The last few days I have spoken with a number of people about Donald Trump, almost all of them supporters. What surprises me is their refusal to admit the man's negatives. Their partisanship blinds them. And then there is the naive belief that, if elected, Trump will accomplish what he says he will. Given his bad judgment and school-boy mouthing off and glee at offending people, how will he work with Congress? Or will he try to do everything by executive order? There is this document called the Constitution. Or does he too believe in a 'living' Constitution?
Will I vote for Trump if nominated? Of course. Hillary must be defeated, and Trump has so mastered the politics of personal destruction, hitherto a specialty of leftists, that he has a good chance of defeating her.
So what's my point? My point is that we are very sick society if it should come down to a choice between a brazen hard-leftist liar like Hillary and a low life like Trump. I would like to see a bit of understanding by Trump's supporters of who it is they are supporting. That and a little less rah-rah partisanship. You don't think he is a low life? He fails the decency test. Max Lucado has his number:
I don't know Mr. Trump. But I've been chagrined at his antics. He ridiculed a war hero. He made mockery of a reporter's menstrual cycle. He made fun of a disabled reporter. He referred to the former first lady, Barbara Bush as "mommy," and belittled Jeb Bush for bringing her on the campaign trail. He routinely calls people "stupid," "loser," and "dummy." These were not off-line, backstage, overheard, not-to-be-repeated comments. They were publicly and intentionally tweeted, recorded, and presented.
Such insensitivities wouldn't even be acceptable even for a middle school student body election. But for the Oval Office? And to do so while brandishing a Bible and boasting of his Christian faith? I'm bewildered, both by his behavior and the public's support of it.
The stock explanation for his success is this: he has tapped into the anger of the American people. As one man said, "We are voting with our middle finger." Sounds more like a comment for a gang-fight than a presidential election. Anger-fueled reactions have caused trouble ever since Cain was angry at Abel.
We can only hope, and pray, for a return to decency. Perhaps Mr. Trump will better manage his antics. (Worthy of a prayer, for sure.) Or, perhaps the American public will remember the key role of the president is to be the face of America. When he speaks, he speaks for us. Whether we agree or disagree with the policies of the president, do we not hope that they behave in a way that is consistent with the status of the office?
Assertion is a speech act of an agent, a speaker. This topic belongs to pragmatics. But one can also speak of the assertoric force of a sentence, considered apart from a context of use. So considered, assertoric force is presumably an aspect of a sentence's semantics along with the sentence's content. That is what I want to think about in this entry. The assertoric force of a sentence is, as it were, a semantic correlate of the speech act of assertion. I cannot assert a sentence unless it is of the right grammatical form. I can assert 'Dan is drunk' but not 'Dan, be drunk!' or 'Is Dan drunk?' or 'Would that Dan were drunk.'
My asserting that Dan is drunk is a speech act. When I make an assertion, I do at least two things: I commit myself to the truth of what I assert, and I communicate the content of my assertion to a hearer.
Suppose I assert that Dan is drunk. I do this by tokening the sentence type 'Dan is drunk.' The assertoric force of the tokened sentence type is indicated by 'is' which signals the indicative mood among other things. Now here is my question: Are indicative mood and assertoric force the same, or different? When I refer to the assertoric force of a sentence, am I referring to its indicativity, and vice versa? Or must we distinguish between indicativity and assertoric force? I will argue that they are the same property.
Consider this exchange between speakers A and B:
A: Peter is innocent. B: (Ironically) Yeah, right. Peter is innocent.
Although both A and B are tokening 'Peter is innocent,' only A is asserting that Peter is innocent. Now the sentence type considered by itself is in the indicative mood. So I am tempted to say that assertoric force, as a semantic component, is identical to indicativity. Both tokens have assertoric force despite the fact that only one is asserted. Now consider this example:
1. If Peter is innocent, then his conviction is unjust.
To assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent. (Or its consequent for that matter.) The antecedent, 'Peter is innocent,' is in the indicative mood. I want to say that it has assertoric force despite the fact that it is not being asserted.
What is assertoric force? I suggest that it is that property of a sentence that renders it capable of being used by an agent to say something either true or false. As far as I can see, it is the same as the property of indicativity. Sentences with assertoric force can be used without being asserted, but no sentence lacking assertoric force can be asserted. To say that a sentence is assertoric, or has assertoric force, is to say that it is of the appropriate form for the making of assertions.
Since assertoric force either is or is equivalent to the property of being either true or false, a sentence's being assertoric does not entail its being true. Nor, of course, does a sentence's being asserted by someone entail its being true. To assert a sentence is to assert it as being true, but that is not to say that an asserted sentence is true. Whatever truth is, it involves a relation to something external to sentences or propositions.
One reason, the best reason, is to keep ourselves face-to-face with the reality of death. To live well is to live in the truth, without evasion. Transhumanist and cryonic fantasies aside, death cannot be evaded. We remember the dead, then, for our own spiritual benefit. Where they are, we will be. And soon enough. But people think they have plenty of time. Don't put off until the eleventh hour your preparation for death. You may die at 10:30.
Another reason is because we owe the dead something: honor, remembrance, gratitude, care of their monuments, legacies and intentions. But how can anything be owed to the no longer existent?
Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist and I have loosely referred to him in the same way, violating my own strictures against loose talk. Mea culpa. But of course Sanders is not a socialist in any reasonably strict sense of the term. Not only does he misuse the term, but he also does so quite foolishly since in American politics 'socialist' remains a dirty word. By so labeling himself he insures that he will never be more than a Vermont senator. He is a decent old coot, unlike the despicable Hillary, but in the end a side show on the way to the main event. Practically, then, my question is moot, but theoretically interesting nonetheless.
Sanders recently claimed that he, like Pope Francis, is a socialist. When asked to clarify his meaning, he said the following: "Well, what it means to be a socialist, in the sense of what the pope is talking about, what I'm talking about, is to say that [1] we have got to do our best and live our lives in a way that alleviates human suffering, [2] that does not accelerate the disparities of income and wealth."
I have intercalated numbers to distinguish the two different claims Sanders makes. [1] has nothing specifically to do with socialism. After all, I agree with [1] and I support free enterprise under the rule of law. Capitalism is good because it leads to prosperity and the alleviation of human suffering. Capitalism makes charitable giving possible. [2] has something to do with socialism but it is based on the foolish notion that there is something wrong with inequality as such.
The main point, however, is that Sanders' definition of 'socialism' is risible. Here is a dictionary definition adequate for present purposes:
Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods;
a system of society or group living in which there is no private property : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state.
By this definition, Sanders is not a socialist. For he does not advocate government ownership of the means of production, nor is he out to abolish all private property. He needs capitalism to generate the loot that he wants to confiscate and redistribute.
Here it is argued that Sanders would do better to label himself a social democrat rather than a democratic socialist.
While Sanders is not a socialist strictly speaking you could say he is drifting in the socialist direction toward the omni-competent (omni-incompetent?) and omni-intrusive state. So if you value liberty you must oppose Bernie and Hillary and the whole bunch of gun-grabbing, religion-bashing, race-baiting, tradition-trashing, free speech-despising, liberty-quashing, Constitution-shredding, state-worshipping, hate-America leftists.
So if it comes down to Trump versus Hillary, you must roll the dice and vote for the awful Trump and hope for the best.
Another spectacular column by Victor Davis Hanson. I will resist the temptation to quote the entire piece.
On college:
Today’s campuses have become as foreign to American traditions of tolerance and free expression as what followed the Weimar Republic. To appreciate cry-bully censorship, visit a campus “free-speech” area. To witness segregation, walk into a college “safe space.” To hear unapologetic anti-Semitism, attend a university lecture. To learn of the absence of due process, read of a campus hearing on alleged sexual assault. To see a brown shirt in action, watch faculty call for muscle at a campus demonstration. To relearn the mentality of a Chamberlain or Daladier, listen to the contextualizations of a college president. And to talk to an uneducated person, approach a recent college graduate.
On Bernie:
Sanders has little appreciation that he is an artifact of free-market capitalism, which alone has created enough bounty for such a demagogue to call for massive redistribution—in a way impossible for socialists any longer in exhausted Cuba, Greece, Venezuela, or any other command-economy paradise. Where does Sanders think his statism has worked—China, North Korea, Bolivia, Cuba, or the ossified European Union?
On Hillary:
Mrs. Clinton is now like a tottering third-world caudillo—she can’t really continue on in politics and she can’t quit trying if she wants to stay out of jail. Her possible indictment depends entirely on her political viability and utility. She and the once disbarred Bill Clinton might appear like tired, tragic dinosaurs, bewildered that politics have left them behind in their late sixties—were it not for these aging egoists’ routine petulance and sense of entitlement.
On Trump:
Donald Trump is probably not a serious student of the European 1930s, but in brilliant fashion he has sized up the public’s worries over a Potemkin economy, exhaustion with wars, and namby-pamby leadership. His own remedy is 1930s to the core: nationalism, crude bombast, mytho-history, and sloganeering without much detail. Trump’s trajectory is predicated on the premise that a jaded public cares more about emotion than logic, and how a leader speaks rather than what he says.
In European 1930s street-brawling fashion, no one knows quite whether Trump is a 1990s Clinton Democrat, a 1980s Reagan Republican, or a Perotist misfit. He has thrown a ball and chain through the pretentious glass of American campaigning. Trump excites voters because he can profane, smear, interrupt, and fabricate—on the premise that as a performance artist he reifies what they think but don’t dare say about a corrupt political class and its warped, politically correct values. Trump reminds Americans what deterrence is: the supposedly courageous media, the so-called truth-to-power leftists, and the sober and judicious careerist politicians are all terrified how he might reply or react to their criticism. None of them want to spend 2-3 days trading smears with Donald Trump.
On Pope Francis:
Not since Pius XII has a pope proved as mysterious and exasperating as Francis. He seems not to have transcended the parochial time and space of Peronist Argentina. The well-meaning and kindly pope acts as if he is unworried about the historical wages of leftwing authoritarianism and government-mandated redistribution. Why would a pontiff, protected by medieval walls and Vatican territorial security, blast U.S. immigration policy toward Mexican illegal immigrants?
Since Obama’s reelection, the southern border has been wide open, in naked efforts to recalibrate American electoral demography. The U.S. has taken in more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other country—the only impediment for entry is being educated, skilled, with resources, and insisting on legality. The U.S. last year allowed nearly $80 billion to be sent in annual remittances to Mexico and Latin America, mostly from those here illegally. Certainly, Mexico, in a most un-Christian fashion, has built walls on its own southern border to prevent unlawful entry, published comic-book manuals to instruct its emigrants how to violate U.S. immigration law, and written into its own constitution repulsive racial prerequisites for emigrating to Mexico—all to the apparent ignorance of the otherwise intrusively editorializing pope. Mexico’s own obsession with exporting its indigenous people to the U.S. is predicated on historic Mexican racism, always emanating from grandees in Mexico City.
On segregation:
Segregation, not integration and assimilation, is the new trajectory of racial relations. “White privilege” is said to be such an insidious aid to career success that careerist whites like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, Shaun King, and Rachel Dolezal will do almost anything to insist that they are really non-white. The president of the United States invited a rapper for a White House visit. The rapper's latest album cover shows a dead white judge lying at the feet of celebratory African-American men, with fists of money and champagne held in triumph—in front of the White House. Reality imitates art. Could the president give another Cairo speech about such symbolism?
Is it perhaps time to give dictatorship a chance?
I would have liked to have read from Professor Hanson a comparison of the sexual decadence of Weimar Germany and that of Weimar America.
A regular reader, professional philosopher, and Trump supporter writes that he is "very puzzled" by my position on Donald Trump. The occasion of his puzzlement is my linkage to a vitriolic anti-Trump piece by C. W. Cooke at NRO.
But what exactly is supposed to be so terrible about Trump? So terrible as compared to anyone else who has any chance of winning the [Republican] nomination or the election? For the most part, he [C. W. Cooke] seems to be focused on issues of character or history: Trump is 'an entitled mess' with a 'questionable' record, he merely pretends to be religious, etc. He fails to even address the real reason for Trump's appeal.
What's so bad about him? Well, for one thing he is vicious and narcissistic. He is in some ways like Brian Leiter who is also a New Yorker and who is on record as justifying his offensive behavior because he is one. Like Leiter, Trump viciously attacks people without provocation and then acts hurt and wronged when a reply in kind is made, sometimes to the point of threatening a law suit in retaliation. Trump's attack on Carly Fiorina's appearance is a clear example, one of many. He did not criticize her on something over which she has control such as personal hygiene, but because she is not beautiful. And he did it in public. Is this the sort of person we want representing the greatest country that has ever existed? If nothing else, it shows very bad judgment on his part.
