Maverick Philosopher

The Theological Virtues and the Scientistic Virtues

The theological virtues are three: faith, hope, and charity.  The scientistic virtues are two: faith and hope.  The scientistic types, pinning their hopes on future science,  are full of faith in things unseen, things that are incomprehensible now but will, they hope, become comprehensible in the fullness of time.  They thirst less for justice and righteousness than for the final slaying  of the dragon of the Hard Problem that stands  between them and the paradise of naturalism.  (Of course they fool themselves in thinking that the problem of qualia is the only hard problem in the philosophy of mind.)

What is strange here is the quasi-religious talk of "pinning  hopes on future science"  as if -- quite absurdly -- knowing more and more about the meat within our skulls will finally resolve the outstanding questions in the philosophy of mind.  And what, pray tell,  does science have to do with hope?  To speak of hope in this context shows that one has abandoned science for scientism. There is also something exceedingly curious about hoping that one turn out to be just a material system, a bit of dust in the wind.

"I was so hoping to be proved to be nothing more than a clever land mammal slated for destruction in a few years, but, dammit all, there are reasons to think that we are more than animals and have a higher destiny.  That sucks! Life would then have a meaning beyond the four 'F's: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproducing!"

Related articles

Scientism

Preach What You Practice!

The Mortalist's Hope

Farewell to Krauss, A Universe From Nothing

Courage and Content

There are courageous souls who will say publically what others think but are afraid to say.  True.  But the courageousness of the saying does not underwrite the truth of what is said.  Courage does not validate content.

Muhammad Atta and the 9/11 terrorists had the courage of their false and murderous convictions.

As a corollary, passion is not probative.  The passion with which a proposition is propounded is no proof of it.  It is scant praise of a person, and perhaps no praise at all, to say, as is often nowadays said, that so-and-so is passionate about his beliefs.  So what?  Hitler was passionate.

We have need of dispassion these days, not passion. William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, first stanza:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Related articles

Courage and Fearlessness

Extremists

Conservatives and Prudence

The fourth of Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles reads:

Fourth, conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence. Burke agrees with Plato that in the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues. Any public measure ought to be judged by its probable long-run consequences, not merely by temporary advantage or popularity. Liberals and radicals, the conservative says, are imprudent: for they dash at their objectives without giving much heed to the risk of new abuses worse than the evils they hope to sweep away. As John Randolph of Roanoke put it, Providence moves slowly, but the devil always hurries. Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.

How does Barack Obama stack up against this fourth principle?  Permit me a slight exaggeration: Obama is the apotheosis of imprudence.  Like Randolph's "devil who always hurries,"  he is in a big rush to "fundamentally transform America" (his words), as witness Obamacare and Obama's stunning fiscal irresponsibility.  The national debt approaches 17 trillion (by a very conservative measure) and the man thinks that not a problem.  Well, as Krazy Krugman says, the government is not like a household: the government can print money!  Yes it can.  And will.

At once a devil and a deification.  We are in for it.

Related articles

Subsidiarity and the Left's Assault on Civil Society

Prudence and Republican Vindication

Vices Vitiated

It can happen that as a man becomes weaker, he is better able to weaken the grip of his weaknesses.  Having less energy for their implementation, he now masters what mastered him.  Vices vitiate until the body they have vitiated vitiates them in turn.

Intellectual Maturity

A mark of intellectual maturity is the ability to tolerate uncertainty without fleeing to dogmas that make false certainties of objective uncertainties, but also without falling into a self-vitiating relativism.  The ideal is a love of truth that does not flag but also accepts no substitutes.

Measurement by Regrets

We are measurable by the nature of our regrets.  What do you regret?  Not having drunk enough good wine?  Not having amassed more wealth?  Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places?  Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?

We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.

Courage and Fearlessness

Courage is not fearlessness.  The courageous feel fear, but master it, unlike the cowardly who are mastered by it.  To feel no fear in any of life's situations is to fail to perceive real dangers.  The fearless are foolish.  It is therefore inept to praise the courageous as fearless: their virtue, which one presumably intends to praise, consists in the mastery of  precisely that the absence of which would render them foolish.

A School of Humility?

Perhaps we are here to be taught humility.  Some indications that this could be so:

1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it.  A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity.  It is an excellent bet that there will be wars as long as there are human beings.  There are wars within families and between tribes and nations and gangs and interest groups.    There is class warfare  and racial hatred and the battle of the sexes.  There are inter-generational tensions ("Don't trust anyone over 30!")  and intrapsychic conflicts.  There is inter-species predation.  Not only is man a wolf to man, wolves are wolves to men, and men to wolves.  If extraterrestrials should show up it is a good bet that a 'war of the worlds' would ensue.  If they came to serve man, it would be to serve him for dinner, as in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man."

Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.

