Maverick Philosopher

On 'Making It'

One reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success cannot  be a final goal of legitimate human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters.  He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both success and failure, not that most of the successful ever do.  Their success traps them.  Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs away from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only -- six feet.

Brand Blanshard on Santayana's Prose Style

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphases added.
   
The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish     something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems  to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

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What Exists Exists

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphases added.
   
The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish     something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems  to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

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Peter Geach on Worshipping the Right God

Having just read Peter Geach's "On Worshipping the Right God" (in God and the Soul, Thoemmes Press, 1994, pp. 100-116, orig. publ. 1969)  I was pleased to discover that I had arrived by my own reasoning at some of his conclusions.  On Christmas Eve I quoted Michael Rea:

Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs about God; but they agree on this much: there is exactly one God. This common point of agreement is logically equivalent to [the] thesis that all Gods are the same God. In other words, everyone who worships a God worships the same God, no matter how different their views about God might be.

Rea's argument is this:

A. There is exactly one God if and only if all Gods are the same God

Ergo

B.  Everyone who worships a God worships the same God.

But as I pointed out, the state of worship/worshipping is an intentional or object-directed state, and like all such states, not such as to entail the existence of the object of the state.  One cannot worship without worshipping something, but it does not follow that the object worshipped exists. So (B) is false.  Geach makes the same point in 'formal mode':

It may be thought that since there is only one God to worship, a man who worships a God cannot but worship the true God.  But this misconceives the logical character of the the verb 'to worship.'  In philosophers' jargon, 'to worship' is an intentional verb. (108)

Exactly right.  And so, just as I can shoot at an animal that is not there to be shot at, I can worship a God that is not there to be worshipped.

I put the point in my own 'formal mode' way when I said that 'worships' is not a verb of success. 

The possibility of worshipping what does not exist  is connected with the question whether 'God' is a logically proper name.  Geach rightly argues that "'God' is not a proper name but a descriptive term: it is like 'the Prime Minister' rather than 'Mr. Harold Wilson.'" (108)  One of his arguments is similar to one I had given, namely, that God is not known by acquaintance in this life. As Geach puts it, ". . . in this life we know God not as an acquaintance we can name, but by description." (109)

God is therefore relevantly disanalogous to the examples Beckwith and Tuggy gave.  Those examples were of things known or knowable by sensory acquaintance here below. Suppose Dale and I are seated at one and the same table.  I pound on it and assert "This table is solid oak!"  Dale replies, "No, it is not: there is particle board where you can't see."   Dale thinks that a disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x presupposes, and thus entails, that there really is a self-same x whose properties are in dispute. But that is not the case.  Disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x is merely logically consistent with there really being a self-same x whose properties are in dispute.  In the case of the table, of course, we KNOW that the dispute is about one and the same item.  This is because the table is an object of sensory acquaintance: its existence and identity are evident.  But it can be different in the case of God with whom we are not sensorily acquainted.

Clearly, a Spinozist and a Thomist are not worshipping one and the same God despite the fact that for both Thomists and Spinozists there is exactly one God.  One of them is worshipping what does not exist.

And so it is not at all obvious that Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all worshipping the same God.  That, I submit, is crystal-clear.  And so those who think that the question has an obvious answer are plainly wrong.

But this is not to say that Jew, Christian, and Muslim are NOT worshipping one and the same God.  That is much more difficult question.

Do we all agree now?  

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Christians and Muslims: Exactly One God, so the Same God?

Peter Geach 1916-2013

Do Christians and Jews Worship the Same God?

Yale's Miroslav Volf has a 17 December 2015 piece entitled Wheaton professor’s suspension is about anti-Muslim bigotry, not theology.  It is a sloppy piece of mere journalism but it does raise an important question:

What is theologically wrong with asserting that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, according to Hawkins’s opponents — and mine? Muslims deny the Trinity and incarnation, and, therefore, the Christian God and Muslim God cannot be the same. But the conclusion doesn’t square. And Christians, though historically not friendly to either Judaism or the Jews, have rightly resisted that line of thinking when it comes to the God of Israel.

The important question is this:  Is someone who denies that the Christian and Muslim Gods are the same logically committed to denying that the Christian and Jewish Gods are the same?  Volf seems to think so.  To the  extent that an argument can be attributed to Volf it seems to be this:

A. There are good reasons to deny that the Christian and Muslim Gods are the same if and only if there are good reasons to deny that the Jewish and Christian Gods are the same.

B.  There are no good reasons to deny that the Jewish and Christian Gods are the same.

Ergo

C.  There are no good reasons to deny that the Christian and Muslims Gods are the same.

I think one can reasonably reject (A).  Volf writes,

For centuries, a great many Orthodox Jews have strenuously objected to those same Christian convictions: Christians are idolaters because they worship a human being, Jesus Christ, and Christians are polytheists because they worship “Father, Son and the Spirit” rather than the one true God of Israel.

It is arguable however that these great many Orthodox Jews have misrepresented the Christian convictions.  Christians do not worship a mere human being; they worship a being that is both human and divine.  So the charge of idolatry is easily turned aside.  And Christians are not polytheists since they explicitly maintain that there is exactly one God, albeit in three divine persons.   Trinitarianism is not tri-theism.

A Christian could say this:  The God of the ancient Jews and the God of the Christians is the same God; it is just that his attributes were more fully revealed in the Christian revelation.  The Christian revelation augments and supersedes the Jewish revelation without contradicting it.  Or did Jews before Christianity arose explicitly maintain that God could not be triune?  Did they address this question explicitly?  And did they explicitly maintain that Incarnation as Christians understand it is impossible? (These are not rhetorical questions; I am really asking!)  Suppose the answers are No and No.  Then one could argue that the Christian revelation fills in the Jewish revelation without contradicting it and that the two putatively distinct Gods are the same.  My knowledge of an object can be enriched over time without prejudice to its remaining numerically one and the same object.

Analogy:  the more Dale Tuggy 'reveals' about himself, the fuller my knowledge of him becomes.  Time was when I didn't know which state he hails from.  At that time he was to my mind indeterminate with respect to the property of being from Texas: he was to my mind neither from Texas nor not from Texas.  I simply had no belief about his native state.  But now I know he is from Texas.  There was no real change in him in this respect; there was a doxastic change in me. My knowledge of the man was enriched due to his 'self-revelation.'

Now why couldn't it be like that with respect to the O.T. God and the N.T. God?  We know him better now because we know him through Jesus Christ, but he is numerically the same One as we knew before. 

It is different with Islam.  It is arguably a Christian heresy that explicitly denies Trinity and Incarnation which (from the Christian point of view) are attributes God has revealed to us.  Islam takes a backward step.  Arguably, Islam's God does not exist since it is determined explicitly  to be non-triune and non-incarnated.  The God of the O. T. was not explicitly determined to be non-triune and non-incarnated; so there is no difficulty with the O.T. God being identical to the N. T. God.  But what if Jews now claim, or even before the Christ event claimed,  that their God is non-triune and non-incarnated?  Then their God does not exist.  This seems like a reasonable line for a Christian to take.  It involves no bigotry whatsoever.

Of course, these issues are exceedingly  difficult  and one cannot reasonably expect to reach any agreement on them among learned and sincere truth-seekers.  I am not being dogmatic above.  As before, I am urging caution and rejecting simple-minded solutions.  Volf's simple-mindedness and sloppy journalism gets us nowhere.  And his accusations of bigotry are deeply offensive and themselves an expression of politically correct bigotry.

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A Note on Analytic Style

The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental Divide.

"How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"

Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.

So we should try to be as clear as possible given the constraints we face. (In blogging, one of the constraints is the need to be pithy.) But it doesn't follow that one should avoid, or legislate out of existence, topics or problems that are hard to bring into focus. It would be folly to avoid God, the soul, Mr. Bradley's Absolute, the meaning of life and all the Big Questions just because it is hard to be clear about them. To give up metaphysics for logic on the ground of the former's messiness, makes no sense to me: the good of logic is instrumental, not intrinsic. (See Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.)   We study logic to help us resolve substantive questions. If all you ever do in philosophy is worry about such topics as the logical form of 'Everyone who owns a donkey beats it,' then I say you have not been doing philosophy at all, but something preliminary to it.

We are not here to waste our time on logical bagatelles and scholarly punctilios.  We are here to work out our intellectual and spiritual salvation with diligence.

Clarity, then, is a value. But it ceases to be one if it drives us to such extremes as the logical positivist's Verifiability Principle of cognitive significance, or the extreme of a fellow who once said that "If it cannot be said in the language of Principia Mathematica, then it can't be said." My response to that would be: so much the worse for the language of Principia Mathematica.

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Another Misrepresentation of Meinong

The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental Divide.

"How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"

Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.

So we should try to be as clear as possible given the constraints we face. (In blogging, one of the constraints is the need to be pithy.) But it doesn't follow that one should avoid, or legislate out of existence, topics or problems that are hard to bring into focus. It would be folly to avoid God, the soul, Mr. Bradley's Absolute, the meaning of life and all the Big Questions just because it is hard to be clear about them. To give up metaphysics for logic on the ground of the former's messiness, makes no sense to me: the good of logic is instrumental, not intrinsic. (See Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.)   We study logic to help us resolve substantive questions. If all you ever do in philosophy is worry about such topics as the logical form of 'Everyone who owns a donkey beats it,' then I say you have not been doing philosophy at all, but something preliminary to it.

We are not here to waste our time on logical bagatelles and scholarly punctilios.  We are here to work out our intellectual and spiritual salvation with diligence.

Clarity, then, is a value. But it ceases to be one if it drives us to such extremes as the logical positivist's Verifiability Principle of cognitive significance, or the extreme of a fellow who once said that "If it cannot be said in the language of Principia Mathematica, then it can't be said." My response to that would be: so much the worse for the language of Principia Mathematica.

On Writing Well: The Example of William James

This from a graduate student in philosophy:

I have always been an admirer of your philosophical writing style--both in your published works and on your blog. Have you ever blogged about which writers and books have most influenced your philosophical writing style?

Yes, I have some posts on or near this topic.  What follows is one from 21 September 2009, slightly revised.

............................

From the mail bag:

I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

One who can appreciate that this is good writing is well on the way to becoming a good writer. The idea is not so much to imitate as to absorb and store away large swaths of such excellent writing. It is bound to have its effect. Immersion in specimens of good writing is perhaps the only way to learn what good style is. It cannot be reduced to rules and maxims. And even if it could, there would remain the problem of the application of the rules. The application of rules requires good judgment, and one can easily appreciate that there cannot be rules of good judgment. This for the reason that the application of said rules would presuppose the very thing — good judgment — that cannot be reduced to rules. Requiring as it does good judgment, good writing cannot be taught, which is why teaching composition is even worse  in point of frustration than teaching philosophy. Trying to get a student to appreciate why a certain formulation is awkward is like trying to get a nerd to understand why pocket-protectors are sartorially substandard.

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial weaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

C. S. Lewis somewhere says something to the effect that reading one's prose out loud is a way to improve it. I would add to this Nietzsche's observation that

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry . . . (Gay Science, Book II, Section 92, tr. Kaufmann)

A well-mannered war, a loving polemic. There is a poetic quality to the James passage quoted above, but the lovely goddess of poetry is given to understand that truth trumps beauty and that she is but a handmaiden to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia. Or to coin a Latin phrase, ars ancilla philosophiae.

Finally, a corollary to the point that one must read good books to become a good writer: watch your consumption of media dreck. Avoid bad writing, and when you cannot, imbibe it critically.

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From the mail bag:

I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition? — he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta? — both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs? — he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal. (The Will to Believe, Dover 1956, pp. 202-203, emphases in original)

One who can appreciate that this is good writing is well on the way to becoming a good writer. The idea is not so much to imitate as to absorb and store away large swaths of such excellent writing. It is bound to have its effect. Immersion in specimens of good writing is perhaps the only way to learn what good style is. It cannot be reduced to rules and maxims. And even if it could, there would remain the problem of the application of the rules. The application of rules requires good judgment, and one can easily appreciate that there cannot be rules of good judgment. This for the reason that the application of said rules would presuppose the very thing — good judgment — that cannot be reduced to rules. Requiring as it does good judgment, good writing cannot be taught, which is why teaching composition is even worse  in point of frustration than teaching philosophy. Trying to get a student to appreciate why a certain formulation is awkward is like trying to get a nerd to understand why pocket-protectors are sartorially substandard.

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial weaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

C. S. Lewis somewhere says something to the effect that reading one's prose out loud is a way to improve it. I would add to this Nietzsche's observation that

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry. For it is an uninterrupted, well-mannered war with poetry . . . (Gay Science, Book II, Section 92, tr. Kaufmann)

A well-mannered war, a loving polemic. There is a poetic quality to the James passage quoted above, but the lovely goddess of poetry is given to understand that truth trumps beauty and that she is but a handmaiden to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia. Or to coin a Latin phrase, ars ancilla philosophiae.

Finally, a corollary to the point that one must read good books to become a good writer: watch your consumption of media dreck. Avoid bad writing, and when you cannot, imbibe it critically.

"And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us" (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, entering between the legs of a poor girl in a stable.  Just like one of us, a slob like one of us. The notion is so mind-boggling that one is tempted to credit it for this very reason, for its affront to Reason, and to the natural man, accepting it because it is absurd,  or else dismissing  it as the height of absurdity. A third possibility is to accept it despite its being absurd, and a fourth is to argue that rational sense can be made of it. The conflict of these approaches, and of the positions within each, only serves to underscore the mind-boggling quality of the notion, a notion that to the eye and mind of faith is FACT.

The Most High freely lowers himself, accepting the indigence and misery of material existence, including a short temporal career that ends with the ultimate worldly failure: execution by the political authorities.  And not a civilized Athenian execution by hemlock as was the fate of that other great teacher of humanity, but execution by the worst method the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.