And then there is the fact that the man is mendacious. Many of us conservatives are sick of the brazen liars in politics. Obama and Hillary are prime examples. It is now well-known that Obamacare was rammed though on the basis of repeated lies. There is no doubt that both Obama and Hillary are liars in the strict sense of that term. Why would we want another presidential liar? Trump clearly lied when, 'channeling' Code Pink, he claimed that Bush the Younger lied about WMDs in Iraq. The man seems incapable of controlling his mouth.
You say all politicians lie? But are they all liars? There is a difference. Are they all brazen liars in the Obama mold? It may be a good idea to make some distinctions here. In any case a defense on the ground that all politicians lie is pretty weak.
Is Trump a conservative or a leftist? We expect Obama and Hillary to lie: they are leftists. Truth is not a leftist value. What matters to a leftist is power and winning. That sounds just like Trump. Winning is what counts; otherwise you are a 'loser.' Winning by any means. The end, winning, justifies the means, e.g., lying about George W. Bush, a morally decent man, even if inept.
Vicious, petty, petulant, narcissistic, and how about unprincipled? Ted Cruz is rooted in sound conservative principles. Trump is about as principled as Hillary, which is to say devoid of principles except for the supreme 'principle' of personal ambition. Anything to win. When Cruz pointed out that Trump had reversed himself on key positions, he called Cruz a liar when the mendacity is all in the Trumpster's court. He cannot take any criticism; he can only flail about and lash back.
Not only is he unprincipled, his proposals are little more than vacuous bluster. He says he will build a wall. That's great. I'm all for it. But he also says that the Mexicans will pay for it. How exactly? He said something last night about trade deficits. But how is this supposed to work in detail? We got nothing last night. In all fairness, his people have made some detailed proposals here. Perhaps the Donald should bone up on his own position statements.
Trump has some good ideas but he is incapable of articulating them in a way that could appeal to any reasonable person and persuade fence-sitters. For example, he has called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration. That is a sound idea easily defended. But he can't defend it or even articulate it. For example, to properly articulate the proposal one has to add some qualifications. Suppose an American citizen who is a Muslim visits a relative in Turkey. Does the Trump proposal prevent him from returning to the USA? It had better not. And Trump had better make this clear.
A typical business-type, he seem incapable of thinking in any abstract way grounded in principles. If I wanted to persuade you of the reasonableness of a moratorium on Muslim immigration, I would start with the idea that there is no legal or moral right to immigrate. I would then make points about the purposes of immigration and right of a nation to defend its culture and values, and in so doing select immigrants on that basis. I would explicitly point out that there is nothing 'xenophobic' about an immigration policy that excludes unassimilable elements and favors certain countries of origin over others. I would point out that at the present time there is no net benefit to Muslim immigration. I would make sure that people understand that moratoria, by definition, are temporary. And so on.
Is Trump capable of this? Is he capable of persuading anyone not already a member of the choir? I see no evidence of it. Instead of calmly making a case for those of his proposals that are reasonable, he alienates people with incendiary rhetoric, vicious and wholly unnecessary personal attacks, bluster and braggadocio. These are not just 'academic' points I am making. They pertain to electability. Hillary must be stopped. Trump, I fear, won't be able to stop her because of his manifold defects as a candidate. He won't be able to persuade enough people to support him. It is a good bet that many conservatives will stay home out of disgust.
You say he is a builder. Excellent. But what does he build? Casinos. So we need more casinos? What we really need in this country is moral renewal. But a moral low-life like Trump is not the man to lead it.
People are inspired by the fact that he's giving them a _voice_ for the first time. They can't speak plainly about the evils of immigration and multiculturalism, for example, and he talks about it. The country is facing existential threats, and pretty much everyone in power, including mainstream 'conservatives', pretends that it's all great. In this situation, what matters is that someone is standing up for the beliefs and values of ordinary people who've been silenced.
Here I am in broad agreement with my reader. Trump's appeal is a populist appeal. He 'channels' people's 'inner Jacksonian.' He does give people a voice and says for them what they cannot say for themselves free of reprisal. People are sick and tired of political correctness. They are disgusted by the liberal-left scum who have been allowed to infiltrate our institutions.
But the question is not what explains Trump's popularity; the question is how to stop Hillary. Can Trump stop her? I don't know. And I don't know whether Cruz has a better shot at stopping her.
But if Trump gets the nomination I will of course vote for him. Politics is always about the lesser of evils.
Want more? Read here how Trump got beta'd last night.
This weblog averages about 1,350 page views per day. But yesterday it snagged 10,695 views, and now at 6:20 AM local time it has already racked up 3,200 or so. What explains this? Reddit got hold of my Zappfe post, scroll down a bit, and that must be driving the surge.
Perhaps we philosophers need to pay more attention to anti-natalism as a cultural phenomenon and as a component in der Untergang des Abendlandes.
We are losing the will to perpetuate our civilization and its values. Christians in the Middle East are being slaughtered and their churches pulverized by Muslim savages. So what did Pope Francis say in response to Donald Trump's call for a wall along the southern U.S. border? We don't need to build walls, but bridges. Francis the fool is one dope of a pope.
Evangelicals understand this, though they are too polite and politic to put it the way I just did. This is why, mirabile dictu, so many of them support Trump, the nasty sybarite of Gotham who builds casinos to the greater glory of Lust, Greed, Gluttony, and Lady Luck.
Point of logic: 'Muslim savages' does not imply that all Muslims are savages. Or do you think that 'deciduous trees' implies that all trees are deciduous?
UPDATE 2/27: Traffic settled down a bit yesterday with a mere 4,509 page views. It should get back to normal over the next few days. As every conservative appreciates, the 'regard' of fellow mortals is a decidedly mixed blessing. I am quite happy to bump along at 1, 500 page views per day. Obscurity is bliss and he who craves fame is a fool. Fame is conferred by others and the quality of these others is a good measure of the value of fame.
"Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method," Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, vol, 12, no. 2 (2015), pp. 99-125. This is a long review article on Peter van Inwagen's Existence: Essays in Ontology, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
"Facts: An Essay in Aporetics" in Francesco F. Calemi, ed., Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, Walter de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 105-131.
This volume also includes contributions by Matthew Tugby, Francesco F. Calemi, Peter van Inwagen, Peter Simons, Anna-Sofia Maurin, Javier Cumpa, Kristie Miller, Stephen Mumford, Andrea Borghini, Michele Paolini Paoletti, Tuomas E. Tahko, D. H. Mellor, Francesco Orilia, and Paolo Valore.
Another subtle existence entry to flummox and fascinate the Londonistas. Hell, this Phoenician is flummoxed by it himself. Ain't philosophy grand?
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In section 53 of The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege famously maintains that
. . . existence is analogous to number. Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought. Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down. (65)
Frege is here advancing a double-barreled thesis that splits into two subtheses.
ST1. Existence is analogous to number.
ST2. Existence is a property (Eigenschaft) of concepts and not of objects.
In the background is the sharp distinction between property (Eigenschaft) and mark (Merkmal). Three-sided is a mark of the concept triangle, but not a property of this concept; being instantiated is a property of this concept but not a mark of it. The Cartesian-Kantian ontological argument "from mere concepts" (aus lauter Begriffen), according to Frege, runs aground because existence cannot be a mark of any concept, but only a property of some concepts. And so one cannot validly argue from the concept of God to the existence of God.
Existence as a property of concepts is the property of being-instantiated. We can therefore call the Fregean account of existence an instantiation account. A concept is instantiated just in case it has one or more instances. So on a Fregean reading, 'Cats exist' says that the concept cat is instantiated. This implies, of course, that 'Cats exist' is not about cats, but about a non-cat, a concept, and what it says about this concept is not that it (singulatly) exists, but that it is instantiated! A whiff of paradox? Or more than just a whiff?
My concern in this entry is the logical relation between the above two subtheses. Does the first entail the second or are they logically independent? There is a clear sense in which (ST1) is true. Necessarily, if horses exist, then the number of horses is not zero, and vice versa. So 'Horses exist' is logically equivalent to 'The number of horses is not zero.' This is wholly unproblematic for those of us who agree that there are no Meinongian nonexistent objects. But note that, in general, equivalences, even logical equivalences, do not sanction reductions or identifications. So it remains an open question whether one can take the further step of reducing existence to instantiation, or identifying existence with instantiation, or even eliminating existence in favor of instantiation. Equivalence, reduction, elimination: those are all different. But I make this point only to move on.
(ST1), then, is unproblematically true if understood as expressing the following logical equivalence: 'Necessarily Fs exist iff the number of Fs is not zero.' My question is whether (ST1) entails (ST2). Peter van Inwagen in effect denies the entailment by denying that the 'the number of . . . is not zero' is a predicate of concepts:
I would say that, on a given occasion of its use, it predicates of certain things that they number more than zero. Thus, if one says, 'The number of horses is not zero,' one predicates of horses that they number more than zero. 'The number of . . . is not zero' is thus what some philosophers have called a 'variably polyadic' predicate. But so are many predicates that can hardly be regarded as predicates of concepts. The predicates 'are ungulates' and 'have an interesting evolutionary history,' for example, are variably polyadic predicates. When one says, 'Horses are ungulates' or 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' one is obviously making a statement about horses and not about the concept horse. ("Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment," pp. 483-484)
It is this passage that I am having a hard time understanding. It is of course clear what van Inwagen is trying to show, namely, that the Fregean subtheses are logically independent and that one can affirm the first without being committed to the second. One can hold that existence is denial of the number zero without holding that existence is a property of concepts. One can go half-way with Frege without going 'whole hog' or all the way.
But I am having trouble with the claim that the predicate 'the number of . . . is not zero' is 'variably polyadic' and the examples van Inwagen employs. 'Robbed a bank together' is an example of a variably polyadic predicate. It is polyadic because it expresses a relation and it is variably polyadic because it expresses a family of relations having different numbers of arguments. For example, Bonnie and Clyde robbed a bank together, but so did Ma Barker and her two boys, Patti Hearst and three members of the ill-starred Symbionese Liberation Army, and so on. (Example from Chris Swoyer and Francesco Orilia.)
Now when I say that the number of horses is not zero, what am I talking about? It is plausible to say that I am talking about horses, not about the concept horse. (Recall the whiff of paradox, supra.) What I don't understand are van Inwagen's examples of variably polyadic predicates. Consider 'are ungulates.' If an ungulate is just a mammal with hooves, then I fail to see how 'are ungulates' is polyadic, let alone variably polyadic. 'Are hooved mammals' is monadic.
The other example is 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history.' This sentence is clearly not about the concept horse. But it is not about any individual horse either. Consider Harry the horse. Harry has a history. He was born in a certain place, grew up, was bought and sold, etc. and then died at a certain age. He went through all sorts of changes. But Harry didn't evolve, and so he had no evolutionary history. No individual evolves; populations evolve:
Evolutionary change is based on changes in the genetic makeup of populations over time. Populations, not individual organisms, evolve. Changes in an individual over the course of its lifetime may be developmental (e.g., a male bird growing more colorful plumage as it reaches sexual maturity) or may be caused by how the environment affects an organism (e.g., a bird losing feathers because it is infected with many parasites); however, these shifts are not caused by changes in its genes. While it would be handy if there were a way for environmental changes to cause adaptive changes in our genes — who wouldn't want a gene for malaria resistance to come along with a vacation to Mozambique? — evolution just doesn't work that way. New gene variants (i.e., alleles) are produced by random mutation, and over the course of many generations, natural selection may favor advantageous variants, causing them to become more common in the population.
'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history,' then, is neither about the concept horse nor about any individual horse. The predicate in this sentence appears to be non-distributive or collective. It is like the predicate in 'Horses have been domesticated for millenia.' That is certainly not about the concept horse. No concept can be ridden or made to carry a load. But it is also not about any individual horse. Not even the Methuselah of horses, whoever he might be, has been around for millenia.
A predicate F is distributive just in case it is analytic that whenever some things are F, then each is F. Thus a distributive predicate is one the very meaning of which dictates that if it applies to some things, then it applies to each of them. 'Blue' is an example. If some things are blue, then each of them is blue.
If a predicate is not distributive, then it is non-distributive (collective). If some Occupy-X nimrods have the building surrounded, it does not follow that each such nimrod has the building surrounded. If some students moved a grand piano into my living room, it does not follow that each student did. If bald eagles are becoming extinct, it does not follow that each bald eagle is becoming extinct. Individual animals die, but no individual animal ever becomes extinct. If the students come from many different countries, it does not follow that each comes from many different countries. If horses have an interesting evolutionary history, it does not follow that each horse has an interesting evolutionary history.