"I will not weaponize space," said Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep
lack of understanding of the human condition.  Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can   bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard.  And whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?

Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:

     Si vis pacem, para bellum.

     If you want peace, prepare for war.

2. At the level of ideas there is unending controversy, often acrimonious, in almost every field.  There is the strife of systems, not to mention the strife of the systematic with the anti-systematic. (Hegel versus Kierkegaard, for example.)   Despite invincible ignorance ignorant of itself as ignorance, contentious humans proudly proclaim their 'knowledge' -- and are contradicted by fools of opposing stripes.

3.  My third point is subsumable under my first, but so important that it deserves separate mention.  Homo homini lupus.  Never eradicated, man's inhumanity to man is seemingly ineradicable.  As we speak, people are being poisoned, shot, stabbed for the flimsiest of reasons or no reason at all.   Girls are being raped and sold into slavery.  The abortion 'doctors' are slaughtering innocent human beings while apologists whose intellects have been suborned by their lusts cook up justifications. The Iranian head of state calls for the destruction of Israel and its inhabitants. Meanwhile benighted leftists ignore the threat of radical Islam and label 'islamophobic' those who see straight. Every hour of every day extends the litany of the 'lupine.' And there is not much we can do about it.

4.  And then there is the eventual if not present corruption of all the institutions that are supposed to ameliorate the human condition: the churches, the criminal justice system, the U. N., governments. The reformers reform until they too become corrupted.  And there is little we can do about it.

5. Let's not leave out our animal nature that insures fragility, sickness, death and untold miseries.  Transhumanist fantasies aside, there is not much we can do about it.  (We can do something, and we have, and that is good; but sickness, old age, and death are as much with us as in the days of the Buddha.)

Meditating on such points as these one might hazard the inference that this world is a vale of soul-making wherein a chief virtue to be learned is that of humility.  Our minds are dark, our wills weak, our hearts foul.  What is to be so proud about?

The other side of the coin:  Proud to be a Human Being.

 

Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects.  When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing.  In the end he swindles himself.

How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot?  You have  otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.

Or take the Enron employees.  They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries!  Now how stupid is that?  But they weren't stupid; they stupified themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.

The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature.  Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt?  A lack of money?  No, a lack of virtue.  People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, pursue truly choice-worthy ends.

False Modesty

To appear modest, some of us preface our remarks with, "Correct me if I'm wrong."  But we say it only when we know we are not.

Negativity Breeds Negativity

Negative people elicit negative responses from others.  So they suffer twice: from their own negativity and from the negativity they cause.

A Use of Old Age

Old age is a good time for the continence whose practice was too difficult in younger days.   But wait too long, and your vices will abandon  you before you abandon them.  Scant is the merit of continence born of incapacity.

Preach What You Practice!

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach these conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals  live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left. They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending.  If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

It is not enough to practice what you preach; you must also preach what you practice.

The Noble and the Base

If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"

The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be above them.

The Mortalist's Hope

Must not the materialist, the mortalist hope that bodily death is the absolute end as death draws near? For he has lived as if it is. He has made no provision for anything else. He has decided that this life is all there is and has lived accordingly. He hopes he is in for no surprise. If he has lived in ways commonly regarded as evil, in the manner of a Saddam Hussein, say, surely he hopes that in the end there is no good and evil but only flimsy and fleeting human opinions.

So the mortalist too has his hope. He hopes for annihilation at death. He does not, after all, know that he is slated for annihilation. So he must hope. He has faith and hope. And love? He loves this world so much that he cannot allow even the possibility of another to distract his love.

These then are the mortalist's 'theological virtues.'

Companion post: Mortalism

Milton Praises the Strenuous Life

Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice,"  he quotes Milton:

     I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
     unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
     slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
     for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
     into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
     us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.

The passage bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's remarks about being in the arena.

I like especially the last sentence of the Milton quotation.  We are born corrupt, not innocent.  We are not here (mainly) to improve the world, but (mainly) to be improved by it.  The world's a vale of soul-making.  Since this world is a vanishing quantity, it makes little sense to expend energy trying to improve it: when your house is burning down, you don't spruce up the facade.  You don't swab the decks of a sinking ship.  It makes more sense to spend time and effort  on what has a chance of outlasting the transitory.  This world's use is to build something that outlasts it.

But this will, pace Milton, require some flight from the world into the cloister where perhaps alone the virtues can be developed that will need testing later in the world.

The Fragility of Patience

A while back we had to deal with a difficult person.  Afterwards, wanting to praise me for my patience, my wife said, "Thank you for trying to be patient."  At that I lost my patience. "I wasn't trying to be patient, I was succeeding!"  Until that moment.

Vanity and Shamelessness?

 From the pen of E. M. Cioran:

     Indolence saves us from prolixity and thereby from the shamelessness inherent in production.

The aphorism is from Drawn and Quartered. 

