I have been discussing Islamist terrorism with a couple of Brits who are open to the sorts of things I say. One of them I know is a conservative; the other I think is. What struck me is that both make a curious lefty move. The move is well-described by Heather Mac Donald:
Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi [the Manchester suicide bomber], immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: FOX NEWS HOST SUGGESTS ‘OPEN BORDERS’ ARE TO BLAME FOR MANCHESTER ATTACK CARRIED OUT BY BRITISH NATIVE.
My correspondents are not open-borders advocates, but they seem to want to decouple questions about immigration policy from questions about 'homegrown' terrorists. That strikes me as foolish. I answer them in the words of Heather Mac:
Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.
Of course! Isn't that blindingly obvious?
And another thing.
'Homegrown terrorist' is an obfuscatory leftist phrase. That is why I enclosed it in sneer quotes above. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.
It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.
There is a line such that if you cross it you will have hell to pay. A lot of people think like Kurt Schlichter:
I know it’s theoretically wrong for a Republican candidate to smack around an annoying liberal journalist, but that still doesn’t mean that I care. Our ability to care is a finite resource, and, in the vast scheme of things, millions of us have chosen to devote exactly none of it toward caring enough to engage in fussy self-flagellation because of what happened to Slappy La Brokenshades.
Sorry, not sorry.
And that’s not a good thing, not by any measure, but it is a real thing. Liberals have chosen to coarsen our culture. Their validation and encouragement of raw hate, their flouting of laws (Hi leakers! Hi Hillary!) and their utter refusal to accept democratic outcomes they disapprove of have consequences. What is itself so surprising is how liberals and their media rentboyz are so surprised to find that we normals are beginning to feel about them the way they feel about us – and that we’re starting to act on it. If you hate us, guess what?
Dennis Prager answers the question to my satisfaction. Here is the main part of his answer:
The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.
While they strongly differ with the left, they do not regard the left-right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.
That is why, after vigorously opposing Trump's candidacy during the Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a Democrat had been elected president. With the Supreme Court and hundreds of additional federal judgeships in the balance; with the Democrats' relentless push toward European-style socialism -- completely undoing the unique American value of limited government; the misuse of the government to suppress conservative speech; the continuing degradation of our universities and high schools; the weakening of the American military; and so much more, America, as envisioned by the Founders, would have been lost, perhaps irreversibly. The "fundamental transformation" that candidate Barack Obama promised in 2008 would have been completed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
To my amazement, no anti-Trump conservative writer sees it that way. They all thought during the election, and still think, that while it would not have been a good thing if Hillary Clinton had won, it wouldn't have been a catastrophe either.
That's it, in a nutshell. Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won. Moreover, I am certain that only Donald Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton.
In other words, I believe that Donald Trump may have saved the country. And that, in my book, covers a lot of sins -- foolish tweets, included.
I too vigorously opposed Trump's nomination. But when he got the nod, I had the good sense to support him. It boggled my mind that supposed conservatives at least as intelligent as me would support Hillary either by voting for her or by refusing to vote for Trump. What were they thinking? Prager's analysis is the best I have seen so far.
And 'surely' Prager is right that no one else could have defeated Hillary. A Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio would have been a re-play of Romney against Obama: too many conservatives would have stayed home.
Counterfactual conditionals are fascinating. I wish I understood them. But there is much that your humble correspondent does not understand.
'Had Cruz been the Republication nominee in 2016, then Hillary would have won the presidential election.'
How do I know that that is true? Logically prior question: what makes it true if it is true? And logicaly prior to that: do all or some truths need truthmakers?
And yet I am confident that the counterfactual in question is not only true, but more reasonably believed than its negation.
A footnote in Paul Tournier's The Meaning of Persons sent me to Julian Green, Personal Record 1928-1939. Here is George Orwell's review in Time and Tide, 13 April 1940:
Julian Green's diaries, which ten years ago or even five years ago might have seemed comparatively commonplace, are at this moment of the greatest interest. What they really record is the twilight of the aesthetic age, the last gasp of the cultivated second-generation rentier. With his extreme sensitiveness and his almost effeminate manner of writing, Mr Green is a figure particularly representative of the nineteen-twenties, of the period when simply to preserve your aesthetic integrity seemed a sufficient return for living on inherited money. Although the diary records visits to London, to various parts of Europe, and to America (Mr Green is of American origin though he writes in French), one has the feeling of being all the while in Paris, the Paris of old yellow-faced houses and green plane trees, and also of first nights, private views and interminable literary conversations with Gide, Gertrude Stein and Madame de Noailles. Everything is recorded with the restless sensitiveness of the writer, who translates his experience into literature almost as automatically as a cow turns grass into milk:
December 19th. A gas-lamp burning behind the glass door of a concierge's room at the end of a winter's day, with darkness overhead — what a lovely opening for a novel! Today, for a whole hour, I had nothing but this admirable picture in my mind.
February 2nd. At Versailles. . . . As I looked at the ivy-leaves with their dainty pale yellow borders, I had a moment of sadness at the thought that, till my life's end, things as lovely as they will be there for me to see and I shall have no time to describe them.
He writes much of his work, and his difficulties with his work (like the majority of writers he never feels in the mood for writing, and yet his books somehow get finished), of his dreams, which seem to affect his waking life considerably, and of his remembered childhood in the golden age "before the war". Nearly all his thoughts have a nostalgic tinge. But what gives them their special interest is that he is far too intelligent to imagine that his way of life or his scheme of values will last for ever. Totally uninterested in politics, he is nevertheless able to see, even as early as the nineteen-twenties, that the age of liberalism is ending and that wars, revolutions and dictatorships are just round the corner. Everything is cracking and collapsing. The shadow of Hitler flits almost constantly across the pages:
We are going to see life changing under our very eyes. Everything that gives us pleasure will be taken from us. . . . I am growing accustomed to the idea of vanishing from sight, together with all that I love in this world; for it seems reasonable to suppose that we are approaching the end of a long era. How long shall we sleep?. . . Paris is living in a sort of latent panic. . . . In the Europe of 1934 murder inevitably and fatally leads to other murder. How far can this go without the outbreak of war?. . . The war rumours continue as before. Everyone's daily life seems to be saturated with these feelings of apprehension. . . . The Rhineland has been reoccupied. . . . I was asked to say something on the wireless about Minuit. As if that were of the slightest importance with things as they are at the moment! But one has to go on pretending. . .
The feeling of futility and impermanence, of hanging about in a draughty room and waiting for the guns to begin to shoot, which has haunted many of us during the past seven years, is present everywhere, and it grows stronger as the diary moves towards 1939. Perhaps even the possession of this feeling depends upon being of a certain age (Julian Green is not quite forty), young enough to expect something from life and old enough to remember "before the war". It is a fact that the people who are now twenty do not appear to notice that the world is falling into ruins. But what is attractive in this diary is its complete impenitence, its refusal to move with the times. It is the diary of a civilized man who realizes that barbarism is bound to triumph, but who is unable to stop being civilized. A new world is coming to birth, a world in which there will be no room for him. He has too much vision to fight against it; on the other hand, he makes no pretence of liking it. As it is exactly that pretence that has been the stock-in-trade of the younger intelligentsia during the last few years, the ghostly sincerity of this book is deeply appealing. It has the charm of the ineffectual, which is so out-of-date as to wear an air of novelty.
We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?
"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence. One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"
Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know? Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?
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. Trans-humanist 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. They fool themselves. 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. On Memorial Day and every day.
McCarthy knows this subject from the inside and sees things with blinding clarity:
. . . the challenge of Islam must be confronted head-on and without apology. That is unavoidable. You can’t flinch. It is a certainty that the Democrat-media complex — of which Islamist organizations are members in good standing — is going to smear you as a racist “Islamophobe.” (Yes, this is another race-obsessed “progressive” narrative, so Islam gets to be the “race,” so that defenders of the Constitution and Western culture can be cast as “the oppressor.”) You have to be content with knowing that you are not a racist, with knowing that you are defending religious liberty, including the religious liberty of pro-Western Muslims.
There is a single battle that must be won. American culture must be convinced that Islam, while it has plenty of diversity, has a mainstream strain — sharia supremacism — that is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology hiding under a religious veneer.
Permit me a respectful quibble. (I say 'respectful' because McCarthy's qualifications in this area far exceed mine.) A more measured way of putting the point would be by saying that sharia supremacism is at once both a totalitarian political ideology and a religion. It is a hybrid ideology that blends the religious with the political. The religiosity of sharia supremacism is not a mere veneer. But this is a mere quibble since, either way, the practical problem remains and the goal of the "single battle" is the same: to keep sharia-based Islam out of the U. S. A.
Intellectually, this should not be a difficult thing to do. Sharia supremacism does not accept the separation of religion from political life (which is why it is lethally hostile to reform Muslims). It requires the imposition of classical, ancient sharia law, which crushes individual liberty (particularly freedom — of conscience, of speech, and in economic affairs). It systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. It is cruel in its enforcement. It endorses violent jihad to settle political disputes (since such disputes boil down to whether sharia is being undermined — a capital offense).
What I have just outlined is not a “theory.” Quite apart from the fact that sharia supremacism is the subject of numerous books, studies, public-opinion polls, and courtroom prosecutions, one need only look at life in Saudi Arabia and Iran, societies in which the regime imposes sharia. As I mentioned a few days ago, one need only look at the State Department’s warnings to Americans who travel to Saudi Arabia.