My problem is that I don't understand why van Inwagen gives the 'Horses have an interesting evolutionary history' example when he is committed to saying that each horse exists. His view , I take it, is that 'exist(s)' is a first-level distributive predicate. 'Has an interesting evolutionary history,' however, is a first-level non-distributive predicate. Or is it PvI's view that 'exist(s)' is a first-level non-distributive predicate?
Either I don't understand van Inwagen's position due to some defect in me, or it is incoherent. I incline toward the latter. He is trying to show that (ST1) does not entail (ST2). He does this by giving examples of predicates that are first-level, i.e., apply to objects, but are variably polyadic as he claims 'the number of . . . is not zero' is variably polyadic. But the only clear example he gives is a predicate that is non-distributive, namely 'has an interesting evolutionary history.' 'Horses exist,' however, cannot be non-distributive. If some horses exist, then each of them exists. And if each of them exists, then 'exists' is monadic, not polyadic, let alone variably polyadic.
. . . Trump is an entitled mess whose business record is so questionable that he managed to bankrupt a casino; that he is an unashamed fraud who didn’t even wait to be elected president before folding on Planned Parenthood and Obamacare, exactly like the “feckless” Congress he is running against; that he is feigning religiosity to appeal to people he believes are rubes; and, above all, that whatever he may be pretending now, he has spent a lifetime screwing the little guy. They must repeat verbatim his previous words on amnesty; they must outline in detail how his policies will make life worse for everyone; and they must point out that a Trump nomination designed to “mix things up” will result, eventually, in more of the same.
Gisle Tangenesdescribes the life and ideas of a cheerfully pessimistic, mountain-climbing Norwegian existentialist, pessimist, and anti-natalist, Peter Wessel Zapffe:
Thus the ‘thousand consolatory fictions’ that deny our captivity in dying beasts, afloat on a speck of dust in the eternal void. And after all, if a godly creator is waiting in the wings, it must be akin to the Lord in The Book of Job, since it allows its breathing creations to be “tumbled and destroyed in a vast machinery of forces foreign to interests.” Asserts Zapffe: “The more a human being in his worldview approaches the goal, the hegemony of love in a moral universe, the more has he become slipshod in the light of intellectual honesty.” The only escape from this predicament should be to discontinue the human race. Though extinction by agreement is not a terribly likely scenario, that is no more than an empirical fact of public opinion; in principle, all it would require is a global consensus to reproduce below replacement rates, and in a few generations, the likening of humankind would “not be the stars or the ocean sand, but a river dwindling to nothing in the great drought.”
So if you believe in a moral world order and the ultimate hegemony of love in the midst of all this misery and apparent senselessness, if you deny our irremediable "captivity in dying beasts," (what a great line!) then you display a lack of intellectual honesty. Let's think about this.
The gist of Zapffe's s position as best I can make out from the fragments I have read is that our over-developed consciousness is an evolutionary fluke that makes us miserable by uselessly generating in us the conceit that we are more than animals and somehow deserving of something better than dying like an animal after some years of struggle. Giseles: "Evolution, he [Zapffe] argues, overdid its act when creating the human brain, akin to how a contemporary of the hunter, a deer misnamed the ‘Irish elk’, became moribund by its increasingly oversized antlers." A powerful image. The unfortunate species of deer, having evolved huge antlers for defense, cannot carry their weight and dies out in consequence. Similarly with us. We cannot carry the weight of the awareness born of our hypertrophic brains, an awareness that is not life-enhancing but inimical to life.
Human existence is thus absurd, without point or purpose. For human existence is not a merely biological living, but a conscious and self-conscious living, a reflective and self-questioning living in the light of the 'knowledge' of good and evil. Human existence is a mode of existence in which one apperceives oneself as aware of moral distinctions and as free to choose right or wrong. Whether or not we are really free, we cannot help but experience ourselves as free. Having become morally reflective, man becomes self-questioning. He hesitates, he feels guilty, his direct connection to life is weakened and in some cases destroyed. He torments himself with questions he cannot answer. The male beast in heat seizes the female and has his way with her. He doesn't reflect or scruple. 'Respect for persons' does not hobble him. The human beast, weakened by consciousness, self-consciousness, moral sensitivity, reason, objectivity, and all the rest, hesitates and moralizes -- and the female gets away.
In short, man is a sick animal weakened by an over-developed brain who torments himself with questions about morality and ultimate meaning and then answers them by inventing consolatory fictions about God and the soul, or else about a future society in which the problem of meaning will be solved. Either pie in the sky or pie in the future to be washed down with leftist Kool-Aid. The truth, however, is that there is no ultimate meaning to be found either beyond the grave or this side of it. The truth is that human existence -- which again is not a merely biological living -- is absurd. And at some level we all know this to be the case. We all know, deep down, that we are just over-clever land mammals without a higher origin or higher destiny. One who will not accept this truth and who seeks to evade reality via religious and secular faiths is intellectually dishonest. Antinatalism follows from intellectual honesty: it is wrong to cause the existence of more meaningless human lives. It is unfortunate that the human race came to be in the first place; the next best thing would be for it to die out.
Many of us have entertained such a dark vision at one time or another. But does it stand up to rational scrutiny? Could this really be the way things are? Or is this dark vision the nightmare of a diseased mind and heart?
There are several questions we can ask. Here I will consider only one: Can Zapffe legitimately demand intellectual honesty given his own premises?
The Demand for Intellectual Honesty
Zapffe thinks we ought to be intellectually honest and admit the absurdity of human existence. This is presumably a moral ought, and indeed a categorical moral ought. We ought to accept the truth, not because of some desirable consequence of accepting it, but because it is the truth. But surely the following question cannot be suppressed: What place is there in an amoral universe for objective moral oughts and objective moral demands? No place at all.
It is we who demand that reality be faced and it is we who judge negatively those we do not face it. We demand truthfulness and condemn willful self-deception. But these demands of ours are absurd demands if our mental life is an absurd excrescence of matter. They would in that case have no objective validity whatsoever. The absurdist cannot, consistently with his absurdism, make moral demands and invoke objective moral oughts. He cannot coherently say: You ought to face the truth! You ought not deceive yourself or believe something because it is consoling or otherwise life-enhancing. Why should I face the truth?
"Because it is the truth."
But this is no answer, but a miserable tautology. The truth has no claim on my attention unless it is objectively valuable and, because objectively valuable, capable of generating in me an obligation to accept it. So why should I accept the truth?
"Because accepting the truth will help you adapt to your environment."
But this is exactly what is not the case in the present instance. The truth I am supposed to accept, namely, that my existence is meaningless, is inimical to my happiness and well-being. After all, numerous empirical studies have shown that conservatives, who tend to be religious, are much happier than leftists who tend to be irreligious. These people, from the absurdist perspective, fool themselves, but from the same perspective there can be no moral objection to such self-deception.
So again, assuming that human life is absurd, why should we accept rather than evade this supposed truth?
The absurdist cannot coherently maintain that one ought to be intellectually honest, or hold that being such is better than being intellectually dishonest. Nor can he hold that humans ought not procreate. Indeed, he cannot even maintain that it is an objectively bad thing that human existence is absurd.
The fundamental problem here is that the absurdist cannot coherently maintain that truth is objectively valuable. In his world there is no room for objective values and disvalues. By presupposing that truth is objectively valuable and that our intellectual integrity depends on acknowledging it, he presupposes something inconsistent with his own premises.
"You are ignoring the possibility that objective values are grounded in objective needs. We are organisms that need truth because we need contact with reality to flourish. This is why truth is objectively valuable."
But again this misses the crucial point that on Zapffe's absurdism, acceptance of the truth about our condition is not life-enhancing, not conducive to our flourishing. On the contrary, evasion of this 'truth' is life-enhancing.
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Addendum (2/25): Karl White refers us to some translations of Zapffe.
As dubious as are the fleeting items of this world, we yet cling to them. We even cling to the claim checks of memory's lost baggage such as the faded photographs of forgotten friends.
Which sort of prayer is appropriate for the proud intellectual? Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol. I (Catholic Way Publishing, 2013), p. 535:
Some souls absolutely need prayer, intimate and profound prayer; another form of prayer will not suffice for them. There are very intelligent people whose character is difficult, intellectuals who will dry up in their work, in study, in seeking themselves therein in pride, unless they lead a life of true prayer, which for them should be a life of mental prayer. It alone can give them a childlike soul in regard to God . . . . It alone can teach them the profound meaning of Christ's words: "Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." It is, therefore, important, especially for certain souls, to persevere in prayer; unless they do so, they are almost certain to abandon the interior life and perhaps come to ruin.
If I had had outstanding teachers, perhaps I would not have been able to gain and sustain the self-confidence that saw me through. And if not for lousy colleagues I might not have been hired when I was pretty lousy too.
The general existential, 'Philosophers exist,' is reasonably construed as an instantiation claim:
G. The concept philosopher has one or more instances.
But a parallel construal seems to fail in the case of the singular existential, 'Socrates exists.' For both of the following are objectionable:
S1. The concept Socrates has one or more instances.
S2. The concept Socrateity has one of more instances.
(S1) is objectionable because Socrates is not a concept (Begriff), but an object (Gegenstand), while (S2) is objectionable because there is no haecceity concept Socrateity (identity-with-Socrates), as I have already argued ad nauseam. (But see below for another go-round.)
On the other hand, 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials would seem to be univocal in sense inasmuch as arguments like the following appear valid:
Philosophers exist Socrates is a philosopher ------------ Socrates exists.
Whatever the exact logical form of this argument, there does not seem to be an equivocation on 'exist(s)' or at least not one that would induce a quaternio terminorum. (A valid syllogism must have exactly three terms; if there is an equivocation on one of them, then we have the quaternio terminorum, or four-term fallacy.)
Here then is the problem. Is it possible to uphold a broadly Fregean understanding of 'exist(s)' while also maintaining the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials? A broadly Fregean understanding is one that links existence with number. The locus classicus is Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, 65:
In this respect existence is analogous to [hat Aehnlichkeit mit] number. Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought. Because existence is a property of concepts the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down.
To affirm the existence of philosophers, then, is to affirm that the number of philosophers is one or more, and to deny the existence of philosophers is to affirm that the number of philosophers is zero. But then what are we saying of Socrates when we say that he exists? That the number of Socrateses is one or more? That can't be right: 'Socrates' is a proper name (Eigenname) not a concept-word (Begriffswort) like 'philosopher.' It makes no sense to say that the number of Socrateses is one or more. And when I say, with truth, that Socrates might never have existed, I am surely not saying that the number of Socrateses might always have been zero.
London Ed doesn't see much of a problem here. From his latest entry:
But why, from the fact that ‘Socrates’ is not a concept word, does it follow that there is no corresponding concept? [. . .] Why can’t ‘Socrates’ be semantically compound? So that it embeds a concept like person identical with Socrates, which with the definite article appended gives us ‘Socrates’?
From my point of view, Ed does not see the problem. The problem is that if 'Socrates' expresses a concept, that concept can only be an haecceity concept, and there aren't any. It doesn't matter whether we call this concept 'Socrateity,' or 'person identical with Socrates.'
Ask yourself: Is the haecceity H of Socrates contingent or necessary? Socrates is contingent. And so one might naturally think that his haecceity must also be contingent. For it is the ontological factor that makes him be this very individual and no other. Haecceitas = thisness. No Socrates, no haecceity of Socrates. But then you can't say that the existence of Socrates is the being-instantiated of his haecceity, and the non-existence of Socrates is the non-instantiation of his haecceity. For that presupposes that his haecceity exists whether or not he exists. Which is absurd.
So haecceities must be necessary beings. But now we have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Socrateity involves Socrates himself, that very individual, warts and all, mit Haut und Haar. It is not a conjunction of multiply instantiable properties. This is why identity -- absolute numerical identity --is brought into the definition of H as, for example, 'person identical with Socrates.' Hence an haecceity of a contingent being cannot be a necessary being.
The absurdity here is the attempt to make a necessarily existent abstract property out of a contingent concrete individual. This is why I say that haecceity concepts/properties are metaphysical monstrosities.
It should also be pointed out that on a Fregean scheme, no concept is an object and no name is a predicate. You cannot turn a name such as 'Socrates' into a predicate, which is what Ed is trying to do.
So the problem remains unsolved. On the one hand, 'exist(s)' appears univocal across general and singular existentials. And yet how can we make sense of this if we are not allowed to bring in haecceity properties?