In the Incarnation the Word nailed itself to the flesh in anticipation of later being nailed to the wood of the cross to suffer the ultimate fate of everything material and composite: dissolution. Christ dies like each of us will die, utterly, alone, abandoned.  But then the mystery: He rises again.  Is this the central conundrum of Christianity?  He rises, but not as a pure spirit.  He rises body and soul.

God is the Word ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God"); the Word becomes flesh; the flesh nailed to wood becomes dead matter and nothing Wordly or Verbal or Logical or Spiritual or Sense Bearing, and so next-to-nothing; but then the next-to-nothing rises and ascends body and soul to the Father by the power of the Father.  Christ rises bodily and ascends bodily.  A strange idea: bodily ascension out of the entire spatio-temporal-bodily matrix!  He ascends to the Father who is pure spirit.  So, in ascending, Christ brings matter, albeit a transformed or transfigured matter, into the spiritual realm which must therefore be amenable to such materialization. It must permit it, be patient of it.  The divine spiritual milieu cannot be essentially impervious to material penetration.

Before the creation and before the Incarnation of the Creator into the created order divine spirit had the power to manifest itself materially, and in the Incarnation the power not only to manifest itself materially but to become material.  The divine Word becomes flesh; the Word does not merely manifest itself in a fleshly vehicle.  It becomes that vehicle and comes to suffer the fate of all such vehicles, dissolution.  The divine spirit was always already apt for materialization: it bore this possibility within it from the beginning.  It was always already in some way disposed toward materialization.  On the other hand, matter was always already apt for spiritualization. 

We humans know from experience that we can in some measure spiritualize ourselves and indeed freely and by our own power.  We know ourselves to be spiritual beings while also knowing ourselves to be animals, animated matter, necessarily dependent on inanimate matter including air, water, dead plants and dead meat. (When an animal eats another animal alive, the first is after the matter of the second, not after its being animated.) 

Whether or not we exercise our severely limited power of self-spiritualization, we are spiritual animals whether we like it or not and whether we know it or not:  we think.  Each one of us is a hunk of thinking meat.  We are meaning meat.  How is this possible? The matter of physics cannot think.  But we are thinking matter.  This is the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us.  We live it and we experience it.

We could call it the 'The Little Incarnation.'  Mind is incarnated, enfleshed, in us.  The Little Word, the Little Logos, has always already been incarnated is us, separating us as by an abyss from the rest of the animals. Here, in us, we have an ANALOGY to the Incarnation proper.  In the latter, the Second Person of the Trinity does not take on a human body merely, but an individual human nature body and soul.  So I speak of an analogy.  Incarnation in the case of Christ is not a mere enfleshment or embodiment.  The Little Incarnation in us is the apparently necessary  enfleshment of our spiritual acts in animal flesh.

The mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in us reflects the mystery of the entanglement of spirit and matter in God.  Divine spirit is pregnant with matter, and accepting of the risen matter of Christ, but matter is also pregnant with divine spirit.  Mary is the mother of God.  A material being gives birth to God.  This is how the Word, who is God, is made flesh to dwell among us for our salvation from meaninglessness and abandonment to a material world that is merely material.

Matter in Mary is mater Dei.  Matter in Mary is mother and matrix of the birth of God.

For a different take on the meaning of Christmas, see my Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

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Are There Possible Worlds in which the Human Nature of Christ Exists Unassumed?

More on One Person-Two Natures: Response to Timothy Pawl

Incarnation Approached Subjectively: The Mystical Birth of God in the Soul

White Christmas

Do you dream of a white Christmas?  Then you must be a raaacist!

Merry Xmas!

When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten.

It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading. Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.

A reader suggests some further constructions:

For those who love the capitol of the Czech Republic: Pragmas. For Dutch Reformed theologians of Frisian extraction who think Christmas is silly: Hoekemas. For Dutch Reformed philosophy professors of Frisian extraction who like preserves on their toast: Jellemas. For fans of older British sci-fi flicks: Quatermas. For those who buy every special seasonal periodical they can get their hands on: Magmas. One could probably multiply such examples ad nauseum, so I won't.

How could an ACLU bonehead object to 'Xmas' so construed? No doubt he would find a way.

A while back I quipped that "Aporeticians qua aporeticians do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Enigmas."  My man Hodges shot back:  "But they do celebrate 'X-mas'! (Or maybe they 'cerebrate' it?)"

Merry Chimas to all, and to all a good night.

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Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning

When I was eight years old or so and first took note of the phrase 'Merry Xmas,' my piety was offended by what I took to be the removal of 'Christ' from 'Christmas' only to be replaced by the universally recognized symbol for an unknown quantity, 'X.' But it wasn't long before I realized that the 'X' was merely a font-challenged typesetter's attempt at rendering the Greek Chi, an ancient abbreviation for 'Christ.' There is therefore nothing at all offensive in the expression 'Xmas.' Year after year, however, certain ignorant Christians who are old enough to know better make the mistake that I made when I was eight and corrected when I was ten.

It just now occurs to me that 'Xmas' may be susceptible of a quasi-Tillichian reading. Paul Tillich is famous for his benighted definition of 'God' as 'whatever is one's ultimate concern.' Well, take the 'X' in 'Xmas' as a variable the values of which are whatever one wants to celebrate at this time of year. So for some, 'Xmas' will amount to Solsticemas, for burglars Swagmas, for materialists Lootmas, for gluttons Foodmas, for inebriates Hoochmas, and for ACLU extremists Antichristianitymas.

A reader suggests some further constructions:

For those who love the capitol of the Czech Republic: Pragmas. For Dutch Reformed theologians of Frisian extraction who think Christmas is silly: Hoekemas. For Dutch Reformed philosophy professors of Frisian extraction who like preserves on their toast: Jellemas. For fans of older British sci-fi flicks: Quatermas. For those who buy every special seasonal periodical they can get their hands on: Magmas. One could probably multiply such examples ad nauseum, so I won't.

How could an ACLU bonehead object to 'Xmas' so construed? No doubt he would find a way.

A while back I quipped that "Aporeticians qua aporeticians do not celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Enigmas."  My man Hodges shot back:  "But they do celebrate 'X-mas'! (Or maybe they 'cerebrate' it?)"

Merry Chimas to all, and to all a good night.

Christians and Muslims: Exactly One God, so the Same God?

Michael Rea, no slouch of a philosopher, makes the following surprising claim in the Huffington Post:

Christians and Muslims have very different beliefs about God; but they agree on this much: there is exactly one God. This common point of agreement is logically equivalent to [the] thesis that all Gods are the same God. In other words, everyone who worships a God worships the same God, no matter how different their views about God might be.

I am having trouble understanding this; perhaps the esteemed members of the MavPhil commentariat can help me.  Doesn't Rea's claim succumb to an elementary counterexample?

Suppose there is exactly one God, but that Tom worships a nonexistent God.  (Tom is perhaps a Mormon, or a Manichean, or a 'pastafarian.')  It would then not be the case that "everyone who worships a God worships the same God."  This is because the one existent God cannot be identical to a nonexistent God.  Therefore, if there is exactly one God it does not follow that all Gods are the same God.  What follows is merely that all existent Gods are the same God.  But that is surely trivial. It is as trivial as saying that if I own exactly one house, then all the houses I own are  the same house. (It is relevant to point out that if one owns x, then x exists whereas if one desires x, it does not follow that x exists. The relevance will emerge in a moment.)

How is the above trivial truth -- There is exactly one God if and only if all existent Gods are the same God -- supposed to help us with the question whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God?  It does not help at all: it may be that the God Muslims worship does not exist  while the God Christians worship does exist.  Or the other way around.

Surely this is a logically consistent trio of propositions:

The Christian (triune) God exists.
The Muslim (non-triune) God does not exist.
There is exactly one God.

And this one as well:

The Christian (triune) God does not exist.
The Muslim (non-triune) God does exist.
There is exactly one God.

So it could be that while there is, i.e., exists, exactly one God, Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God.  It could be that Muslims worship a nonexistent God.  Or it could be that Christians worship a nonexistent God.  Bear in mind that the one existent God cannot be both triune and not triune.  Cannot be: if God is triune, then essentially triune, and if essentially triune, then necessarily triune given that God is a necessary being.  The same modal upshot if God is not triune but unitarian.

So What Was Rea Thinking?

That 'worships' is a verb of success?  If 'worships' is a verb of success, then Rea's claim is true.  To say that 'worships' is a verb of success is to say that it follows from x's worshiping y that both x and y exist.  But if Rea assumes that 'worships' is a verb of success, then he simply begs the question.  The question is whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God on the assumption that they both hold, namely,  that there is exactly one God.  To assume that whatever one worships exists is equivalent under the just-named assumption to assuming that the Christian and Muslim must be worshiping the same God. But then the question is begged.

A Dilemma

Either 'worships' is a verb of success or it is not.  If it is a verb of success, then Rea begs the question.  But if he holds that 'worships' is not a verb of success, then he allows the possibility that either the Muslim or the Christian worships a God that does not exist.  Ergo, etc. 

'Worships' is not Reasonably Viewed as a Verb of Success

'Sees' has both a phenomenological use according to which it is not a verb of success and a use as a verb of success.  It is reasonably taken to have both uses.  But all I need for present purposes is the point that 'sees' is reasonably used as a verb of success: if I see x, then x exists.  On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. What's more, it is reasonable to say that there is a causal explanation of my being in a  state as of seeing a tree.  The explanation is that the state is caused (in part) by the tree which would not be the case if the tree did not exist.  Why do I know have a visual experience as of a tree?  Becuase there really is a tree that is causing me to have this very experience.  This makes some sense.

Does 'worships' have a reasonable use as a verb of success?  I say No.  God, being a pure spirit,  is not given to the senses; nor is he 'giveable' to the senses: he is not a possible object of sinnliche Anschauung in Kantian jargon.  We have no direct sensory evidence of the existence of God.  So it doesn't make much sense to try to explain my being in a worshipful state by saying that my being in this state is caused by God.  Nor does it make much sense to say that my use of 'God' succeeds in referring to God because God caused my use of the name. 

Worship as an Intentional (Object-Directed) State

In any case, to worship is to worship something, with no guarantee that the item worshiped exists.  In this respect worship is like belief:  to believe is to believe something with no guarantee that what one believes is the case.  If S knows that p, it follows that p is true; if S believes that p, it does not follow that p is true. The proposition believed may or my not be true without prejudice to one's being in a state of belief.

I say the same is true of worship/worshiping.  The object of worship may or may not exist without prejudice to one's being in a worshipful state with respect to it.  So it could be that Muslims worship a God that does not exist.  How might this come about? It would come about if nothing in reality satisfies the definite description that they associate wth their use of 'Allah' and equivalents.  And how could that be?  That would be so if the true God is triune.

Interim Conclusion

There are very deep issues here and I am but scratching the surface in bloggity-blog style.  But one thing is clear to me:  one cannot resolve the question whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God with "a flick of the philosophical wrist" to borrow a cute phrase from Lydia McGrew (my only distaff reader?) who dropped it in an earlier comment thread.

There is no 'quickie' solution here, with all due respect to Michael Rea and Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy et al. 

It is Christmas Eve.  Time to punch the clock.  I leave you with a fine rendition of Silver Bells.

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Immigration and Religion

Self-Control and Self-Esteem

"Self-control is infinitely more important that self-esteem."  (Dennis Prager)

Delete 'infinitely' and you have an important truth pithily and accurately expressed.  With self-control one can develop attributes that justify one's self-esteem.  Without it one may come to an untimely end as did Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, who brought about his own death through a lack of self-control.

Liberals, of course, preach an empty self-esteem. 

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Dale Tuggy's Round-Up of the Wheaton Dust-Up

This thing has really 'gone viral' as they say.  A tip of the holiday hat to Dale for his excellent compilation of hyperlinks and commentary.  Everybody and his uncle seems eager to jump into the fray, one that is at once bitterly political and deeply philosophical.

A moment ago I headed over to The Catholic Thing to drop a link there to my piece, but the combox to Dr. Beckwith's article has been closed at 170 comments.  Just as well.  That comment zone resembles the Augean stables and you are well-advised to don your hip-length boots before wading in.  "Don we now our gay apparel." Better yet, just read the material Dale has selected.

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Chris Hedges

I saw Chris Hedges on C-SPAN the other night.  Four years ago I heard him in the same venue and was much impressed by what he had to say about pornography. Oxymoronic as it may sound, I'd say Hedges is a decent leftist.  Decent but delusional, as witness this opening paragraph of The Creeping Villainy of American Politics:

The threefold rise in hate crimes against Muslims since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and the acceptance of hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse signal the morbidity of our civil society. The body politic is coughing up blood. The daily amplification of this hate speech by a commercial media whose sole concern is ratings and advertising dollars rather than serving as a bulwark to protect society presages a descent into the protofascist nightmare of racism, indiscriminate violence against the marginalized, and a blind celebration of American chauvinism, militarism and bigotry.

Who accepts hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse?  And, more importantly, what do leftists mean by 'hate speech'?  Suppose I call for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands, or, more precisely, a moratorium on the immigration of Muslims from any land.  Is my call 'hate speech'?  Not to any rational person.  You may disagree with this proposal but it is reasonable and prudent given the state of the world, and numerous reasons can be given in support of it.  It  reflects no hatred of Muslims, but a sober recognition of the threat they pose to our culture and values, a culture that we of course have a right to defend. 

This suggests that leftists use 'hate speech' in such a broad way that it includes any speech with which they disagree.  Should we conclude that leftists are opposed to free speech and open debate and free inquiry? I am afraid so. In this respect they are just like the orthodox Muslims they quite strangely defend.  They think they own dissent.  And surely it is passing strange for so many of them to defend Islam given the pronounced 'libertine wobble' of so many leftists.  Don't these people defend homosexual practices and alternative sexual lifestyles generally?  They would be the first to lose their heads under Sharia. Do our lefty pals perhaps have a death wish?