Nevertheless, what should be easy to establish intellectually is difficult as a practical matter. Sharia supremacists and their progressive allies maintain that Islam may not be parsed into different strains. For legal purposes, they insist it is a monolith that is protected by religious-liberty principles — notwithstanding that a) progressives are generally hostile to religious liberty and b) sharia supremacists themselves would destroy religious liberty. Perversely, then, they argue that the First Amendment is offended by national-security measures against anti-American radicals who would, given the chance, deep-six the First Amendment in favor of sharia.
This may well be the heart of the issue. If Islam is a religion like any other, then it is protected by religious-liberty principles. If so, any attempt to keep sharia-supporting Muslims out of the country would run counter to the values enshrined in the First Amendment, specifically, the first clause thereof. It would constitute discrimination on the basis of religion.
The issue, then, is whether Islam is a religion like any other. Clearly, it is not. If McCarthy is right, then it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; if I am right, it is a hybrid ideology. Either way, it is a political threat to our political system which is premised on the separation of church/mosque/synagogue and state.
It is essential to win this debate over the political nature of sharia supremacism. Our law has a long constitutional tradition, rooted in the natural and international law of self-defense, of excluding aliens on the basis of radical, anti-American political ideology. Thus, if sharia supremacism is deemed a political ideology, we can keep out alien adherents of a cause that both inspires the terrorists of today and, wherever it is allowed to take root, produces the terrorists of tomorrow.
Yet, we also have a strong commitment to religious freedom. If at the end of the debate — assuming we ever have the debate — our culture’s conclusion is that sharia supremacism equals Islam, equals religion, equals immunity from governmental protective measures, then the Constitution really will have become a suicide pact. We will have decided that anti-constitutional sharia radicals are just as welcome as any other Muslim.
Sharia supremacists are like communists: they use our values against us. They hypocritically invoke them to subvert them. If we allow them to do this we are fools and we deserve to perish. Our magnificent Constitution must not be allowed to become a suicide pact.
I will mention just the most obvious and most important one: severely curtail Muslim immigration. There is no right to immigrate, and correspondingly, we are under no obligation to let in subversive elements. We have a culture and a way of life to protect, and their culture and way of life are inimical to ours. Muslims who enter the USA should be forced to sign a statement in which they renounce Shari'a, and then they must be monitored for compliance.
This is not a religious test but a cultural-political test: do you share our values or not? Chief among these values is toleration.
I agree with you -- it mainly comes down to value systems (I wrote a blog post on just this a couple of years ago). But a couple of points:
1. In my experience there are two types of Muslim immigrants to the West: educated graduates who have no interest whatever in Islam, and who sometimes actively hate it. I have worked with and have close friends fitting this description. The second are uneducated, and are far more likely to embody the kinds of values we mostly find repellent in the West; some of these people commit crimes against women and children thinking them to be normal privileges, and create cultural ghettos (however some have been victims of religious persecution). So I think curtailing Muslim immigration is too coarse a tool; I'd rather deprive totalitarian theocratic regimes of their better people, both for the sake of those individuals, and in the hope of keeping such regimes from gaining greater power (or perhaps their more courageous citizens overthrowing said dictatorships).
BV: The reader's idea is very interesting: take the best and brightest from Muslim countries, thereby causing a 'brain drain'; this will weaken totalitarian theocracies and possibly lead to their overthrow. And of course the reader is absolutely right that not every Muslim is a Sharia supremacist.
The difficulty, of course, is to separate the sheep from the goats (to employ a New Testament image for the sake of maximal political incorrectness). It's a problem of vetting. This is made difficult by the doctrine of taqiyya which justifies a Muslim's lying to non-Muslims. Practically, it will be very difficult to separate the assimilable Muslims from the non-assimilable ones.
Given this fact, it would be wise to curtail Muslim immigration, at least for the time being. 'Curtail' does not mean stop. It means reduce in extent or quantity. Or one could have a temporary total stoppage which is what a moratorium is. One of the questions that has to be asked, and that people are afraid to ask is this: what is the net benefit to a Western country of Muslim immigration? I am assuming, as any rational person must, that immigration can only be justified if it works to the benefit of the host country.
A second problem with the reader's suggestion is that it will have the effect of weakening the Muslim countries that suffer the 'brain drain.' But we want them to flourish, don't we? If they flourish, then they are less likely to practice and export terrorism. Happy people don't cause trouble. And happy people don't leave their homelands. Lefties such as Obama and Hillary are not entirely wrong: the more economically prosperous the Muslim lands, the lower the appeal of radical Islam.
2. I think one way to go about dealing with traditional Islam (which is the problem, not so-called 'political Islam' - Islam is inherently 'political') in the West is to find a way to legislate against the promotion of ideologies containing certain features - primarily those the conflict with our basic notions of human rights, i.e. freedom of thought and expression, non-discrimination on the basis of innate qualities (sex, race etc), and so on; ideologies that tend toward fascism. We need to think more on how we would deal with a serious movement of National Socialism or Italian Fascism today. No names of any religion or ideology need be mentioned, just the unacceptable features. Here 'legislate' probably doesn't mean in law, but by other means; it might even mean immigrants renouncing Sharia as you say. But unfortunately, the majority of Jihadist terrorism in Europe comes from citizens born into the cultural ghettos with their alternate value systems and deep resentments. No immigration policy can touch them.
It is interesting to note that we still have the absurd crime of blasphemy on the statute books in the UK, but there is nothing to protect our system of common law or values.
BV: I agree that Islam is inherently political: it is as much a political ideology as a religion. I call it a 'hybrid' ideology. People who speak of 'political Islam,' however, have in mind the project of a reform of Islam which would render it consistent with Western political principles and values. I am thinking of Zuhdi Jasser, for example. Part of his proposed reform is a separation of mosque and state. I fear that his proposal is utopian; if it could be achieved, however, Islam would cease to be the world-wide problem it is.
As for 'legislation' that is not achieved by passing laws, I just don't understand what that could be.
My reader suggests that no change in immigration policy will affect the jihadis that are born in cultural ghettos in our countries. But that is just false. Suppose that Muslim immigration into the U. K. were stopped. Then no jihadis could be born in the U. K. to the potential Muslim immigrants who would have been stopped. The young troublemakers already in the U. K. will grow old and become less troublesome.
Meanwhile, you just have to get ruthless with terrorists. That includes the swift and sure application of the death penalty. Do you love your country or not? Do you value your way of life? Are English values and ways worth defending? Or are you a bunch of decadents who don't care whether you live or die?
As an American who feels a certain piety toward the Mother Country, I hope you grow a collective pair before it is too late.
There is a lot of unsung talent out there in the Land of YouTube. Check out the 'classic' covers by this cutie who goes by the name of Sayaka Alessandra:
The Wanderer. A creditable version of the feminist anthem. Dion DiMucci's original. It takes a wop to sing this song right.
A Teenager in Love. Dion and the Belmonts' original. They guy has amazing staying power. He still looks and sounds good at 70+. I Wonder Why (2004). Wop, wop, wop, wop, wopwopwop. Is that why they call it 'do wop'?
My brand of conservatism is personalist, which may help explain why I find myself at loggerheads with those on the so-called 'Alternative Right.' And my brand of personalism is conservative which may help explain why I look askance at libertarianism and at 'mainstream conservatism' to the extent that the latter is libertarian and insufficiently attentive to the importance of national sovereignty and the right of a nation to preserve its culture from dilution and indeed subversion. The libertarian overemphasizes the economic. He is followed in this by the mainstream conservative. The alt-rightist rightly resists this overemphasis but runs the risk of falling into an excessive and morally obnoxious particularism. One form this particularism takes is in the alt-right's anti-egalitarianism. See here:
The Alt Right is anti-equalitarian. It rejects the idea of equality for the same reason it rejects the ideas of unicorns and leprechauns, noting that human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.
We are being told that there is no non-trivial sense in which human beings are equal. This, I take it, is a characteristic and defining Alt Right claim to which I oppose the Trad Right thesis that there is a sense in which all human beings are equal, namely, as persons. I suspect that this may be the main difference between the Alt and the Trad versions of conservatism. Or if not the main difference, then an important one.
But my concern is not to oppose the Alt Right, whatever exactly it is supposed to be, but to defend the thesis that human beings are equal, not as animals in nature, but as persons. Here, as elsewhere, my aim is clarity, not agreement. Agreement is out of reach, but clarification of differences is an achievable and worthwhile goal.
Empirical Inequality is a Fact
Empirical inequality cannot be denied: by the various empirical measures there is plenty of inequality among individuals and groups. (Trivial example: men on average are taller than women. Height is an example of an empirically measurable attribute.) So if human beings are taken solely in their empirical and material natures, or if human beings are nothing more than material beings, then talk of the equality of all human beings is either false or trivial. (That all human beings are equal in that they all have been born at or near the surface of the earth is empirically true, but trivially true.)
Let me make a couple more pedantic points just to make sure that the issue is clear. That we are not all empirically equal is of course consistent with two or more of us being equal in some measurable respect or even in all such respects. If it should turn out that Tim and Tom are alike in all empirical respects, that would be consistent with the denial that we are all empirically equal. A second point is that the denial that we are all empirically equally is not a normative, but a factual, claim and as such axiologically neutral. There is no implication that this is a bad, or a good, state of affairs. It is just a fact.
The Question
Given the plain fact of empirical inequality, is there any defensible sense in which human beings could be said to be equal and in possession of equal rights?