In this Internet age the availability of accurate on-line dictionary definitions makes the misuse of language by so-called journalists inexcusable. The Merriam-Webster's definition of 'suspend' receives the coveted MavPhilnihil obstat. Suspensions are temporary. But we all know, and Jeb! knows, that he ain't coming back, leastways not in this election cycle.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that in this Age of Feeling, people are afraid to speak plainly and label things accurately. What is manifestly an act of terrorism, for example, is labelled 'work-place violence.' People are afraid to call a spade a spade. Hell, they are afraid to use this very expression lest they be called a 'racist.'
And so, instead of stating bluntly that Mr. Bush quit, or gave up, one says euphemistically that he 'suspended' his campaign. As if he needs a 'breather.' It is on a par with saying, of Antonin Scalia, that he 'is no longer among us' as opposed to saying that he died. Finality is not something we like facing up to. One who is no longer among us may reappear; and he who suspends his campaign may soon be back in the race.
For reasons why it is good that Jeb Bush is out of the race, see here.
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Correction (23 February). I got off a wild shot above in my zeal to oppose the misuse of language by journalists. 'Suspend' in the context of an election can be used in a technical sense. A reader sends us here where we read:
Delegates:
Federal law plays no role in delegate selection rules. It's up to the party to decide how to treat delegates won by a candidate who has suspended his campaign. In general, candidates who suspend their campaigns get to keep any delegates they've won, while candidates who drop out have to forfeit certain delegates, usually statewide delegates.
Money:
"Suspending" a campaign allows a candidate to publicly withdraw from a race while preserving the ability to raise funds beyond what's needed to retire debt. This may include the ability to continue to receive federal matching funds, if the candidate has previously qualified for them.
When candidates announce they are dropping out or ending their campaigns, they may then only raise money to retire any remaining campaign debts or to pay for other costs related to shutting down a campaign committee. They may not continue to amass war chests beyond that if they drop out.
However, if a candidate "suspends" his campaign but doesn't officially end his candidacy, federal law does not specifically prohibit that candidate from continuing to raise funds for purposes other [than] debt retirement.
Candidates who "suspend" their campaigns as well as those who officially drop out must still continue to file disclosure reports, as long as they have an active campaign committee.
. . . no construction should call attention to its own grammatical correctness. Finding no other formulation that could make the point in quite the way I wanted, I decided to be ungrammatical instead of pedantic.
A good rule, within limits. The forward momentum of a sentence may be be impeded if you do not split an infinitive or use a contraction. Your precision may distract; your use of 'one' may strike the reader as precious. Writing 'of which' instead of 'whose' may mark you as pedantic even if you have correct usage and logic on your side. We sometimes do well to thumb our noses at the strictures of the school marms while yet reverencing the old gals in our memories. But now my style is about to slide into the sentimental as my mind drifts back to the dear old ladies who taught me and my mates to read and write. So I take myself in hand, a bit too late perhaps.
A caveat, though, anent Scalia's rule. As the culture declines and writing with it, you may not be able to help your constructions' calling attention to their grammatical correctness. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with standing for what is correct among barbarians.
Two sentence fragments in a row. Nothing wrong with that with that either, in moderation.
'Anent,' 'caveat'? Who am I trying to impress? Well, not a barbarian like you, ignorant of his own tongue, whose literary intake is a Twitter feed.
Ferguson's "For a writer like Scalia, who prized the precise and the particular (and seldom succumbed to soupy alliteration) . . . ." both illustrates alliteration and puts me in mind of my own excessively alliterative style.
Laying down rules of style, however, is a risky game. It is easy to fall into one's own traps, as does the great Orwell.
Beware of internalizing your parents' and relatives' attitudes, their harsh, unsympathetic, 'practical' attitudes and suggestions especially as regards what is tender, fledgling, open, searching, trusting, idealistic and unworldly in yourself. Beware of dismissing or discounting your young self, the young self that was and the one that still is. One must treat oneself critically but with sympathy.
As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility all other human pursuits, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. The magnificence and misery of philosophy reflect the magnificence and misery of its author man, who, neither animal nor angel, is the tension between the two and a question mark to himself.
Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is yet miserable in execution.
Another important step is a better comprehension by communities that government is at best a rude machinery, which can accomplish but very limited good, and which, when strained to accomplish what individuals should do for themselves, is sure to be perverted by selfishness to narrow purposes, or to defeat through ignorance its own ends. Man is too ignorant to govern much, to form vast plans for states and empires. Human policy has almost always been in conflict with the great laws of social well-being, and the less we rely on it the better. The less of power given to man over man the better. I speak, of course, of physical, political force. There is a power which cannot be accumulated to excess, — I mean moral power, that of truth and virtue, the royalty of wisdom and love, of magnanimity and true religion. This is the guardian of all right. It makes those whom it acts on free. (from Discourses on War. HT: Dave Bagwill)
According to Wikipedia, the argumentum ad lapidem, or appeal to the stone, "consists in dismissing a statement as absurd without giving a proof of its absurdity."
This supposed fallacy takes its name from the following incident reported in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson:
57. Refutation of Bishop Berkeley After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." Boswell: Life
But where is the fallacy? If the good bishop really did maintain the nonexistence of material objects such as stones, then Johnson really did refute him by drawing Boswell's attention to a massive stone and the resistance it offered to Johnson's foot. But of course Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects. He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. If you know your Berkeley you know that what I just wrote is true and that the bishop cannot be refuted by kicking a stone.
Johnson's mistake, therefore, was not that he simply dismissed Berkeley's thesis without argument; his mistake was that he took Berkeley to be maintaining something other than what he in fact maintained, and then went on, stupidly, to refute this other proposition.
Johnson's fallacy was the ignoratio elenchi, not the ad lapidem. The very name 'ad lapidem' shows misunderstanding.
I suggest that there is something fallacious in the very notion of the ad lapidem fallacy. I rather doubt that we have any need to add this so-called fallacy to the grab-bag list of informal fallacies. Surely it cannot be the case that it is always wrong to dismiss a statement as false or even absurd without proof. Some claims are refutable by kicking. Suppose you maintain that there are no pains. Without saying anything, I kick you in the shins with steel-tipped boots, or perhaps I kick you a bit higher up. I will have brought home to you the plain falsehood of your claim. The fallacy behind ad lapidem is the notion that no assertion can be legitimately dismissed, that every assertion, no matter what, must be paid the respect of an explicit discursive rebuttal.
Or suppose sophomore Sam says that there is no truth. I would be fully within my epistemic rights to respond, 'Is that so?' and then walk away.
David Horowitz is a national treasure. The following is so important and so right that I reproduce the whole of it here. From National Review.
Is the Left Even on America’s Side Anymore?
The progressives have undermined American security and damaged race relations.
By David Horowitz — January 8, 2016
The Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky once described Stalinism as “the perfect theory for glueing up the brain.” What he meant was that a regime as monstrous as Stalin’s, which murdered 40 million people and enslaved many times more, was nonetheless able to persuade progressives and “social justice” advocates all over the world to act as its supporters and defenders. These enlightened enablers of Stalin’s crimes included leading intellectuals of the day, even Nobel Prize winners in the sciences and the arts such as Frederic Joliot-Curie and Andre Gide. But brilliant as they were, they were blind to the realities of the Stalinist regime and, therefore, to the virtues of the free societies they lived in.
What glued up their brains was the belief that a brave new world of social justice — a world governed by progressive principles — existed in embryo in Soviet Russia and had to be defended by any means necessary. As a result of this illusion, they put their talents and prestige at the service of the totalitarian enemies of democracy, acting, in Trotsky’s words, as “frontier guards” for the Stalinist empire. And they continued their efforts even after the Soviets conquered Eastern Europe, acquired nuclear weapons, and initiated a “cold war” with the West. To the progressives seduced by Stalinism, democratic America represented a greater evil than the barbaric police states of the Soviet bloc. Even half a century later a progressive culture still refers to the formative phase of the Cold War as the “Red Scare” — as though the fifth column of American progressives whose loyalties were to the Soviet enemy, whose members included Soviet spies, was not a matter of serious concern, and as though a nuclear-armed, rapacious Soviet empire did not pose a credible threat.
How were these delusions of otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people possible? How were otherwise informed individuals able to deny the obvious and support one of the most brutal and oppressive dictatorships in history? How did they come to view a relatively humane, decent, and democratic society like the United States as evil, while regarding the barbarous Communist regime as the victim of America? The answer lies in the identification of Marxism with the promise of social justice and the institution of progressive values ( to take place in a magical socialist future). Defense of the progressive idea trumped recognition of the reactionary fact.
To Western progressives, once the Stalinist regime was identified with the imaginary progressive future, everything followed — its status as a persecuted victim and America’s role as a reactionary force standing in the way of the noble leftist aspiration. Every fault of Stalin’s regime, every crime it committed — if not denied outright by progressives — was attributed to the nefarious actions of its enemies, most glaringly the United States. And once the promise of progressive redemption was juxtaposed to an imperfect real-world actor, all of their responses became virtually inevitable. Hence, the glueing of the brain.
The Soviet Union is gone, and history has moved on. But the Stalin-apologist dynamic endures as the heritage of a post-Communist Left, which remains wedded to fantasies of an impossibly beautiful future that collides with the flawed American present. The Left is now the dominant force in the American Democratic party. Its extreme disconnect from realities is encapsulated in the support for the transparently racist movement called “Black Lives Matter,” which attacks law enforcement and defends street predators, excusing their crimes with the alibi that “white supremacists” created the circumstances that make some commit criminal acts. This extremist movement has the “strong support” of the entire spectrum of the “progressive” Left (including 46 percent of the Democratic party, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll).
Black Lives Matter is a movement built on the fiction that police have declared open season on innocent black Americans. According to progressive fictions, police are the agents of a “white supremacist society” — a claim alone that should make one wary of the sanity of those who advance it. The facts belie the very basis of the claim that African Americans are being indiscriminately gunned down by police: African-American males, accounting for 6 percent of the population are responsible for more than 40 percent of violent crimes. But a Washington Post report on all 980 police shootings of 2015 reveals that only 4 percent of fatal police shootings involved white officers and black victims, while in “three-quarters of the incidents, cops were either under attack themselves or defending civilians,” or, as Michael Walsh observed in the New York Post, police officers were “in other words, doing their jobs.”
One incident in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., became the launching point for the Black Lives Matter movement and its malicious claim that innocent blacks were being wantonly gunned down by racist police. The alleged “victim,” Michael Brown, had just committed a strong-armed robbery and refused to comply with Officer Darren Wilson’s order to surrender. Instead the 300-pound street thug attacked Wilson in his vehicle, tried to wrest his gun from him, and then walked away before turning and charging him. Several shots failed to stop Brown, until one killed him.
Ignoring the facts, Black Lives Matter promoted the lie, invented by Brown’s robbery accomplice, that Brown had his hands up and was attempting to surrender when he was shot. “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” quickly became the anthem of the movement. But this lie was refuted not only by black eyewitnesses testifying before the grand jury convened for the case and by forensic evidence, but by a review conducted by former attorney general Eric Holder’s Justice Department, otherwise bent on demonstrating the existence of bigotry in the Ferguson police department. Meanwhile “protesters” went about setting fire to Ferguson, causing millions of dollars of damage, because if there was no justice — no hanging of Wilson — there would be no peace, as the now familiar mob slogan framed it.
Black Lives Matter then set about taking its crusade to other cities, most prominently to Baltimore, where a career criminal named Freddie Gray became another cause célèbre. Gray had suffered fatal injuries inside a police van where only another captive was present. As the Black Lives Matter–inspired mobs began to gather in “protest,” Baltimore’s black Democratic mayor ordered police to stand down, allowing them to destroy millions of dollars of property. The state’s black Democratic prosecutor then indicted six police officers, three of them African American, on various ludicrous charges including first-degree murder.
The immediate result of Black Lives Matter’s war on law enforcement was an epidemic of crime, as police officers decided that aggressive law enforcement was dangerous to their lives and careers. Homicides in the Ferguson area and in Baltimore jumped 60 percent. Virtually all the victims were blacks, revealing the hypocrisy of a movement for which black lives didn’t really matter — attacks on the law enforcement and on the “power structure” did.
How could any reasonable citizen — let alone one with progressive aspirations — support a roving lynch mob like the one in Ferguson? How could half the Democratic party support a movement that condemns America as a white-supremacist society, disregarding the reality that the president and chief law-enforcement officer, and thousands of civil servants and elected officials, including the mayors and police chiefs of large urban centers, such as Memphis, Tenn., Atlanta, and Philadelphia are black? (In Detroit the new mayor is actually the first white mayor in 40 years, while its police chief is still black.)
