On the Separation of Church, Science, Education, and Business from the State: Avoiding Repressive Fascism

A suggested revision of the First Amendment of the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, scientific research, education, or business activity, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

When the state meddles, bad things happen—besides violating our rights.
 
The origin of the notion of a dividing line between church and state, or more correctly, “a theory of two powers,” as Britannica.com writes, goes back to Mark 12:13-17 when Jesus replied to questioning by the Pharisees who were attempting to trap him in a dilemma: either offend his followers by saying taxes should be paid to Rome or be arrested for treason for telling them not to pay.
 
Jesus replied: “Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and give to God what belongs to God” (Mark 12:17, New Living Translation).
 
Prior to this statement, church and state were inseparable. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the Church continued to dominate life, though by the tenth century numerous secular rulers had arisen to compete with and manipulate the Church. Over the centuries, conflict between church and state, as well as conflicts between the newly founded religious sects, led to many bloody wars. In the eighteenth century the notion of individual rights and separation of religion and state became expressed in the US’s First Amendment.
 
Classical liberals of today understand the separation as complete, as in “leave us (the citizens) alone” to pursue religion or not and in the manner we choose. The state should stay totally out of religious life.
 
As writer Collin Killick put it: “Laws that establish religion in government, even if created with the most benign intent, could put our nation on a path toward repressive theocracy” (emphasis added).
 
And “repressive” is how the state has been relating to science and business.
 
Former Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorf, though not fully calling for laissez-faire of science by the state, is calling for the decentralization of scientific research. Kulldorf challenges the domination of government string-pulling in science because the government, especially in public health as controlled by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, dispenses most of the research money, deciding who gets it and which problem will be studied. Two-thirds of research money comes from federal, state, and local government sources, with well over half from the US government.
 
The gatekeeping, not to mention censorship, by the government on scientific research became apparent throughout our recent past two years of covid totalitarianism, as I have described the ordeal.
 
Kulldorf’s coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, Sunetra Gupta, calls the science-controllers cartels: government agencies, journal editors, and peer reviewers, all of whom determine promotion, tenure, and research in academia.*
 
“Repressive scientism,” using F. A. Hayek’s term for a “pretense at science,” is what we seem to have been given. The disastrous effect of logical positivism on science today cannot be overstated. Quoting from the description of Hayek’s book, The Counter Revolution of Science, at Mises.org:

There was once such a thing as the human sciences of which economics was part. The goal was to discover and elucidate the exact laws that govern the interaction of people with the material world. It had its own methods and own recommendations.

Throughout the twentieth century, however,

the economy and people began to be regarded as a collective entity to be examined as if whole societies should be studied as we study planets or other non-volitional beings.

As molecules, in other words, or billiard balls and other inanimate objects. “Science had turned from being a friend of freedom into being employed as its enemy.” From a methodological individualism, where the individual entity or person was the unit of analysis, to a methodological collectivism—the group, or collective, as the unit.
 
The new, repressive method now applies to all sciences. And that is the collectivization and herd conformity (or groupthink) of science that we have today with the government in charge.
 
What we are left with is a narrow range of conventional research, sometimes flawed (or even fraudulent), and neglect or repression of creative thinking and disagreement with the establishment.
 
Decentralize all research to the university level, says Kulldorf. Let universities distribute the money and publish their own scientists’ findings through open (not blind) peer review. The process would speed up research and publication and perhaps lead to innovative findings.
 
The best solution, of course, would be to separate education completely from the state, but that would mean making universities businesses, which they are, as are churches. They just are not profit-making businesses, which they should be. (See Applying Principles, pp. 187-90.)
 
The fundamental issue is to completely separate business and state. Paraphrasing Killick, “Laws that regulate and control businesses could put our nation on a path toward repressive . . . fascism.”
 
Which is what fascism in its essence is. Socialism owns everything and everyone; fascism, a variant of socialism (perhaps we should call it the “Omicron” of socialism??) leaves some property private, but only in a nominal sense. It still controls everything and everyone at the governmental level.
 
It is the total, airtight control we have endured over the past two years.
 
 
* See my discussion of academic research, the peer review process, and its effects on science in Applying Principles, pp. 123-32, 140-42.

All It Takes Is Guts

A president from the American past stated this about his previous four years:

During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare.

No, this is not a statement of our most recent former president. The words are from Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural on March 4, 1805, in which Jefferson endorses and praises the American experiment in a free press. He continues:

The experiment is noted, to prove that, since truth and reason have maintained their ground against false opinions in league with false facts, the press, confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint; the public judgment will correct false reasonings and opinions, on a full hearing of all parties; and no other definite line can be drawn between the inestimable liberty of the press and its demoralizing licentiousness. If there be still improprieties which this rule would not restrain, its supplement must be sought in the censorship of public opinion.