Equality is not a Matter of Abstraction
There is a misunderstanding that needs to be squelched at the outset. Talk of the equality of humans as persons does not involve abstraction from all the empirical differences that divide individuals and groups. No doubt there is the concept human being in general which every individual human animal falls under. We arrive at this concept by abstracting from all the differences between individuals to arrive at a determination common to them all. But to speak of persons is not to engage in such an abstraction. It is to refer to the unique subject of experience that each of us is, and to which each one of us can refer using the first-person singular pronoun. That to which I refer when I say 'I' is a unique personal reality, a concrete individual, not an abstraction.
The Concept of Person
A person, then, is a concrete subject of experience. By 'subject,' I don't just mean something that has or supports experiences as in the Aristotelian notion of a substrate or hypokeimenon, but something that is an initiator or enactor or source of experiences. Analogously as rays of light emanate from a light source, 'rays' of intentionality emanate outward from the subject (in the modern sense) toward objects. A person is a subject in both of these ancient and modern senses.
To unpack it a bit: a person is a conscious and thus sentient individual, capable of self-consciousness, possessing feeling and will and memory and the capacity to reason and plan and seek the truth about itself and everything else. I have just limned the concept of person in the descriptive sense of 'person.' We may now add the normative sense. A person in the normative sense is a rights-possessor which, in virtue of having rights, induces in other persons various duties. For example, my right to life induces in you the duty to refrain from taking my life, and your duty derives from my right. In this sense rights and duties are correlative.
Equality of Persons, not of Animals
So when I speak of the equality of persons, that does not mean that all human animals are empirically equal, either as individuals or as groups, which is plainly false, nor does it mean that all human animals are equal just insofar as they are instances of the concept human being. The latter is true of course: each instance of human being is the same as, and equal to, every other such instance qua instance. But while true it misses the point, namely, that each human being is a unique person.
We need to distinguish among: (a) All humans are empirically equal, which is false; (b) All humans are equally instances of the concept human being, which is true but trivial; (c) Each human being is a unique person.
My claim, then, is that we are all equal as persons in the descriptive sense, and therefore all equal in the normative sense. That is, if any one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person, then every one of us is a rights-possessor in virtue of being a descriptive person. And all of this regardless of sex, race, age, and any other empirical feature. We are equal as persons even if my will is stronger than yours and my intellect more penetrating. We are equal as persons even if you are more compassionate than me.
The point, then, is that equality is grounded in personhood, not in animal constitution. To clarify this, we need to think some more about the relation of persons and human beings or human animals when the latter are viewed from the angle of the natural sciences of biology and anthropology.
Persons and Human Animals
The above definition of 'person' allows for persons that are not human beings and human beings (genetic humans) that are not persons, as well as persons that are human beings. In the following Venn diagram, A = persons and B = humans. The intersection C represents persons who are human. God, angels, demons, and pre-embodied and disembodied Platonic souls are examples of persons that are not human. They are not human because they are not animals at all, but pure spirits. Also examples of persons that are not human are embodied persons whose personhood is realized in non-human material stuff, e.g. extraterrestrials and persons realized, not in living matter, but in computers. Examples of humans that are not persons, on my definition of 'person,' would be anencephalic human neonates. They would not be persons because of their lack of capacity to develop language and reasoning skills. (For more on the anencephalic business, see Potentiality and the Substance View of Persons, the comments to which were good.) But these anencephalic individuals are nonetheless genetically human as the offspring of human parents.
To repeat, our equality is grounded in our shared personhood despite our considerable empirical differences. Personhood cannot be understood in natural-scientific terms.
I am not commited to saying that we can exist as persons without animal embodiment. I am committed to saying that persons cannot be reduced to animals.
Equality in the Declaration of Independence
The first sentence of the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence reads, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Clearly, on a charitable interpretation, what this affirms is not (a) or (b) but something in the vicinity of (c). We are equal as persons, as subjects of experience and as rights-possessors, not as animals in nature. As objects in the natural world having natural and empirically detectable properties, we are obviously not all equal.
Our equality is grounded in our being, not objects in the world, but subjects for whom there is a world. Subjectivity looms large on the personalist conception. It is only as conscious and self-conscious subjects that we are purposive beings who pursue things, including happiness, and have a right to the sort of life that conscious beings enjoy. This is life via intentional acts emanating from a personal center and not life in a merely biological sense. Human living cannot be exhaustively understood biologically, and this despite the plain fact that we are animals in nature.
That empirical equality is not at issue should also be obvious from the talk of a Creator. We are said to be created equal. If we are created equal, but are at the same time plainly unequal empirically speaking, then the respect in which we are created equal cannot be an empirical respect. We are not equal as specimens of a biological species, but equal in some other respect. What respect could that be?
Talk of a creator brings a purely spiritual being, God, into the picture. In the context of Christianity, which is the context in which the Founders operate, that means that we are created in the image and likeness of God. And what that means is that we too are spiritual beings possessing free will and the dignity and worth that comes with it, despite our embodiment in nature.
On this scheme, political equality and equality of rights rest on a metaphysical foundation, namely the metaphysics of persons, where persons are spiritual individuals with a destiny that transcends their animal mortality. We are all equal as creatures of the same Creator.
Interim Conclusion
Our problem was to explain how how humans could be said to equal when they are manifestly unequal empirically speaking. The classical theist will have no trouble answering. We are more than animals. We are spiritual individuals created by God in his image and likeness. As such we are equal in dignity and worth and equal in rights, whether tall or short, white or black of brown or yellow, male or female young or old, etc.
If it is essential to the Alt Right to deny that there is any sense in which humans are equal that is not either false or trivial, then the Alt Right view excludes classical theism and conversely.
An Objection and a Reply
Correspondent Jacques raises the following objection:
Let's agree it's ["All men are created equal"] a normative claim to the effect that all 'persons' have certain 'rights'. What then entitles all of them to these rights? A normative fact like that doesn't float free from all empirical facts. There's got to be some reason why all normal human adults have these rights but chickens or pencils don't, some empirical property of these beings only that generates or confers certain rights. Is it the shared property of being a person? Or the shared property of being human? Something else? I suspect that any of the candidate properties will be either morally irrelevant, even by liberal-leftist standards, or else relevant but distributed so unequally that it will be hard to understand how it could be the basis for 'equal' rights.
This is a fair question. We do not ascribe rights such as a right to life to chickens. We raise them to eat them. We treat them as mere means to our ends, even if we treat them humanely. Why is it morally permissible to eat chickens but not to eat humans? Why is it morally permissible to force animals to work for us but impermissible to enslave humans? What grounds the normative properties?
I agree with Jacques that normativity does not "float free": it needs anchorage in the non-normative. But the non-normative need not be observable by the senses. The non-normative is not equivalent to the empirical. It is open to me to say that the moral impermissibility of eating humans is grounded in the non-normative fact of their being persons in the descriptive sense. Humans are persons while chickens are not; this factual difference grounds the normative difference. It also explains why it is permissible to make a beast of burden of a donkey, but not of a man. I may agree to carry your load, but if you force me to carry it, then you violate my normative personhood which is grounded in my descriptive personhood.
Jacques also asks, "Why should we think there is any suitable empirical basis for the normative claim that 'all men are equal' or that such normative claims could be true regardless of any empirical facts?" I agree that there is no empirical basis for the normative claim. But it doesn't follow that it has no basis. The normative claim has a metaphysical basis in the nature of persons.
One has to stand in awe at the intellectual power and wisdom of the leading ladies of the Democrat Party. I am thinking of Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren and now, Chelsea Clinton. The latter has recently opined that racism, sexism . . . and yes, even jingoism are not opinions.
If you are a regular reader you know how I would respond to this scurrilous nonsense. So I won't waste any time on it. (But see related articles below.)
Why the post then? It is merely to keep you informed of the direction in which the cultural indicators are pointing, and, possibly, to inspire you to do your bit to flush the liberal-left scum from positions of power, or, in the case of Chelsea, to keep this twerp from gaining any.
I wrote this last year. Its reposting, slightly redacted, is appropriate in the wake of Manchester. I explain the main thing that must be done if the West is to survive as the West.
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Things are coming to a head. We cannot tolerate as a 'new normal' another Islamist slaughter of innocents every six months or so. So what is to be done? What prophylactic measures do we need to take to protect the USA and the rest of the West from the Islamist virus?
London Ed writes,
What kind of public policy, if any, would you advocate to improve the currently dire relations between the Islamic communities in the West, and their neighbours? All Muslims I know (not many, however) are horrified by extremism, and do not see it as Islamic. ‘They are just thugs’, said one of them. Most immigrant communities have ended up assimilating in some way. My first encounter with Islam was in Turkey, where a nice ex-policeman showed us round some mosques and explained Islam. He told me a moving story about a Turkish earthquake where a badly injured man, crushed under some concrete, begged him to shoot him. The policeman refused, saying it was for God to make those kind of decisions about life and death. The man died an hour later. Here we are talking about ‘ordinary Muslims’. It is a fact that all religions have extremists, and that such extremists tend to hold disproportionate power. Is there any way of redressing the balance? I.e. if you were home secretary or the US equivalent, what measures would you be taking?
Let me first take issue, not with the truth, but with the import, of the claim that all religions have extremists. The claim is true, but it is misleading unless various other truths are brought into proximity with it. It is not enough to tell the truth; you must tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There is a mode of mendacity whereby one tells truths with the intention of deceiving one's audience. See How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful .
Here is a second truth: the raw number of Islamic extremists (terrorists and those who foment terrorism) is vastly greater than the number of Buddhist extremists. So one cannot use the truth that all religions have extremists to downplay the threat of Islam, or to suggest that there is a moral equivalence between Buddhism and Islam.