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Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

Francis Beckwith and Dale Tuggy, two philosophers I respect, answer in the affirmative in recent articles. While neither are obviously wrong, neither are obviously right either, and neither seem to appreciate the depth and difficulty of the question.  In all fairness, though, the two articles in question were written for popular consumption. 

Beckwith begins with an obvious point: from a difference in names one cannot validly infer a difference in nominata. 'Muhammad Ali' and 'Cassius Clay,' though different names, refer to the same person. The same goes for 'George Orwell' and 'Eric Blair.' They refer to the same writer.  So from the difference of 'Yahweh' and 'Allah' one cannot infer that Yahweh and Allah are numerically different Gods. Similarly, with 'God' and 'Allah.' Difference in names is consistent with sameness of referent. But difference in names is also consistent with difference of referents, a point that Beckwith does not make.   'Trump' and 'Obama' are different names and they refer to different people. 'Trump' and 'Zeus' are different names but only one of them refers, which implies that they do not have the same referent.  It may be that 'God' and 'Allah' are like 'Trump' and 'Zeus' or like 'Trump' and 'Pegasus.'

Another obvious point Beckwith makes is that if some people have true beliefs about x, and other people have false beliefs about x, it does not follow that there is no one x that these people have true and false beliefs about. Suppose Sam believes (falsely) that Karl Marx is a Russian while Dave believes (truly) that he is a German. That is consistent with there being one and same philosopher that they have beliefs about and are referring to.  Now suppose God is triune. Then (normative) Christians have the true belief that God is triune while (normative) Muslims have the false belief that God is not triune. This seems consistent with there being one God about whom they have different beliefs but to whom they both refer and worship.  But it is also consistent with a difference in referent.  It could be that when a Christian uses 'God' he refers to something while a Muslim refers to nothing when he uses 'Allah.' 

Of course, both Christian and Muslim intend to refer to something real with their uses of 'God' and 'Allah.'  But the question is whether they both succeed in referring to something real and whether that thing is the same thing.  It could be that one succeeds while the other fails.  And it could be that both succeed but succeed in referring to different items.

Consider God and Zeus.  Will you say that the Christian and the ancient Greek polytheist worship the same God except that the Greek has false beliefs about their common object of worship, believing as he does that Zeus is a superman who lives on a mountain top, literally hurls thunderbolts, etc.?   Or will you say that there is no one God that they worship, that the Christian worships a being that exists while the Greek worships a nonexistent object?  And if you say the latter, why not also say the same about God and Allah, namely, that there is no one being that they both worship, that the Christian worships the true God, the God that really exists, whereas Muslims worship  a God that does not exist?

And then there is the God of the orthodox Christian and the Deus sive Natura of Spinoza.  Would it make sense to say that the orthodox Christian and the Spinozist worship the same God?  Would it make sense for the orthodox Christian to give this little speech: 

We and the Spinozists worship the same God, the one and only God, but we have different beliefs about this same God.  We Christians believe (truly) that God is a transcendent being who could exist without having created anything, whereas Spinozists believe (falsely)  that God is immanent and could not have existed without having created anything.  Still and all, we and the Spinozists are referring to and worshiping exactly the same God.

Are the Christians and the Spinozists referring to one and the same being and differing merely about its attributes?  I say No!  The conceptions of deity are so radically different that there cannot be one and the same item to which they both refer when they say 'God' or Deus. (Deus is Latin for 'God.')

This is blindingly obvious in the case of the orthodox Christian versus the Feuerbachian.  They both talk and write about God.  Do they refer to one and same being with 'God' or 'Gott' and differ merely on his attributes?  This is impossible.  For the Feuerbachian, God is an unconsciously projected anthropomorphic projection.  For the orthodox Christian,  God is no such thing: he exists in reality beyond all human thoughts, desires, projections.  It's the other way around: Man is a theomorphic projection.  The characteristic Feuerbachian thesis, although it appears by its surface structure to be a predication ascribing a property to God, namely, the property of being an unconsciously projected anthropomorphic projection, is really a negative existential proposition equivalent to 'God does not exist.'  Compare:  'Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional item.'  Is this at logical bottom a predication?  Pace Meinong, it is not: in its depth structure it is a negative existential equivalent to 'Sherlock Holmes does not exist.'  To be precise, it entails the latter.  For it also conveys that the character Holmes figures in an extant piece of fiction which of course does exist.

To sum up the main point: there are concepts so radically different that they cannot be concepts of one and the same thing.  Some people say that thoughts, i.e., acts or episodes of thinking, are brain states.  Others object: "Thoughts are intentional or object-directed, whereas no physical state is object-directed; hence, no thought is a brain state."  This is equivalent to maintaining that the concept intentional state and the concept physical state cannot be instantiated by one and the same item.  So it cannot be the case that the mind-brain identity theorist and I are referring to the same item when I refer to my occurrent desiring of a double espresso. 

Dale Tuggy writes,

Christians and Muslims disagree about whether God has a Son, right? Then, they’re talking about the same (alleged) being. They may disagree about “who God is” in the sense of what he’s done, what attributes he has, how many “Persons” are in him, and whether Muhammad was really his Messenger, etc. But disagreement assumes one subject-matter – here, one god.

I think Tuggy is making a mistake here.  Surely disagreement about the properties of a putatively self-same x does not entail that there is in reality one and the same x under discussion, although it is logically consistent with it.

A dispute between me and Ed Feser, say, about whether our mutual acquaintance Tuggy has a son no doubt presupposes, and thus entails, that there is one and the same man whom we are talking about.  It would be absurd to maintain that there are two Tuggys, my Tuggy and Ed's where mine has a son and Ed's does not.  It would be absurd for me to say, "I'm talking about the true Tuggy while you, Ed, are talking about a different Tuggy, one that doesn't exist. You are referencing, if not worshipping, a false Tuggy."  Why is this absurd? Because we are both acquainted with the man ('in the flesh,' by sense-perception) and we are  arguing merely over the properties of the one and the same man  with whom we are both acquainted.  There is simply no question but that he exists and that we are both referring to him.  The dispute concerns his attributes.

But of course the situation is different with God.  We are not acquainted with God: God, unlike Tuggy, is not given to the senses.  Mystical intuition and revelation aside, we are thrown back upon our concepts of God.  And so it may be that the dispute over whether God is triune or not is not a dispute that presupposes that there is one subject-matter, but rather a dispute over whether the Christian concept of God (which includes the sub-concept triune) is instantiated or whether the Muslim concept (which does not include the subconcept  triune) is instantiated.  Note that they cannot both be instantiated by the same item similarly as the concept object-directed state and the concept physical state cannot be instantiated by one and the same item such as my desiring an espresso.

The point I am making against both Beckwith and Tuggy  is that it is not at all obvious which of the following views is correct:

V1: Christian and Muslim can worship the same God, even though one of them must have a false belief about God, whether it be the belief that God is unitarian or the belief that God is trinitarian.

V2: Christian and Muslim must worship different Gods precisely because they have mutually exclusive conceptions of God. So it is not that one of them has a false belief about the one God they both worship; it is rather that one of them does not worship the true God at all.

There is no easy way to decide rationally between these two views. We have to delve into the philosophy of language and ask how reference is achieved. How do linguistic expressions attach or apply to extralinguistic entities? How do words grab onto the (extralinguistic) world? In particular, how do nominal expressions work? What makes my utterance of 'Socrates' denote Socrates rather than someone or something else? What makes my use of 'God' (i) have a referent at all and (ii) have the precise referent it has?

It is reasonable to hold, with Frege, Russell, Searle, and many others, that reference is routed through, and determined by, sense: an expression picks out its object in virtue of the latter's unique satisfaction of a description associated with the referring expression, a description that unpacks the expression's sense. If we think of reference in this way, then 'God' refers to whatever entity, if any, that satisfies the definite description encapsulated in 'God' as this term is used in a given linguistic community.

Given that God is not an actual or possible object of (sense) experience, this seems like a reasonable approach to take. The idea is that 'God' is a definite description in disguise so that 'God' refers to whichever entity satisfies the description associated with 'God.' The reference relation is then one of satisfaction. A grammatically singular term t refers to x if and only if x exists and x satisfies the description associated with t. Now consider two candidate definite descriptions, the first corresponding to the Muslim conception, the second corresponding to the Christian.

D1: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo and is unitarian'

D2: 'the unique x such that x is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, created the world ex nihilo, and is triune.'

Suppose that reference is not direct, but routed through sense, or mediated by a description, in the manner explained above. It is easy to see that no one entity can satisfy both (D1) and (D2). For while the descriptions overlap, nothing can be both unitarian and triune. So if reference is routed through sense, then Christian and Muslim cannot be referring to the same being. Indeed, one of them is not succeeding in referring at all. For if God is triune, nothing in reality answers to the Muslim's conception of God. And if God is unitarian, then nothing in reality answers to the Christian conception.

And so, contrary to what Miroslav Volf maintains, the four points of commonality in the Christian and Muslim conceptions  do NOT "establish the claim that in their worship of God, Muslims and Christians refer to the same object." (Allah: A Christian Response, HarperCollins 2011, p. 110.) The four points are:

a. There is exactly one God.
b. God is the creator of everything distinct from himself.
c. God is transcendent: he is radically different from everything distinct from himself.
d. God is good.

For if reference to God is mediated by a conception which includes the subconcept triune or else the subconcept unitarian, then the reference cannot be to the same entity.  And this despite the conceptual overlap represented by (a)-(d).

A mundane example (adapted from Saul Kripke) will make this more clear. Sally sees a handsome man at a party standing in the corner drinking a clear bubbly liquid from a cocktail glass. She turns to her companion Nancy and says, "The man standing in the corner drinking champagne is handsome!" Suppose the man is not drinking champagne, but mineral water instead. Has Sally succeeded in referring to the man or not?

Argumentative Nancy, who knows that no alcohol is being served at the party, and who also finds the man handsome, says, "You are not referring to anything: there is no man in the corner drinking champagne. The man is drinking mineral water or some other bubbly clear beverage. Nothing satisfies your definite description. There is no one man we both admire. Your handsome man does not exist, but mine does."

Now in this example what we would intuitively say is that Sally did succeed in referring to someone using a definite description even though the object she succeeded in referring to does not satisfy the description. Intuitively, we would say that Sally simply has a false belief about the object to which she is successfully referring, and that Sally and Nancy are referring to and admiring the very same man.

But note how this case differs from the God case. Both women see the man in the corner. But God is not an object of possible (sense) experience. We don't see God in this life. Hence the reference of 'God' cannot be nailed down perceptually. A burning bush is an object of possible sense experience, and God may manifest himself in a burning bush; but God is not a burning bush, and the referent of 'God' cannot be a burning bush. The man in the corner that the women sees and admire is not a manifestation of a man, but a man himself.

Given that God is not literally seen or otherwise sense-perceived in this life, then, apart from mystical experience and revelation, the only way to get at God is via concepts and descriptions. And so it seems that in the God case what we succeed in referring to is whatever satisfies the definite description that unpacks our conception of God.

My tentative conclusion, then, is that (i) if we accept a description theory of names, the Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being when they use 'God' or 'Allah' and (ii) that a description theory of names is what we must invoke given the non-perceivability of God. Christian and Muslim do not refer to the same being because no one being can satisfy both (D1) and (D2) above: nothing can be both triune and not triune any more than one man can both be drinking champagne and not drinking champagne at the same time.

If, on the other hand, 'God' is a logically proper name whose reference is direct and not routed through sense or mediated by a definite description, then what would make 'God' or a particular use of 'God' refer to God?  If names are Millian tags, we surely cannot 'tag' God in the way I could tag a stray cat with the name 'Mungo.'

One might propose a causal theory of names.

The causal theory of names of Saul Kripke et al. requires that there be an initial baptism of the target of reference, a baptism at which the name is first introduced. This can come about by ostension: Pointing to a newly acquired kitten, I bestow upon it the moniker, 'Mungojerrie.' Or it can come about by the use of a reference-fixing definite description: Let 'Neptune' denote the celestial object responsible for the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus. In the second case, it may be that the object whose name is being introduced is not itself present at the baptismal ceremony. What is present, or observable, are certain effects of the object hypothesized. (See Saul Kripke Naming and Necessity, Harvard 1980 p. 79, n. 33 and p. 96, n. 42.)

As I understand it, a necessary condition for successful reference on the causal theory is that a speaker's use of a name be causally connected (either directly or indirectly via a causal chain) with the object referred to. We can refer to objects only if we stand in some causal relation to them (direct or indirect). So my use of 'God' refers to God not because there is something that satisfies the definite description or Searlean disjunction of definite descriptions that unpack the sense of 'God' as I use the term, but because my use of 'God' can be traced back though a long causal chain to an initial baptism, as it were, of God by, say, Moses on Mt. Sinai.

A particular use of a name is presumably caused by an earlier use. But eventually there must be an initial use. Imagine Moses on Mt. Sinai. He has a profound mystical experience of a being who conveys to his mind such exogenic locutions as "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me." Moses applies 'God' or 'YHWH' to the being he believes is addressing him in the experience. But what makes the name the name of the being? One may say: the being or an effect of the being is simply labelled or tagged with the name in an initial 'baptism.'

But a certain indeterminacy seems to creep in if we think of the semantic relation of referring as explicable in terms of tagging and causation (as opposed to in terms of the non-causal relation of satisfaction of a definite description encapsulated in a grammatically proper name). For is it the (mystical) experience of God that causes the use of 'God'? Or is it God himself who causes the use of 'God'? If the former, then 'God' refers to an experience had by Moses and not to God. Surely God is not an experience. But if God is the cause of Moses' use of 'God,' then the mystical experience must be veridical. (Cf. Richard M. Gale, On the Nature and Existence of God, Cambridge UP, 1991, p. 11.)