One can embrace the absurdity that America is a white-supremacist society only if afflicted with the illusion that all statistical inequalities affecting African Americans, like high crime rates, are not reflections of culture and character but marks of racist oppression. (This particular absurdity — universal as it is among American progressives and the current U.S. Department of Justice — is easily refuted: If statistical disparities proved racism, the National Basketball Association in which 95 percent of the starting multimillionaires are black would be an association controlled by black racists, as would the National Football League, while the National Hockey League would be under the thumb of white racists.) Progressives are delusional about black racism and black crime because they are in thrall to the vision of an imaginary progressive future in which social justice will guarantee that every individual outcome is the same.
The Left is blind to the responsibility of inner-city populations for their off-the-charts violent-crime rates. The failure to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood is as characteristic of the progressive attitude as is its blindness to the betrayal of inner-city communities by Democrats, responsible almost entirely for the disgraceful condition of America’s cities. Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and numerous other centers of out-of-control black poverty, failed public-school systems, and black-on-black violence are 100 percent controlled by the Democratic party and have been so for 50 to 100 years. Yet 95 percent of the black vote and 100 percent of the progressive vote continues to go to Democrats who oppress African Americans.
Unfortunately, progressives’ sordid history of supporting criminals at home is accompanied by an equally dishonorable record of sympathy for America’s enemies abroad. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was one of the monsters of the 20th century, launching two aggressive wars, dropping poison gas on the Kurdish minority, and murdering 300,000 Iraqi citizens. But when America proposed deposing him, more than a million progressives poured into the streets in protest. At first, the Democratic leadership supported the Iraq invasion as a just and necessary war. But three months later, with American men and women still in harm’s way — and under pressure from the progressive Left — they turned against the very war they had voted to authorize and, for the next five years, conducted a malicious propaganda campaign, worthy of the enemy, to discredit America’s intentions and to obstruct our military mission.
Because the Bush administration chose not to defend itself by confronting the Left’s subversive actions — including the exposure of three national-security programs — leftist myths about the Iraq War persist to this day, even in some conservative circles. To set the record straight: Bush did not lie to seduce Democrats into supporting the war, and could not have done so, since the Democrats had access to the same intelligence reports he did. The war was not about extant stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, as Democrats dishonestly claimed: It was about Saddam’s violation of 17 U.N. Security Council resolutions designed to prevent him from pursuing the WMD programs he was developing. The Democrats’ betrayal of their country’s war effort crippled its progress and, with the election to the presidency of an anti-war leftist in 2008, led directly to the explosion of terrorism and bloodshed that has since engulfed the Middle East.
But it wasn’t just the surrender mentality of the Obama administration that fueled these catastrophes. With the full support of the Democratic party, President Obama embraced the Muslim Brotherhood and America’s mortal enemy, Iran, providing its ayatollahs with a path to nuclear weapons and dominance of the region — causing Sunni Arab states to prepare for a Middle Eastern civil war.
Just as leftists acted as propagandists for the Soviet empire, discrediting America’s Cold War effort and conducting deceptive campaigns to hide Soviet crimes, so the Left today disparages the Islamist threat and opposes the security measures necessary to protect the homeland — most alarmingly the sealing of our southern border. Progressives have created seditious “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security and the immigration laws in more than 300 outlaw municipalities under Democratic control. This betrayal has gone un-reversed for years and led to the needless deaths of numerous American citizens at the hands of illegal-alien criminals, of which there are more than 200,000 in our jails alone, and obviously many more inside our borders.
Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. But in truth, 60 percent of religious hate crimes are directed at Jews, with a small minority directed a Muslims.
Exploiting the myth of Muslim persecution, progressives oppose scrutiny of the Muslim community, including terror-promoting imams and mosques. They immediately denounce proposals to screen Muslim immigrants as religious bigotry, and thus close off any rational discussion of the problem. Led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Democrats have enabled the Islamist assault on free speech, which is a central component of the Islamist campaign to create a worldwide religious theocracy. Most notoriously the president and his operatives cynically spread the lie that an obscure Internet video about Mohammed was behind the Benghazi terror attack. Speaking like an ayatollah before the U.N. General Assembly, shortly after the attack, Obama declared: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” What an American president should have said is: “The future must not belong to those who murder in the name of Islam.”
Our country is at a perilous crossroads, one that is made immeasurably more dangerous by a national party that blames its own country for the crimes of its enemies, and by a political opposition too feckless and timid to hold its fellow citizens accountable for their unconscionable acts.
Panayot Butchvarov, Anthropocentrism in Philosophy: Realism, Antirealism, Semirealism, Walter de Gruyter, 2015, p. 33:
As used in epistemology, "justified" is a technical term, of obscure meaning and uncertain reference, indeed often explicitly introduced as a primitive. In everyday talk, it is a deontic term, usually a synonym of 'just' or 'right,' and thus 'justified belief' is a solecism. For it is actions that are justified or unjustified, and beliefs are not actions.
The argument is this, assuming that moral justification is in question:
a. Actions alone are morally either justified or unjustified. b. No belief is an action. Therefore c. No belief is morally either justified or unjustified. Therefore d. 'Morally justified belief' is a solecism.
(b) is not evident. Aren't some beliefs actions or at least analogous to actions? I will argue that some beliefs are actions because they come under the direct control of the will. As coming under the direct control of the will, they are morally evaluable.
1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it impermissible? Is disbelieving it obligatory? Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?
2. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions because they are under voluntary control. Thus it makes sense to say that one ought to feed one's children because (apart from unusual circumstances) it is within one's power to feed one's children. So if it makes sense to apply deontological predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes, then they too must be under voluntary control. If I cannot help but believe what I believe, then I cannot be morally censured for believing, disbelieving, or suspending judgment.
3. This brings us to the question of doxastic voluntarism: Are any of our (occurrent) believings under our direct voluntary control as regards their coming into existence? To introduce some terminology:
Extreme doxastic voluntarism: ALL beliefs are such that their formation is under one's direct voluntary control. Limited doxastic voluntarism: There are only SOME beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control. Doxastic involuntarism: There are are NO beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control.
Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it.
4. I am a limited doxastic voluntarist.
a) Clearly, one cannot believe at will just anything. One cannot believe at will what is obviously false. It is obviously false that the Third Reich continues to exercise its brutal hegemony over Europe, and no one who is sane has the power to believe this falsehood at will, just by deciding to believe it.
b) One cannot not believe what is obviously the case. It is obviously the case that this thing in front of me is a computer monitor. Can I disbelieve this perceptual deliverance? No. Seeing is believing. It is a more subtle question whether I can suspend judgment in the manner of Husserl's phenomenological epoche. But this is a topic for a separate post. For now I am happy to concede that one cannot disbelieve at will what is obviously the case.
c) The matter becomes much more difficult when we turn to propositions from religion, philosophy, science and elsewhere that are neither obviously true nor obviously false. It is not obviously true that God exists, but neither is it obviously true that God does not exist. It is not obviously true that doxastic voluntarism is true, but neither is it obviously true that it is not true.
Suppose I am concerned with the freedom of the will, study the issue thoroughly, but am torn between libertarianism and compatibilism. It is surely not obvious that one or the other is true. If the positions strike me as equally well-supported, then nothing at the level of intellect inclines me one way or the other. Must not will come in to decide the matter, if the matter must be decided? Or consider the weightier question of the existence of God. Suppose the arguments pro et contra strike me as equally probative so that, at the level of intellect, I am not inclined one way or the other. If the issue is to be resolved, must I not simply decide to believe one way or the other? But William Alston, doxastic involuntarist, will have none of this: "How could we do that any more than, lacking any reasons at all for one alternative rather than another, we decide to believe that the number of ultimate particles in the universe is even rather than odd?" (Beyond "Justification," p. 65)
This response packaged in a rhetorical question strikes me as very weak. No one cares what the number of particles is let alone whether it is odd or even. Indeed, it is not clear that the question even makes sense. (How could one possibly count them?) The God question is toto caelo different. In Jamesian terms, the God question is live, forced, momentous, and not intellectually decidable. A live issue is one that matters to us and seems to need deciding. Whether the number of ultimate particles is odd or even is certainly not live. A forced issue is one that is compulsory in the sense that we cannot not take a stand on it: to remain agnostic or uncommitted on the God question is practically to live as an atheist. There is nothing forced about the particles question. A momentous issue is one about which it matters greatly which position we adopt. The particles question is clearly not momentous. An intellectually undecidable question is one which, if it is to be decided, must be decided by an act of will.
So what I would say to the doxastic involuntarist is that in some cases -- those that fit the Jamesian criteria are clear but not the only examples -- the will does in fact come into play in the formation of beliefs and indeed legitimately comes into play. To the extent that it does, a limited doxastic voluntarism is true.
If so, then some belief formation is under the control of the will and is morally evaluable, contra Butchvarov.
According to Heather Wilhelm, feminists are teetering on the brink of a "nervous breakdown":
Why, the chorus goes, is Bernie cast as the future, while Hillary gets painted as “the establishment”? Hillary Clinton is a woman, didn’t you notice? She is by her very nature oppressed; by definition, she cannot be the establishment. Never mind her questionable treatment of the many women who accused her husband of sexual assault; never mind her current classified e-mail quagmire, in which she may have put national security at risk. She is a woman, America. Everything else is chump change.
This lefty-feminist thinking is that women can no more belong to the establishment than blacks can be racists. Why? Because this is true by definition.
At this point I must plug my posts on the illicit use of 'by definition.' Here and here. ("Why must you?" Because it is my self-imposed task people to enlighten people.)
The problem here is that too many women, like too many blacks, are tribal, though not as tribal as blacks. Of course, women are not literally a tribe. Nor is it the case that all women are 'tribal' any more than all blacks are tribal. What do I mean when I say that women, many women, too many women, are 'tribal'? I mean that they place their self-identification as women at the top or near the top of more reasonable and less divisive self-identifications. Any woman who would vote for Hillary just because she is a woman or would place Hillary's being a woman near the top of her reasons for voting for the former Secretary of State is tribal in my sense.
You should vote for the candidate that you think best serves the common good. So if you support Hillary because you think she will best forward the 'progressive' agenda, and you believe in that agenda, then I won't call you 'tribal.' But I will question your judgment. If you really believe in the 'progressive' agenda, shouldn't you be supporting Sanders?
I'm no monarchist, neither am I mad, but the following from The Mad Monarchist is on target. (HT: London Karl)
You think you have free speech? Depends on your politics or your skin color or your religion. A French magazine can publish numerous cartoons mocking Christians, a few mocking Jews but one mocking Islam gets them all shot and western governments give cover to the murderers by self-censoring. One set of rules for them, another for us. If you are President Obama, or the mayor of any of the numerous “sanctuary cities” in these United States, you can refuse to enforce immigration laws and that’s perfectly fine but if you are a county clerk named Kim Davis in Kentucky who refuses to enforce a court ruling on granting gay “marriage” licenses, you go straight to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200. They can do it, but you can’t. You have to follow the rules but they don’t. If you’re a socialist mp from Scotland you can be on a first-name basis with the most murderous dictators in the world, spout treason constantly while taking a paycheck from the Queen and be a national celebrity, a left-wing icon but if you’re name is Tommy Robinson and you say you are against the Islamization of Britain, even while French-kissing a Black, Jewish, homosexual you are going to be called a “Nazi” and have the police set on you until they find some reason to put you behind bars.
The point about self-censoring is important. A good recent example of it was Martin O'Malley's supine retraction of 'All lives matter' when confronted by Black Lives Matter idiots. By the way, it is this sort of disgusting grovelling before thugs and idiots that gives Trump traction. Probably the main thing animating his supporters is disgust at political correctness. Watch the entire clip; it is less than three minutes. Sanders at least had the cojones to stand his ground, and the black Kevin Jackson talks sense.
I read a book by Kevin Jackson recently, Race Pimping. He is one black dude with his head screwed on Right. To a leftard, that must make him a 'traitor to his race.'
By the way, how stupid a phrase! As if race is a political affiliation. But why not if race is a 'social construct'? One stupidity breeds another.
Here is an argument adapted from Peter van Inwagen for the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials.
a. Number-words are univocal.
b. 'Exist(s)' is a number-word.
Therefore
c. 'Exist(s)' is univocal.
(a) is plainly true. The words 'six' and 'forty-nine' have the same sense regardless of what we are counting. As van Inwagen puts it, "If you have written thirteen epics and I own thirteen cats, the number of your epics is the number of my cats."