So when a leftist says, "There are Buddhist terrorists too!" force him to name one that that was involved in a terror attack in London or Madrid or Paris or New York or Orlando or San Bernardino or . . . . Not only are there very few Buddhist terrorists, they are not a threat to us, meaning chiefly: the USA, the UK, and Europe.
There is another important point that Ed the philosopher will appreciate, namely, the distinction between being accidentally and essentially a terrorist. Suppose there is a Buddhist monk who is a terrorist. Qua Buddhist monk, he cannot be a terrorist because there is nothing in Buddhism that supports or enjoins terrorism. What makes him a Buddhist does not make him a terrorist or predispose him toward terrorism. Our Buddhist monk is therefore accidentally a terrorist. His committing terrorist acts is accidental to his being a Buddhist. He is a Buddhist monk and a terrorist; but he is not a terrorist because he is a Buddhist. Muslim terrorists, however, commit terrorist acts because their religion supports or enjoins terrorism. Their terrorism flows from their doctrine. This is not the case for Buddhism or Christianity. No Christian qua Christian is a terrorist.
Of course, not every Muslim is a terrorist; but every Muslim has at the ready a religious doctrine that enjoins and justifies terrorism should our Muslim decide to go that route. There are many more potential Muslim terrorists than actual Muslim terrorists.
Note also that a Muslim does not have to commit terrorist acts himself to aid and abet terrorists. He can support them monetarily and in other ways including by refusing to condemn terrorist acts. Their silence is deafening.
While not every Muslim is a terrorist, almost every terrorist at the present time is a Muslim. We ought to demand that leftists admit the truth of both halves of the foregoing statement. But they won't, which fact demonstrates (a) their lack of intellectual honesty, (b) their destructive, anti-Western agenda, and (c) their ignorance of their own long-term best interest. As for (c), liberals and leftists have a pronounced 'libertine wobble' as I like to call it. They are into 'alternative sexual lifestyles' and the defense of pornography as 'free speech,' and such. They would be the first to be slaughtered under Shari'a. Or have they forgotten Orlando already?
London Ed tells us that in Turkey he met "ordinary Muslims" who were fine people. Well, I lived in Turkey for a solid year, 1995-1996, and met many Muslims, almost all of them very decent people. These "ordinary Muslims," some of them secularists, and others of them innocuously religious, are not the problem. The jihadis are the problem, and there are a lot of them, not percentage-wise, but in terms of raw numbers. It is irrelevant to point out that there are good Muslims. Of course there are. We all know that. But they are not the problem.
So what measures should we in the West take?
I will mention just the most obvious and most important one: severely curtail Muslim immigration. There is no right to immigrate, and correspondingly, we are under no obligation to let in subversive elements. We have a culture and a way of life to protect, and their culture and way of life are inimical to ours. Muslims who enter the USA should be forced to sign a statement in which they renounce Shari'a, and then they must be monitored for compliance.
This is not a religious test but a cultural-political test: do you share our values or not? Chief among these values is toleration. If not, stay home, in the lands whose inanition and misery demonstrate the inferiority of Islamic culture and Islamic values. The main reason for carefully vetting Muslims who aim to immigrate into the USA is political rather than religious, as I explain in the following companion post:
I cite yet another example of liberal erosion of standards. But that's to put it too mildly. Contemporary liberals have lost their minds.
Harvard libraries will no longer charge 50 cent per day fees on overdue books.
[. . .]
“We have witnessed firsthand the stress that overdue fines can cause for students,” [Steven] Beardsley continued. “Eliminating standard overdue fines and standardizing loan periods across Harvard’s libraries should help students focus on their scholarship, rather than worrying about renewing library books every 28 days in order to avoid fines.”
I'm not making this up. Click on the link and see for yourself.
And did you know that wood paneling is sexist and racist?
As I have been saying for years, there is no idea so crazy that some liberal-left loon won't embrace it. These idiots do not need refutation; they need therapy.
At the root of the problem is that liberals do not understand human nature. They do not understand that people are much more likely to behave properly under the influence of various incentives and disincentives.
He has been called "rock's greatest songwriter." A better description is "America's greatest writer of popular songs." Bar none. We can discuss the criteria later, and consider counterexamples. Maybe this Saturday night. His earliest four or five albums are not in the rock genre. I'll permit quibbling about #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), but Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) , The Time's They Are A'Changin' (1964), and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) are better classified as folk, not that they sit all that comfortably in this niche.
These early albums are studded with lasting contributions to Americana. This is music with meaning that speaks to the mind and the heart. No Rat Pack crooner Las Vegas lounge lizard stuff here. Two lesser-known compositions both from The Times They Are a'Changin' (1964):
North Country Blues. Written from the point of view of a woman and so appropriately sung by the angel-throated Joan Baez.
D. A. Pennebaker on the making of Don't Look Back. I saw it in '67 when it first came out. I just had to see it, just as I had to have all of Dylan's albums, all of his sheet music, and every article and book about him. I was a Dylan fanatic. No longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
May he die with his boots on. It ain't dark yet, but it's gettin' there. When his 30th album Time Out of Mind came out in 1997, twenty years ago now, I was amazed to discover that Dylan could still tap back into that magic mood he achieved in the mid-60s.
Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.
I was born here and I'll die here, against my will I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.
Sinatra is supposed to have said that a pro is one who can play it the same way twice. (Where?) Dylan rarely plays it the same way twice. Here is a version of "Just Like a Woman" which is lyrically and in other minor ways different from the Blonde on Blonde version.
UPDATE: Dave Bagwill recommends this outstanding extended version (Freewheelin' outake 2, 1962) of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown." Move over, Stephen Stills! The harp fills don't quite make it, however, in this minor-keyed tune.
Question: Is it my brain that feels and thinks when I feel and think?
Argument A. Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.
A in Reverse: What thinks in me when I think is my brain. My brain is meat. Therefore, meat can think.
The proponent of A needn't deny that we are meatheads. Of course we are. We are literally meat (and bone) all the way through. His point is that the res cogitans, that in us which thinks, cannot be a hunk of meat.
Both arguments are valid, but only one is sound. The decision comes down to the initial premises of the two arguments. Is there a rational way of deciding between these premises?
A materialist might argue as follows. Although we cannot at present understand how a hunk of living meat could feel and think, what is actual is possible regardless of our ability or inability to explain how it is possible. The powers of certain configurations of matter could remain hidden for a long time from our best science, or even remain hidden forever. What else would be doing the thinking and feeling in us if not our brains? What else could the mind be but the living and functioning brain well-supplied with oxygen-rich blood? The fact that we cannot understand how the brain could be a semantic engine, an engine productive of and sensitive to meanings, is not a conclusive reason for thinking that it is not a semantic engine.
It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states. For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity could trigger a metabasis eis allo genos. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat? You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle. Some speak of 'emergence.' But that word merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it. You may as well say, as in the cartoon, "And then a miracle occurs." But then it's Game Over for the materialist.
Our materialist would do better to insist that unintelligibility to us does not entail impossibility. Our inability to explain how X is possible does not entail that X is not possible.
My response would be that while unintelligibility does not entail impossibility, it is excellent evidence of it. If you tell me that a certain configuration of neurons is intrinsically object-directed, directed to an object that may or may not exist without prejudice to the object-directedness, then you are saying something unintelligible. It is as if you said that .5 volts intrinsically represents 1 and .7 volts intrinsically represents 0. That's nonsense. Or it as if you said that a pile of rocks intrinsically indicates the direction of the trial. (See The Philosophizing Hiker: The Derivative Intentionality of Trail Markers.)
No rock pile has intrinsic meaning or intrinsic representational power. And the same goes for any material item or configuration of material items no matter how complex. No such system has intrinsic meaning; any meaning it has is derived. The meaning is derived either from an intelligent being who ascribes meaning to the material system, or from an intelligent being whose purposes are embodied in the material system, or both.
Thus I am rejecting the view that meaning could inhere in material systems apart from relations to minds that are intrinsically intentional, minds who are original Sinn-ers, if you will, original mean-ers. We are all of us Sinn-ers, every man Jack of us, original Sinn-ers, but our Sinn-ing is not mortal or venial but vital. Intrinsic, underived intentionality is our very lifeblood as spiritual beings.
So if the materialist says that the brain means, intends, represents, thinks, etc., then I say that makes no sense given what we understand the brain to be. The brain is a material system and the physical, chemical, electrical, and biological properties it and its parts have cannot be meaningfully predicated of mental states. One cannot speak intelligibly of a voltage drop across a mental state any more than can one speak intelligibly of the intentionality of synapses or of their point of view or of what it is like to be one.
Of course, the materialist can pin his hope on a future science that understands the brain in different terms, terms that could be sensibly attached to mental phenomena. But this is nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms. It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.
There is also the dogmatism of the materialist who insists that the subject of thinking must be the functioning brain. How does he know that? He doesn't. He believes it strongly is all.
So I give the palm to Argument A: Meat can't think. My brain is meat. Therefore, what thinks in me when I think is not my brain.
I do not absolutely foreclose on the abstract possibility that there be thinking meat. For I grant that unintelligibility to us is not invincible proof of impossibility. But when I compare that vaguely described abstract possibility with the present certainty that matter as we know it cannot think due to the very unintelligibility of the idea, then the present certainty wins over the abstract possibility and over the faith and hope of the materialist.
If you need to pin your hopes on something, pin them on the possibility that you are more than meat.
That there are still a few influential people such as Dershowitz with the civil courage to speak out supplies a slim basis for hope in the midst of the current madness.