So if we set aside mystical experience and the question of its veridicality, it seems we ought to adopt a description theory of the divine names with the consequences mentioned in (i) above. If, on the other hand, a causal theory of divine names names is tenable, and if the causal chain extends from Moses down to Christians and (later) to Muslims, then a case could be made that Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all referring to the same God when they use 'God' and such equivalents as 'Yahweh' and 'Allah.'

So it looks like there is no easy answer to the title question. It depends on the resolution of intricate questions in the philosophy of language.

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Hate Crimes Against Jews and Muslims

Supposing we acquiesce in the 'hate crimes' terminology, here are some interesting statistics from the FBI for 2013:

Religious bias

Of the 1,223 victims of anti-religious hate crimes:

• 60.3 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.
• 13.7 percent were victims of anti-Islamic (Muslim) bias.
• 6.1 percent were victims of anti-Catholic bias.
• 4.3 percent were victims of bias against groups of individuals of varying religions (anti-multiple religions, group).
• 3.8 percent were victims of anti-Protestant bias.
• 0.6 percent were victims of anti-Atheist/Agnostic bias.
• 11.2 percent were victims of bias against other religions (anti-other religion). (Based on Table 1.)

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Trump and ISIS

The party line on Donald Trump is that he is an 'agent' of ISIS, a 'recruiter' for them.  A typically supine liberal-left line in response to a real threat. Spouting the party line as Hillary did in the recent Democrat 'debate' is analogous to saying in the late '30s or early '40s that any opposition to Hitler would only 'recruit' more Nazis.

There are already enough ISIS members and other Muslim terrorists to destroy our way of life.  There is no need to recruit more.  There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world.  On a very conservative estimate, 10% of them support Islamic law (Shari'a).  Other estimates are as high as 25%.  10% of 1.2 billion = 120 million, a sizeable number! But of course not all of them would participate actively in terrorist activities.   Suppose only 1% of them would.  That would still leave 1.2 million.  And of these, only a few need to get through with a little luck and the right weaponry.

The Left's Insensitivity to Danger boggles the mind of the rational.

As for the much-maligned Donald Trump, Conrad Black speaks in his defense.

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Unnecessary Conversation Avoided

Whether it is haiku or not, it is 17 syllables, and a good addition to the Stoic's armamentarium:

Avoid the near occasion
Of unnecessary conversation.

Avoiding the near occasion is not always practicable or even reasonable, but pointless conversation itself is best avoided if one values one's peace of mind.  For according to an aphorism of mine:

Peace of mind is sometimes best preserved by refraining from giving others a piece of one's mind. 

The other day a lady asked me if I had watched the Republican debate.  I said I had. She then asked me what I had thought of it.  I told her, "I don't talk politics with people I don't know extremely well."  To which her response was that she is not the combative type. She followed that with a comment to the effect that while in a medico's waiting room recently she amused herself by listening to some men talking politics, men she described as 'bigots.'

I then knew what I had earlier surmised: she was a liberal.  I congratulated myself on my self-restraint.  At that point I excused myself and wished her a good day.

Companion post: Safe Speech.  "No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Christmas Tunes

Merry Christmas everybody.  Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.  Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier.  It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon.  One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange.  A serious libation.  The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Italian joins the fight on the side of the bourbon.  Or you  can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters.  That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.

Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie

Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick.  A rarely heard alternate version.

Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas

Jeff Dunham, Jingle Bombs by Achmed the Terrorist.  TRIGGER WARNING! Not for the p.c.-whipped.

Porky Pig, Blue Christmas
Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas

Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells

Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate.  Don't miss this one if you are a Los Angeleno.  Great video.
Bob Dylan, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except

Tom Waits, Silent Night.  Give it a chance. 

A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.  

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Third-Person Singular Feminine Pronoun

Merry Christmas everybody.  Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.  Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier.  It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon.  One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange.  A serious libation.  The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Italian joins the fight on the side of the bourbon.  Or you  can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters.  That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.

Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie

Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick.  A rarely heard alternate version.

Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas

Jeff Dunham, Jingle Bombs by Achmed the Terrorist.  TRIGGER WARNING! Not for the p.c.-whipped.

Porky Pig, Blue Christmas
Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas

Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells

Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate.  Don't miss this one if you are a Los Angeleno.  Great video.
Bob Dylan, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except

Tom Waits, Silent Night.  Give it a chance. 

A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.  

Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta

"Here is Rhodes, jump here" (through the hoops of political correctness).  A graduate of Oriel College, Oxford University, sent me this statement concerning the Rhodes Must Fall petition.  A memorial to Cecil Rhodes, that is.  Can you say Der Untergang des Abendlandes?

"Here is Rhodes, jump here."  From Aesop's Fables #209, "The Boastful Athlete."  A man who had been off in foreign lands returns home.  He brags of his exploits.  He claims that in Rhodes he made a long jump the likes of which had never been seen before.  A skeptical bystander calls him on his boast:  Here's your Rhodes, jump here!

The moral?  Put your money where your mouth is.  Don't talk about it, do it!

Perhaps an erudite classicist such as Mike Gilleland could say more on this topic.  He would have to do at least the following:  dig up all the ancient sources in Greek and Latin; trace the saying in Erasmus and Goethe; comment on Hegel's variation on the saying in the Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts, explaining why he has saltus for salta; find and comment on Marx's comment on Hegel's employment of the saying.

Finally, if Alan Rhoda were to rename his cleverly titled, but now defunct, weblog Alanyzer -- and I'm not saying he should -- he might consider Hic Rhoda, Hic Salta.  He is a very tall man; I'm 6' 1'' and had to look up to see his face when I met him in Las Vegas some years back.  To jump over him would be quite a feat.

UPDATE 12/19:  Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace and friend and facilitator of bloggers, informs me that Dr. Gilleland has taken note of my call for an erudite classicist.  This bibliomaniac, antediluvian, and curmudgeon does not, however, consider himself "truly erudite."  If his self-deprecatory consideration is just, then he had me fooled.

As for Mr. Lull, here is a tribute to him.

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"Here is Rhodes, jump here."  From Aesop's Fables #209, "The Boastful Athlete."  A man who had been off in foreign lands returns home.  He brags of his exploits.  He claims that in Rhodes he made a long jump the likes of which had never been seen before.  A skeptical bystander calls him on his boast:  Here's your Rhodes, jump here!

The moral?  Put your money where your mouth is.  Don't talk about it, do it!

Perhaps an erudite classicist such as Mike Gilleland could say more on this topic.  He would have to do at least the following:  dig up all the ancient sources in Greek and Latin; trace the saying in Erasmus and Goethe; comment on Hegel's variation on the saying in the Vorrede zur Philosophie des Rechts, explaining why he has saltus for salta; find and comment on Marx's comment on Hegel's employment of the saying.

Finally, if Alan Rhoda were to rename his cleverly titled, but now defunct, weblog Alanyzer -- and I'm not saying he should -- he might consider Hic Rhoda, Hic Salta.  He is a very tall man; I'm 6' 1'' and had to look up to see his face when I met him in Las Vegas some years back.  To jump over him would be quite a feat.

UPDATE 12/19:  Dave Lull, argonaut nonpareil of cyberspace and friend and facilitator of bloggers, informs me that Dr. Gilleland has taken note of my call for an erudite classicist.  This bibliomaniac, antediluvian, and curmudgeon does not, however, consider himself "truly erudite."  If his self-deprecatory consideration is just, then he had me fooled.

As for Mr. Lull, here is a tribute to him.

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The Lapse of Laïcité: Cause and Effect

Alain Finkielkraut:

Laicity is the solution that modern Europe found in order to escape its religious civil wars. But contemporary Europe doesn’t take religion seriously enough to know how to stick to this solution. She has exiled faith to the fantastic world of human irreality that the Marxists called “superstructure”… thus, precisely through their failure to believe in religion, the representatives of secularism empty laicity of its substance, and swallow, for humanitarian reasons, the demands of its enemies.

I haven't read anything by Finkielkraut except the above and a few other excerpts translated and edited by Ann Sterzinger.  But that won't stop me from explaining what I take to be the  brilliant insight embedded in the above quotation. 

Laicity is French secularity, the absence of religious influence and involvement in government affairs.  It has had the salutary effect of preventing civil strife over religion.  But to appreciate why laicity is important and salutary one must understand that the roots of religion lie deep in human nature.  Religion is even less likely to wither away than the State. Leftists, however, are constitutionally  incapable of understanding that man by nature is homo religiosus and that  the roots of religion in human nature are ineradicable.  The Radicals don't understand the radicality (deep-going rootedness) of religion. (Radix is Latin for 'root.')  In their superficial way, leftists think that religion is merely "the sigh of the oppressed creature" (Marx) and will vanish when the oppression of man by man is eliminated, which of course will never happen by human effort alone, though they fancy that they can bring it about if only they throw enough people into enough gulags.  Leftists cannot take religion seriously and they don't think anyone else really takes it seriously either, not even Muslims.  They don't believe that most Muslims really do believe in Allah and divine origin of the Koran and the 72 black-eyed virgins and the obligation to make jihad.  They project their failure to understand religion and its grip into others.  See my Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise in which I report on the Sam Harris vs. Scott Atran debate.

The issue is not whether religion is true but whether it answers to deep human needs that cannot be met in any other way.  My point is not that leftists think that religion is false or delusional, although they do think it to be such; my point  that they don't appreciate the depth of the religious need even if it is a need that, in the nature of things, cannot be met.

Not understanding religion, leftists fail to understand how important laicity is to prevent civil strife over religion.  And so they don't properly uphold it. They cave in to the Muslims who reject it.  Why don't they understand the dire existential threat that radical Islam poses to European culture?  I suspect that it is because they think that Muslims don't really believe in all their official claptrap and what Muslims really want are mundane things such as jobs and material security and panem et circenses.

In nuce:  leftists, who are resolutely secular, fail to uphold the secularity that they must uphold if they are to preserve their loose and libertine way of life, and they fail to uphold it  by failing to understand the dangers of religion, dangers they do not understand because they fail to take religion seriously and to appreciate the deep roots it has in human nature.  Even pithier:

Leftists, whose shallow heads cannot grasp religion, are in danger of losing their heads to radical jihadi.  Cause and effect of the lapse of laicity.

Two quibbles with Finkielkraut.   First, it is not that leftists "do not believe in religion," but that they do not believe that religion is a powerful and ineradicable force in human affairs.  You don't have to believe in religion to believe facts about it.  Second, if I remember my Marx, the superstructure (Ueberbau) though a repository of fantastic ideas devoid of truth such as religious ideas and the ideas of bourgeois law and morality, also contains all ideology and therefore the 'liberating' Marxist ideology as well.  It too is a reflection of the Unterbau, the social base and the means of production.  So not everything  in the superstructure is "fantastic."  This conception leads to relativism, but that's not my problem.

Related:  Alain Finkielkraut vs. the End of Civility

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Hitchens on Falwell

The following entry has been languishing in the queue for years.  I just now finished it for what it's worth.

................

Which is worse, the fundamentalism of a Jerry Falwell or the snarling hatred of religion of a Christopher Hitchens, who, in his anti-Falwell diatribe, shows just how far someone who is a leftist about religion can sink? 

Readers of this blog know that I have little patience with fundamentalist forms of religion. But whatever one thinks of Falwell's views, he was a decent human being capable of compassion and forgiveness. (I recall with admiration the kindness and forbearance he displayed when he confronted his tormentor, the pornographer Larry Flynt, on Larry King Live.) Can one say that Hitchens is a decent human being after his unspeakably vicious attack on a dead man while he was still warm? I have in mind the matchbox quotation.  In "Faith-Based Fraud," Hitchens wrote:

     In the time immediately following the assault by religious fascism
     on American civil society in September 2001, he [Falwell] used his
     regular indulgence on the airwaves to commit treason. Entirely
     exculpating the suicide-murderers, he asserted that their acts were
     a divine punishment of the United States.

The problem with Falwell's statement was that he was in no position to know that the 9/11 attacks were divine punishment. What is offensive about such statements is the presumption that one is en rapport with the divine plan, that one has some sort of inside dope as to the deity's designs. In his credulousness and self-confidence, Falwell  displayed a lack of respect for God's transcendence and unsearchableness. But this is just part of what is wrong with fundamentalism, which is a kind of theological positivism. 

It is also offensive to hear some proclaim in tones of certainty that Hitchens is now no longer an atheist.  They know that God exists and persons survive bodily death? They know no such thing, any more than Hitchens knew the opposite.  Convictions, no matter how strong, do not amount to knowledge.  (Here is a quick little proof.  Knowledge entails truth.  So if A and B have opposite convictions, and convictions amount to knowledge, then one and the same proposition can be both true and not true, which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.)

But although Falwell's 9/11 statement can be criticized, he can't be criticized for making it. He had as much right to make that statement as Hitchens had for his cocksure proclamation that no God exists, not to mention his assaults on Mother Teresa and who all else.  After all, that was Falwell's view, and it makes sense within his system of beliefs. There was certainly nothing treasonous about Falwell's statement, nor did it "entirely exculpate the suicide-murderers." Perhaps Falwell was a theological compatibilist, one  who finds no contradiction in people acting freely in accordance with a divine plan.

So while we should certainly not follow Hitchens' nasty example and trash the dead, we should not go to the other extreme and paper over the foul aspects of Hitchens' personality.  And we should also give some thought to the extent to which his viciousness is an upshot of his atheism. 

For in the end, the atheist has nothing and can be expected to be bitter.  This world is a vanishing quantity and he knows it; and beyond this world, he believes, there is nothing.  That is not to say it isn't true.  But if you are convinced that it is true, then you must live hopelessly unless you fool yourself with such evasions as living for some pie-in-the-future utopia such as Communists and other 'progressives' believe in, or for some such abstraction as literature.

Nobody will be reading Hitchens in a hundred years.  He'll  be lucky if he is still read in ten years.

Have you ever heard of Joseph McCabe (1867-1955)?  Not until now. But he too was a major free-thinker and anti-religion polemicist in his day.  Who reads him now?

