, as the decades and centuries passed and more and more translations were produced, the word love was increasingly substituted for the word charity, until by 1881, the Revised Edition of the King James had completely replaced charity with love. That of course is how it stands today.
Love, in other words, made caritas and dilectio into one.
Remember, though, that these words, as well as the Greek word agape from which they originated, all meant “Dearness, fondness, affection; to esteem highly.”
(It is perhaps worth noting also that decades before the King James translation, there was the William Tyndale New Testament, and Tyndale chose the word love instead of charite.)
From a New Testament perspective, it is, I think, beyond dispute that love is the most important theme that the gospels and the epistles propound. In fact, I believe that if you were to distill the entire New Testament down to its fundamental principle, the one thing that would remain is love. No thinking person, atheist or not, can in my opinion reasonably deny that.
And yet (as I wrote, last Valentine’s Day) if that’s the case, why are we still left feeling slightly unsatisfied about what, precisely, it all means?
Thomas Aquinas, as he so often does, offers some help:
Natural things desire what is in conformity to their nature… Now, in every appetite or desire, love is the principle of the movement that tends toward the end which is loved. In natural appetite the principle of such movement is the connaturality that exists between the one who desires and the end to which he tends. We might call it a natural love.
Natural love is nothing more than the fundamental inclination which is stamped upon every being by the Author of nature.
Thomas Aquinas, like his teacher Aristotle, thought that the highest love was friendship. Both, however, believed that friendship was just a precursor to understanding the love that is, in Aquinas’s words, caritas (charity). One of the first questions Aquinas poses in his tract on charity is whether charity equals friendship. He answers this way:
According to Aristotle (Ethics VIII, 4) not all love has the character of friendship, but only that love which goes with wishing well, namely when we so love another as to will what is good for him. For if we do not will what is good to the things we love but rather, we will their good for ourselves, as we are said to love wine, a horse or the like, then that is not love of friendship but a love of desire. For it would be foolish to say that someone has friendship with wine or a horse.
But benevolence alone does not suffice to constitute friendship; it also requires a certain mutual loving, because a friend is friendly to his friend. But such mutual benevolence is based on something shared in common.
Here are two different translation of what is probably the most famous codification of love:
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth (1 Corinthians 13:4, King James).
And:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails (1 Corinthians, New International ).
Yet in both instances this strikes me not so much as a definition but more as a manifestation — a by-product, a side-effect.
A side-effect of what?
Of happiness, and the verdict in your eyes when you look up at me.