Back story here. The e-mail message that got him in trouble:
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2017 4:26 PM To: Anathea Portier-Young Cc: Divinity Regular Rank Faculty; Divinity Visiting Other Faculty Subject: Re: Racial Equity Institute Phase I Training–March 4-5
Dear Faculty Colleagues,
I’m responding to Thea’s exhortation that we should attend the Racial Equity Institute Phase 1 Training scheduled for 4-5 March. In her message she made her ideological commitments clear. I’ll do the same, in the interests of free exchange.
I exhort you not to attend this training. Don’t lay waste your time by doing so. It’ll be, I predict with confidence, intellectually flaccid: there’ll be bromides, clichés, and amen-corner rah-rahs in plenty. When (if) it gets beyond that, its illiberal roots and totalitarian tendencies will show. Events of this sort are definitively anti-intellectual. (Re)trainings of intellectuals by bureaucrats and apparatchiks have a long and ignoble history; I hope you’ll keep that history in mind as you think about this instance.
We here at Duke Divinity have a mission. Such things as this training are at best a distraction from it and at worst inimical to it. Our mission is to think, read, write, and teach about the triune Lord of Christian confession. This is a hard thing. Each of us should be tense with the effort of it, thrumming like a tautly triple-woven steel thread with the work of it, consumed by the fire of it, ever eager for more of it. We have neither time nor resources to waste. This training is a waste. Please, ignore it. Keep your eyes on the prize.
Paul
——————– Paul J. Griffiths Warren Chair of Catholic Theology Duke Divinity School
This is an addendum to Thomas Nagel on the Mind-Body Problem. In that entry I set forth a problem in the philosophy of mind, pouring it into the mold of an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
This is one hard nut to crack. So hard that many, following David Chalmers, call it, or something very much like it, the Hard Problem in the philosophy of mind. It is so hard that it drives some into the loony bin. I am thinking of Daniel Dennett and those who have the chutzpah to deny (1). But eliminativism about conscious experience is not worth discussing outside of the aforementioned bin.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Those of a scientistic stripe accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
What I didn't do in my original post was to state why a Nagel-type answer is better than a scientistic one.
Why not just reject (2)? One way to reject it is by holding that some physical processes are essentially subjective. Consider any felt sensation precisely as felt, a twinge of pain, say, or a rush of euphoria. Why couldn't that felt sensation be identical to a physical process transpiring in one's brain?
Here is an argument contra. Not every brain event is identical to a conscious experience. There is a lot going on in the brain that does not manifest itself at the level of consciousness. What then distinguishes those brain events that are conscious experiences from those that are not? There will have to be a difference in properties. But if the only properties are physical properties, taking 'physical' in a broad sense to include the properties mentioned in physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, and so on, then there will be no way to distinguish between conscious and non-conscious brain events. Since there is that distinction, conscious experiences cannot be identical to brain events. (Don't forget: eliminativism has been eliminated.)
More simply, perhaps, the claim that a particular conscious experience is numerically identical to a brain event violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Necessarily, if x, y are identical (one and the same), then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. Equivalently, if x = y, then x, y share all properties. (After all, if two putatively distinct items are in reality one item, then it is trivially the case that 'they' share all properties.) But conscious experiences and physical states do not share all properties. It could be true of a pain that it is bearable, excruciating, throbbing, non-throbbing, etc. But these phenomenal predicates cannot be true of a physical state such as brain state. Why not? Because physical states have only physical properties, and no phenomenal properties.
"But if the pain and the brain state are identical, then they must share all properties!" True, but which properties are those? The physicalist/materialist/naturalist can admit only physical properties. His aim is to reduce the mental (or at least the qualitatively mental) to the physical, but without eliminating the mental. That I claim is impossible. For again, conscious experiences are essentially subjective, as Nagel says, but there is nothing essentially subjective about physical states as physics and the related natural sciences conceive them. The materialist reduction doesn't work. Sensory qualia have not been show to be material in nature.
Going Mysterian
Someone who thinks that qualia just have to be material in nature might at this point go mysterian along the lines of Colin McGinn. The mysterian grants that we cannot understand how that twinge of pain or that sense of euphoria could be just a complex state of the brain, a pattern of neuron firings. But he insists that it is nevertheless the case. It is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for us to understand how it could be the case. After all, if x is actual, then it is possible even if we cannot understand how it is possible. It is and will remain a sort of secular mystery.
In other words, the unintelligibility of the reduction of consciousness to matter is not taken as an argument against this reduction, but as an argument against our ability to grasp certain fundamental truths. Thus (2) and (3) above are both true and hence logically consistent; it is just that insight into this consistency is beyond our ken. What is unintelligible to us is intelligible in itself. In reality, my felt pain is identical to something going on intracranially; it is just that insight into how this is possible is impossible for us given how were are constructed.
There are problems with this mysterian way out that I may discuss in a separate post.
Two Ways of Referring to the Same Thing?
Another option for the materialist is to invoke the familiar idea that linguistic and epistemic access to one and the same item can be had in different ways, and that duality of linguistic and/or epistemic access need not be taken to argue ontological duality in that to which one gains access. Reference to one and the same item can be routed through different senses or modes of presentation. Different terms, with different senses, can be used to target one and the same referent. 'Morning Star' and 'Evening Star,' though differing in sense, can be used to refer to the same celestial body, the planet Venus.
Why not say something similar about the physical state I am in when I feel pain? Why not say that there are two ways of accessing the same physical state? The one mode of access is via neuroscience, the other is 'from the inside' via the pain's qualitative feel to the one who endures it. If so, there are not two states or events one physical and the other mental differing in mode of existence; there is exactly one state or event, and it is physical. Dualism is avoided. The upshot is that, contra Nagel, the third-person physicalistic approach to the mind does not leave anything out. One may go on to tax Nagel, Searle, and Co. with illicitly inferring a difference in mode of existence from a difference in mode of linguistic/epistemic access. Something like this objection is made by Christopher Peacocke in his review of Nagel's The View from Nowhere (Philosophical Review, January 1989.)
It's a nice try, a very nice try. And it is exactly what one would expect from someone who takes an objectifying third-person view. What's more, it would be in keeping with Occam's Razor if mind could be seamlessly integrated into nature. Unfortunately, the pain I am in is not a mode of presentation, or means of epistemic access, to the underlying brain state. Thus the Fregean analogy collapses. The sense of 'morning star' mediates my reference to Venus; but my pain quale, even if it is caused by the brain state, does not mediate my reference to it.
Let me see if I can make this clear. The suggestion is that the same physical reality appears, or can appear, in two different ways, a third-person way and a first-person way, and that this first-person way of access is no evidence of a first-person way of being. One problem is the one I just alluded to: there is no clear sense in which a pain quale is an appearance of a brain state. The former may be caused by the latter. But that is not to say that the pain quale is of the brain state. The felt pain does not present the brain state to me. It does not present anything (distinct from itself) to me. After all, the felt pain is a non-intentional state. No doubt it has a certain content, but not an intentional or representational content. One can describe it without describing what it is of, for the simple reason that there is nothing it is of. An intentional state, however, cannot be described without describing what it is of.
The Fregean sense/reference analogy therefore breaks down. The basic idea was that one and same reality can appear in different ways, and that the numerical difference of these ways is consistent with a unitary mode of existence of the reality. A felt pain, however, is not an appearance of a reality, but an appearance that is a reality. The appearing of a felt pain is its being, and its being is its appearing. And because this is so, the felt pain is a distinct reality from the brain state. Not only is it a distinct reality, it is a distinct reality with a distinct, irreducibly subjective, mode of existence.
Nagelus vindicatus est. There is something essentially incomplete about a third-person approach to reality. It leaves something out, and what it leaves out is precisely that which makes life worth living. For as Wilfrid Sellars once said to Daniel Dennett over a fine bottle of Chambertin, "But Dan, qualia are what make life worth living!" (Consciousness Explained, p. 383)
In vino veritas.
I conclude that if our aporetic triad has a solution, the solution is by rejecting (3).
It seems to be acceptable in British English, as witness:
Donald Trump received a glittering welcome from leaders in Saudi Arabia on the first day of his first international tour, as the two countries agreed a series of military deals worth nearly $110bn (£85bn).
That offends my linguistic sensibilities. If I were editor, I would expend some red ink. One does not agree X, one agrees to X, or upon X. If you make a proposal, I may reject it, but if I agree, I agree to it; I don't agree it.
Stateside one often hears sentences like 'She will graduate high school in June.' The meaning is clear, but the style is bad. One graduates from high school.
I am just reporting on how I prefer to write and speak. But if a competent user of English reports on how he prefers to write and speak, then the report has normative import.
The Lousy Linguist has more data on British English if this topic is of interest. And even if it isn't.
Addendum
An equal but opposite stylistic infelicity is the adding of unnecessary prepositions. For example, 'Where's your car at?' instead of 'Where's your car?'
You know you're list-obsessive when, having completed a task, you add an entry to your 'to do' list just so you can cross it off.
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Agenda is the plural of agendum, something to be done. The infinitive form of the corresponding verb is agere, to do.
Age quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.
Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man. (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.' I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.
The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doing. Age is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'
Eructation is simply a fancier, and some might argue a more decorous, word for "belch." "Eructation" was borrowed from Latin in the 15th century; the verb eruct, meaning "to belch," followed in the late 16th century. Both have their source in the Latin verb eructare, which is the frequentative form of erugere, meaning "to belch or disgorge." (A frequentative form is one that denotes a repeated or recurrent action or state.) "Eructare" shares an ancestor with Greek word ereugesthai as well as Old English "rocettan," both of which also mean "to belch."