Can One Get Older Without Aging?

"My father is 95 years old except that he's dead."  Is this  a nonsensical thing to say? 

No.  Death is an entirely effective bar to aging: you can't age if you are dead.  But you can get older.  The sentence sounds like nonsense or a joke  because we tend to conflate aging with getting older.  That they are different is clear from the fact that some of us age faster than others while we all get older at the same rate.

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Here is the first comment on  Ross Douthat's December 16th column.  The comment has been awarded 'verified' status, meaning that ". . . it is earned based on a history of quality [read: high quality] comments."  Ready?

The following means Douthat knows he is neing dishinest, but it is debatable by he and his buddies, so ok, and, he is not accountable. It is like a talisman to negate reaponsibility for dishinonest: pure phony conservative. "Of course one can dispute how much of this was actually Obama’s fault, and argue over what might have been done differently. "

But anything to say, phony conservative hack style, liberals suck. Douthat's god.

And why is Trump popular?Cathartic howl? Typical cute Douthat rhetoric with all the depth teo dimensions can bring, yeah sure, like the nazis were a cathartic howl. Trump is popular, six months in, because he is reaping what the republican Party has sown and real american republican trash, his countrymen who Douthat respects less than Star Wars dolls,(Haravrd baby!) like the guy and think he is better than the other chump clown .1% lackeys. This, requires daily lies from Douthat and lie he does. 

Yet another proof that the only good NYT combox is a closed NYT combox.  Or: the best arguments against an open NYT combox are the contents of one.

As for the quality of the Opinion Pages themselves, they are piss-poor with only two or three exceptions, Douthat being one of them.  He is worth reading.  The aptronymically-appellated Charles Blow comes across as an affirmative action hire.  I saw him on C-SPAN once.  A very nice man with a beautiful wife, and I'm sure he means well.

By the way, if you are a conservative you ought to do everything in your power to defund the Left, and that includes not subscribing to the Rag of Record.

 

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Two Leftist Constraints on 'Conversation'

Only politically correct topics may be discussed.  So Eric Holder called for a 'conversation' on race as if we had never talked about this before.  But I don't recall him calling for a 'conversation' on immigration.

The other constraint is that 'conversation' must consist in an acquiescence by the conservative in the leftist's nonsense.  No dialog allowed.

So whatever you say about Donald Trump, we ought to give him this much:  he began a real conversation (no sneer quotes) about immigration.  And the RINOs are going to be dragged into it.

You don't like Trump's crudity, bombast, and exaggeration?  Me neither.  He is undoubtedly lacking in the gravitas department. But on immigration he is basically on the Right track.  For proposals more temperate and nuanced we may turn to thinkers such as Daniel Pipes.  See here.

Let the conversation (no sneer quotes) begin.  Let's see how serious you leftists are about real conversation.

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On Hitchens and Death

Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011.  Herewith, a meditation composed in August 2010, slightly revised.

................................................

I just caught the last third of an interview of Christopher Hitchens by Charlie Rose. Hitchens looks bad, the chemotherapy having done a nasty tonsorial number on him. But his trademark intellectual incandescence appears undiminished. 'Brilliant' is a word I don't toss around lightly, but  Hitch is one to whom it unarguably applies. Public intellectuals of his caliber are rare and it will be sad to see him go. Agree or disagree with him, it is discourse at his level that justifies the high regard we place on free speech.

In the teeth of death the man remains intransigent in his unbelief. And why not? He lived in unbelief and so it is only fitting that he should die in it as well. He lived for this life alone; it is fitting that he should die without hope. God and the soul were never Jamesian live options for him. To cop out now as debility and death approach must appear to him to be utterly contemptible, a grasping at straws, a fooling himself into a palliative illusion to ease the horror of annihilation.

For what he takes to be the illusion of immortality, Hitchens substitutes literary immortality. "As an adult whose hopes lay assuredly in the intellect, not in the hereafter, he concluded, 'Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and — since there is no other metaphor — also the soul.'" (Here)

But to the clearheaded, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitchens now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will drink the dust of oblivion in the fullness of time.

To live on in one's books is a paltry substitute for immortality, especially when one recalls Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's aphorism: Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, aus dem kein Apostel herausgucken kann, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt. "A book is a mirror: if an ape peers in, no apostle will look out." Most readers are more apish than apostolic.  The fame they confer cannot be worth much, given that they confer it.

To live on in one's books is only marginally better than to live on in the flickering and mainly indifferent memories of a few friends and relatives. And how can reduction to the status of a merely intentional object count as living on?

The besetting sin of powerful intellects is pride. Lucifer, as his name indicates, is or was the light-bearer. Blinded by his own light, he could see nothing beyond himself. Such is the peril of intellectual incandescence. Otherworldly light simply can't get through. One thinks of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and to a lesser extent Hitchens. A mortal man with a huge ego -- one which is soon to pop like an over-inflated balloon.

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of non-being. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Have you read Philip Larkin's Aubade?

What would Hitchens lose by believing? Of course, he can't bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could. Would he lose 'the truth'? But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter. People only think they do.  They bluster and whistle in the dark.  But suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system? How could truth be a value in a purely material world?

If materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it?  And if materialism is true, could truth even exist? It is not a physical thing or property.  It is not empirically detectable.  It is inherently mind-involving. 

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From C-Span's Book TV, 24 April 2013 (22 minutes).  A tip of the holiday hat to London Karl.

Should One Talk with those who Deny the Law of Non-Contradiction?

A local philosophy professor writes,

I often find myself among what might be called postmodern philosophers. They are willing to say things like "I don't accept the law of non-contradiction."  Does this seem to be sufficient enough to say that further conversation is not possible?

In general, yes.  Life is short, philosophy is long, and fools are many.  One shouldn't waste precious time debating with mush-heads, including  many in POMO precincts.  That being said, there are some discussions about LNC that I would engage in.

If a student sincerely wants to learn about LNC, then I would surely talk to him.

If a person doubts the truth of LNC, or wants to know how we know it to be true, then I would talk to him.

Also worthwhile are discussions with serious and well-informed people about the 'reach' of such logical principles as LNC.  The following sort of discussion I would take to be highly profitable:

Are the 'laws of thought' 'laws of reality' as well? Since such laws are necessities of thought, the question can also be put by asking whether or not the necessities of thought are also necessities of being. It is surely not self-evident that principles that govern how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and to others must also apply to mind-independent reality. One cannot invoke self-evidence since such philosophers as Nagarjuna and Hegel and Nietzsche have denied (in different ways) that the laws of thought apply to the real. (See here.)

As I read Aristotle, he too was aware of a possible  'gap' between thought and reality.

The Law of Non-Contradiction, in its property version, can be put like this:

LNC. (F)(x)~(Fx & ~Fx)

which is to say: for any property F-ness, and any object x, it is not the case that x is F and x is not F. For example, nothing is both red and non-red.

This is subject to the usual three qualifications: an object cannot be F and not F (i) at the same time, (ii) in the same respect, and (iii) in the same sense. Thus a ball could be both red and non-red at different times, or red and non-red in respect of different hemispheres, or in different senses: Jack can be both red and non-red at the same time if 'red' in its first occurrence refers to a color, and in its second occurrence to a political affiliation.  One can be a redskin without being a commie.

Now Aristotle was quite clear that first principles like (LNC) are non-demonstrable. They are so basic that they cannot be proven. Since a proof cannot be circular, (LNC) cannot be derived from itself or from any logically equivalent proposition. To use (LNC) to prove (LNC) would be to beg the question. It is also clear that no proof can have infinitely many inferential steps. So what justifies (LNC)? Is it perhaps unjustifiable, a dogmatic posit? Is it a groundless assumption?

One might just announce that (LNC) is (objectively) self-evident, that it is self-justifying, that it 'glows by its own epistemic light.' But then how respond to someone like Heraclitus who sincerely maintains that it is not self-evident?  If a proposition is subjectively self-evident, self-evident to one, it does not follow that it is objectively self-evident, self-evident in itself.

At Metaphysics Gamma, 3, 4, Aristotle can be read as using retortion to establish (LNC).  Since he cannot, on pain of begging the question, resort to a direct proof in the case of this most fundamental of all principles, "the surest principle of all," (1005b10) he must try to show that anyone who denies (LNC) falls into performative inconsistency. As I read Aristotle, the key idea is that (LNC) is " a principle one must have to understand anything whatever. . . ." (1005b15) It is a principle that governs all understanding, all definite and determinate speech.  So it is at least a transcendental principle in a roughly Kantian sense of 'transcendental.'

As such, (LNC) seems to function as a semantic constraint: one cannot mean anything definite or make any definite judgment unless one abides by, and thus presupposes, the principle that no subject of discourse both has and does not have a property at the same time and in the same respect. To counter the (LNC)-denier, Aristotle simply demands that the man say something, that he express the same idea to himself and to another, "for this much is necessary if there is to be any proposition (legein, dicere) at all." (1006a20) If the (LNC)-denier says nothing, then "he is no better than a plant" (1006a15) and one can ignore him. But if he says anything definite at all, then he makes use of (LNC). For suppose he asserts 'The arrow is at rest.' He thereby commits himself to 'It is not the case that the arrow is not at rest.' If he asserts both 'The arrow is at rest' and 'The arrow is not at rest,' then, far from making two assertions, he does not even make one. He expresses no definite thought since he violates a principle observance of which is necessary for making sense.

The idea here is that he who asserts something contradictory asserts nothing at all: a necessary condition of there being a definite thought, a definite proposition, is that (LNC) be satisfied. The retortion might be spelled out as follows. The denier states

2. (LNC) is false.

But in making this definite statement, a statement that opposes what the (LNC)-affirmer states, the (LNC) denier commits himself to

3. It is not the case that (LNC) is not false.

But the commitment to (3) is tantamount to an acceptance of (LNC). So the denier's performance -- his stating of (2) -- 'contradicts' the content of (2).

But what exactly does the retortion show? Does it show that (LNC) is true of reality, or does it show merely that it is true of thought-contents? Is it an ontological principle or is it merely a law of thought, a principle that governs how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and others? Is it an ontological principle or merely a transcendental one?  Is it perhaps true of only phenomenal reality but not of noumenal reality?

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Ron Radosh on Trumbo

Here.  Excerpts:

The film presents [Dalton] Trumbo as a hero and martyr for free speech, a principled rich Communist who nevertheless stands firm, sells his beautiful ranch for a “modest” new house in Los Angeles, and survives by writing film scripts -- most run of the mill but some major films (such as the Academy Award-winning Roman Holiday) -- using a “front” who pretended to be the writer.

[. . .]

While Trumbo was an interesting and colorful character, the film gives us the story of the Communists and the blacklist in the mold of the Ten’s own propaganda book published after their HUAC appearances. The book is Hollywood on Trial, which portrayed them as advocates of free speech who were defending the American Constitution, civil liberties, and American freedom itself.

[. . .]

In presenting this rosy picture, Trumbo avoids dealing with the actual nature of Communism and the role played by the CPUSA in Hollywood in the 1940s. It shows Trumbo and the others of the Ten who invoked the First Amendment as unadulterated heroes, and contrasts them with a group of nasty and brutish anti-Communist villains, including Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Roy Brewer, two conservative groups that supported a blacklist and opposed the Communists, and virtually all those in Hollywood who opposed Communism.

[. . .]

Trumbo was no defender of free speech. He was a serious Communist and a defender of Stalin and the Soviet Union.

[. . .]

He could not have claimed innocence of Stalin’s crimes. In 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin to a Party Congress, he told an old friend of his that he was not surprised, because he had read George Orwell, Koestler, James Burnham, Eugene Lyons and Isaac Don Levine, authors who told the truth about Soviet totalitarianism. In other words, Trumbo supported Stalin while knowing at the time that “Uncle Joe” was a monster and murderer.

[. . .]

Moreover, as the blacklist came to an end, Trumbo had time to reevaluate much of what he believed that led him to join the Communist Party. When my wife and I were doing research for our book Red Star Over Hollywood, we came across an article Trumbo had written but never published.

In this 1958 article, Trumbo told some frank truths about the Party -- truths which eventually led him to quit. You would never suspect this from Roach’s film. There is nothing about the Party accusing him of “white chauvinism” -- in today’s terms, racism. The CP, he told one old comrade, threw “a bucket of filth over me.” Moreover, he wrote that the Ten did not “perform historic deeds,” but took part “in a circus orchestrated by CP lawyers, all to save [ourselves] from punishment.”

He concluded that the blacklist took place not only because of the Committee, but because of the antics of the CP itself. In this article, he wrote that “the question of a secret Communist Party lies at the very heart of the Hollywood blacklist,” which is why Americans believed the Communists had something to hide. They lived in the United States, not Stalin’s U.S.S.R., and should have openly proclaimed their views and membership so that the American people could judge them for what they believed. Instead, they formed secret Leninist cells. The CPUSA should have been open and its members all known, he wrote, or the Communists in Hollywood should “not have been members at all.”

If I'm a Racist, then You're a Tribalist!

The following entry is from November, 2013.  One reason to repost it is because a couple of neo-reactionary conservatives have, to my surprise, asked me what is wrong with being a tribalist.  I had naively assumed that among philosophers at least  tribalism would be deemed a Bad Thing.  So I want to give them the opportunity to make a case for tribalism.  If they choose to respond, however, I hope they keep it pithy.  As one of my aphorisms has it:

Brevity is the soul of blog.

We live in a hyperkinetic age.  Short incisive comments are better than long rambling ones, leastways in a venue such as this.

Recent examples of what I am calling tribalism are Juan Williams' and Colin Powell's refusal to condemn the virulently anti-cop thugs that parade under the banner of Black Lives Matter while chanting "Pigs in a blanket, fry 'em like bacon."  It is as if these otherwise outstanding gentlemen identify as blacks first and as Americans second. Tribalism was on prominent display among the jurors in the O. J. Simpson trial.  It is evinced by women who will vote for Hillary because she is a woman.  The whiff of tribalism is about Geraldo Rivera, whom I greatly respect by the way, when he says things that suggest that he identifies as Hispanic first and as American second.

