The Declaration of independence makes no argument for the legitimacy of its claim that the rights of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, that governments are instituted from the consent of the governed, or that the people have the right to overthrow oppressive governments. These are held to be self-evident - conclusions that anyone could arrive at without much thought. But are these truths actually self-evident anymore in the context of modern thought?

The American Revolution was the direct spawn of Enlightenment political thought. John Locke, in his Two Treatises on Government, was perhaps the most influential, having stated that each individual has the right to life, liberty, and property, a phrase that was copied with little modification straight into the American Declaration of Independence. Locke believed that the first right was unalienable due to its bestowment by the Creator, and the latter two derive from one’s capacity for rational thought - i.e., children have not yet developed and criminals have demonstrated their lack of rational thought, and so are not entitled to these rights.

So what of the deterministic shift in recent thought? Criminals are becoming less responsible for their actions, and more extreme determinists would say that no one at all is capable of truly rational thought except what is incidental. This therefore precludes the self-evidence of the latter two rights, and since naturalistic determinism itself precludes the existence (or at least involvement) of a Creator, the first right as well loses its self-evidence. Even without naturalistic determinism, simply secularity of state makes these rights much less clear, for without a Creator, nothing can be self-evident. One can certainly make the argument that it is advantageous to allow one’s citizens freedom of life, choice, and property, but any argument for the superiority of such a system can only evaluate it based on its results rather than any intrinsic value.

Though Ecclesiastical states have their share of problems with corruption among other things, instability is not one of their weak points. Democracy and liberal freedom in general have proven over the past centuries to be remarkably stable compared to other secular forms of government, but how much longer can it exist before a more convincing system exploits the popular unrest inevitable in a state old enough to be removed from its prior government with another set of “self-evident” truths so called only because they exemplify the mindset of the time?

Never before in history has global communication in so many media been so accessible. Cultural elements now spread across the world, taking us ever closer to what increasingly appears to be a homogenous global base culture marked by subcultures rather than regional variation. In looking at this trend, one must ask, will this resulting culture become a conglomerate synthesis of the cultures of the world, or will one in particular come out on top?

Looking around the world, one can undeniably see the pervasive influence of American consumer culture, and by all accounts this is the culture coming out on top. Consumer culture appeals to the innate desire of the individual to pursue his own interests at the expense of a greater good, whatever that may be, like cocaine appeals to the innate personal desire for raw pleasure. And in the long run for a society it is no less addictive or destructive. The appeal of Western luxury to the developing world in Asia and Africa is almost irresistible despite the outspoken antipathy of many of their governments to the West.

Or does the antipathy to the West regard its policies rather than its culture? Why is it that Middle-Easterners can cry “Death to America” while drinking a Pepsi?

During the Cold War, the United States used culture very deliberately as a form of soft power. Listening to the Beatles broadcasting through the Iron Curtain sowed seeds of discontent among Soviet youth with the Union’s isolationism, and was eventually an important factor in bringing about the downfall of Marxism in the Soviet bloc. In recent years however, without a Soviet union to keep us on our toes, our deliberate use of soft power in this fashion has dropped off to near nonexistence. This does not mean that our culture is not spreading - on the contrary, it is spreading faster and more pervasively than ever - but now it is like the spreading of a virus rather than the injection of a serum: passive rather than active. Donald Rumsfeld even stated at one point that he did not even understand the concept of soft power.

The problem is that modern third-worlders in anti-American governments, rather than adopt pro-American sentiments as they adopt American consumer culture, dissociate the culture from the nation and shamelessly take on the most shameful of American ideals while positioning themselves ideologically opposite from, for example, the US’s favor towards Israel and Democracy in general. I do not of course refer to the higher anti-American ideologues - many of whom renounce consumerism just as strongly as American policy - but rather the lower classes in their sphere of influence, who see dissociation as a way to align themselves with their own ideologues without giving up the goods they have become accustomed to, however meager they may be (especially compared to the goods we receive in America).

We are then in the precarious position of having self-preservation from inner corruption at odds against self-preservation from outside forces. The most obvious way to protect ourselves from continuing terrorist threats is to dull their ideology with deliberate injections of consumer culture. As their youth grow into complacency as ours have, then the threat of attack diminishes. But with this diminished threat of attack comes an increased threat of collapse under the unsustainable load of deficit spending and indebtedness, both on the personal and federal level, and not just in the West, but worldwide should we consumerize the third world.