The poverty of most people's vocabularies these days is enough to make one belch in disgust.
Angelo M. Codevilla's essay is essential reading. Restraining myself, I will quote only the opening paragraph:
“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
he notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually.
. . . Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA. “Show me the man,” says any federal prosecutor, “and I can show you the crime.” This is not an exaggeration.
And now Donald J. Trump, the legally elected president of the United States, is the man. To prosecute someone for a crime, some crime has to be alleged. But in this case what is the crime? Alan Dershowitz raises the question and answers it: there is no crime.
There is no evidence that Trump or his team colluded with the Kremlin to swing the election in Trump's favor. But even if there were, such collusion would be at worst political wrong doing, not a crime. This is not my opinion but the opinion of a distinguished Harvard law professor who is not a Trump supporter. As Dershowitz told Tucker Carlson last night, "I voted for Hillary Clinton very proudly."
Around 3:10 Dershowitz speaks of "hacking the DNA" several times. He means: hacking the DNC, the Democrat National Committee. Carlson failed to catch the mistake.
I now want to make a point that Dershowitz did not make last night, namely, that phrases like 'hacking the election' have no definite meaning. You can literally hack into John Podesta's e-mail account, but you can't literally hack an election. (It has been claimed that the password he employed was 'password.' Could Podesta be that stupid or careless? I am skeptical.) Of course, you could use 'hack an election' to mean 'influence an election,' but then you will have changed the subject. Almost all of us, from low-level bloggers to the most august pundits, were trying to 'hack the election' in the sense of 'influence the election.'
What we have here with the appointment of special prosecutor Robert Mueller is not an inquiry into whether a crime has been committed, but a witch hunt: a search for a nonexistent crime to pin on a much-hated man.
But didn't Trump obstruct justice by firing Comey? Is that not what is maintained by such powerful intellects as Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi? Of course not, as Dershowitz points out at 3:38 ff. Trump's firing of Comey was well within the president's constitutional rights. "Under the unitary theory of the executive, the president has the right to direct the justice department." I would add that the president fired Comey for good reason.
No doubt the 'optics' were bad: the firing looked self-serving. So the haters pounced suggesting that the only reason Trump fired Comey was because Comey was about to expose criminal acts by Trump. But that is just nonsense. Again: which criminal acts?
Even if Trump was sick of Comey and wanted him out for personal motives, he had solid impersonal legal reasons for firing him. They were set forth in the Rosenstein memorandum.
The Trump haters appear to be committing a version of the genetic fallacy. The psychological motivation of a claim or action is irrelevant to the question of the truth of the claim or the justifiability of the action. Had Hillary or Bernie or Jill or Jeb! been president, each would have been justified in firing Comey. Again, this is because of the availability of solid impersonal legal reasons for his firing. And you can bet all of Hillary's ugly pant-suits that she would have fired him had she won as she was 'supposed to.'
Heather Mac Donald is a profile in civil courage in stark contrast to the cowardice of the university administrators who, in abdication of authority, allow leftist thugs to prevent her and other sensible people from speaking. As I have lately observed, the university is pretty much dead, not everywhere of course, and naturally I except the STEM disciplines.
When the authorities will not maintain order, then eventually others will, and things can turn very ugly very quickly.
I was joking with somebody recently about blog backup.
"Why do I need to back up my blog?" said I. "The NSA has every word."
Joking aside, the underlying issue is a vexing one. There is no true liberty without security, but a security worth wanting must make allowance for a large measure of liberty.
It is a case of competing values. One of my early posts (13 May 2004) explores the dialectic. I gave it the catchy title, Liberty and Security. Damn, if it's not good! By the way, one of the many pleasures of blogging is re-reading and re-enjoying one's old writings.
Serendipitous! I spent the morning out in the desert practicing with my handguns. When I logged on afterward I found that Bill Keezer had referred me to an entry entitled Power Tools by Malcolm Pollack in which the latter quotes Col. Jeff Cooper. I want the quotation for my files:
Weapons are the tools of power. In the hands of the state, they can be the tools of decency or the tools of oppression, depending on the righteousness that state. In the hands of criminals, they are the tools of evil. In the hands of the free and decent citizen, they should be the tools of liberty. Weapons compound man’s power to achieve whatever purpose he may have. They amplify the capabilities of both the good man and the bad, and to exactly the same degree, having no will of their own. Thus, we must regard them as servants, not masters–and good servants of good men. Without them, man is diminished, and his opportunities to fulfill his destiny are lessened. An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.
I haven't been able to find a source. As you know, I do not like unsourced quotations. It's the scholar in me. Paging Dave Lull! If cyberspace has a Head Librarian, Dave is the man.
"An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it."
You are free to live unarmed, and for some this will be a wise course. A gun is not a talisman. Its mere presence won't protect you. To paraphrase Col. Jeff Cooper, owning a gun no more makes you armed than owning a guitar makes you a musician. You will need to get training, and you will need to throw thousands of (aimed!) rounds down range before you can consider yourself competent.
These are trying times. The thuggish elements among us are on the rise, and they are enabled by those in positions of authority. The wise hope for the best, and work for the best, but prepare for the worst. You might want to think about that as well as ask yourself: Which side am I on, and who is on my side?
Nagel replies in the pages of NYRB (8 June 2017; HT: Dave Lull) to one Roy Black, a professor of bioengineering:
The mind-body problem that exercises both Daniel Dennett and me is a problem about what experience is, not how it is caused. The difficulty is that conscious experience has an essentially subjective character—what it is like for its subject, from the inside—that purely physical processes do not share. Physical concepts describe the world as it is in itself, and not for any conscious subject. That includes dark energy, the strong force, and the development of an organism from the egg, to cite Black’s examples. But if subjective experience is not an illusion, the real world includes more than can be described in this way.
I agree with Black that “we need to determine what ‘thing,’ what activity of neurons beyond activating other neurons, was amplified to the point that consciousness arose.” But I believe this will require that we attribute to neurons, and perhaps to still more basic physical things and processes, some properties that in the right combination are capable of constituting subjects of experience like ourselves, to whom sunsets and chocolate and violins look and taste and sound as they do. These, if they are ever discovered, will not be physical properties, because physical properties, however sophisticated and complex, characterize only the order of the world extended in space and time, not how things appear from any particular point of view.
The problem might be condensed into an aporetic triad:
1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.
Take a little time to savor this problem. Note first that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Any two limbs entail the negation of the remaining one. Note second that each limb exerts a strong pull on our acceptance. But we cannot accept them all because they are logically incompatible.
Which proposition should we reject? Dennett, I take it, would reject (1). But that's a lunatic solution as Professor Black seems to appreciate, though he puts the point more politely. When I call Dennett a sophist, as I have on several occasions, I am not abusing him; I am underscoring what is obvious, namely, that the smell of cooked onions, for example, is a genuine datum of experience, and that such phenomenological data trump scientistic theories.
Sophistry aside, we either reject (2) or we reject (3). Nagel and I accept (1) and (2) and reject (3). Black, and others of the scientistic stripe, accept (1) and (3) and reject (2).
I appreciate the appeal of the naturalistic-scientistic worldview and I don't dismiss it in the way I dismiss eliminativism about the mental:
Look, there is just one world, this physical world, and we are physical parts of it including all your precious thoughts, moods, and sensations. If you are serious about explaining consciousness, then you have to explain it the way you explain everything else: in terms of our best natural science. With the progress of science over the centuries, more and more of what hitherto was thought inexplicable scientifically has been explained. The trend is clear: science is increasingly de-mystifying the world, and it is a good induction that one day it will have wholly de-mystified it and will have cut off every obscurantist escape route into the Cloud Cuckoo Land of religion/superstition.
It is essential to see, however, that this worldview is precisely that, a worldview, and therefore just another philosophy. This is what makes it scientistic as opposed to scientific. Scientism is not science, but philosophy. Scientism is the epistemology of naturalism, where naturalism is not science but ontology. No natural science can prove that reality is exhausted by the physical, and no natural science can prove that all and only the scientifically knowable is knowable.
But it is not irrational to be a naturalist and a scientisticist -- an ugly word for an ugly thing -- in the way that it is irrational to be an eliminativist. But is also not irrational to reject naturalism and scientism.
And so the strife of systems will continue. People like me will continue to insist that qualia, intentionality, conscience, normativity, reason, truth and other things cannot be explained naturalistically. Those on the other side will keep trying. Let them continue, with vigor. The more they fail, the better we look.
Do those on our side have a hidden religious agenda? Some do. But Nagel doesn't. He is just convinced that the naturalist project doesn't work. Nagel rejects theism, and I believe he says somewhere that he very much does not want it to be the case that religion is true.
Nagel, then, has no religious agenda. But this did not stop numerous prominent, but viciously leftist, academics from attacking him after he published Mind and Cosmos. See the following articles of mine:
Democrats know how to circle the wagons, stand together, and refrain from attacking their own. Republicans seem to prefer the circular firing squad. And the Libertarians? Theirs is the self-indulgent circle jerk of those who will never have power.