Is all production vain and shameless? Perhaps not if one keeps one's productions to oneself. But writing books, articles and blog posts is not just production, but publishing, making public. Is publishing mere vanity and self-promotion?

In given cases it can be. And whether one of those cases is my case is not for me to decide. But surely it would be absurd to claim that all publishing by anyone is mere vanity and shameless self-promotion. Take the books of John Searle. He thinks he has solved the mind-body problem. He has done no such thing. Yet his books are enormously rich and stimulating despite some error and confusion. I am glad he has written his many books and made his contribution to our common ongoing philosophical quest. He has given me many hours of pleasure and elevated thought.

All living is self-asserting. But there is self-assertion and there is self-assertion. Personal assertion in the service of the impersonal truth is more than mere personal assertion. Thereby is vanity   substantiated and shamelessness redeemed.

David Brooks on the Vigorous Virtues

David Brooks makes some good points in The Vigorous Virtues, but ends on a silly and naive note:

Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.

First of all, no one thinks that a reduction in the role of government  "will magically regrow . . . the older habits and arrangements."  So that was a silly thing to write.  Such  a reduction is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of a reversal of American decline.  Second, only a liberal could believe that government activism could lead to a flourishing of the 'vigorous virtues'  of self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom.  Action is required, but at the level of the individual, the family, the neighbohood, the community, the church, the school.

These virtues are what make good government possible.  The notion that government can inculcate them is silly.  The inculcation occurs primarily in the family.  But what does government do? It undermines the family. 

On a positive note, David Brooks is a very entertaining and mainly sane writer and proof that the leftist rag-of-record, the NYT, hasn't completely gone to hell on its opinion pages.

On Temptation and the Perfection of Jesus

Joshua Orsak e-mails: 

Your recent posts on temptation got me thinking (again) about a problem I've wrestled with a long time. I'm a Christian minister and I've long thought about a tension between Jesus Christ's focus on intentions and sin in the internal life of man and the Christian conviction summed up in Hebrews 4:15 that Jesus was tempted in all the ways that we are but did not sin. I accept Jesus' injunction against (for instance) lusting after a person in one's heart and being angry at a person as sinful mental states or attitudes. I know from many of your past posts that you, too, are sympathetic with such a view. I believe that attitudes and intentions can be sinful as well as actions, and no doubt I get that from my Christianity.

 

But it seems to me that to be tempted is at least in part to (for instance) 'lust after a woman in your heart'. To be angry at someone is to be tempted to act against them. To be attracted to a woman and think about (say) cheating on my wife is to be tempted to cheat. But isn't that lusting after her in my heart? This creates a problem with the view that Jesus was sinless and indeed has often made me question that particular doctrine. How could Jesus be tempted 'in all ways' that we are and yet not sin, since it seems that to be tempted is to adopt, if only for a moment, the attitudes he labels as sinful? I've never come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, so I was wondering what you might think of it.

I had actually never thought of this.  The problem seems genuine and worth discussing for anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously.  To throw the problem into sharp relief, I will formulate it as an inconsistent pentad:

 

1. Being fully human, Jesus was subject to every manner of temptation and was actually tempted.
2. To be tempted to do X is to harbor the thought of doing X.
3. Thoughts are morally evaluable: there are such things as evil (sinful) thoughts.
4.  If a person habitually harbors evil (sinful) thoughts,  then the person is sinful.
5. Being fully divine, Jesus was wholly sinless.

 

This quintet of propositions is logically inconsistent as is obvious from the fact that if  the first four are true, then the fifth must be false.

 

To solve the problem we must reject one of the pentad's limbs.  (1) and (5) are clear commitments of orthodox Christian theology and so cannot be abandoned by anyone who wishes to remain orthodox.  (3) has a NT basis, and so it cannot be abandoned either.  But (2) and (4) are rejectable.

 

As for (2), I can be tempted to do something like cheating my inexperienced customers without harboring the thought of doing so: I might just have the thought but then suppress it or dismiss it.

 

As for (4), even if  a married person dwells on the sinful thought of a trip to Las Vegas (where, we are told, "what happens there, stays there") to hook up (in the contemporary sexual sense) with an old flame, that by itself does not make the person a sinful person.  To be a sinful person one must habitually sin in thought, word, or deed.  Going on a drunk or two does not make one a drunkard; lying a few times does not make one a liar, etc. 

 

Note that (2) and (4) are necessary to derive a contradiction.  The problem can thus be solved by rejecting one or both of these propositions.  Rejecting (2) suffices to solve the problem.

 

In sum, Jesus' being tempted and his being perfectly sinless are consistent because, while Jesus had tempting thoughts, he did not entertain them with hospitality but rejected them.  "Get behind me, Satan, etc."

 

See also: Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? and Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis.

