After a long hiatus, Bill Whittle has a new essay up. Well, actually it's the introduction to a new book. About the American civilization.

I have a mental map of the world. So do you. So did Lenin, and al-Zarqawi, and Winston Churchill, and Attila, and Ronald Reagan. Everyone has an internal map of how the world works.

The problem is that we get rather fond of these maps. Some people get so fond of these maps that they do nothing but sit around in the dark depths of the chart room and compare maps. If they see something on another map that seems to agree, more or less, with what they have sketched out on their own, they feel vindicated. This is human nature. I do it, and you do it too.

People will sit in the chartroom, and argue about their maps, while the ship of history rips out her keel. But as the arguments rage hither and yon down in the chartroom, as maps and cartographers are bandied back and forth like trading cards and people come to blows over mapmakers dead a century or a millennium before, there does remain one small, unassuming little token of hope. Not much really -- just an action so simple and obvious that we overlook it time and time again. What can we do to end this arguing about which way to sail and on what map? How can we tell where the reefs and channels really are? Dear God, is there nothing we can do to get an answer among all these authorities?

Well, there is something we can do. We can get up from the chartroom of theory, this dungeon of pointless debate and argumentation, and go and stand on the bridge. We can look at the world as it really is, and draw new maps as we go on.

When you use your common sense, your personal experience, over any of the so-called “social theories” being sold at fire sale prices, you are looking out the window and seeing whether or not the map matches the coastline. If it does not, then it doesn’t matter how credentialed or tenured or respected the cartographer is or was -– he is wrong. He says river delta; there sits a barrier reef. Wrong!

Next map!

These people, down below, arguing endlessly in the chartroom -– they have a word for themselves that they find flattering. They call themselves intellectuals. A friend of mine referred to me as an intellectual the other day, and I nearly knocked him off the bar stool. What a repellent thing to say to a man who tries on a daily basis to pre-flight his facts to make sure his theories – his map – is as accurate as it can be. Things change. Things that were once true sometimes no longer are. The map has to change or you are in deep yogurt. It is that process, not my map, that I am trying to teach to the best of my ability.

It’s sad but true: there are people who are deathly afraid to go up on deck, face the sunshine, and realize that the maps they have so lovingly and painstakingly crafted over decades are essentially worthless scraps of paper. They are so wrong, in so many places, that they are far worse than no maps at all. They draw all manner of hazards where there are none, and disastrously, they show open seas and smooth sailing in the most treacherous and deadly places. Such maps are not merely worthless; they are dangerous.

There was a time when intellectual meant someone who uses reason and intellect. Today, people who call themselves intellectuals are in a form of mental death spiral: they search for, and find, those index cards that support their world view, and clutch little red books like rosaries in the face of all external evidence. They are ruled by appeals to authority. Their self-image and sense of emotional well-being trumps any and all objective evidence to the contrary.

How many students today believe what they believe because they met someone who knew a guy whose girlfriend turned him on to an article by Noam Chomsky? Noam Chomsky predicted, in his even, intellectual, authoritative, tenured manner, that if the US went to war in Afghanistan after 9/11, the result would be 3 million Afghan casualties. How many of these students who worship St. Noam independently ask themselves why he had come up 2,999,500 bodies short? Noam is not wrong by a factor of one or two; Noam is not wrong by an order of magnitude. Noam is not wrong by a factor of a hundred to one. Noam is wrong by more than three orders of magnitude. Noam is wrong by a factor of 6,000 to one. Noam says the reef is three miles off the port bow, when in fact it is barely ten feet away. That’s six thousand to one. Noam says the ocean is a thousand feet deep when in fact the keel has been ripped out and is sitting on the sandbar back yonder: that’s a 6,000-to-one error. Extrapolating this accuracy rate, if Noam writes 6,000 pages on the evil of the United States, how many pages of truth might there be in such a twenty-volume set?

Does this mean that everything Noam Chomsky writes is nonsense? Not at all. He is a professor of Linguistics. I am not qualified to say how accurate the work in his field of expertise is. I can however make a stab at how accurate he is in the field of US foreign policy, and if you have a handheld calculator at home, you can make the same comparison and achieve the same results.

Listen, I’m all in favor of reading and studying all manner of philosophy and literature. And while social studies evidence cards cut both ways, there are not too many expert physicists out there claiming objects regularly fall up off the table and into the air. People are not pool balls. Their behavior is not as predictable. Both intellectual studies, and expert opinion, have their place. It is only when they are used beyond their limits that problems come thick and heavy.

Don’t take my word for this. Let’s not sit down in the bilge arguing about whether Karl Marx or Adam Smith had the best course to freedom and happiness. Let’s just go up the ladder, open a hatch, go out on deck, get out the telescope and have a look at what actually happened to the lives of the people impacted by one map, and what happened to those subjected to the other.

We are not blind, and we are not crippled, and the world is not a novel or a treatise or a theory or a manifesto. It exists. We can go look for ourselves. And on the way up, when those desperate elitist bastards start clutching at your ankles and implore you to stay below where it’s safe and argue some more…be sure to kick those sons of bitches right in the teeth. Their blind obedience to their Big Ideas have killed more people in history than anything except disease. Boot to the teeth, I say.

But that’s just me. You’ve been around. You’re no sap. What do you think?

Go ahead and read it all. You know you want to.

Let's keep in mind that academics and intellectuals tend to conflate scientific theory and academic. For example: In a thread over at a forum I frequent I tried proposing a workable theory of roleplaying games. I specifically stated that this was to be a scientific theory. I hypothesize, evidence is gathered, hypothesis gets restated until it works to accurately describe what an RPG is according to the currently available data. Resulting in a theory. What did I get? Some mental klutz telling me I've gotten theory all wrong, and laying out the old, thesis-antithesis-synthesis guff.

When you talk about intellectuals you are talking about people who are proud of their naivity. And they are not confined to one field of interest.

No, Rand. I don't want to.

For the life of me, I do not understand why everybody keels over with the vapors every time this guy puts up words with a meat-to-salad ratio of about 1:20. I really don't get it and I never have.

"

No, Rand. I don't want to.

For the life of me, I do not understand why everybody keels over with the vapors every time this guy puts up words with a meat-to-salad ratio of about 1:20. I really don't get it and I never have."

Perhaps you don't get it because he puts your absurdity upon a common sense canvas. The coastline does not match your anonymous map and you are puzzled as to why the coastline could be so arrogant!

Please, just stay below deck, its more cozy there.

Hmm.

No; it's really for the reason that I stated.

I think it is just because you are too lazy to get him. After all, you are too lazy to pick a pseudonym for a screen name so what are we to expect?

(hah) That was an oversight. (These fields usually auto-fill for me, and I didn't notice that they hadn't.) I apologize for confusing you. My name is William Joseph Beck III, and I live in Dryden, New York. You want my phone number? I've never posted under a pseudonym in all the time I've been wired -- which goes back to my CompuServe account in 1986 -- and I'd go long green there are lots more people around the net who know me than you.

And I don't understand why people fall down with the flaps over Bill Whittle. I never have, from day-one.

Just like I said.

" I'd go long green there are lots more people around the net who know me than you."

Considering the times, that is a dubious claim at best. One of the employment checks we do at my place of business now consists of a google search on the applicants name.