You can add this to the list of Trump's accomplishments: he has provoked the Left to expose themselves in all their ugliness. Wittingly? Some say yes: he is playing them like a fiddle. I don't know whether his provocations are witting or unwitting. The fact remains:
So far all the political violence associated with the election of Trump, from Inauguration to the latest campus rioting, has been on the Left. No pro-Trump crowds don masks, break windows or shut down traffic. The crudity in contemporary politics—from the constant sick jokes referring to First Family incest, smears against the First Lady, low attacks on the Trump children, boycotts of the Inauguration, talk and dreams of killing the president—is on the liberal/progressive side. The entertainment industry’s obscenity and coarseness have been picked up by mainstream Democratic officials, who now routinely resort to profanities like s–t and f–k to attack the president. Almost every ethical code—television journalists do not report on air private conservations with their guests during breaks, opposition congressional representatives do attend the Inauguration, Senators do not use obscenities—have been abandoned in efforts to delegitimize Trump.
When Hillary Clinton assumed the mantle of the “Resistance,” she was deliberately using a metaphor to convey the idea that she is analogous to a French patriot under occupation and Trump is a veritable foreign Nazi belligerent.
The point about Hillary is important. Here we have a prominent politician engaging in what is arguably seditious libel if not outright sedition.
There are egalitarians in ontology as there are in political theory.
Herewith, four types of ontological egalitarianism: egological, spatial, temporal, and modal.
Egological egalitarianism is the view there is a plurality of equally real selves. I take it we are all egological egalitarians in sane moments. I'll assume that no one reading this thinks, solipsistically, that he alone is real and that others, if they exist at all, exist only as merely intentional objects for him. The problem of Other Minds may concern us, but that is an epistemological problem, one that presupposes that there are other minds/selves. On ontological egalitarianism, then, no self enjoys ontological privilege.
Spatial egalitarianism is the that there is a plurality of equally real places. Places other than here are just as real as the place picked out by a speaker's use of 'here.' I take it we are all spatial egalitarians. No one, not even a Manhattanite, thinks that the place where he is is the only real place. Here is real but so is yonder. No place enjoys ontological privilege. All places are equal.
Temporal egalitarianism is the view that there is a plurality of equally real times. Times other than the present time are just as real as the present time. No time enjoys ontological privilege, which implies that there is nothing ontologically special about the present time. All times are equal. No time is present, period. This is called the B-theory of time. Here is a fuller explanation.
Modal egalitarianism is the view that there is a plurality of equally real possibilities. Possibilities other than those that are actual are just as real as those that are actual. It is plausible to think of possibilities as coming in maximal or 'world-sized' packages. Call them possible worlds. On modal egalitarianism, then, all possible worlds are equally real. No world enjoys ontological privilege. Our world, the world we take to be actual, is not absolutely actual; it is merely actual for us, or rather, actual at itself. But that is true of every world: each is actual at itself. No world is actual, period. In respect of actuality, all possible worlds are equal.
What is curious about these four types of ontological egalitarianism is that, while the first two are about as close to common sense as one is likely to get, the second two are not. Indeed, the fourth will strike most people as crazy. Was David Lewis crazy? I don't know, but I hear he was a bad driver.
At root, commentary is a minding-with, a co-mentation. It is an attempt to enter into an author's thinking and think along, sympathetically yet critically. The good commentator is companion before critic, but critic too. A com-pan-ion, at root, is one with whom one breaks bread. The companionable commentator thus shares with the author the bread of sense he puts on the table.
The following ruminations belong among the metaphysical foundations of debates about tribalism, racism, and the differences between my brand of conservatism and the neo-reactionary variety. For example, I say things like, "We should aspire to treat individuals as individuals rather than reduce them to tokens of types or members of groups or instances of attributes." This of course gives rise to questions like, "What exactly is it to treat an individual as an individual, given that there are no individuals bereft of attributes?" And before you know it we are deep in the bowels of metaphysics, entangled, to shift metaphors, in conundra that may well be insoluble. Here are two theses I will just state on the present occasion:
T1. All the hot-button issues (abortion, immigration, capital punishment, etc.) are metaphysical at bottom.
T2. The insolubility of the underlying metaphysical problems, if they are insoluble, 'percolates up' into the popular debates and renders them insoluble as well.
Here is a remarkable passage from Pascal's remarkable Pensées:
A man goes to the window to see the passers by. If I happen to pass by, can I say that he has gone there to see me? No; for he is not thinking of me in particular. But does he who loves someone for her beauty, really love her? No; for small-pox, destroying the beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to love. And if I am loved for my judgment, for my memory, am I loved? No; for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this 'I,' if it resides neither in the body, nor the soul [mind]? And how love the body or the soul [mind] save for these qualities which do not make the 'me,' since they are doomed to perish? For can one love the soul [mind] of a person in the abstract, irrespective of its qualities? Impossible and wrong! So we never love anyone, but only qualities. (p. 337, tr. H. F. Stewart)
This passage raises the following question. When I love a person, is it the person in her particularity and uniqueness that I love, or merely the being-instantiated of certain lovable properties? Do I love Mary as Mary, or merely as an instance of helpfulness, friendliness, faithfulness, etc.? The issue is not whether I love Mary as Mary versus loving attributes in abstracto; the issue is whether I love Mary as Mary versus loving her as an instance of lovable attributes.
These are clearly different. If it is merely the being-instantiated of an ensemble of lovable properties that I love, then it would not matter if the love object were replaced by another with the same ensemble of properties. It would not matter if Mary were replaced by her indiscernible twin Sherry. Mary, Sherry, what's the difference? Either way you get a package of the very same delectable attributes.
But if it is the person in her uniqueness that I love, then it would matter if someone else with exactly the same ensemble of properties were substituted for the love object. It would matter to me, and it would matter even more to the one I love. Mary would complain bitterly if Sherry were to replace her in my affections. "I want to be loved for being ME, not for what I have in common with HER!"
Self Love
The point is subtle. It is perhaps more clearly made using the example of self-love. Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin. Now it is a fact that I love myself. But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of properties, then I should love Phil equally. For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do. But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil. Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go. I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have. I prefer myself and love myself just because I am myself.
This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties. For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other. This would make no sense if the being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties. In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual. And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual. Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.
We can take it a step further. If love is blind as folk wisdom has it, self-love is blind in excelsis. In some cases self-love is present even when the lover/beloved lacks any and all lovable attributes. If there are cases like this then there is love of self as a pure individual. I love me just because I am me and not because I instantiate lovable attributes. I love myself, not as an instance of attributes, but as a case of existence. Instances are interchangeable; cases of existence are not. I love myself in that I am in a sense of 'am' that cannot be identified with the being-instantiated of a set of properties. I love my very existing. If so, and if my love is a 'correct emotion' (Brentano), then my sheer existing must be good.
I take this to show that self-love cannot be identified with, or reduced to, love of an instance of lovable attributes qua instance of those attributes.
Other Love
Now it is a point of phenomenology that love intends to reach the very haecceity and ipseity of the beloved: in loving someone we mean to make contact with his or her unique thisness and selfhood. It is not a mere instance of lovable properties that love intends, but the very being of the beloved. It is also true that this intending or meaning is in some cases fulfilled: we actually do sometimes make conscious contact with the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved. In the case of self love we not only intend, but arrive at, the very being of the beloved, not merely at the co-instantiation of a set of multiply instantiable lovable properties. In the case of other love, there is the intention to reach the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved, but it is not clear how arriving at it is possible given Pascal's argument.
In the case of self love, my love 'reaches' the beloved because I am the beloved. In the case of other-love, my love intends the beloved, but it is not clear that it 'reaches' her.
The question underlying all of this is quite fundamental: Are there any genuine individuals? X is a genuine individual if and only if X is essentially unique. The Bill and Phil example suggests that selves are genuine individuals and not mere bundles of multiply instantiable properties. For each of the twins is acutely aware that he is not the other despite complete agreement in respect of pure properties.
Here are some of my metaphysical theses:
1. There exist genuine individuals. 2. Genuine individuals cannot be reduced to bundles of properties. 3. The Identity of Indiscernibles is false. 4. Numerical difference is numerical-existential difference: the existence of an individual is implicated in its very haecceity. 5. There are no nonexistent individuals. 6. There are no not-yet existent individuals.
With all the fake news and journalistic malpractice, there is real news that is going unreported and under-reported. Below, a couple of under-reported recent items that will gladden conservatives while eliciting howls of rage from the nattering knuckleheads of the Left.
A correspondent of mine thinks that Trump has done only one conservative thing: nominated and presided over the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Not so. He has done a number of conservative things. For example, his courageous affirmation of the rule of law anent illegal immigration has reduced it by some 60-70%. And that tough talk cost nothing. Good deal, eh? I am put in mind of Grandmaster Nimzowitsch: "The threat is often stronger than the execution." As for the execution of the Great Wall of Trump, give it time. The obstructionist Dems need to be subdued first.
The two items mentioned below are only the latest of the Orange Man's conservative accomplishments.
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards, committees and other entities both within and outside his department.
Here is a little irony for you. There is voter fraud, and 'the dead' are prime offenders. And everybody except for a handful of troglodytes has photo ID. But crapweasel Dems deny these obvious truths. And yet they call us denialists for merely being skeptical about the claim that anthropogenic global warming is such a threat to humanity as to trump [I love it!] all others and to demand a radical re-organization of the nation's economy.
Today, states and cities ruled by the Left are seizing disproportionate influence in national politics by counting the votes of non-citizens. California issued drivers’ licenses—de facto voter registration—to a million illegals. Countless localities, such as New York City, Detroit, and Florida’s Broward County, do similar things. A few million votes here and there add up to a wall protecting today’s ruling class as it imposes itself on the rest of the country. Because this fraud so threatens the body politic’s integrity, a federal law requiring positive proof of citizenship for voting in federal elections is a sine qua non of continued national cohesion.