Temptation Again

This from a reader:

 

I have been a follower and great admirer of you and your blog writing for some time. I enjoyed reading your most recent post, especially as this topic has been fresh in my mind from preaching a sermon last week from James 1:13-15 on the nature and power of temptation in the Christian life. While of course our conclusions will inevitably differ in many ways on this topic, given our differences of belief concerning Christianity, I wanted to write you to ask for clarification concerning what you distinguish as first-order temptations and meta-temptations (or perhaps second-order temptations?).

 

I believe the heart of your argument is: Meta-temptation is the worst form of temptation because one who succumbs to the temptation to reject the objective validity of the moral point view has removed the context in which dalliance with floozies, paying one's debts, not murdering one's rivals, etc. are morally evaluable.

My question is this: is not your definition of meta temptation true of all temptation? Since I always choose that which is most desirable to my mind’s eye in the moment (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will), am I not choosing that which I perceive as the greatest good and desirable, even if in reality it is not good but evil? Of course self-deception is at work where I assent to contradictory propositions in the moment: I should not do [X] because it is evil (i.e. God has forbidden [X]); I should do [X] because it is good (i.e. [X] will satisfy me and thus I determine what is good and evil).

 

The distinction I was making was between being tempted to do what one's moral sense tells one is wrong in a particular situation, and the temptation to discount as illusory the entire moral point of view.  These strike me as different  because one can be tempted in the first way while having no doubts at all about the objective validity of morality. Consider an example.  I am a married man in a distant city attending a convention.  A woman I meet there makes it clear that she is attracted to me and is available for sex. Finding her attractive I am tempted to invite her up to my hotel room. This is a 'first-order' temptation in that it concerns a specific action.  Let us assume that there is no prudential reason why I shouldn't act upon my desire.  But my conscience or moral sense  tells me that the contemplated action, adultery, is wrong because it violates a vow I took.   I do not doubt at all the objective validity of the deliverances of conscience in general or even the validity of the present deliverance; I simply override the present deliverance.  I just block it out.  I don't even have to engage in any rationalization.  I merely suppress the bite of conscience and go ahead with the action.

 

So I don't see that my definition of meta-temptation applies to this sort of case.  I know (or rather believe) that what I am about to do is objectively wrong, but, in the grip of lust, I freely suppress this knowledge (or belief) and freely go ahead with the contemplated action. I am not choosing what appears to me at the moment most desirable (desire-worthy), for I believe I am about to do a morally shabby thing.  But I do it anyway!  I willfully do what I know or believe I ought not do.  And I do it freely.  Lust may have me in its grip but I am not powerless to resist it; I freely consent to going with the flow.

 

Is not the purpose of all temptation to construct on alternate reality/metaphysic of what is good and what is evil, to make the false “look more true than truth itself” (to quote Irenaeus from his Against Heresies), to make something look larger than life in order to tempt me to believe that it will slake and satisfy my vicious lusts? It reminds me of Romans 1:22-23 where the Apostle Paul writes, "Claiming to be wise, they became fools, [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” What is interesting about verse 23 is that Paul lists the order of creation backwards as if to say, “The moment you exchange the glory of the Creator for the creature, all of reality becomes inverted and perverted and thrown completely upside down.”

I think that seems to be the nature of all temptation: an inversion and perversion of reality where the evil becomes the good and the good the evil.

 

I don't see that all temptation amounts to an erection of an alternative metaphysic of good and evil.  The example I gave, which is common enough, involves no transvaluation of any received values.  We value fidelity and disvalue betrayal.

 

Please note that the inversion you speak of where the evil becomes good and the good becomes evil presupposes the moral point of view.  Suppose A agrees with B that there is an objective and absolute moral order.  But they disagree about which actions are good and which evil.  A might hold that it is objectively good to procreate while B, under the influence of Schopenhauer, holds that procreation is objectively evil.  That is a deep disagreement but one that plays out within the context of the shared assumption of an objective moral world order. The meta-temptation I am referring to is far more radical: the 'Nietzschean' temptation to dismiss as illusory the very notion of objective good and evil. 

Temptation and Meta-Temptation

Is it built into the very concept of temptation that if one is tempted to do something or leave something undone that the act or ommission is morally wrong? I should think so.  This is not to say that in ordinary English 'temptation' is not used in looser ways. For example, 'I am tempted to answer my opening question in the affirmative.'  Or, 'I am tempted to take some of my cash and buy precious metals.'  These are loose uses of 'tempt' and cognates.  I am here concerned with the strict use, the moral use.  Accordingly, it is by my lights a conceptual truth, and thus a necessary truth, that if one is tempted to do X or forego doing Y, then the act or the omission is morally wrong. 