(b) captures the Fregean claim that ". . . existence is analogous to number. Affirmation of existence is in fact nothing but denial of the number nought." (Foundations of Arithmetic, p. 65)
How so? Well, to say that unicorns do not exist is equivalent to saying that the number of unicorns is zero, and to say that horses exist is equivalent to saying that the number of horses is one or more. Surely that is true for both affirmative and negative general existentials. Whether it is true for singular existentials is a further question.
Van Inwagen maintains "The univocacy [univocity] of number and the the intimate connection between number and existence should convince us that existence is univocal."
I am not convinced.
Consider my cat Max Black. I exclaim, 'Max exists!' My exclamation expresses a truth. Contrast the singular 'Max exists' with the general 'Cats exist.' I agree with van Inwagen that the general 'Cats exist' is equivalent to 'The number of cats is one or more.' But it is perfectly plain that the singular 'Max exists' is not equivalent to 'The number of Max is one or more.' For the right-hand-side of the equivalence is nonsense, hence necessarily neither true nor false.
This question makes sense: 'How many cats are there in BV's house?' But this question makes no sense: 'How many Max are there in BV's house?' Why not? Well, 'Max' is a proper name (Eigenname in Frege's terminology) not a concept-word (Begriffswort in Frege's terminology). Of course, I could sensibly ask how many Maxes there are hereabouts, but then 'Max' is not being used as a proper name, but as a stand-in for 'person/cat named "Max" .' The latter phrase is obviously not a proper name.
And so I deny the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials.
Andrew Bailey lodges the following objection to what I maintain:
You note that "‘Max exists’ is not equivalent to ‘The number of Max is one or more’", and that seems right.
But why think "The number of Max is one or more" is the way to say of Max that he exists using number-words? Why not, instead, "At least one thing is Max"? My suggestion, note, would align closely with the way one would ordinarily translate "Max exists" into the predicate logic: -- 'Ex(x=Max)' -- a statement of logic one might render in English as "there is at least one thing that is identical to Max".
Dr. Bailey is of course right that 'Max exists' can be translated into standard first-order predicate logic in the way he indicates and that this is equivalent in 'canonical English' to 'There is at least one thing that is identical to Max.' Bailey's rebuttal seems to be the following: Just as we can express 'Cats exist' as 'At least one thing is a cat,' we can express 'Max exists' as 'At least one thing is Max.'
But this response is unavailing. Note that the 'is' in 'is a cat' is not the 'is' of identity, but the 'is' of predication, while the 'is' in 'is Max' is the 'is of identity. So if Bailey tries to secure the univocity of 'exist(s)' in this way, he does so by exploiting an equivocation on 'is.'
Another possible rebuttal would be by invoking haecceities. One might argue that there is no equivocation on 'is' because both of the following feature the 'is' of predication:
At least one thing is a cat
At least one thing is Max-identical.
On the second approach one secures the univocity of 'exist(s)' but at the expense of those metaphysical monstrosities known as haecceity properties. The haecceity H of x is a property x cannot fail to instantiate, alone instantiates in the actual world, and that nothing distinct from x instantiates in any possible world. If Max has such such a property -- call it Maxity -- then this property captures Max's haecceitas or thisness, where 'thisness' is to be understood as irreducible and nonqualitative. If there is such a property, then it is the property of identity-with-Max or Max-identity.
So if you want to maintain the univocity of 'exist(s)' across general and singular existentials, you must either conflate the 'is' of identity' with the 'is' of predication, or embrace haecceity properties.
You envy me? What a wretch you must be to feel diminished in your sense of self-worth by comparison with me! I have something you lack? Why isn't that compensated for by what you have that I lack? You feel bad that I have achieved something by my hard work? Don't you realize that you waste time and energy that could be used to improve your own lot?
You ought to feel bad, not because I do well, but because you are so foolish as to indulge envy. Vices vitiate, they weaken. You weaken yourself and make yourself even more of a wretch by succumbing to envy.
We'll start with murder. David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):
Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her. In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.
[. . .]
The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales. Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.
The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music. [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary. They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee. Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement. Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."
Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events. It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.
And now for some love songs.
Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love. A great version from 1964. Lynne died at 83 in 2013. Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.
Ketty Lester, Love Letters. Another great old tune in a 1962 version. The best to my taste.
1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day. Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements. Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism? But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life. A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.
2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother She's sleeping here right by my side And in her right hand a silver dagger, She says that I can't be your bride.
All men are false, says my mother, They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies. The very next evening, they'll court another, Leave you alone to pine and sigh.
My daddy is a handsome devil He's got a chain five miles long, And on every link a heart does dangle Of another maid he's loved and wronged.
Go court another tender maiden, And hope that she will be your wife, For I've been warned, and I've decided To sleep alone all of my life.
The American Philosophical Association has issued a statement that condemns bullying and harrassment. Who could disagree? But the following paragraph needs a little more work:
Abusive speech directed at philosophers is not limited to responses by the public to published op-eds. A look at some of the anonymous philosophy blogs also reveals a host of examples of abusive speech by philosophers directed against other philosophers. Disagreement is fine and is not the issue. But bullying and ad hominem harassment of philosophers by other philosophers undermines civil disagreement and discourse and has no place in our community. [. . .]
Two points. Why the restriction to anonymous philosophy blogs? There is a decidedly non-anonymous gossip site run by a philosophy adjunct that has featured numerous unprovoked attacks on fellow philosophers. Here is a prime example.
Now let's say you have been attacked out of the blue by this fellow, and you respond in kind with mockery and contumely, to give him a taste of his own medicine. Should it not be pointed out that the same types of actions can be justified as defense that cannot be justified as attack?
Civility is a good old conservative virtue. But it has limits. Civility is for the civil, not for those whose hypocritical calls for civility serve to mask their aggression.
I thought he would have 'flamed out' by now, but he is still going strong. Might The Donald be on the way to becoming il Duce of America? I ascribed Trump's traction to conservative inaction and Obama's overreach. But cultural factors need to be considered. And who better than Charles Murray to do the job? His WSJ piece begins like this:
If you are dismayed by Trumpism, don’t kid yourself that it will fade away if Donald Trump fails to win the Republican nomination. Trumpism is an expression of the legitimate anger that many Americans feel about the course that the country has taken, and its appearance was predictable. It is the endgame of a process that has been going on for a half-century: America’s divestment of its historic national identity.
For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”
What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority.
As recently as 1960, the creed was our national consensus. Running that year for the Democratic nomination, candidates like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Hubert Humphrey genuinely embraced the creed, differing from Republicans only in how its elements should be realized.
Today, the creed has lost its authority and its substance. What happened?
I was purchasing shotgun ammo at a gun store a while back. The proprietor brought out a box of double-aught buckshot shells which he recommended as having "the power to separate the soul from the body." The proprietor was a 'good old boy,' not someone with whom a wise man initiates a philosophical discussion. But his colorful phraseology got me thinking.
The words 'soul' and 'spirit' carry a cargo of both religious and substance-dualist connotations. And that is the way I will use them. The soul is that in us which thinks in the broad Cartesian sense of 'think.' it is the subject of consciousness and self-consciousness and moral sense (conscience). It is the thinker of our thoughts and the agent of our actions. It is the ultimate reference of the first person singular pronoun 'I' in its indexical use. But I must add that the soul is these things construed as capable of independent existence, as having not only an immaterial nature, but also an immaterial nature capable of existing on its own apart from these gross physical bodies with which we are all too familiar. So 'soul' is a theoretical term; it is not datanic or theory-neutral. 'Consciousness,' by contrast, is theory neutral. If you deny that there are souls, you will be forgiven, and you may even be right. If you deny that there is consciousness, however, then you are either a sophist, a lunatic, or an eliminativist, which is to say, a lunatic. Sophists and lunatics are not to be debated; they are to be 'shown the door.'
A substance, among other things, is an entity metaphysically capable of independent existence. The soul is a substance. It does not require some other thing in which to exist. (Nulla res indiget ad existendum.) So it is capable of independent existence. We encounter it as 'attached' to the body, but it can 'separate' from the body. The question is what these words mean in this context. The problem is to ascribe some coherent sense to them. What is the nature of this strange attachment?
1. Only physical things can be physically separated and physically attached. (The toenail from the toe; the stamp to the envelope; the spark plug from the cylinder; the yolk from the white, etc.) The soul is not a physical thing; ergo, souls cannot be physically separated from or attached to anything. So in this context we are not to take 'separation' and 'attachment' in any physical or material sense, whether gross or subtle. So don't think of ghosts or spooks floating out of gross bodies. Spook-stuff is still stuff, while what we are talking about now is not 'stuffy' at all.
2. It follows from this that every physical model is inadequate and just as, or more, misleading than helpful. The soul is not like the pilot in the ship, the man in his house, the oyster in the shell, the prisoner in his cell. These analogies may capture certain aspects of the soul-body relation, but they occlude others so that on balance they are of little use. But they are of some use. The morally sensitive, for example, experience a tension between their higher nature and their animal inclinations. There is more to the moral life than a struggle against the lusts of the flesh, but that is part of it. Thus the resonance of the Socratic image of the body as the prison-house of the soul.
3. The soul-body relation cannot literally be an instance of a physical relation, nor could it be an instance of a logical or mathematical or mereological or set-theoretical relation. We can lump these last four together under the rubric 'abstract relations.' Presumably the soul-body relation is sui generis. It's its own thing. Just as it would be absurd to say that entailment is an instance of a physical relation, it is absurd to suppose that soul-body is an instance of a physical or a logico-mathematical relation. The soul is neither a physical entity nor an abstract entity.
4. It seems to follow that if the the soul-body relation is sui generis, then there can be no model for it borrowed from some more familiar realm. The relation can only be understood in 'soulic,' or as I will say, spiritual terms. It can only be understood in its own terms. So let's consider mental or spiritual attachment. I am attached to my cat in the sense that, were he to die, I would grieve. Clearly, this is not a physical relation. Whether he is on my lap or far away, the attachment is the same. Spiritual attachment is consistent with physical separation. And spiritual non-attachment (spiritual separation) is consistent with physical proximity and indeed contact.
We allow ourselves to become attached to all sorts of things, people, and ideas, especially our own ideas. Attachments wax and wane. Many are foolish and even delusional. We become attached to what cannot last as if it will last forever. We become attached to what has no value. We have trouble apportioning our degree of attachment to the reality and value of attachment's object. As has been appreciated in many religions and wisdom traditions, much of our misery arises from desire and attachment to the objects of desire. For Pali Buddhism it is desire as such that is the problem; on more moderate views inordinate and misdirected desire. We are also capable of non-attachment or detachment, and this has been recommended in different ways and to different degrees by the religions and the wisdom traditions. There can be no doubt that non-attachment is a major component in wisdom.
5. None of this attaching and detaching would be possible without intentionality. The spiritual self, by virtue of its intentionality, flees itself and loses itself among the objects of its attachment. Chief among these is the mundane self: the body, the personality, their pasts, and the myriad of objects that one takes to be one's own. My car, my house, my wife, my children, my brilliant insights . . . . And now I come to my speculation. The soul attaches itself to this body here in a manner similar to the way it attaches itself to everything else to which it attaches itself. So attaching itself, my soul makes this body here my body. I come to 'inhabit' this body here, thereby making it my body, by my having chosen this body as the material locus of my subjectivity, as the vehicle of my trajectory through space-time. But when" Where? How? I chose this fall into time?
I am telling a Platonic story. I am penning yet another footnote to Plato. Who can believe it? Well, consider the alternatives! You are not your body and yet you are attached to it. What is your theory as to the nature of this attachment? I know what you will say. And I will have no trouble poking holes in it.
What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58. It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article. First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland. Then I explain and raise two objections to this theory. I post the following on account of hearing from a student of Moreland who is himself now a professor of philosophy. He has some criticisms to make. I should like to hear them in the ComBox. Another student of Moreland says he agrees with me. He may wish to chime in as well. The other day a third student of Moreland surfaced. The Moreland text I have under my logical microscope is pp. 134-139 of his 2001 Universals (McGill-Queen's University Press).
Common Ground with Moreland on Existence
We agree on the following five points (which is not to say that Moreland will agree with every detail of my explanation of these five points):
Existence is attributable to individuals. The cat that just jumped into my lap exists. This very cat, Manny, exists. Existence belongs to it and is meaningfully attributable to it. Pace Frege and Russell, 'Manny exists' is a meaningful sentence, and it is meaningful as it stands, as predicating existence of an individual. It is nothing like 'Manny is numerous.' To argue that since cats are numerous, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny is numerous is to commit the fallacy of division. Russell held that the same fallacy is committed by someone who thinks that since cats exist, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny exists. But Russell was mistaken: there is no fallacy of division; there is an equivocation on 'exists.' It has a general or second-level use and a singular or first-level use.