By the way, let me say that my opposition to tribalism is entirely consistent (as it seems to me) with wanting to keep out of our country those who would destroy it and its culture, at the present time these being radical (or, if you will, orthodox) Muslims, Muslims who support sharia and have no intention of assimilating to American culture and accepting our values. There is nothing tribal about standing up for Western values, values I have already argued are universal even if not universally recognized.  The fact that dead white men discovered and promoted these values does not make them racially white values: they are universal values contributory to everyone's flourishing white or black, brown or yellow or red.  And let's not leave out pinkos.  We're inclusive! 

.......................................................

Suppose you present careful arguments against Obama's policies and ideas, foreign or domestic or both.  Some black is sure to jump up and shout, "Racist!  You hate him because he's black!"  Oprah Winfrey is the latest example.  There is no point in arguing with such an idiot, argument being fruitful only with those who inhabit the plane of reason; but you must respond.  I suggest "If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist."

If I oppose Obama's policies because he is black, then you support them because he is black.  If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist!  If his being black is no reason to oppose his policies, then his being black is no reason to support them either.  If racism is bad, then so is your knee-jerk tribalism.

One of the sad facts about American blacks is that many if not most  of them cannot seem to transcend their tribal identification.  They identify, not as human beings or as rational animals or as Americans, but as blacks.  That tribal identification  so dominates their consciousness that even the calmest and most polite arguments against Obama's ideas cannot be comprehended except as personal attacks on their man who is, first and foremost, a black man, even though he is half-white.  That tribal identification was also at play in the O. J. Simpson trial.  The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence of his guilt and yet the black-dominated jury acquitted him of double homicide. 

My advice to blacks:  if you want to be judged by "the content of your character and not the color of your skin," to adapt the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., then drop the tribal identification.  if you want to be treated as individuals, then stop identifying as members of a racial group. Why is your race so important to you?  Are you perhaps raaacists?

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Invective

Suppose you present careful arguments against Obama's policies and ideas, foreign or domestic or both.  Some black is sure to jump up and shout, "Racist!  You hate him because he's black!"  Oprah Winfrey is the latest example.  There is no point in arguing with such an idiot, argument being fruitful only with those who inhabit the plane of reason; but you must respond.  I suggest "If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist."

If I oppose Obama's policies because he is black, then you support them because he is black.  If I'm a racist, then you are a tribalist!  If his being black is no reason to oppose his policies, then his being black is no reason to support them either.  If racism is bad, then so is your knee-jerk tribalism.

One of the sad facts about American blacks is that many if not most  of them cannot seem to transcend their tribal identification.  They identify, not as human beings or as rational animals or as Americans, but as blacks.  That tribal identification  so dominates their consciousness that even the calmest and most polite arguments against Obama's ideas cannot be comprehended except as personal attacks on their man who is, first and foremost, a black man, even though he is half-white.  That tribal identification was also at play in the O. J. Simpson trial.  The prosecution presented a mountain of evidence of his guilt and yet the black-dominated jury acquitted him of double homicide. 

My advice to blacks:  if you want to be judged by "the content of your character and not the color of your skin," to adapt the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., then drop the tribal identification.  if you want to be treated as individuals, then stop identifying as members of a racial group. Why is your race so important to you?  Are you perhaps raaacists?

San Bernardino, ISIS, Islam, and Refugees

A measured statement from the Christian evangelical camp by Mark Tooley.  Excerpt:

At the very least, Christian immigration advocates should urge U.S. immigration policies that strongly prohibit persons who reject American democratic principles.  Over one hundred years ago immigration policies screened against anarchist sympathies, which murderously raged in Europe.  Later U.S. policies screened against Bolshevism.  Of course, the U.S. screened against Nazi and Fascist sympathizers.  So too it should protect against adherents of Islamist theocratic political supremacy.

This should strike one as supremely self-evident unless one is  a hate-America leftist as are too many people in high places.  I don't need to name names.

(That's a curious expression, isn't it?  If I write or say a name, I haven't named it.  I have named the bearer of the name.  For example, if I write 'Obama,' I haven't named that name; to name that name I would have to write something like, " 'Obama'. ")

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David Horowitz on Donald Trump

Here:

Donald Trump’s great contribution is saying the unsayable; putting things on the table that would otherwise be buried; calling a spade a spade in a time when political correctness has made us unable to discuss things that have to do with our basic national survival.  This is the crux of the issue.  Every time he creates a controversy like this he also tells this country that its emperors, Republican and Democrat, have no clothes. That they prefer propriety over defending the country.  That they are dedicated only to keeping the lid on a cauldron of threat and challenge they have allowed to boil over.

This is why Trump is so popular.  This is why people overlook his gratuitous insults, exaggerations, egomania, and all the rest.  Clearly, a moratorium on Muslim immigration is just common sense given the Islamic threat and the incompetence of our leaders in dealing with it.  But no mainstream Republican  has the courage to call for it.  They are, let us say, 'pc-whipped.'  One of those whom the cognitive aberration known as political correctness has infected is former Vice President Cheney.  Here is Diana West on Cheney:

Cheney says that Trump's proposed ban "goes against everything we believe in," and cites "religious freedom" specifically, which, he notes, is a "very important part of our history."

It should be (but isn't) self-evident by now: Continued Islamic immigration will ensure that "religious freedom" is exactly that  -- "part of our history." In the past. Something we read about in books. It is a clear-cut matter, even if seems to have escaped the vice president's ken (despite his waging two wars in the Islamic world): There is no religious freedom in Islam. Nada. Zilch. Rien. Geert Wilders isn't kidding when he says, the more Islam in society, the less freedom there is in society.

This central feature of Islamic law, this central feature of Islam -- namely, the absence of religious freedom --  turns the vice president's appeal for Muslim immigration on the grounds of our history of "religious freedom" into so much emotionalism, so much puffery. In other words, it may puff up the old self-esteem -- what a kindly, generous, beneficent personage am I -- but when the inner smile dies our republic and Constitutional liberties are still imperiled by Islamic immigration waves that carry with them a transformative sharia demographic.

To put it very simply: you cannot grant religious freedom to a religion one of whose central aims is to stamp out all freedom of religion.

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Flannery O'Connor on Pious Language

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), p. 227 in a letter to Maryat Lee dated 28 June 1957:

I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the realities it hides.

To the unbeliever, pious language is just so much cant and hypocrisy and offensive for these reasons.  At funerals for worldly persons one sometimes hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord.  This may prove sickening to the unbeliever.  Here is someone who spent his whole life on the make.  And now you portray him as eager to meet his Maker?  Or a nominal Catholic who never prayed the rosary in his life is set  in an open casket with a rosary interlaced between his fingers.  Disgusting!

The conventional lukewarm believer, for whom there is a tendency to conflate formulas and usages with the underlying realities, will not be offended.  He does not take religion all that seriously in any case.  It is a matter of habit and acculturation and respectability together with a vague sense that it might be a good idea to attend services as a sort of insurance  lest any of the stuff about heaven and hell turn out to be true.

And then there is the person of genuine faith, for whom faith is not a convenience or a crutch or cheap consolation or an insurance policy or a mere matter of habit or acculturation or respectability.  Such a person aims to penetrate through the formulas and usages to the transcendent realities and is offended by conventional piety for the right reason.

Related:  Afterlife Again

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The Latest Low in Liberal-Left Lunacy

Via Breitbart:

Students at Lebanon Valley College (LVC) in Pennsylvania are demanding Lynch Memorial Hall on campus be renamed, due to the potential traces of racism associated with the word “lynch.”

[. . .]

Michael Schroeder, an associate professor of history, said about LVC, “We’re not an island but sometimes it feels like an island because it’s such a rural and bucolic setting. But we’re clearly caught up in the same currents that the rest of the country is.”

Schroeder added he supports the goals of the students making the demands.

“Students here tend to be relatively quiescent, but this year there’s a disproportionately large number of students of color and they’re feeling marginalized and silenced,” he said.

The stupidity of the students making this ridiculous demand, though deplorable, is perhaps excusable, but not the abdication of authority on the part of the history professor.  The man is a despicable fool and probably a coward.  You don't acquiesce in a demand like this, you point out the obvious.  The name 'Lynch' is precisely a name and not a verb, and has nothing to do with lynching. 

You point out that critical thinking, which is part of what should be taught in college, is not the association of ideas. 

Does this fool think that Loretta Lynch, the present Attorney General of the U. S. should change her name?  Does he think she is a 'traitor to her race' for bearing this name?

And then there is the utter incoherence of his final remark.  If there is a disproportionately large number of "students of color," how is it that they "feel marginalized and silenced"?

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

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Thinking Clearly About Terrorist and Non-Terrorist Gun-Related Deaths

Robert Paul Wolff writes,

Fourteen people were murdered in San Bernardino, and almost two dozen were injured, several critically. That is perfectly awful. Since September 11, 2001, I believe almost three score people have been killed in the United States in similar terrorist attacks, or so one television commentator asserted. The number sounds about right. During those same fourteen years, 120,000 Americans have been killed by guns (including those who killed themselves, just to be clear .) I cannot imagine any rational mode of discourse that treats the former number as somehow more important than the latter number. And yet, people who would pass most tests for sanity, if not intelligence, are eager to take dramatic steps to prevent another San Bernardino although they would not even consider equally vigorous steps to diminish, say by half, the number of deaths from firearms in the next fourteen years. [Emphasis added.]

Let us first note that Wolff conveniently begins his count after 9/11.  The Islamic terrorism of that day  resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people and the injuries of 6,000 + others.^[107] That adds up to around 9,000 casualties.  As for the numbers Wolff cites, I will assume that they are correct.

Let us also note the phrase "killed by guns."  But of course no gun has ever killed anyone.  The plain truth is that people kill people and other animals often with guns, but also with box cutters, jumbo jets, and so on.  Surely the good professor will grant the distinction between weapon and wielder. Weapons are morally neutral; wielders are typically not.

The question is whether it is rational to take dramatic steps to prevent another terrorist attack while taking no steps (beyond the many steps that already have been taken) to prevent further non-terrorist gun deaths, given that since 9/11 the number of gun-related non-terrorist deaths is much smaller than the number of gun-related terrorist deaths.

Wolff is maintaining that it is not rational.  I say it is rational, and that Wolff's approach to the issue is not rational.

Wolff considers only the numbers of gun-related deaths while abstracting entirely from the motives of the gun-wielders and the effects that the deaths due to terror have on other people and the society at large.  But this is a vicious abstraction.   Terrorists aim to spread terror and disrupt civil society by slaughtering as many noncombatants as possible in unpredictable ways.  They have a political agenda. Terrorism, unlike crime, is essentially political and essentially public.  But the sorts of crimes that drive up the gun death numbers often occur in private and the disruption they cause is miniscule compared to that caused by terrorists.

For example, non-terrorist suicides, as opposed to suicide bombers, directly affect only themselves and almost never act from political considerations. And the same goes for mafiosi and other organized crime figures who 'whack' competitors and potential witnesses and 'rats.'  The last thing they want is publicity. They are not motivated by political ideals or goals.  The Lufthansa heist was about making a big score and nothing more.   This holds too for ordinary criminals who kill each other and potential witnesses.  And similarly for gang-bangers and drug dealers and gun-related crimes of passion.  And there are the so-called 'accidental' shootings as when a careless gun owner leaves a loaded pistol where a child can find it or proceeds to clean a loaded gun. 

So while the number of non-terrorist gun-related deaths of Americans is much higher over the time-frame Wolff arbitrarily chose than the number of terrorist gun-related deaths, that fact plays a minor role in any rational assessment of the threat of terrorism.  Part of being rational is thinking synoptically, taking in the whole of a situation in its many aspects, and not seizing upon one aspect. 

One cannot reasonably abstract from the political agenda of terrorists and the effects even a few terrorist events have on an entire society.  Ask yourself: has your life changed at all since 9/11?  It most certainly has if you travel by air whether domestically or internationally.  Terrorists don't have to kill large numbers to attain their political goal and wreak large-scale disruption.  The Tsarnaev attack on the Boston Marathon shut down the city for a few days.  Same with Paris, San Bernardino, Madrid, London, etc.    

There is also the obvious point that jihadis would kill millions if they could.  Would they use nukes against the West if they could? Of course they would. 

Why are leftists so insensitive to clear and present dangers?  Why are they so eager to deflect attention from them by bringing up gun control and  dubious dangers such as 'climate change'?

Here is a theory.  Leftists favor losers and underdogs.  Terrorists are losers and underdogs both as terrorists and as Muslims. (Not all Muslims are terrorists but almost all terrorists at the present time are Muslims.)  So leftists downplay the terrorist threat.  They downplay it because losers and underdogs are their clients.  To them, the terrorist 'frontlash' is as nothing compared to the 'Islamophobic' backlash of the bigots, rubes, and racists of fly-over country.  This helps account for why leftists downplay the terrorist threat.

But why do they try to steer the debate away from terrorism to gun control?  Part of it has to be that guns and private gun ownership represent everything leftists hate such as self-reliance, individual responsibility, patriotism which they dismiss as 'jingoism,' limited government, rural people  and small-town folk, and conservative attitudes which leftists perceive as racist, bigoted, xenophobic, nativist, nationalist, fascist, etc.  Private gun ownership stands in the way of their totalitarian agenda.  This is why they continually call for gun control when we have plenty of it already.  They talk as if there is no gun control.  This is because what they mean by 'gun control' is confiscation of all or almost all firearms including all semi-automatic pistols and long guns.