So, strictly speaking, to be tempted to do something is to be tempted to do something wrong.  One cannot be tempted to do the right thing, or the good thing, or what one ought to do.  This is nonsense: 'The floozy at the Kitty Kat lounge shook her comely ass in my face thereby tempting me to go home to my wife.'  If there is temptation in this situation, it is the temptation to dally with the floozy.  There is no temptation in the  desire to be faithful to one's spouse or in the even stronger desire to engage in sexual intercourse with her. 

Nor can one be tempted to do something morally insignificant, i.e., morally neutral.    'Home fries or hash browns'  in normal circumstances is not a morally significant choice.  I cannot be temped either way. 

I am inclined, though not tempted, to say that the worst form of temptation is the temptation to think that it doesn't matter morally what one does or leaves undone, that the moral point of view is illusory, that morality is buncombe, conventional at best, not grounded in rerum natura.  Lacking a better name for this I will call it 'meta-temptation in order distinguish it from such first-order temptations as the temptation to commit adultery or to shoot my neighbor's barking dog.

Meta-temptation is the worst form of temptation because one who succumbs to the temptation to reject the objective validity of the  moral point view has removed the context in which dalliance with floozies, paying one's debts, not murdering one's rivals, etc. are morally evaluable.  Such a person 'beyond morality' may have prudential reasons for doing this and refraining from that, but not strictly moral reasons.

But if meta-temptation is a form of temptation, strictly speaking, then rejecting the moral point of view is itself immoral.  Rejecting it is immoral, however, only if the moral POV is objectively valid and binding.  If it is without validity, then it cannot be immoral to reject it.  And if it is invalid, then what appears to be temptation cannot really be temptation, and the bite of conscience that accompanies the meta-temptation to reject the moral POV is illusory and not revelatory of any moral truth.

Nothing I have said resolves the question of the objective validitiy/invalidity of the moral point of view.  I myself find it impossible to shake off the thought of its objective validity.  Its objective validity is subjectively certain to me.  That inability of mine is, however, arguably consistent with the illusoriness of the moral POV.  And so my subjective certainty is not objective certainty -- even to me!

I suspect that here as elsewhere one must in the end simply decide what one will believe and how one will live.  You are fooling yourself if you think you will come up with a knock-down argument proof against every objection and acceptable to all able and sincere investigators.  Examine the question throughly and then decide.  Once you have decided, don't let your decision be overturned lightly.  What you have resolved upon in your best hours should not be put in jeopardy by passing fears and doubts. 

Dennis Prager, Jealousy, and Envy

Talk-show host Dennis Prager is a fount of wisdom.  I recommend his Happiness Hour to you, and the rest of his show as well. But I just heard him say on the Happiness Hour segment of his show, "jealousy slash envy."  I beg to differ.  I see a distinction between the two.  See my Envy, Jealousy, and <i>Schadenfreude</i>.

Distinctions are good so long as they cut the bird of reality at the joints.  The more the better.

The Ascesis of the Lower

It is useful to suppose oneself composed of a lower and a higher self.  Much good comes from denying the former, good that accrues to the latter.

Companion post: William James on Self-Denial.

Be Hard on Yourself

The better people are hard on themselves.  The exemplify the anti-Bukowski property: they try.  They set themselves difficult tasks and strive to complete them.  They make intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical demands of themselves.  They are alive to the discrepancy between what they are and what they ought to be.

But they also know how to relax and enjoy life.  Be hard on yourself, but honor yourself and permit yourself a bit of self-congratulation at obstacles overcome and goals attained.  The true conservative knows how to appreciate and enjoy -- and that includes appreciating and enjoying dear old self.

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

One might wonder about recognition especially as it shades off into fame, and beyond that, into empty celebrity. Is it really good? Surely a modicum of recognition by certain of one's fellows is necessary for human happiness. To that extent, recognition is good. But a little suffices, and more is not better.  To be famous would be horrible, after the initial rush wore off.  And it might even get you killed by some crazy, as witness the case of John Lennon.

Consider this quartet of claims:

1. Money is the root of all evil.
2. Love of money is the root of all evil.
3. Inordinate love of money is the root of all evil.
4. Inordinate love of money is the root of some evil.

It is easy to see that each of (1)-(3) is false, and that (4) alone is true. Money is an abstract form of wealth and wealth is obviously good. How can something good be the root of all evil? It is not even the  root of some evil. It makes more sense to say that the love of money is the root of all evil. But this too is plainly mistaken. Since money is good, a certain ‘love’ or desire of it is both wise and morally legitimate. It is the inordinate love of money that bears some connection to evil. But to all evil? Surely some of the evil in the world derives from such other sources as the inordinate love of power, sex, and fame. Therefore, the most we can say with a show of plausibility is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evil.

An inordinate love is an excessive love, a love unhinged and unbalanced. One form of excess consists in taking for an end in itself what can only be viewed as a means. Thus the miser’s mistake is in taking money to be an end in itself when it can only be a means.