There are admissible first-level uses of '. . .exist(s).' It is not the case that only second-level uses are admissible. And it is only because Manny, or some other individual cat, exists that the concept cat is instantiated. The existence of an individual cannot be reduced to the being-instantiated of a property or concept. If you like, you can say that the existence of a concept is its being instantiated. We sometimes speak like that. A typical utterance of 'Beauty exists,' say, is not intended to convey that Beauty itself exists, but is intended to convey that Beauty is exemplified, that there are beautiful things. But then one is speaking of general existence, not of singular existence.
Clearly, general existence presupposes singular existence in the following sense: if a first-level concept or property is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, and this individual must exist in order to stand in the instantiation nexus to a concept or property. From here on out, by 'existence' I mean 'singular existence.' There is really no need for 'general existence' inasmuch as we can speak of instantiation or of someness, as when we say that cats exist if and only something is a cat. The fundamental error of what Peter van Inwagen calls the 'thin theory' of existence is to imagine that existence can be reduced to the purely logical notion of someness. That would be to suppose, falsely, that singular existence can be dispensed with in favor of general existence. Existence is not a merely logical topic ; existence is a metaphysical topic.
Existence cannot be an ordinary property of individuals. While existence is attributable to individuals, it is no ordinary property of them. There are several reasons for this, but I will mention only one: you cannot add to a thing's description by saying of it that it exists. Nothing is added to the description of a tomato if one adds 'exists' to its descriptors: 'red,' round,' ripe,' etc. As Kant famously observed, "Being is not a real predicate," i.e., being or existence adds nothing to the realitas or whatness of a thing. Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, Kant did not anticipate the Frege-Russell theory. He does not deny that 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate. (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75, esp. 48-50.)
Existence is not a classificatory concept or property. The reason is simple: there is no logically prior domain of items classifiable as either existent or nonexistent. Pace Meinong, everything exists. There are no nonexistent items. On Meinong's view, some items actually have properties despite having no Being at all.
Existence makes a real difference to a thing that exists. In one sense existence adds nothing to a thing. It adds nothing quidditative. In another sense it adds everything: if a thing does not exist, it is nothing at all! To be or not to be -- not just a question, but the most 'abysmal' difference conceivable. In this connection, Moreland rightly speaks of a "real difference between existence and non-existence." (137)
Existence itself exists. This is not the trivial claim that existing things exist. It is the momentous claim that that in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists. It is a logical consequence of (4) in conjunction with (3). As Moreland puts it, "[i]f existence itself does not exist, then nothing else could exist in virtue of having existence." (135)
The above five points are criteria of adequacy for a theory of existence: any adequate theory must include or entail each of these points. Most philosophers nowadays will not agree, but I think Moreland will. So he and I stand on common ground. I should think that the only fruitful disputes are those that play out over a large chunk of common ground.
But these criteria of adequacy also pose a problem: How can existence belong to individuals without being a property of them? Existence belongs to individual as it would not belong to them if it were a property of properties or concepts; but it is not a property of individuals.
Moreland's Theory
Moreland's theory gets off to a good start: "existence is not a property which belongs, but is the belonging of a property." (137) This insight nicely accommodates points (1) and (2) above: existence is attributable to individuals without being an ordinary property of them. Indeed, it is not a property at all. I infer from this that existence is not the property of having properties. It is rather the mutual belongingness of a thing and its properties. Moreland continues:
Existence is the entering into the exemplification nexus . . . . In the case of Tony the tiger, the fact [that] the property of being a tiger belongs to something and that something has this property belonging to it is what confers existence. (137)
I take this to mean that existence is the mutual belonging together of individual and property. It is 'between' a thing and its properties as that which unifies them, thereby tying them into a concrete fact or state of affairs. The existence of Tony is not one of his properties; nor is it Tony. And of course the existence of Tony is not the being-exemplified of some such haecceity property as identity-with-Tony. Rather, the existence of Tony, of that very individual, is his exemplifying of his properties. The existence of a (thick) individual in general is then the exemplification relation itself insofar as this relation actually relates (thin) individual and properties.
Moreland implies as much. In answer to the question how existence itself exists, he explains that "The belonging-to (exemplification, predication) relation is itself exemplified . . ." (137) Thus the asymmetrical exemplification relation x exemplifies P is exemplified by Tony and the property of being a tiger (in that order). Existence itself exists because existence itself is the universal exemplification relation which is itself exemplified. It exists in that it is exemplified by a and F-ness, a and G-ness, a and H-ness, b and F-ness, b and G-ness, b and H-ness, and so on. An individual existent exists in that its ontological constituents (thin particular and properties) exemplify the exemplification relation which is existence itself.
The basic idea is this. The existence of a thick particular such as Tony, that is, a particular taken together with all its monadic properties, is the unity of its ontological constituents. (This is not just any old kind of unity, of course, but a type of unity that ties items that are not facts into a fact.) This unity is brought about by the exemplification relation within the thick particular. The terms of this relation are the thin particular on the one hand and the properties on the other.
Moreland's theory accommodates all five of the desiderata listed above which in my book is a strong point in its favor.
A Bradleyan Difficulty
A sentence such as 'Al is fat' is not a list of its constituent words. The sentence is either true or false, but neither the corresponding list, nor any item on the list, is either true or false. So there is something more to a declarative sentence than its constituent words. Something very similar holds for the fact that makes the sentence true, if it is true. I mean the extralinguistic fact of Al's being fat. The primary constituents of this fact, Al and fatness, can exist without the fact existing. The fact, therefore, cannot be identified with its primary constituents, taken either singly, or collectively. A fact is more than its primary constituents. But how are we to account for this 'more'?
On Moreland's theory, as I understand it, this problem is solved by adding a secondary constituent, the exemplification relation, call it EX, whose task is to connect the primary constituents. This relation ties the primary constituents into a fact. It is what makes a fact more than its primary constituents. Unfortunately, this proposal leads to Bradley's Regress. For if Al + fatness do not add up to the fact of Al's being fat, then Al + fatness + EX won't either. If Al and fatness can exist without forming the fact of Al's being fat, then Al and fatness and EX can all exist without forming the fact in question. How can adding a constituent to the primary constituents bring about the fact-constituting unity of all constituents? EX has not only to connect a and F-ness, but also to connect itself to a and to F-ness. How can it do the latter? The answer to this, presumably, will be that EX is a relation and the business of a relation is to relate. EX, relating itself to a and to F-ness, relates them to each other. EX is an active ingredient in the fact, not an inert ingredient. It is a relating relation, and not just one more constituent that needs relating to the others by something distinct from itself. For this reason, Bradley's regress can't get started.
The problem, however, is that EX can exist without relating the relata that it happens to relate in a given case. This is because EX is a universal. If it were a relation-instance as on D. W. Mertz's theory, then it would be a particular, an unrepeatable, and could not exist apart from the very items it relates. Bradley's regress could not then arise. But if EX is a universal, then it can exist without relating any specific relata that it does relate, even though, as an immanent universal, it must relate some relata or other. This implies that a relation's relating what it relates is contingent to its being the relation it is. For example, x loves y contingently relates Al and Barbara, which implies that the relation is distinct from its relating. The same goes for EX: it is distinct from its relating. It is more than just a constituent of any fact into which it enters; it is a constituent that does something to the other constituents, and in so doing does something to itself, namely, connect itself to the other constituents. Relating relations are active ingredients in facts, not inert ingredients. Or we could say that a relating relation is ontologically participial in addition to its being ontologically substantival. And since the relating is contingent in any given case, the relating in any given case requires a ground. What could this ground be?
My claim is that it cannot be any relation, including the relation, Exemplification. More generally, no constituent of a fact can serve as ontological ground of the unity of a fact's constituents. For any such putatively unifying constituent will either need a further really unifying constituent to connect it to what it connects, in which case Bradley's regress is up and running, or the unifying constituent will have to be ascribed a 'magical' power, a power no abstract object could possess, namely, the power to unify itself with what it unifies. Such an item would be a self-grounding ground: a ground of unity that grounds its unity with that which it unifies. The synthetic unity at the heart of each contingent fact needs to be grounded in an act of synthesis that cannot be brought about by any constituent of a fact, or by the fact itself.
My first objection to Moreland's theory may be put as follows. The existence of a thick particular (which we are assaying as a concrete fact along the lines of Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong) cannot be the fact's constituents' standing in the exemplification relation. And existence itself, existence in its difference from existents, cannot be identified with the exemplification relation.
Can Existence Exist Without Being Uniquely Self-Existent?
I agree with Moreland that existence itself exists. One reason was supplied by Reinhardt Grossmann: "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (Categorial Structure of the World, 405) But I have trouble with the notion that existence itself is the exemplification relation. Existence as that which is common to all that exists, and as that in virtue of which everything exists cannot be just one more thing that exists. Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership, such as the category of relations. For reasons like these such penetrating minds as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Panayot Butchvarov have denied that existence itself exists.
In my 2002 existence book I proposed a synthesis of these competing theses: Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it. From this point of view, Moreland has a genuine insight, but he has not taken it far enough: he stops short at the dubious view that existence is the relation of exemplification. But if you drive all the way down the road with me you end up at Divine Simplicity, which Moreland has good reasons for rejecting.
Hillary took a shellacking yesterday in the New Hampshire primary, losing to Bernie Sanders by 20 or so points. Time to pull out the race card:
Clinton is set to campaign with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans who died in incidents involving law enforcement officers and a neighborhood watch representative, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an inspirational message.
Remember Trayvon Martin? He was the black child on the way to the candy store who was brutally murdered by the racist white Hispanic, George Zimmerman.
Bret Stephens applied it to Hillary in today's Wall Street Journal. The meaning, I take it, is that she can move either right or left in pursuit of her personal ambitions depending on the circumstances.
But we ought to consider whether 'ideologically ambisinistrous' might fit her better, given her being a two-fisted lefty.
I am happy to see that Ed is back to blogging. It have reproduced his latest entry and added some comments.
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Peter Geach (“Intentional Identity.” Journal of Philosophy 64, 627-32, reprinted in Logic Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972) argues that the following sentence can be true even if there are no witches, yet can only be true if Hob and Nob are, as it were, thinking of the same witch.
Hob thinks that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow.
But how it could be true? If we read it in the opaque way of reading indirect speech clauses then each that-clause must stand on its own syntactically, but there is no way of interpreting the pronoun ‘she’ as a bound variable. The two thoughts add up, as it were, to ‘for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and x killed Cob’s sow. But we can’t split them up into two separate thoughts, because of the second part of the conjunction. I.e. the following is not well-formed.
* Hob thinks that for some x, x has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether x killed Cob’s sow.
On the other hand, if we render the original sentence in the transparent way, we have to presume the existence of a real witch, i.e. some witch such that Hob thinks that she has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow. Neither of these are satisfactory. I don’t propose any answer yet, but I will start by noticing that the same problem attaches to saying what sentences say, rather than what people think.
(1) A witch has blighted Bob’s mare. (2) She killed Cob’s sow. (3) Sentence (1) says that a witch has blighted Bob’s mare. (4) Sentence (2) says that she (or the witch) has blighted Bob’s mare.
Clearly sentences (3) and (4) are true, even though sentences (1) and (2) are false. Yet the problem is exactly the same as the problem involving different thoughts. Thus we have simplified the problem. We don’t have to worry about explaining thoughts in different minds, but only how we express the meaning of different sentences. Meanings are a little easier than thoughts.
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Ed maintains that the problem of intentional identity can be put as a problem concerning what sentences say rather than as a problem concerning what people think. Ed thinks that this reformulation renders the problem simpler and more tractable. But here I object.
Strictly speaking, sentences don't say anything; people say things using sentences. For (1) to express a thought or proposition, it must be assertively uttered by a definite person in definite circumstances. What's more, the assertive utterance has to be thoughtful, i.e., made by a thinker who intends to express a proposition by his assertive utterance of (1). So we are brought right back to people and their thoughts. We have turned in a circle. (Out of respect for Ed, I will not comment on the 'diameter' of the circle.)