The answer we find on this the sixth anniversary of the most vivid demonstration of Western antipathy in American history, lies in the tedium of a continued war on terror coupled with a concerted internal propaganda effort aimed at breaking consumer culture. It is as Machiavelli says unfathomably difficult to reform a deeply corrupted nation, but what choice do we have? Perhaps it’s wishful thinking, but one could imagine the number of anti-American ideologues greatly diminishing if we do break through consumer culture.

Notice a difference between the screenshot of iTunes 7.2 on the left and an unmodified iTunes 7.3 on the right?

That’s right, it’s actually iTunes 7.3 on the right. Apple has given in and changed perhaps the most offensive new element of the new iTunes back to the round blue shade of its predecessors. Whether this was from the collective disgust of iTunes users or Apple arbitrarily deciding that it didn’t like the dark highlight after all (the same thing happened with iTunes’ search field several versions ago, when the dropdown menu made a brief disappearance), I can’t help but feel that it’s a small victory on behalf of those of us who dislike the post-Aqua direction Apple’s interface design is headed.

But if you’re like me - not (completely, at least) satisfied until Aqua is returned to its former glory - there’s AguaT 1.2.6 hot off the presses and ready for the new iTunes 7.4.1.

The concept of time travel has tantalized mankind for as long as there has been literature, and has become especially prominent in recent decades with the rise of Science Fiction as a genre. How can a past still vivid in memory or an inevitable future be completely inaccessible to us except for the instant in which it passes, and what would happen if it was not? Various branches of physics have been trying to answer this since Einstein postulated that one could slow the passage of time by accelerating one’s self. Yet like so many other esoteric branches of science, ignoring the technicalities of achieving time travel in the first place (widely regarded to be impossible anyways), the topic lies firmly in the realm of philosophy and religion to qualify any theories.

The feasibility and nature of time travel lie in three questions:

• Is there free will?
• What does this imply about the nature of the universe?
• If that nature does not preclude time travel, what are the consequences of it?

The fundamental question to all of this is the first, for in it is vested a greater question: is there a soul - a supernatural? From a purely evolutionary and atheistic standpoint, free will cannot exist, for a human being is no more than the complex interaction of his molecules, ultimately completely predictable could we account for all the molecular motion in his body. Though the brain is so complex as to give the illusion of self-awareness and choice, it is still just an illusion and we are no more than the sum of our parts.

If, however, free will does exist, then it would imply that we are greater than the sum of our parts, self-awareness being the hallmark of having risen above being a bundle of molecules interacting in complex fashion - having a soul, so to speak, something that is separate from yet manifest in the matter comprising the body.

So what does this mean for time travel? The first case - one of pure determinism - means that any human endeavor, no matter how complex or grandiose, is nothing more than the inevitable emergence of high-level order from the force with which the universe began long ago. Time travel then would then not be something creatable by mankind, for we cannot affect the universe in any proactive way. If this is the case, then any paradox caused by time travel chanced upon by wormhole or other natural methods would necessarily be inconsequential, meaning that one cannot change the past because will have already been changed (unless you’re Denzel Washington, in which case your salary has sufficient mass to distort space-time to your bidding). And in the case that time travel is the intersection of parallel universes at different points, then any change in the past will not affect the future in which one travelled there, your presence in the other inevitable anyway. Changes made in a deterministic universe cannot be recursive.

If however, we do have free will and our will is formed outside the physical realm, then we do have the capability of affecting the universe in a substantiative way. Assuming time travel is possible, only in the case of the existence of souls could one build a “time machine”, so to speak, and cause the universe to behave in ways it otherwise would not. It is only in this case that a recursive paradox could exist: Since alternate universes are inherently deterministic being probabilistic, their presence precludes the existence of the supernatural, at least dwelling in us, so our universe is all we have to deal with. Time travel of any sort then, assuming the existence of the soul, is necessarily impossible, if we are to assume cause-and-effect are inherent to the nature of time-space (rather than artificially introduced by a deity, as one would draw a flip book - in which case we are still determined beings, only by a different determinant).

One’s views on time travel and physics is then dependent on one’s fundamental philosophic and religious assumptions. As in universal origins, the question for each of us is which set of assumptions we will start from: Will our views on the nature of the universe affect our belief or lack thereof in the soul, or will we draw our views on the nature of the universe from our belief in the soul?

-Inspired by a late night conversation with the ineffable devil’s advocate Joseph Sileo.