Generalizing the opening quartet yields:

A. X is the root of all evil.
B. Love of X is the root of all evil.
C. Inordinate love of X is the root of all evil.
D. Inordinate love of X is the root of some evil.

I claim that whatever one plugs in for ‘X’ — whether it be money, property, progeny, power, influence, sex, fame, knowledge, alcohol, tobacco, firearms — results in a pattern of three falsehoods and one truth. You may verify this for yourself. Or else present me with a counterexample.

One conclusion I draw is that evil has no one root. So one should not speak of the root of evil. Evil has many roots corresponding to our many inordinate loves. Since there is no one root of all evil, the eradication of evil is no simple matter. Or if there is a single root, it lies not in things desired, but in the disordered human heart. Only metanoia, a change of heart/mind, could eradicate evil, assuming evil can be uprooted.

On Postponing Self Mastery

Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them.  In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.  Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon?  Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness.  However you say it, it is true.  The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene. 

Broad generalizations, these.  They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying.  He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur cannot think his way out of his misery.  Don't get hung up on the exceptions.  Meditate on the broad practical truth.  On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.'  But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical.   Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative.  Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist,  a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

 

Compassion

Feeling compassion for the earthquake victims, he was pleased by his sensitivity, but his warm feeling did not motivate him to do anything such as make a monetary contribution to the Red Cross.  His feeling remained mere sentiment and to that extent mere self-indulgence.

Better to feel compassion than to define it. Better still to act upon the feeling.  But now an interesting question arises.  Would it not be even better to act in alleviation of the other's suffering without feeling the negative affect?  This line of thought is explored in Spinoza on Commiseratio.

Kerouac and the Ancient Lures

I told myself that come November I would quit Jackin' off for a while, but October's momentum continues.  I was just now looking in an old journal for something else and found this entry from 10 November 2000:

During the years he wrote Some of the Dharma, Kerouac had a chance.  But then On the Road was published in 1957 (in a sense the opposite of Some of the Dharma), fame came, and he was lost forever. Sex, drugs,  booze, and fame.  Ancient lures.  A lure is an evil that appears good.  The alluring is that which to all appearances is good but is poisonous at its core.  The fish lure se-duces the fish then hooks him.  Women are the chief "fishers of men" to twist a New Testament phrase.  The fish is 'taken in' by the lure and then 'taken out' by it.  "Pretty girls make graves," said Ray Smith the Kerouac character in The Dharma Bums.  The meaning  is that sex leads to birth and birth to another go-round on the "slaving meat wheel" (Mexico City Blues, 211 Chorus) of samsara.

Skeptical and Credulous

By turns we are too much the one or the other. We find it difficult to balance doubting and believing.

Properly deployed, doubt is the engine of inquiry, but it can also become a brake on commitment and thus on living. One cannot live well without belief and trust -- but not when they become gullibility and credulousness.

Whistle blowers such as Harry Markopolos have a hard time getting through to people who want to believe.  Their intellects suborned by greed, otherwise intelligent people who were warned by Markopolos were taken to the cleaners  by the avuncular Bernie Madoff despite the improbability of a legitimate 1% per month return in a market that safely permitted half of that.

They were skeptical of Markopolos while credulous of Madoff.  A clear proof of not only the difficulty of balancing skepticism and credulousness, but also of the weakness of the  intellect in the face of the torrent of the passions.

By the way, Markopolos' book, No One Would Listen, held my interest from the first page to the last.  It lives up to its subtitle, "A Financial Thriller."  A central lesson is that we should be deeply skeptical of federal regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.  It failed utterly to uncover the Madoff Ponzi scheme and dismissed the repeatedly-made Markopolos warnings.  Liberals, with their tendency to believe in the salutary effects of an omni-intrusive and purportedly omnicompetent government,  should heed this lesson. 

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental bandwagons.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'   But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.

The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage & plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Milton Contra Cloistered Virtue Unexercised

Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.

This fits nicely with Keat's notion of the world as a vale of soul-making.

Courtesy

I suggest that we think of courtesy as a mean between rudeness and obsequiousness. The courteous are neither churls nor courtiers. This despite the etymology of 'courtesy.' (As a separate post could argue, there is no such thing as the true meaning of a word, and even if there were, etymology would not guide us to it.) To put it crudely, so that even a contemporary can get the point: the courteous neither show, nor kiss, ass.

Passion

Passion dies out in the old, but there is no credit in that. If your vices abandon you before you abandon them, you are no candidate for praise. The trick is for the young and the midstreamers to learn to control passion while there is time left to enjoy the passion-free state.

Against Postponing Self-Mastery

Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them. In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

Kindness

Small acts of kindness have the power to transfigure the bleak face of existence. While gratefully remembering the words and gestures I have been fortunate to receive, I also regret the occasions I let slip where, at no cost to myself, I could have offered a word of encouragement or support to someone in need.