Of course there is much more to it than this.  Leftists are anti-religion unless the religion is Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of  theism," (Schopenhauer) the religion of losers and underdogs, the gang religion.  As anti-religion, leftists are against God, the soul, and the freedom of the will.  Not believing in freedom of the will, they don't believe in moral evil -- which is perhaps their deepest error.  People are nothing but deterministic systems and products of their environment.  Part of the environment is guns.  Hence the repeated call to "get guns off the street"as if guns are just laying around on our highways and byways.  Not believing in free agency, leftists displace agency onto inanimate non-agents such as guns.  And so they think the solution is to get rid of them.

And of course this only scratches the surface.  But the sun is setting and battling the Wolff Man and his bullshit has conjured up a powerful thirst in this philosopher.  Time for a beer!

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Did You Know that there are Climate Heretics?

Malcolm Pollack quotes extensively from Dr. Judith Curry, climatologist, about whom Scientific American published an article in 2010 entitled, "Climate Heretic Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues." 

If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science.  Or am I exaggerating?  By how much?

One thing is clear: talk of heresy and heretics has no place in the hard sciences.  If a 'science' has heretics, then it is no hard science.  Current climate 'science' is science only by analogy to a serious science such as physics.  And this for two reasons.  First, it is heavily infected with ideology.  Second, climatology falls short of strict science if strict science must satisfy all of the following:

1. Clearly defined terminology.
2. Quantifiability.
3. Highly controlled conditions. "A scientifically rigorous study maintains direct control over as many of the factors that influence the outcome as possible. The experiment is then performed with such precision that any other person in the world, using identical materials and methods, should achieve the exact same result."
4. Reproducibility. "A rigorous science is able to reproduce the same result over and over again. Multiple researchers on different continents, cities, or even planets should find the exact same results if they precisely duplicated the experimental conditions."
5. Predictability and Testability. "A rigorous science is able to make testable predictions."

You need to study Malcolm's post.

And then to further clarify your thoughts, study my  Global Warming: Questions that Need Distinguishing.

UPDATE

Malcolm sends this:

Thanks for all the recent linkage. This climate business, in particular, really winds my stem. One thought about your post - you wrote:

If Islam is an anti-Enlightenment political ideology masquerading as a religion, then current climatology is an anti-capitalist political ideology masquerading as an empirical science.

I'd go one level deeper: I think, in fact I am completely certain, that current climatology is a religion masquerading as an anti-capitalist ideology masquerading as an empirical science. Plenty of people have done the spadework to make a persuasive case that the modern Left is actually a secular religion that continues, in more or less a straight line, the "mission into the wilderness" that so animated the Puritans. I'm thinking, for example, of Paul Gottfried's Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy, George Kenna's outstanding The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, and pretty much all of Mencius Moldbug. (By the way, if you want to get to grips with "neoreaction", you really have to read some Moldbug, if you haven't already. A great place to start is here.)

I know we may trip on the definition of "religion", but global warmism has all the features, save one, of a good universalist religion: sin, atonement, redemption, salvation, indefinite time-frames, and unfalsifiability (if the 19-year pause, the expanding Antarctic icecaps and the consistent failure of all the models to make even moderately accurate predictions don't do it, I suspect nothing will).  It also happens to coincide very satisfyingly with the "progressive" goals of centralized power and a general sort of "boffinocracy", if you'll forgive the coinage.

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Some history.

I Feel a Little Guilty . . .

. . . at deriving so much intellectual stimulation from the events of the day.  It is fascinating to watch the country fall apart. What is a calamity for the citizen, however, is grist for the philosopher's mill. Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a).  And if the philosopher is an old Platonist who has nearly had his fill of the Cave and its chiaroscuro, he is ever looking beyond this life, and while in no rush to bid it a bittersweet adieu, is not affrighted at the coming transition either.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.  The old Platonist owl lives by the hope  that the dusk of death will lead to the Light, a light unmixed with darkness.

National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however; it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, wisdom  arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.

Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey -- no longer green and full of life.  And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane.   The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood.  Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight.  What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.

The consolations of philosophy are many.

On the other hand, it ain't over until it's over, and as citizens we must fight on, lest our spectatorship of all time and existence suffer a premature earthly termination.  The joys if not the  consolations of philosophy are possible only in certain political conditions.  We are not made of the stern stuff of Boethius though we are inspired by his example.

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Political and Anti-Left Linkage

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

American Sniper

What is to be Done? The Dark Side of Diversity

What is to be done about the threat of radical Islam?  After explaining the problem, Pat Buchanan gives his answer:

How do we deal with this irreconcilable conflict between a secular West and a  resurgent Islam?

First, as it is our presence in their world that enrages so many, we should  end our interventions, shut down the empire and let Muslim rulers deal with  Muslim radicals.

Second, we need a moratorium on immigration from the Islamic world.  Inevitably, some of the young we bring in, like the Tsarnaevs, will yield to  radicalization and seek to strike a blow for Islam against us.

What benefit do we derive as a people to justify the risks we take by opening  up America to mass migration from a world aflame with hatred and hostility over  race, ethnicity, culture, history and faith?

Why are we bringing all of the world's quarrelsome minorities, and all the  world's quarrels with them, into our home?

What we saw in Boston was the dark side of diversity. 

Buchanan is right.  We will never be able to teach the backward denizens of these God-forsaken regions how to live.  And certainly not by invasion and bombing.  Besides, what moral authority do we have at this point?  We are a country  in dangerous fiscal, political, and moral decline. The owl of Minerva is about to spread her wings. We will have our hands full keeping ourselves afloat for a few more years.  Until we wise up and shape up, a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands is only common sense.

Common sense, however, is precisely what liberals lack.  So I fear things will have to get much worse before they get better.

Related articles

Michael Walzer, "Islamism and the Left"

Explaining the Obama Admin's Refusal to Identify the Threat as Islamic

Stop Whining, Bostonians: The Great Blizzard of '78 was Worse

"No Religious Test"

In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Does it follow that the U. S. Constitution allows a Muslim citizen who supports sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office?  No!  For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words.  Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible.  On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.

It is important to realize that Islam is as much  an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion.  Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices.

UPDATE 1

I just heard Marco Rubio refer to "no religious test" and Article VI in connection with Muslim immigration.  But this shows deep confusion on his part.  The U. S. Constitution affords protections to U. S. citizens, not to non-citizens.

UPDATE 2

From a reader:

I don’t follow your reasoning in the “’No Religious Test’” post. I have no idea what “…no religious Test shall ever be required” means if not that someone is permitted to run and be elected regardless of his religious views. It doesn’t mean we have to vote for him, or that his religious views can’t be criticized, or that his own attempts to give state sanction to his religious beliefs and practices can pass Constitutional muster. As you allusively note, the Establishment clause prevents Sharia law or any other distinctively religious practice from becoming the law of the land. But legally preventing the pro-Sharia Muslim from getting what he wants doesn’t legally prevent him from getting elected in the first place.

My reader assumes that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions.  I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the "no religious Test" provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all.  Damn near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody.  Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion.  Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of 'religion.'  I have heard it said that atheism is a religion.  Surely it isn't.  Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion?  Arguably not.  Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy.  Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam,  is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.  How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion. 

The point here is that "religious" in ". . . no religious Test shall ever be required" is subject to interpretation.  We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles.

My reader apparently thinks that since the Establishment Clause rules out Sharia, that there is no harm in allowing a Sharia-supporting Muslim, i.e., an orthodox Muslim, not a 'radicalized' Muslim,  to become president.  But this is a naive and dangerous view given that presidents have been known to operate outside the law.  (Obama, for example.)  It seems obvious to me that someone who shows contempt for our Constitution should not be allowed anywhere near the presidency.

Related articles

There is No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

A Reason to Curtail Immigration from Muslim Lands

On the Tombstone of the USSR

"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer tr., p. 242)

Related articles

Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

The Extremism of Simone Weil

Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

How Will Death Find Us?

We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used.  We ought to heed the following lines from St. Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:

Let us put away these vain and empty concerns.  Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth.  Life is hard, and death is uncertain.  It may carry us away suddenly.  In what state shall we leave this world?  Where must we learn what we have neglected here?  Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence?  What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself?  This too must be investigated.

This too must be investigated.  For as Blaise Pascal remarks, "It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal."  

There are Only 10 Kinds of People in the World

Those who understand binary and those who don't. 

(Joked swiped from Malcolm Pollack.  It's a good one! And so are his recent posts. )

The programmer's joke has an interesting property: it is writable but not sayable.  Other jokes are sayable but not writable.

What comes between fear and sex? Fünf.

Profiling, Prejudice, and Discrimination

Everybody profiles.  Liberals are no exception.  Liberals reveal their prejudices by where they live, shop, send their kids to school, and with whom they associate.  

The word 'prejudice' needs analysis.  It could refer to blind prejudice: unreasoning, reflexive (as opposed to reflective) aversion to what is other just because it is other, or an unreasoning pro-attitude toward the familiar just because it is familiar.  We should all condemn blind prejudice.  It is execrable to hate a person just because he is of a different color, for example. No doubt, but how many people do that?  How many people who are averse to blacks are averse because of their skin color as opposed to their behavior patterns? Racial prejudice is not, in the main, prejudice based on skin color, but on behavior. 

'Prejudice' could also mean 'prejudgment.'   Although blind prejudice is bad, prejudgment is generally good.  We cannot begin our cognitive lives anew at every instant.  We rely upon the 'sedimentation' of past experience.  Changing the metaphor, we can think of prejudgments as distillations from experience.  The first time I 'serve' my cats whisky they are curious.  After that, they cannot be tempted to come near a shot glass of Jim Beam. They distill from their unpleasant olfactory experiences a well-grounded prejudice against the products of the distillery.

My prejudgments about rattlesnakes are in place and have been for a long time.  I don't need to learn about them afresh at each new encounter with one. I do not treat each new one encountered as a 'unique individual,' whatever that might mean.  Prejudgments are not blind, but experience-based, and they are mostly true. The adult mind is not a tabula rasa.  What experience has written, she retains, and that's all to the good.

So there is good prejudice and there is bad prejudice.  The teenager thinks his father prejudiced in the bad sense when he warns the son not to go into certain parts of town after dark.  Later the son learns that the old man was not such a bigot after all: the father's prejudice was not blind but had a fundamentum in re.  The old man was justified in his prejudgment.

But if you stay away from certain parts of town are you not 'discriminating' against them?  Well of course, but not all discrimination is bad. Everybody discriminates.  Liberals are especially discriminating.  The typical Scottsdale liberal would not be caught dead supping in some of the Apache Junction dives I have been found in.  Liberals discriminate in all sorts of ways.  That's why Scottsdale is Scottsdale and not Apache Junction. 

Is the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' as marriage discriminatory?  Of course!  But not all discrimination is bad.  Indeed, some is morally obligatory.  We discriminate against  felons when we disallow their possession of firearms.  Will you argue against that on the ground that it is discriminatory? If not, then you cannot cogently argue against the refusal to recognize same-sex 'marriage' on the ground that it is discriminatory.  You need a better argument.  And what would that be?

'Profiling,' like 'prejudice' and 'discrimination,' has come to acquire a wholly negative connotation.  Unjustly.  What's wrong with profiling?  We all do it, and we are justified in doing it.  Consider criminal profiling.

It is obvious that only certain kinds of people commit certain kinds of crimes. Suppose a rape has occurred at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Two males are moving away from the crime scene. One, the slower moving of the two, is a Jewish gentleman, 80 years of age, with a chess set under one arm and a copy of Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed under the other. The other fellow, a vigorous twenty-year-old, is running from the scene.

Who is more likely to have committed the rape? If you can't answer this question, then you lack common sense.  But just to spell it out for you liberals: octogenarians are not known for their sexual prowess: the geezer is lucky if he can get it up for a two-minute romp with a very cooperative partner.  Add chess playing and an interest in Maimonides and you have one harmless dude.

Or let's say you are walking down a street in Mesa, Arizona.  On one side of the street you spy some fresh-faced Mormon youths, dressed in their 1950s attire, looking like little Romneys, exiting a Bible studies class.  On the other side of the street, Hells (no apostrophe!) Angels are coming out of their club house.  Which side of the street would you feel safer on?   On which side will your  concealed semi-auto .45 be more likely to see some use?

The problem is not so much that liberals are stupid, as that they have allowed themselves to be stupefied by that cognitive aberration known as political correctness.

Their brains are addled by the equality fetish:  everybody is equal, they think, in every way.  So the vigorous 20-year-old is not more likely than the old man to have committed the rape.  The Mormon and the Hells Angel are equally law-abiding.  And the twenty-something Egyptian Muslim is no more likely to be a terrorist than the Mormon matron from Salt Lake City. 

Clearly, what we need are more profiling, more prejudgment, and more discrimination (in the good sense).  And fewer liberals.

A note on the above image.  Suppose all you know about the two individuals is what you see.  The point is that the likelihood of the old white lady's being a terrorist is much, much less than the likelihood of the man's being a terrorist.  This is what justifies profiling and why it is insane to subject both individuals to the same level of scrutiny.  For that would be to assume something obviously false, namely, that both individuals are equally likely to be terrorists.

Again we face the question why liberals are so preternaturally stupid.  And again, the answer is that they have enstupidated themselves with their political correctness and their fetishization of equality. 

Related articles

Conservative Cities are Better: Mesa, Arizona, for example

Two Pillars of Black Lives Matter

Here:

Two important pillars of the Black Lives Matter perspective are: Claims of racist treatment made by blacks must not be questioned; and at no time should the behaviors of blacks themselves be brought up, since any possibility of blaming the victim must be avoided. These are on display in the most recent writings of CNN correspondent Marc Lamont Hill.

Does anything more need to be said about BLM or Marc Lamont Hill?

Time to Join the NRA?

I am not now, and never have been, a member of the National Rifle Association.  But that might change, and for  the same reasons detailed by a former Jewish lefty, or rather Jewish former lefty, Roger L. Simon in How the 'New York Times' and Loretta Lynch Made Me Join the NRA.

Did you catch the fiery Judge Jeanine Pirro's 'opening'  on Saturday evening?  Here is the clip.