Brilliant analysis by Victor Davis Hanson. A rasty tasty morsel (O felix erratum!):
Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash is underappreciated for its effect on the campaign. Through painstaking research, it tied together all the strands of Clinton nefariousness: the Clinton Foundation as an excuse to hire political flunkies and provide free jet travel; the quid pro quo State Department nods to those who hired Bill Clinton to speak; and corruption under Hillary Clinton, from cellphone concessions in Haiti to North American uranium sales to Russian interests.
Add to the Clinton sleaze Hillary’s unsecured server and communications of classified material, the creepy New York and Washington careerists who turned up in the Podesta archives, and the political rigging that warped the conduct of the Democratic National Committee.
The result was that Hillary could no longer play the role of the “good” Clinton who “put up” with her husband’s “good ole boy” sleaze. Her new image was that of an equal partner in crime — or perhaps even a godmother who used the capo Bill as muscle. In comparison, Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump taxes, and Trump ties were old-fashioned American hucksterism, but with one important difference: Trump’s excesses were a private person’s; Clinton’s were those of a public servant.
Should a special prosecutor be appointed? By all means! To investigate Hillary.
We raise our glasses tonight in tribute to the unsung session players who added so much to our Boomer soundtrack. Back in the '60s we assiduous readers of liner notes came across the name 'Bruce Langhorne' again and again. The mood of so many of those memorable tunes by Dylan, Baez, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Richard and Mimi Farina, Carolyn Hester and others was made by his unobtrusive guitar leads and fills. With his passing at age 78 last month, Langhorne (on the far left) is unsung no more. Here are some tunes which feature Langhorne's work and some that don't.
Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall. The voice of an angel, the words of a poet, and Langhorne's guitar. The incredible mood of this version, especially the intro, is made by Langhorne and the bass of Russ Savakus, another well-known session player from those days. I've been listening to this song since '65 and it gives me chills every time.
Carolyn Hester, I'll Fly Away. Dylan on harp, a little rough and ragged. Langhorne on guitar? Not sure.
Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi Farina, Catch the Wind. Fabulous.
In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:
I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?
Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion. When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.
From this outburst one can see that for the leftist activist, the political is everything. One is not talking about the world if one is talking about the value of life and the morality of procreation. For the Stoned Philosopher, questions about life and death, meaning and value, God and the soul, pale into insignificance in comparison to the political squabbles of the day.
Our appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.
"Donald Trump is the first president in history whose campaign has come under F. B. I.-initiated investigation for collusion with a hostile foreign power. And the person heading that investigation, the F. B. I. director, has been fired." (Timothy Egan, NYT Op-Ed, 11 May 2017)
It might help if you read Rosenstein's Comey memorandum and related documents here. But if you are a lefty, it probably won't.
If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging someone else into said dilemma kicking and screaming (literally), while we attempt to work out our own salvation or lack thereof. That's why I subscribe to a form of prudential antinatalism. This differs from the kind that says life is and always a negative thing, as for all I know there could be a pay-off at the end of it currently indiscernible to humans, but for want of indisputable proof then I cannot see any reason to expose someone else to the dilemma of life, or at least I personally cannot do it, given I cannot find any ultimate meaning or justification for my own existence, at this present time at least.
This entry will attempt to articulate and develop Mr. White's suggestion.
What do we know? We do not know whether human life has an overall positive or negative value. It could have a positive value despite appearances to the contrary. For example, it could be that after our sojourn through this vale of tears, the veil of ignorance will be lifted and we will find ourselves in a realm of peace and light in which every tear is dried and the sense of things is revealed. It could be that the vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making in which some of us 'earn our wings.' But this is an article of faith, not of knowledge. We don't know whether there are further facts, hidden from us at present, in whose light the world as we experience it here and now will come to be seen as overall good.
What we do know is that the problem of the value of human existence is a genuine problem and thus one that needs solving. It needs solving presumably because it is not merely a theoretical problem in axiology but a problem with implications for practical ethics. In particular: Is procreation morally permissible or not?
But does it follow from what we know that anti-natalism is the prudential course? Karl answers in the affirmative. I don't know whether Karl is an extreme or a moderate anti-natalist, but I don't think it matters for the present discussion. Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13) from which axiological thesis there follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12) A moderate anti-natalist could hold that most procreation is wrong.
One assumption that Karl seems to be making is that, absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative. This assumption I find very plausible. But note that it rests on a still deeper assumption, namely, that the value of life can be objectively assessed or evaluated. This assumption is not obviously correct, but it too is plausible. Here, then, is the argument. It is a kind of 'moral safety' argument. To be on the morally safe side, we ought not procreate.
Argument for Prudential Anti-Natalism
1) There is an objective 'fact of the matter' as to whether or not human life is on balance of positive or negative value.
2) Absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative, that is, the harms of existence outweigh the benefits of existence.
3) We do not know that the value of life for most humans is not on balance negative, i.e., that the harms of existence are compensated by the benefits of existence.
4) We do know that bringing children into the world will expose them to physical, mental, and spiritual suffering, and that all of those so exposed will also actually suffer the harms of existence.
5) It is morally wrong to subject people to harms when it is not known that the harms will be compensated by a greater good.
6) To have children is to subject them to such harms. Therefore:
7) It is morally wrong to procreate.
Now you have heard me say that there are no compelling arguments in philosophy, and this is certainly no exception. I'll mention two possible lines of rebuttal.
a) Reject premise (1) along Nietzschean lines as explained in my most recent Nietzsche post. It might be urged that any negative judgment on the value of life merely reflects the lack of vitality of the one rendering the judgment. No healthy specimen takes suffering as an argument against against living and procreating! I do not endorse this view, but I feel its pull. Related: Nietzsche and National Socialism.
b) Reject (3). There are those who, standing fast in their faith, would claim to know by a sort of cognitio fidei that children and life itself are divine gifts, and that in the end all the horrors and injustices of this life will be made good.
I found it in a remarkable paragraph from Conrad Black:
The bizarrerie of the intellectual right is illimitable. My dear and esteemed friend George Will, after an acrobatic exercise in the columnar snobbery that Trump was unaware that Andrew Jackson died 16 years before the start of the Civil War, (Jackson was concerned about the danger of civil war throughout his presidency, as George knows and Mr. Trump was alleging), has fled into the television embrace of Rachel the Madd and Mika Buzzfeed at MSNBC, the most astonishing flight since Joachim von Ribbentrop went to Moscow. They have all walked the plank; President Trump has induced self-destructive political bilharzia in the deranged effigies of once-serious and important people. I still love them, but I grieve for them.
Bilharzia is "an infection caused by a parasitic worm that lives in fresh water in subtropical and tropical regions."
John Horgan reports in Scientific American on a conversation with David Chalmers. (HT: the ever-helpful Dave Lull)
There is some discussion of the so-called 'hard problem' in the philosophy of mind. The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism. The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable. It seems to me, though, that intentionality is also a damned hard problem for physicalists to solve, so hard in fact as to be insoluble within physicalist constraints and another excellent reason to reject physicalism. I give my reasons here.
But this is not the topic of this entry. What caught my eye was a metaphilosophical item.
Chalmers' is a purely theoretical conception of philosophy:
Does philosophy help him [Chalmers] deal with personal problems? “I’m not sure how deep an integration there is between what I think about philosophically and the way I live,” he replied. “I’d love to be able to say, ‘Here is how the insights I’ve had about consciousness have transformed my life.’… I’ve basically lived my life the way I want to live it without necessarily being all that reflective at the practical level.”
A striking admission. Here we have a philosopher who frankly admits to living his life more or less unreflectively and thus more or less unphilosophically. On such an approach, philosophy has little to do with the life of the "existing individual" to employ a signature phrase from Kierkegaard. This is a widespread attitude among contemporary philosophers for whom philosophy is a purely theoretical discipline aimed at the solution of certain puzzles such as the 'hard problem.'
Well, that is a conception of philosophy one might have. I'll say a few words in its defense. The central problems of philosophy are genuine problems, and the attempts by logical positivists, ordinary language philosophers, and others to show them to be pseudo have failed. Whether or not they are humanly important or socially relevant or such that their solution contributes to human flourishing, they are legitimate objects of inquiry. And a pox upon anyone or any government that thinks otherwise.
But some of us favor a more classical conception of philosophy. For some of us, the signature Socratic saying remains normative: "The unexamined life is not worth living." These are words Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates at Apology 38a:
. . . and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.
To contrast it with the purely theoretical conception we could call this an 'existential' conception of philosophy as long as we don't confuse it with existentialism narrowly construed. Obviously, one whose approach to philosophy is broadly existential can also have a strong theoretical bent. It might be interesting to attempt a list of some prominent 'existential' philosophers, and then distill the shared attributes that make them such.
Broadly 'existential' philosophers include Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epicurus, Stoics such as Epictetus, Pyrrhonian Skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus, Christian Platonists such as St. Augustine, all of the medieval thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas for whom philosophia ancilla theologiae. Add to them all those whose concerns are religious first and foremost Blaise Pascal being a prominent example, and even Kant.
Kant? Well yes. In the preface to the second edition (1787) of his magnum opus, Critique of Pure Reason, he famously declares that his aim is to "deny reason in order to make room for faith." The highest concerns of humanity are God, freedom, and immortality, and Kant's labors are for the purpose of securing these noble objects.
These 'broadly existential' philosophers have in common a concern for ultimate human well-being that trumps the merely theoretical. I'm with them.
he notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits. But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually.
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