Visualize Using Your Turn Signals

This is one of my favorite bumper stickers, and not just because there are all too many motorists clogging the roads who seem unacquainted with the function of turn signals. The sticker is a parody of ‘Visualize World Peace’ (‘Visualize Whirled Peas’). Visualizing something as nebulous and utopian as world peace is about as pointless as the sort of visualizing going on in John Lennon’s silly ditty, “Imagine.”

If you want to improve the world, try visualizing some concrete action that it is in your power to perform such as letting a motorist enter your lane. Better, visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed. Then take the next step: visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed, and entertain no negative thoughts to boot. In the end, there is only one person over whose behavior you have any real control, namely, yourself. So if you are serious about improving the world, you can start with that guy. If you desire peace in the world, begin by making war against your lower self.

I am not saying that this is sufficient for world peace, but it may well be necessary.

William James on Self-Denial

No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

At James' door we receive bread. At Quine's a stone. How American philosophy has fallen off since the Golden Age of James, Royce, and Peirce.

The Value of Modesty

Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37:

What good is modesty? -- It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

 

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Bullshitting and Lying

What is it to bullshit?  Perhaps the best way to understand bullshitting is by comparing it to lying. So what is it to lie? The first thing to understand is that a lie is not the same as a false statement. Suppose I make a statement about something but my statement turns out to be false. It does not follow that I have lied. Suppose a latter-day Rip van Winkle wakes up from a long nap and, asked about the Dodgers, says, "They are a baseball team from Brooklyn." Has our man lied? Not at all. He simply hasn't kept up with 'recent' developments.

For a statement to count as a lie two conditions must be satisfied: (a) the statement must be false; (b) the statement must be made with the intention to deceive. These conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. But what if someone states what he believes to be false with the intention to deceive, but it turns out that what he states is true? Isn't that also a lie? Not by the definition I just gave. So it looks as if we are in the presence of two concepts of lying. The concept just defined is the narrower and more usual concept. The other, broader concept, results by the deletion of condition (a).

Superman: The Moral of the Story

George Reeves (1914-1959) was the original 'Superman.' You know the character: "Faster than a speeding bullet . . . ." Reeves was murdered (or was it suicide?) in June of 1959. I remember a comment of my Uncle Ray at the time of Reeves' death: "He could stop other people's bullets, but not his own."

I hope Reeves won't mind it too much if I take moral instruction from the mistakes that killed him. It has long been my policy to let others pay my tuition at the School of Hard Knocks.

Reeves succumbed to sex, booze, and career-identification. It is hard enough to get the sex monkey off your back, but if you allow him to form a tag-team with the booze monkey you have double trouble. But of course I would never say that he was 'addicted' to these two 'monkeys': I believe in free will, self-discipline, self-reliance, and in strengthening one's will by exercising it. With respect to temptations, a good maxim is this: Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens. And if you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.

After his first wife left him, he became involved with two women, sequentially, both of whom had it in them to kill him because of jealousy vis-à-vis  the other. The Bard hath said it well, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Reeves left the first for the second, but near the end was about to return to the first. Both were loose-living, hard-drinking, party animals, especially the second to whom he was drawn like a moth to the flame.

Alcohol fueled the fires of his delusion. Near the end he had become a full-time boozer. Hopelessly type-cast, his career was at an end.

The moral of the story: sex, booze, and worldly ambition are of the devil. But how attractive they are! And how seemingly flat, stale, and boring the life of 'moral virtue.'  And as every leftist 'knows,' morality is but bourgeois ideology and all moral striving but hypocritical posturing.

Evil appears warm and inviting; good, cold and forbidding. Evil seems fascinating and lively; good, boring and dead. Such is the world — in which reality is illusion and illusion reality.

Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm and Mel Gibson

The L. A. Times reports that Mel Gibson's 2006 drunk driving conviction has been expunged.  Here is what I wrote about the case at the time (1 August 2006): 

What's worse: Driving while legally drunk at 87 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, or making stupid anti-Semitic remarks? The former, obviously. And yet a big stink is being made about Gibson's drunken rant. I call this misplaced moral enthusiasm. Calling a Jew a bad name won't kill him, but running him over in your speeding 2006 Lexus LS 430 will.

On the one hand, offensive words that no reasonable person could take seriously; on the other hand, a deed that could get people killed. Here is what Gibson said: "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," and, addressing the arresting officer, "Are you a Jew?"

Now compare Gibson with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who repeatedly has called for the destruction of the State of Israel. Ahmadinejad's is speech that incites unspeakable violence, unlike Gibson's drunken rant which is no threat to anyone. So let's forget about Gibson, and concentrate on real threats.

Inappropriate Niceness

Most of us prefer nice people to surly pricks. And no doubt we should all try to be nicer to our world-mates. But there is such a thing as inappropriate niceness.