To exfoliate or unwrap what I just wrote:
a. Strictly speaking. In philosophy we must speak and write strictly and avoid the sorts of shorthand expression that are perfectly acceptable in ordinary discourse. Philosophy is not ordinary discourse. It is (in part) an attempt to understand ordinary discourse, its logic, its ontological commitments, and its connections with thought.
b. Utterance. To utter a sentence is to produce a token of it consisting of sounds or phonemes. If x is a token of y, then y is a type. So (1) above represents a sentence-type. What your eyes see is of course a token of that type, a token that deputizes for the type, which you cannot see with your eyes. The token you see is of course not an utterance, but an inscription consisting of visible marks. To utter a sentence is only one way of tokening it. To token is to produce a token in some medium.
c. Assertive utterance. Not every tokening is assertive. If I write or say 'Cats are animals' in English class to illustrate, say, noun-verb agreement, I have not asserted that cats are animals. Assertion is a speech act. I can utter a sentence without asserting anything even if the sentence is grammatically declarative.
d. Circumstances. There are many people in the world who rejoice under the nickname 'Bob.' A context of utterance, or, more broadly, a context of tokening is required to know which Bob is being referred to when (1) is assertively uttered.
e. Thoughtful. To say something I cannot merely mechanically produce a token of a sentence even if the sentence upon being heard by a hearer conveys a proposition or thought to the hearer. Voice synthesizers never say anything, even when they produce such sentence tokens as 'Your prescription is ready at Walgreen's pharmacy at the corner of Fifth and Vermouth.' Saying involves a person or thinker's intention to express a thought or proposition.
As for solving Geach's puzzle, I have nothing to propose with confidence. But how would Ed counter the following suggestion? Ed tells us that, "if we render the original sentence in the transparent way, we have to presume the existence of a real witch, i.e. some witch such that Hob thinks that she has blighted Bob’s mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob’s sow."
Ed is assuming that the particular quantifier is an existential quantifier. He is assuming that 'Some witch is such that _______' is logically equivalent to 'There exists a witch such that ________.' The assumption is entirely plausible. But it could be rejected by a Meinongian. If 'a witch' picks out a nonexistent item from the realm of Aussersein, then what would be wrong with a transparent reading of the original sentence? If there are nonexistent items, then one can quantify over them using quantifiers that are objectual (as opposed to substitutional) but not existentially loaded.
Might Geach's puzzle dissolve on a Meinongian approach? Is there any literature on this?
A tip of the hat to Karl White for pointing us to this article which includes a critique of Francis Beckwith's contribution to the debate. Craig concludes:
So whether Muslims and Christians can be said to worship the same God is not the truly germane question. The question is which conception of God is true.
I would allow that the latter question is the more important of the two questions, but it is not the question most of us were discussing. In my various posts, I endeavored to remain neutral on the question of the truth of Christianity while pursuing the former question. See the first two related articles infra.
Among other things, Bernie Sanders supports free tuition at all public colleges and universities, medicare for all, and an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Are such socialist proposals implementable? Are they economically feasible? A necessary but not sufficient condition of practical implementation would have to be a major curtailment of the influx of illegal immigrants and a serious reform of the system of legal immigration. And yet when we look at his immigration policy, we see that Sanders wants to allow all immigrants, legal or illegal, to purchase health care under the Affordable Care Act; that he supports sanctuary cities, and that he opposes building a physical barrier along the southern border.
It's a bit of a paradox: you cannot combine socialism with porous borders and sanctuary cities. 'Freebies' such as free tuition will attract too many legal and illegal immigrants. If you want to be 'liberal' with citizens, you cannot also be 'liberal' with non-citizens. And of course what is free for some will not be free for others, for those who are footing the bill. There are only so many fat cats, and they will not allow themselves to be fleeced.
A second, sharper, form of the paradox. A welfare state cannot work without strict border control. Equally, a welfare state cannot work without large numbers of people willing to work at physically demanding and relatively low-paying jobs such as re-roofing houses in Phoenix in the summer. Where are these people going to come from? Presumably from outside: the existing population, having had their work ethic eroded by welfare state benefits, will not want to work at the demanding jobs. So a welfare state needs strict and also lax immigration controls. There is also the problem that an aging population the members of which will most of them live for many years in retirement on supposed 'entitlements' is not sustainable without plenty of young immigrants.
Feel the 'Bern' yet? Feel the tension? It would be wonderful if turkeys flew around ready-roasted or were delivered by government drones on major holidays. But who is going to foot the bill?
At the other end of the political spectrum, the libertarians are also in a bit of a bind. "Open the borders!" John Stossel once said. That would work only on condition that you first dismantle the welfare state. But the welfare state is here to stay. The only question is whether we can contain it or roll it back a little.
So choose. You can't have both a robust welfare state that provides 'free' health care, education, and so on while also having a liberal immigration policy. You will have noticed, if you went to Sanders' site, that he refuses to distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants. After all, that would be 'xenophobic' as liberals (mis)use the word.
But the question of Sanders' socialism is moot. He won't get the Democrat nomination. Hillary will get the nod. And no, she will not be indicted, no matter what further evidence of her wrongdoing turns up. It is really very simple. Obama will not allow his 'gains' to be overturned or be in any way mitigated by a Republication administration. The rule of law counts for nothing for those who believe that their ends -- noble and worthy in their own eyes -- are to be achieved by any means.
So it will come down to a contest between Hillary and Rubio, and Hillary will win. Cruz is a brilliant man and would make a good president, but he is not electable because of his personality. Rubio is more personable, more of a regular guy. Trump will flame out. He is essentially an empty suit riding a short-term populist wave, to mix some metaphors. In any case, there is no way the Republicans would allow his nomination.
Those are my predictions. I hope I'm wrong about Hillary winning. She is Sanders writ small, a gradualist Sanders if you will, who cunningly hides her true convictions in the manner of the stealth ideologue that Sanders is too honest to be. I am assuming, perhaps falsely, that Hillary has convictions and is not merely out for personal gain. It might be better to say that she either has no convictions or leftist convictions.
A neo-reactionary I was arguing with a while back claimed in effect that I have more in common with Muslims than I do with contemporary liberals. This entry will begin an exploration of this theme.
A reader the other day referred me to to Sayyid Qutb (Milestones p.120):
If the family is the basis of the society, the basis of the family is the division of labour between husband and wife, and the upbringing of children is the most important function of the family, then such a society is indeed civilized. In the Islamic system of life, this kind of a family provides the environment under which human values and morals develop and grow in the new generation; these values and morals cannot exist apart from the family unit. If, on the other hand, free sexual relationships and illegitimate children become the basis of a society, and if the relationship between man and woman is based on lust, passion and impulse, and the division of work is not based on family responsibility and natural gifts; if woman's role is merely to be attractive, sexy and flirtatious, and if the woman is freed from her basic responsibility of bringing up children; and if, on her own or under social demand, she prefers to become a hostess or a stewardess in a hotel or ship or air company, thus spending her ability for material productivity rather than in the training of human beings, because material production is considered to be more important, more valuable and more honourable than the development of human character, then such a civilization is 'backward' from the human point of view, or 'Jahili' in the Islamic terminology.
The emphases were added by my reader. He asks: "Is Qutb right or wrong? In which version of conservatism would this doctrine fit best?"
Five years ago, on 11 February 2011, unaware of the above passage, I wrote, in an entry occasioned by the death of Maria Schneider of "Last Tango in Paris" fame/imfamy:
Islamic culture is in many ways benighted and backward, fanatical and anti-Enlightenment, but our trash culture is not much better. Suppose you are a Muslim and you look to the West. What do you see? Decadence. And an opportunity to bury the West.
If Muslims think that our decadent culture is what Western values are all about, and something we are trying to impose on them, then we are in trouble. They do and we are.
Militant Islam's deadly hatred of us should not be discounted as the ravings of lunatics or psychologized away as a reflex of envy at our fabulous success, despite the obvious presence of lunacy and envy. For there is a kernel of insight in the ravings that we do well to heed. Sayyid Qutb , theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, who visited the USA at the end of the '40s, writes in Milestones (1965):
Humanity today is living in a large brothel! One has only to glance at its press, films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations! Or observe its mad lust for naked flesh, provocative pictures, and sick, suggestive statements in literature, the arts, and mass media! And add to all this the system of usury which fuels man's voracity for money and engenders vile methods for its accumulation and investment, in addition to fraud, trickery, and blackmail dressed up in the garb of law.
A wild exaggeration in 1965, the above statement is much less of an exaggeration today. But setting aside the hyperbole, we are in several ways a sick and decadent society getting worse day by day. On this score, if on no other, we can learn something from our Islamist critics. The fact that a man wants to chop your head off does not mean that he has nothing to teach you. We often learn more from our enemies than from our friends. Our friends often will spare us hard truths.
Turning now to the topmost passage from Qutb, what should we say about it? Here are some points where this conservative agrees with Qutb and some points where he disagrees.
Points of Agreement
1. The family is the building block of a societal order that deserves to be called civilized. The central function of the family is the education and socialization of children. Human offspring need to be brought from the animal to the social level. This requires the cooperation of husband and wife, man and woman, and a division of labor reflecting the different natural abilities of men and women.
2. The transmission of life-enhancing values and the inculcation of morality must occur primarily at the family level, starting when children are very young. This is where the transmission and inculcation is most effectively achieved.
3. The effects of the 'sexual revolution' have been largely negative. The 'revolution' has not led on the whole to human liberations but rather to enslavement, to the destruction of families, and the degradation of the entire culture so much so that television and popular culture can be described, without too much exaggeration, as an open sewer.
4. The "training of human beings" and "the development of human character" are more important and more honorable than "material production."
Points of Disagreement
1. Qutb goes too far with his claim that the transmission of values and the inculcation of morality cannot occur apart from the family unit.
2. My main disagreement with Qutb is that he assigns women a social role which, while reflecting the natural strengths and abilities of women, is oppressive for many women in that it prevents them from developing as persons in the way men are allowed to develop themselves as persons and not merely as fathers. Clearly, many women have what it takes to become competent physicians, lawyers, engineers, university professors, etc. and among these women, some are better at their chosen fields than many men. This is not to say that women as a group are equal to men as a group with respect to ability in any of these fields; it is to say that women as a group should not be discriminated against on the basis of sex. The same goes for voting. While women as a group are too much influenced by their emotions and thus not as well-suited as men to make wise choices at the polling places, the franchise is overall good and it is just wrong to deny women a political say on the basis of their sex.
Of course, in some areas women should be discriminated against on the basis of sex. If you say that all combat roles in the military should be open to women, then I say you are a p.c.-whipped, crazy leftist. The fact that a handful of amazons could overpower a Navy SEAL cuts no ice.
So this makes me a paleoconservative who yet takes on board the best of the classically liberal tradition while avoiding the latter-day lunacies of contemporary liberalism as well as the extremism of the neo-reactionary paleocons. My reader asked: In which version of conservatism does Qutb's doctrine best fit? Answer: that of the neo-reactionary paleocons.
I expect to be, and have been, attacked from both sides. This is something a maverick philosopher should take pride in. The maverick philosopher navigates by the Polaris of Truth Herself, avoiding extremes, and shunning herds.
Time for my annual Super Bowl Sunday rant. But perhaps I should not be so harsh on the masses who need their panem et circenses to keep them distracted from matters of moment, both secular and spiritual. The Latin could be very loosely translated as 'food stamps and football.'
I won't be watching the game. I don't even know which teams are playing. Undoubtedly there is more to football than I comprehend. But the games are nasty, brutish, but not short, and I know all I need to know about the implements of shaving.
As for the buxom wenches who strut their stuff during the half-time show, the less I stoke the fire below the better.
I am no fan of spectator sports in general. We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid professional louts. I preach the People's Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.
Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don't call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)
Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry said, "A man sits as many risks as he runs." Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.
In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey has it right:
Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:
. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)
From Oscar Wilde to Plato to Hank Williams here channeled hauntingly through Kurt Nilsen and Willie Nelson:
I'm a rollin' stone all alone and lost For a life of sin I have paid the cost When I pass by all the people say Just another guy on the lost highway
Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine And a woman's lies make a life like mine On the day we met, I went astray I started rollin' down that lost highway
I was just a lad, nearly 22 Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you And now I'm lost, too late to pray Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highway
Now boys don't start your ramblin' 'round On this road of sin are you sorrow bound Take my advice or you'll curse the day. You started rollin' down that lost highway.
'Homophobic' is a coinage of leftists to prevent one of those famous 'conversations' that they otherwise call for. It is a question-begging epithet and semantic bludgeon meant to close down debate by the branding of their opponents as suffering from a mental defect. This is why only a foolish conservative acquiesces in the use of this made-up word. Language matters. One of the first rules for successful prosecution of the Kulturkampf is to never let the enemy distort the terms of the debate. Insist on standard English, and always slap them down when they engage in their notorious 'framing.' He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.
As for 'gay,' that too is a word we ought not surrender. Use the neutral 'homosexual.' Same with 'queer.' 'Queer' is a good old word. Nominalists think abstracta are queer entities. There is no implication that the analysis of such is in any way proctological.
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