But let my inject a word of caution.  Gun ownership is a grave responsibility.  You can't just buy a gun, load it, and stick it under the bed. You must know the law.  You must take care that your weapons are not stolen.  You must get training.  You must practice with your weapons.  A gun instructor told me that until you have put a thousand rounds through a piece you shouldn't consider yourself proficient in its use.  You must have a plan as to how you will deal with certain contingencies.  You must know yourself.  In the heat of a conflict will you have the stomach to shoot a human being?  Hesitation can get you killed.  These are points that the good Judge failed sufficiently to underscore, not that I blame her for it. 

As for the foolish Obama, he has proven to be the poster boy for gun sales in these United States.  Way to go, dude.

And don't forget what the  agenda is: confiscation.  Being  mendacious to the core, Obama, Hillary, and their ilk won't call it what it is; they call it gun control, as if we have none.  The same pattern as with Islamic terror.  They won't call it what it is. 

 

Related articles

Tax Advice for Philosophers

Guns: Ten Important Observations

Happy Wife, Happy Life

Bibi and Barry: Fundamental Differences

Backlash and 'Frontlash'

Some lefty scribblers, effete and epicene, have their knickers in a knot worrying about the nativist and xenophobic 'backlash' post-Paris and post-San Bernardino.  Even worse, however, is Attorney General Loretta Lynch's disgracing of herself along these lines:

Lynch addressed the Muslim Advocate’s tenth-anniversary dinner and declared that she is concerned about an “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric . . . that fear is my greatest fear.” Her greatest fear is — not terrorism — but a nonexistent Islamophobic backlash? ISIS has demonstrated that it can bring down passenger jets, strike the heart of a great Western capitol with urban assault teams, and inspire horrible carnage in California. We also know that ISIS has pledged to keep attacking the U.S. and possesses chemical weapons. Yet it’s politically incorrect speech that strikes fear into the heart of our attorney general.

 

To put it in the form of an understatement:  Lefties are not very good at threat assessment.  I should think that the 'frontlash' is far worse than any backlash that is likely to occur.

 

Related articles

When Atheists Eat Their Own: The Sexism Charge

Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam (Revised and Expanded)

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Politically Incorrect Tunes

No day without political incorrectness! And no night either.

But I suppose I should issue a TRIGGER WARNING to the 'safe space' girly-girls and pajama boys.  Do not click on any of these links!  I am not responsible  for your psychic meltdown.

Ray Stevens, Ahab the Arab.  Here is the original from 1962.  In the lyrics there are references to two hits from the same era, Chubby Checker's The Twist (1960) and Lonnie Donegan's British skiffle number  Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor?  On second thought, the reference is to Checker's Le't's Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer (1960).

Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960). "What am I doin' here?"

And now a trio of feminist anthems. Marcie Blaine, Bobby's Girl.  "And if I was Bobby's girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I'd be."  Carol Deene, Johnny Get Angry.   Joanie Sommers did it first.  "I want a cave man!"  Nice kazoo work.  k. d. lang's parody.  Little Peggy March, I Will Follow Him.  "From now until forever."

Meanwhile the guys were bragging of having a girl in every port of call.  Dion, The Wanderer (1961). Ricky Nelson, Travelin' Man. (1961)

Addendum:  I forgot to link to two Ray Stevens numbers that are sure to rankle the sorry sensibilities of  our liberal pals: Come to the USA, God Save Arizona.  If you are a liberal shithead do not click on these links!  But if  if you have any sense you will enjoy them.

No day without political incorrectness! And no night either.

But I suppose I should issue a TRIGGER WARNING to the 'safe space' girly-girls and pajama boys.  Do not click on any of these links!  I am not responsible  for your psychic meltdown.

Ray Stevens, Ahab the Arab.  Here is the original from 1962.  In the lyrics there are references to two hits from the same era, Chubby Checker's The Twist (1960) and Lonnie Donegan's British skiffle number  Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor?  On second thought, the reference is to Checker's Le't's Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer (1960).

Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960). "What am I doin' here?"

And now a trio of feminist anthems. Marcie Blaine, Bobby's Girl.  "And if I was Bobby's girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I'd be."  Carol Deene, Johnny Get Angry.   Joanie Sommers did it first.  "I want a cave man!"  Nice kazoo work.  k. d. lang's parody.  Little Peggy March, I Will Follow Him.  "From now until forever."

Meanwhile the guys were bragging of having a girl in every port of call.  Dion, The Wanderer (1961). Ricky Nelson, Travelin' Man. (1961)

Addendum:  I forgot to link to two Ray Stevens numbers that are sure to rankle the sorry sensibilities of  our liberal pals: Come to the USA, God Save Arizona.  If you are a liberal shithead do not click on these links!  But if  if you have any sense you will enjoy them.

Time for a Moratorium on Immigration from Muslim Lands?

And now San Bernardino.  It is surely 'interesting' that in supposedly conservative media venues such as Fox News there has been no discussion, in the wake of this latest instance of Islamic terrorism, of the obvious question whether immigration from Muslim lands should be put on hold.  Instead, time is wasted refuting silly liberal calls for more gun control.  'Interesting' but not surprising.  Political correctness is so pervasive that even conservatives are infected with it.  It is very hard for most of us, including conservatives, to believe that it is Islam itself and not the zealots of some hijacked version thereof that is the problem.  But slowly, and very painfully, people are waking up. But I am not sanguine that only a few more such bloody events will jolt us into alertness.  It will take many more.

So is it not eminently reasonable to call for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands?  Here are some relevant points.  I would say that they add up to a strong cumulative case argument for a moratorium.

1. There is no right to immigrate.  See here for some arguments contra the supposed right by Steven A. Camarota.  Here is my refutation of an argument pro.  My astute commenters add further considerations. Since there is no right to immigrate, immigrants are allowed in only if they meet certain criteria.  Surely we are under no obligation to allow in those who would destroy our way of life.

2.  We philosophers will debate until doomsday about rights and duties and everything else.  But in the meantime, shouldn't  we in our capacity as citizens exercise prudence and advocate that our government exercise prudence?  So even if in the end  there is a right to immigrate, the prudent course would be to suspend this supposed right for the time being until  we get a better fix on what is going on.  Let's see if ISIS is contained or spreads.  Let's observe events in Europe and in Britain.  Let's see if Muslim leaders condemn terrorism.  Let's measure the extent of Muslim assimilation.

3. "Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center." Here.  Now immigrants bring their culture and their values with them.  Most Muslims will bring a commitment to sharia with them.  But sharia is incompatible with our American values and the U. S. Constitution.  Right here we have a very powerful reason to disallow immigration from Muslim lands.

4.  You will tell me that not all Muslims subscribe to sharia, and you will be right.  But how separate the sheep from the goats?  Do you trust government officials to do the vetting?  Are you not aware that people lie and that the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya justifies lying? 

5.  You will insist that not all Muslims are terrorists, and again you will be right. But almost all the terrorism in the world at the present time comes from Muslims acting upon Muslim beliefs. 

Pay attention to the italicized phrase. 

There are two important related distinctions we need to make.

 

There is first of all a distinction between committing murder because one's ideology, whether religious or non-religious, enjoins or justifies murder, and committing murder for non-ideological reasons or from non-ideological motives.  For example, in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the murders were committed  to avenge the blasphemy against  Muhammad, the man Muslims call 'The Prophet'  and consider Allah's messenger.  And that is according to the terrorists themselves.  Clearly, the terrorist acts were rooted in Muslim religious ideology in the same way that Communist and Nazi atrocities were rooted in Communist and Nazi political ideology, respectively.   Compare that to a mafioso killing an innocent person who happens to have witnessed a crime the mafioso has committed.  The latter's a mere criminal whose motives are crass and non-ideological: he just wanted to score some swag and wasn't about to be inconvenienced by a witness to his crime.  "Dead men tell no tales."

 

The other distinction is between sociological and doctrinal uses of terms such as 'Mormon,' 'Catholic,' Buddhist,' and 'Muslim.'  I know a man who is a Mormon in the sense that he was born and raised in a practicing Mormon family, was himself a practicing Mormon in his early youth, hails from a Mormon state, but then  'got philosophy,' went atheist, and now rejects all of the metaphysics of Mormonism.  Is he now a Mormon or not?  I say he is a Mormon sociologically but not doctrinally.  He is a Mormon by upbringing but not by current belief and practice.  This is a distinction that absolutely must be made, though I won't hold it against you if you think my terminology less than felicitous.  Perhaps you can do better.  Couch the distinction in any terms you like, but couch it.

 

Examples abound.  An aquaintance of mine rejoices under the surname 'Anastasio.'  He is Roman Catholic by upbringing, but currently a committed Buddhist by belief and practice.  Or consider the notorious gangster, 'Whitey' Bulger who is fortunately not an acquaintance of mine.  Biographies of this criminal refer to him as Irish-Catholic, which is not wrong. But surely none of his unspeakably evil deeds sprang from Catholic moral teaching.  Nor did they spring from Bulger's 'hijacking' of Catholicism.  You could call him, with some justification, a Catholic criminal.  But a Catholic who firebombs an abortion clinic to protest the evil of abortion is a Catholic criminal in an entirely different sense.   The difference is between the sociological and the doctrinal.

 

6.  Perhaps you will say to me that the percentage of Muslims who are terrorists is tiny.  True.  But all it takes is a handful, properly positioned, with the right devices, to bring the country to a screeching halt.  And those who radicalize and inspire the terrorists need not be terrorists themselves.  They could be imams in mosques operating in quiet and in secret.

 

7.   You will tell me that a moratorium would keep out many good, decent Muslims who are willing to assimilate, who will not try to impose sharia, who will not work to  undermine our system of government, and who do not condone terrorism.  And you will be right.  But again, there is no right to immigrate.  So no wrong is done to good Muslims by preventing them from immigrating. 

 

8.  Think of it in terms of cost and benefit.  Is there any net benefit from Muslim immigration?  No.  The cost outweighs the benefit.  This is consistent with the frank admission that there are many fine Muslims who would add value to our society.

 

9.  Perhaps you will call me a racist.  I will return the compliment by calling you stupid for thinking that Islam is a race.  Islam is a religious political ideology.

It is Saturday night and I'm 'Islamed out.'  I could say more but I've had enough for now.   So I hand off to Patrick J. Buchanan, Time for a Moratorium on Immigration?

Machiavelli, Arendt, and Virtues Public and Private

Current events warrant this re-post from two years ago.  Christian precepts such as "Turn the other cheek" and "Welcome the stranger" make sense and are salutary only within communities of the like-minded and morally decent; they make no sense and are positively harmful in the public sphere, and, a fortiori, in the international sphere.  The monastery is not the wide world.  What is conducive unto salvation in the former will get you killed in the latter.  And we know what totalitarians, whether Communists or Islamists, do when they get power: they destroy the churches, synagogues, monasteries, ashrams, and zendos. And with them are destroyed the means of transmitting the dharma, the kerygma, the law and the prophets. 

So my question to Catholic bishops and their fellow travellers is this: Do you have a death wish for you and your flocks and your doctrine?

........................

An important but troubling thought is conveyed in a recent NYT op-ed (emphasis added):

Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. The power of the lion and the cleverness of the fox: These are the qualities a leader must harness to preserve the republic.

The problem as I see it is that (i) the pacific virtues the practice of which makes life worth living within families, between friends, and in such institutions of civil society as churches and fraternal organizations  are essentially private and cannot be extended outward as if we are all brothers and sisters belonging to a global community.  Talk of  global community is blather.  The institutions of civil society can survive and flourish only if protected by warriors and statesmen whose virtues are of the manly and martial, not of the womanish and pacific,  sort. And yet (ii) if no  extension of the pacific virtues is possible then humanity would seem to be doomed  in an age of terrorism and WMDs.  Besides, it is unsatisfactory that there be two moralities, one private, the other public.

Consider the Christian virtues preached by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.  They include humility, meekness, love of righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, love of peace and of reconciliation.  Everyone who must live uncloistered in the world understands that these pacific and essentially womanish virtues have but limited application there.  (I am not using 'womanish' as a derogatory qualifier.) You may love peace, but unless you are prepared to make war upon your enemies and show them no mercy, you may not be long for this world.  Turning the other cheek makes sense within a loving family, but no sense in the wider world.  (Would the Pope turn the other cheek if the Vatican came under attack by Muslim terrorists or would he call upon the armed might of the Italian state?)  This is perfectly obvious in the case of states: they are in the state (condition) of nature with respect to each other. Each state secures by blood and iron a civilized space within which art and music and science and scholarship can flourish and wherein, ideally, blood does not flow; but these states and their civilizations battle each other in the state (condition) of nature red in tooth and claw.

The Allies would not have been long for this world had they not been merciless in their treatment of the Axis Powers. 

This is also true of individuals once they move beyond their families and friends and genuine communities and sally forth into the wider world. 

The problem is well understood by Hannah Arendt ("Truth and Politics" in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245):

     The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all
     earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular
     -- be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian -- have been
     frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended
     protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of
     the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the
     wicked "to do as much evil as they please"), Aristotle warned
     against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who
     for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with "what is good
     for themselves" cannot very well be trusted with what is good for
     others, and least of all with the "common good," the down-to-earth
     interests of the community.) [Arendt cites the Nicomachean Ethics,
     Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension  between man qua philosopher/Christian and man qua citizen.  As a philosopher raised in Christianity, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic "Better to suffer wrong than to do it" and the Christian  "Resist not the evildoer." But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to  influence public opinion, people like Catholic bishops many of whom are woefully ignorant of the simple points Arendt makes in the passage quoted. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his  perishable body, is not applicable to me as citizen. As a citizen, I   cannot "welcome the stranger" who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I cannot aid and abet his law breaking. I must be concerned with public order.  This order is among  the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger's law breaking, I would not be "rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" as the New Testament enjoins us to do.

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops  and others who confuse private and public morality.

NYT op-ed