“Censorship of public opinion,” does not mean government censorship. As Jefferson clarifies, it means “punishment in the public indignation.” He continues, “Truth and reason” will prevail, as “facts are piercing through the veil drawn over them.”

Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, so he trusted all voters to exercise their reasoning capacity to speak up against the falsehoods of a “licentious” press. Do voters today do so? And will they in the future?

Edmund Burke, another man of the Enlightenment, supposedly said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” These words, though, do not appear in his writings. Ayn Rand, however, did write that evil is impotent and succeeds only from the sanction of its victims, that is, the victims’ willingness, due to ignorance or choice, to suffer silently, for example, through today’s covid totalitarianism.

Our culture’s intelligentsia, which includes the corrupt press, has eagerly promoted, and continues to promote, this total control of our personal and professional lives.

The solution, as it is with any bully, is to stand up to the communist-fascist left that is attempting to destroy civilization. “Stand up” means to speak out and write against the Goebbelsian propaganda (1, 2), to name names and never back down, especially if and when the “cancel culture” comes after you. This means, as I wrote in a previous post, no compromise of principle, no collaboration with the left, no concessions to them.

“All it takes is guts,” said Walter Williams in the title of his 1987 book of newspaper columns. “I have no shame in admitting my uncompromising bias for the sanctity of personal freedom,” he said in his preface, “and freely admit that as economist qua columnist I try to sell Americans on the moral superiority of individual freedom” (second emphasis added).

Conservative radio show host Rush Limbaugh displayed a similar intestinal fortitude with many courageous examples of standing up to the cancel crowd. Normally, Rush ignored whatever the intelligentsia, especially the “drive-by” media as he called them, threw his way. The following incident, however, required a major offensive.

Rush’s primary rule, according to his spokesman and strategist, Brian Glicklich, was “no faux apologies for fake transgressions.” A letter signed by 40-plus Democratic senators, sent to Rush’s syndicator, demanded an apology from Rush for a discussion he had with a listener. The subject of the discussion was “phony soldiers,” fraudulent people who claimed to have served heroically in the military, but did not. The letter claimed that Rush was denigrating these “heroes.”

Not only did Rush not apologize, nor would the apology have been accepted by the Democrats (as Glicklich points out), Rush sold the letter for $2.1 million, matching the sum from his own checkbook, and donated all of it “to scholarships for the children of fallen service members and police officers.”

Rush’s sponsors were then viciously attacked in the usual leftist manner of what looked like thousands of people sending thousands of emails threatening to stop patronizing the sponsors’ businesses. Rush did not just not back down; he provided research showing his sponsors “that 80% or more of all online boycott messages came from a group of people so small as to ‘fit into the elevator we used to come to your office for this meeting.’”

Finally, Rush realized that the handful of aggressors against his sponsors preferred to remain anonymous and unaccountable, so he named them on his website. Like all bullies, they ran.

Not apologizing, compromising, or backing down, Rush instead went on the offensive. “The Limbaugh doctrine against the suppression of speech,” as Glicklich put it, “was to offer more speech.” Rush often aggressively “fished for liberals’ outrage” and tweaked it, doing so with glee, or rather, in his words, “with half his brain tied behind his back, just to keep it fair.”

Rush Limbaugh, as did our previous president, taught many of us how to have guts and to display that intestinal fortitude.

Alan Dershowitz, a moderate Democrat, is an uncompromising First Amendment lawyer who, as victim of the cancel culture himself, has courageously and aggressively stood his ground. When falsely accused of sexual misconduct, he offered mounds of evidence in his defense, filed a defamation lawsuit, and wrote the book Guilt by Accusation.

More recently, Dershowitz wrote Cancel Culture: the Latest Attack on Free Speech and Due Process, in which he exposes the Stalinist and McCarthyite origins of such suppression of free speech. He also produced a video podcast “Cancel Culture Must Be Canceled.”

Dershowitz is very much aware of the need for more people to speak up. In an earlier video podcast he asked “Where are the libertarian Democrats?” The two words together likely mean Bill-of-Rights moderate Democrats, often called “liberals,” who have been far too silent over the past several years.*

In our postmodern age of the “Un-Enlightenment,” an age of untruth and unreason, will there be enough Jeffersonians to courageously counter the Goebbelsian propaganda that is spewed ceaselessly and ubiquitously?

As Rush said, to counter the suppression of free speech, more speech is needed—spoken and written without compromise or concession.

It just takes guts!


* Moderate Democrats, such as Dershowitz, are mixed-economy-Democrats who see some role for the government to regulate business. Far left or leftist Democrats today want the government to control every aspect of our lives, social and economic, which makes them totalitarians, whether of the communist, socialist, or fascist variety. The usual meaning of libertarian is classical liberalism or laissez-faire capitalism.