I am following at a safe distance the motorist in front of me. Then said motorist brakes for a jaywalker, not to avoid hitting him, but to allow him to cross. The jaywalker is violating the law; why aid and abet his lawbreaking? Why be nice to someone who shows no respect for the rules of the road? Why risk causing an accident? These are some questions the inappropriately nice should ask themselves.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

On Reverence

In The Weblog Handbook (Perseus Publishing 2002), Rebecca Blood writes:

If you asked me what the weblog community needs, I would answer, stronger ties among webloggers from various clusters, more independent thinkers, and more irreverence. Much, much more irreverence. Everyone seems to take themselves so seriously. (p. 164)

This passage demonstrates a pretty thorough misunderstanding of the concept of reverence. Blood appears to be confusing reverence with self-importance. Reverence, however, is more like the opposite of self-importance. Reverence is an attitude of honor, respect, devotion, deference toward a sufficiently lofty object distinct from one’s surface self. What Kant calls the moral law is an appropriate object of reverence. Like the starry skies above me, the moral law within me stands apart from, and superordinate to, my lower self. The divine, and anything or anyone sufficiently close to the divine, are also appropriate objects of reverence.

 

The truth is an appropriate object of reverence. A necessary condition of being a good journalist, for example, is reverence for the truth. A good journalist aims to establish the facts. Facts, by definition, are what they are regardless of what anyone believes them to be or desires them to be. The reverence appropriate to the competent and honest journalist has nothing to do with self-importance.

It is a commentary on the decadence of our culture that ‘reverence’ and ‘reverent’ have ceased to be terms of praise, and have almost become pejoratives. In tandem with this, ‘irreverence’ and ‘irreverent’ are constantly used nowadays to express approbation. Open up the New York Times Arts Section and read the blurbs on contemporary films and plays. Expressions like ‘witty and irreverent’ abound. The tacit message is that to be irreverent is good, and that there can be no form of reverence that is not either phony or hypocritical, or else devoid of an appropriate object.

In part this is due to the sort of confusion exemplified by Blood, the confusion of reverence with self-importance. Another part of the explanation is that the belief in reverence-worthy objects is on the wane in the upper echelons of our culture. Truth, for example, is no longer believed in by many. To the ears of decadents, all truth-claims ring hollow and are good only as fodder for deconstruction. Nietzsche clearly saw that the death of God is tantamount to the death of truth. (Cf. Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 27.) It may be twilight time for the West as the reverse-Crusaders (as Oriana Fallaci calls them) gather to storm our gates. The owl of Minerva, spreading her wings at dusk, may take flight only to be decapitated by an Islamo-terrorist. But I’m not quite ready to enter into the Splengerian gloom or adopt the scowl of Minerva.

Advertising and the Lure of the Lucre

I received an e-mail from a fellow who offered me $35 to run an ad on the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms page of this site for a alcoholism/drug addiction resource. I declined the offer for the same reason I don't display any money-making gimmicks such as 'tip jars.' The work I do on this site is a labor of love and an end in itself. To commercialize it would be to sully it. Of course, I have no objection to someone else turning a buck from his online work. If you need money, go ahead and try to earn some by any legitimate means and if this involves cluttering your site with advertising and such, it's a free country. But if you have enough of the lean green, then why not be content with what you have and turn your mind to the nonutilitarian?

"But what if he offered you $3,500?" Well, if I don't need $35, why would I need $3,500 or $35,000?

They say every man has his price. Suppose you were offered $1,000 to kill a defenseless old lady who lives by herself in an outlying area. You wouldn't do it, would you? But what if you were offered a million or ten million? Suppose she is near death, of no use to herself or anyone else, and no one cares whether she lives or dies. Suppose not even she cares whether she lives or dies. Upon hearing such an offer, a typical human brain would go into rationalization overdrive. But again, if you don't need a thousand why do you need a million?

Money, like sex, has an astonishing delusive power, a power to corrupt and distort, so much so that many think it the root of all evil. That cannot be right, of course, as a little thought will show: the most one can say is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evils. See Money, Sex, Power, and Fame and Radix Omnium Malorum. Nevertheless, money makes people crazy and they have a hard time thinking clearly about it. They think it will buy them happiness when at the most it will buy them the absence of certain forms of misery. Just as absurd is the notion promoted in the silliest song of all time, John Lennon's Imagine, that the abolition of money is the way to human flourishing:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

It says something that this asinine exercise in the utopian  is considered one of the greatest songs of all time. I am referring to the lyrics, not the music, which is not bad. 

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

The Financial Times reports on a piece of silliness from the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.

One mistake the good Pontiff is making is to confuse capitalism and capitalists.  One who cannot see the difference may fallaciously conclude that the greed of some capitalists is rooted in capitalism.  Here is a post from a while back that counters the notion: